The Most Important Lesson in Motivation
From the Eye on the Workforce Blog
by Joe Wynne
Workforce management is a key part of project success, but project managers often find it difficult to get trustworthy information on what really works. From interpersonal interactions to big workforce issues we'll look the latest research and proven techniques to find the most effective solutions for your projects.
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You have to motivate workers to be successful at project management, but how good are you at doing this? Answer this question: Which of the following are good motivational strategies? You may choose more than one.
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Associate rewards with reaching new objectives
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Allow individuals to make their own gut decisions
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Avoid praise
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Dwell on past mistakes
There’s not really one leadership style that will win every day in every situation. You have to be flexible while working from your strengths. Individuals are motivated in different ways. The best leaders will understand the motivation of an individual and use that to influence the individual appropriately.
This may not come naturally, of course, so it will be useful to get some tips based on this webinar by Heidi Grant Halvorson provided by the Harvard Business Review. She works in motivational science. You probably didn’t even know there was such a thing, but they have been doing some great work that we all need to learn. According to the summary, the webinar “explains how to identify a person's motivational focus, how to change this focus, and how to use it in the right way to get results.”
How do you avoid making the mistake of attempting to motivate someone by using the wrong tactic? Ms. Halvorson groups people into a couple of easy-to-remember motivational focus groups. People tend to be dominant as
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“Promotion-focused” – who want to advance and identify career opportunities
OR
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“Prevention-focused” – who see goals as responsibilities and concentrate on staying safe by not losing or making errors
Right now, categorize yourself in one of these focus groups. Next, think of someone you work with who is motivated the other way.
Each focus area has strengths and weaknesses, but you’ll have to check out the webinar for those details or buy Halvorson’ book Focus. Suffice it to say now that both focuses are needed to make your teams successful. Your job is to identify which of the two focuses motivates the person you are trying to motivate and use tactics appropriate to that focus area.
These tactics will be the subject of the next post, but you can get started by looking at the question that started this post. The top two answers are motivators for promotion-focused individuals. The bottom two answers are motivators for prevention-focused individuals. Notice how you don’t understand what motivates the other type of person. It may even de-motivate you!
And that, my friend, may be the most important lesson in motivation.
Advance your career with the motivational tips in my next post.
Bonus activity: Find statements made in this post that clearly motivate one or the other focus group!
Posted on: August 20, 2013 10:36 PM |
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Comments (1)
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Bernard Gore
Portfolio, Programme & Project Professional| NZ Police
Wellington, New Zealand
Agree entirely, and that is where so many books and approaches on this subject fail - they seek "THE solution", when no such thing exists. My own background includes some NLP, which has a lot in common with motivational science, in fact I'd describe it as applied motivational science, and one of the core principles is that every individual is diofferent and you have to understand each and establish a "frame" in whcih you can build the right motivation for them.
Obviously this is sometimes impractical - the time to do this for a large team can simply not be availabel, but some work is still needed and is possible as groups of people tend to share some aspects of their views, so you need to find out what are the shared aspects, and what are not, and then design the approach. The Promotion-focus vs Prevention-focus is one of those, although I'd say trying to fit people into a single dimension like this is only one step better than treating everyone the same - typically you have to develop a number of dimensions against which to assess them.
An interesting one is option 3 above "Avoid praise" - now most motivation states that you should parise your people, however this is too simplsitic - some are not comfortable with this, for a variety of reasosn - some are self-judging and may fidn praise condescending if they themselves do not feel they've a good job, others may feel that it places an unreasonable expectation on them to do even better, etc. This is a failry extreme sort of reaction, but one that does occur and an example of how a seemingly obvious approach "priase people for good work" is sometimes too simplistic and even counter-productive, and if you aren't conscious of this sort of trap you can easily cause serious damage despite the best of intentions.
Look forward to your next post!
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