The Mobile MBA: 112 Skills to Take You Further, Faster (Richard Stout's Library) (17 page)

In practice, it is hard to know where people are in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Asking a colleague if they are in need of love could be misinterpreted. And it is not always clear what in practice you can do about it. So we need something simpler.

In practice, people are motivated by four things:

• Greed

• Fear

• Sex

• Idleness

We will ignore sex, although that has been used as a career weapon with great effect down the ages. You make your own choice on that. That leaves us with greed, fear, and idleness.

GREED
This is simple. As Maslow showed, there is always something more which everyone wants. Take time to find out what it is. The simple act of finding out and respecting other people’s interests goes far in building trust. But remember, the more you give, the more they want. As soon as the bonus is paid, they want a promotion. As soon as the promotion is in the bag, they want the foreign post. Don’t give in to greed: use it. Make people work hard for their dream. Dangle the carrot in front of them, but do not let them eat it. Keep them hungry.

don’t give in to greed: use it

FEAR
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs works in reverse: there is always something we fear. We do not want to go backward. If we have recognition, we do not want to lose it. If we have a strong sense of belonging, we do not want to lose that—and we certainly do not want to lose our jobs. Threatening people with loss instils compliance, but not commitment. Show that you can help someone avoid their worst fears (and that their worst fears have a real chance of coming true), and you will find you have a willing ally.

IDLENESS
Plenty of people want to become a top movie star, singer, athlete, professor, or even politician. But that takes both effort and risk, and there are other things I want to do this evening. So idleness is the drag on our greed, our ambition. Leaders and sales people use this to good effect. Make it easy for people to follow and to buy. Make it easy for colleagues to agree with you, and make it awkward and painful for them to disagree. Most will take the easy route.

All of this is the theory. Day to day, you need some simple motivational tools to use. This is the purpose of the next section.

You do not need psychology to work out how to motivate people. Start by thinking about the best boss you ever worked for. What did the boss do to motivate you so well? Do you do the same things with your team?

In reality, we all respond to simple motivational measures. Having asked thousands of people about their jobs, there is one question that consistently indicates how positive or negative you are likely to feel about your work: “my boss cares about me and my career” (agree/disagree). People who have bosses who don’t care feel bad about their job and their boss. People who have bosses who care are much more positive.

Caring is not about currying favor and trying to be liked. Caring means having the courage to be honest, to have the difficult conversation about
performance in a positive way. You do not need to be liked: you need to be respected.

Ultimately, there is no short cut to motivating people. If you care, you have to invest time in your team. It is investing, not spending or wasting, time. And it is not “quality” time: “quality” is a euphemism for “minimal.”

Showing you care is simple to say but hard to do. So how do you show you care? Here are 10 things you can do every day to motivate your team better:

As with all things that sound simple, in practice it is very hard to do all these things well and to do them consistently. It is high effort, but normally very high reward. Of course, there will always be the occasional member of the awkward squad, but most people will respond well if you show you care.

Coaching is a core management skill which few managers master. If you cannot coach your team, then you end up having to deal with every problem yourself. All the monkeys land on your back, which will frustrate you and it will frustrate your team because you are not giving them the chance to develop and grow. In this sense, coaching goes hand in hand with delegation. Coaching support lets your team learn and helps them take some of the monkeys away.

Coaching has been given a bad name by the coaching industry. Too many coaches turn out to be former executives who have gone into semi-retirement. What they lack in skill, they make up for with process. They learn to answer every question with a question: this avoids the need for them to have any insight of their own. You do their work for them, and then you pay them. This sort of coaching is closer to counseling and therapy: it has its place, which is not in the workplace.

you add value by adding insight

Your team does not need you to be a counselor and therapist. They need you to be a coach. You add value by adding insight, not just by asking questions. And you should be able to add insight, because of your experience. This does not mean you tell your team what to do. You let them discover the best solution. And in the process of letting them work out the best solution, you may well find that they come up with a better solution than the one you had in your mind. More importantly, it will be a solution to which your team member is committed: it is their solution, they
own it and they will want it to succeed. If it is your solution, it becomes another half-baked solution from their half-baked boss.

