How to demotivate your team?

Over expecting team performance would make leader or team supervisor feel un satisfied with team results and would lead to continious blaming , negatice feedbacks or even decrease rate of thanking and recongnition and that will reflect demotivating the team.
So leader should monitor team performance before estimating their outputs and whatever some goals were not acheieved as needed.
Also when a leader come to judge his team or give them a feedback or sharing results , he has to start with thank you statement and raising the postive points first (as an apitizer) then stating the negative one and to end with an enxourage statement for upcoming milestone to earn team engagement and to mitigate risk of demotivating.

Oh my word, where do we start? Demotivating people is 1000 times easier than motivating them. As humans we love hearing how great we are and 100 than you's will move you 1 inch forward. But even the slightest criticism typically have us sulk and come to a stand still.

Most people thrive when they have ownership of what they do, take that ownership away and you take away any motivation. Bad leaders tend to struggle with the concept of those 'under' them having any sort of say and therefore they like to tell them what to do.

This is interesting topic for discussion.
consequences of De-motivating the team and how to address them is ... challenge (self imposed).

A very effective way to demotivate a project team is through ineffective project sponsorship. One particularly interesting situation happened on a project I know of where the sponsor delegated sponsorship responsibilities to the project manager. As this was an enterprise-level project spanning multiple program organizations within a government agency, the project manager did not have sufficient formal authority to keep the project going. As a result, the project stalled and the agency was forced to continue using an expensive to maintain and technically obsolescent system.

Another way to demotivate a project team is to have a central Project Management Office (PMO) manage all projects, but the teams consist of individuals from a business unit. This approach is better suited for smaller, less complex projects lasting less than a year (my own rule of thumb). It becomes problematic for large, complex projects involving multiple enterprises where the project manager must have a thorough understanding of the politics involved between the different enterprises. It takes time to develop this understanding (perhaps a year). In the meantime, the project team must carry on with a project manager in learning mode. This can become an insidious cycle if the project manager never really gets up to speed, becomes discouraged and leaves, starting the cycle of recruiting and training a new project manager. I've seen a big project like this cycle through four project managers in eight years. The project in question should have been completed in three years, but with the project manager churn going on, it was still incomplete after eight years. As management considered key members of the project team from the business unit "critical" to the success of the project, the only way for them to advance professionally was to leave the business organization, resulting in further "hollowing-out" of the project team.

Failure to make decisions... A great way to motivate a project team is to revisit issues, and circle around, and the next meeting, revisit the issue... if the leader fails to make decisions and move forward, the project team can lose interest and motivation.

A great way to motivate a team is to make progress, make the difficult decisions, and move forward.

I'll draw on Mr. Pink and Mr. Lencioni's work and say that demotivation can stem from:

- Reducing autonomy - e.g. micromanagement
- Eliminating opportunities for mastery - e.g. not encouraging focus
- Ignoring purpose - e.g. not attempting to tie the project's objectives to the individual's goals
- Encouraging irrelevance - e.g. having team members work on low/no value work
- A culture of anonymity - e.g. you are just a number
- Immeasurement - e.g. no way to know if you are making a difference or not

Any subset of the above is likely to reduce individual motivation.

Kiron