29 Nov Use autonomy, mastery and purpose to build and maintain the motivation of your team
Use autonomy, mastery and purpose to build and maintain the motivation of your team
You know that the success you have experienced in your business so far is down to your team, and you also know that building on this success and growing your business requires continued and increased effort from your team.
Insight, understanding, skills and processes that help you tap into the discretionary effort (unused energy and time) of your people requires high levels of self-motivation. Your role as business leader or manager is to create the environment to enable this.
To allow your team access to intrinsic motivation means creating a work environment where strong autonomy, mastery and purpose are living and breathing for all of your people to see and be part of.
Here are 4 helping hands to get you on your way to promoting intrinsic motivation, avoiding the carrot and stick approach:
1. Take the long-term motivation of your team seriously – Don’t rely on the quick and easy motivational fix of reward and punishment; instead, build autonomy, mastery and purpose into the way in which you and your team work. You can still reward your team after they have achieved great things.
2. Get serious about autonomy – Control ensures your people fall in line, but it will also affect the team’s engagement, so, rather than controlling them, build your skills and processes for engaging with them to enable them to feel more connected to you, to their work and to the business.
3. Get serious about mastery – Clear goals, immediate feedback and Goldilocks (just right) tasks are vital when delivering a sense of mastery in your business. Daniel Pink points out that, when you get these working, “…we don’t just enjoy it more, we do it better. That’s why it’s odd that organisations tolerate work environments that deprive their people of these experiences.”
4. Get serious about purpose – Yes, your business must make a profit, but evidence shows that it will achieve greater success when your team connects with a worthwhile meaning in the work that they do. When you bring the core purpose of your business to life and share it with and through your team, you dramatically increase their motivation – they now know, not only the HOW of what they are doing, but WHY.