So a good manager-coach steers a very careful line between two traps. Avoid becoming counselor and therapist to the team. Avoid being the benign dictator who solves every problem and gives every direction.

It is always quicker for you in the short term to offer the solution and move on. In the long term, this simply makes the team ever more dependent on you and increases your workload and stress. In the short term, coaching takes time and effort. Think of it as investment in your team. The more they learn to deal with challenges themselves, the easier your life becomes and the better their performance becomes.

The coach-manager supports the team and helps them discover the best solution through a combination of asking questions, adding insight, and sharing experience. How you achieve this goal is the purpose of the next section.

Here is a simple framework for coaching a team member when they need help. Think of the five Os:

•
O
bjectives

•
O
utline the situation and explore other perspectives

•
O
ptions

•
O
bstacles to success and offer of help

•
O
utcome and next steps

Here is how each of the Os works in practice.

Your team member will have one objective: to find a solution to a problem. But you should have three objectives:

• Help the team member find a solution

• Ensure that the team member owns the solution and is committed to making it happen

• Help the team member develop their own capabilities

The first two objectives are reasonably self-explanatory. The third needs some explaining. Each of your team members will have development needs, which will probably be of a long-term nature. So use your conversation to help them see how they can solve the problem and develop the skill they require at the same time. That should become clear as you work through the rest of the conversation.

Once you have agreed what the problem is that you are trying to solve, ask the team member to outline the situation as they see it. Standard operating procedure is that the person being coached will see themselves as diligent, hard working, and honest while everyone else is idle, incompetent, and untrustworthy. This is not the time to challenge their personal world view directly. But once they have stated their case, ask how other people might see the situation. Explore it from several angles.

As this part of the conversation unfolds, three things should happen.

• First, you should be forming your hypothesis about what the possible set of solutions might be. You can test your ideas by asking directed questions: if you think funding is the issue, ask questions around that.

• Second, the team member will start to see things differently. They may start to see that they are part of the problem (even though they will never say that) and hopefully they will see that they are responsible for the solution: they will stop blaming everything on other people.

• Third, your team member may already be starting to discover potential solutions. The simple act of having the conversation and forcing their thought processes often works wonders.

Do not rush this stage of the conversation. If you rush into exploring options based on partial and garbled information, you are likely to have a train crash. Only when you have a full picture of the challenge, and you have some hypotheses about what to do about it, then you can proceed to the next stage.

Ask your team member how they might address the challenge. Encourage them to think of more than one option. If they offer a single-point solution you have
a very limited conversation which may become confrontational if they have not identified a workable solution.

If they have not suggested any solutions you can suggest some options yourself. Your experience should tell you how such challenges have been handled well or poorly on the past. Use that experience to open up a range of options: do not close down options yet.

Once you have identified possible solutions ask the team member to evaluate them: what are the benefits and concerns of each solution? In practice, this part of the conversation rapidly focuses on just two contrasting options. Relevant questions now will ensure that the team member does not fall in love with a catastrophic plan of action.

By now, even the slowest team member should be nudging themselves toward the best solution. The brightest team members will probably be exploring solutions that are better than the ones you had in mind.

Let the team member focus on the solution that they feel most confident about. It is critical that it is their solution, not yours.

You now need to turn the conversation to action: how is this going to happen and what might stop it happening? You will probably find that an enthusiastic team member can be naive about how easy it will be to turn their idea into action. That is why you have to make them think explicitly about what and who will be a barrier to success. As they identify each barrier, coach them again to think through what it will take to overcome the barrier.

By the time you and the team member are convinced you have a viable way forward, you have nearly won. The next step is to ask if there is anything you can do to help: you should be there to support if necessary, but not to lead. Let them ask for help rather than imposing it. Imposed help is an imposition, does not help, and is rarely valued. Only help if they want it.

This final step is about summarizing and clarifying what you have agreed and what you are going to do. The potential for miscommunication and misunderstanding is huge: both you and the team member have probably heard and remembered what you want to hear and remember. You may well have chosen to remember different things.

You should not summarize: let the team member summarize. When they say it, they commit to it. And you can check their script against yours. If they are different, resolve the difference immediately and avoid tears later on.