There is a huge industry devoted to a made-up topic called “Employee Motivation.”
The idea of hiring a consultant to motivate your employees is ludicrous. There are no team building exercises, backwoods adventures or contrived HR outings that will motivate a team if the team members don’t trust you and other another.
Trust is the topic we don’t talk about enough at work. We pretend that trust doesn’t matter, but it’s actually the only thing that matters in your business.
If your employees don’t trust you and you don’t trust them, you will scratch your head and wonder why you don’t hit your goals. If your workplace is human and trusting, you will seldom talk about your goals except to say “Another barrier broken, you guys! You rule! We blew right past our Q2 targets!”
We pretend that we can motivate our employees through rewards and punishments, but we know that’s a lie. The best state you can achieve by keeping people in fear of getting on your bad side is this: you can get their grudging compliance. When was the last time you saw a team accomplish anything momentous through grudging compliance?
You can give people rewards, but any motivational bump those rewards give you won’t last. You know what will happen: in a short time, they’ll believe that the rewards are owed to them, because you taught them that that is true. It’s insulting to treat brilliant humans like your team members as though they were donkeys who can be made to do our bidding through carrots and sticks.
Here are ten easy ways for a thoughtless manager — or a whole thoughtless management team — to kill its team members’ motivation. Sadly, these ten management missteps happen every day.
1. When you talk with your team members, talk to them about their targets but don’t ask them how they’re doing, what they need from you or how they’d like to prioritize their projects. The best way to demotivate an employee is to treat him or her like a piece of production equipment, instead of a brilliant collaborator.
2. Don’t give your teammates visibility into the department’s or the company’s plans. How can people care about their work when they have no idea how their work supports to the organization’s goals?
3. Divide and conquer your team by playing favorites and switching up the list of favorites so that no one know whether they’re doing a great job or on the verge of getting fired. When people don’t know where they stand, they can’t blossom.
4. Use punishment as a tool to get people to work harder. Tell them “If you don’t want this job, I’ll find someone who does!”
5. When your team has a victory, don’t mention it. Tell them what they can do better next time, instead.
Read more of the original article in Forbes.
