“Motivation”
by Chris Reinhardt, feedlot specialist
How do you motivate your team? What motivates people to work harder or work differently? Can you change people’s behavior long-term? These are all questions which have made motivational speakers and corporate consultants a lot of money over the past few decades. But I’m not sure the answer to any of these questions is beyond dispute.
Do you know anyone who is completely unmotivated to work harder or take ownership in the effort and is seemingly impervious to any form of external motivation? On the contrary, do you know anyone who, without any obvious external stimulation and in the face of a daunting workload, seems to have an internal motor which never runs down?
Both of these people exist in the workplace, and both raise the question, “Can you motivate people?” We’ve all seen examples that demonstrate that we can stimulate short-term activity toward a particular short-term goal. But what can be done to influence people’s attitude and desire to make the whole team better? If the answer is “Nothing” then “Houston, we have a problem.” To paraphrase a very famous and successful author, “Get the right people on the bus, and get the wrong ones off. Then press down hard on the pedal on the right—move forward.”
What are “the right people”? They’re the kind who share and embrace the team’s vision, and are ready to do what it takes to achieve it. They are not a dime-a-dozen, but they’re not impossible to find either. The reality is that well-managed organizations that take care of and empower their people attract hard-working, self-motivated people. Who doesn’t want to work for that type of organization?
The flip side is that “the wrong people” are those that embrace their own vision, and feel that their vision supersedes that of the organization. In other words they’re selfish, and that is a cancer to team unity. A selfish teammate is not a teammate at all, because they’re not working toward the same goal as the rest of the team, which means the rest of the team has to work that much harder to move the project forward. You have to get them off the bus—they’re dragging it into the ditch.
