Employee’s Motivation - Are You Part of the Problem?
By David W. Earle
Click here to contact David and/or see his GoodTherapy.org Profile
“Watch me grow, Mommy!” the five year old daughter of Joy Irwin exclaimed. Her small child was tip-toeing up over the cabinet to see her little face in the mirror. After each stretching exercise she exclaimed, “Watch me grow Mommy!” Her mother was busy getting ready for work with lunches to pack, hair to brush, and changing the diapers on the youngest. “Watch me grow, Mommy!” She exclaimed again with the intensity and the receptiveness that only a five-year old can inflict upon parents.
In a fit of frustration, the mother loudly exclaimed, “I don’t have time to see you grow!” After seeing the hurt on her daughters face, Joy sat on the bathroom floor and softly said to her sniffling daughter, “Come to Mother, I do have time to watch you to grow.”
Joy put this experience in a much broader content than the obvious child-rearing lesson, when she said, “Take time to see your employees grow”. Nurturing the success of your employees guarantees more accomplishments will follow, but in the rush to production, supervisors are often remiss about remembering that their primary function is the growth of their employees. How better to encourage this progress than acknowledging what is working well.
When a supervisor detects a problem with an employee the natural reaction is to confront the worker with criticism. This has been the time honored method of getting employees to focus on doing their job correctly. The key question is: how effective is this method?
After determining the problem, the significant question a successful supervisor should immediately ask himself is this: “How have I contributed to this problem?” This introspective point of view sounds very simple but often involves a complete shift in a person’s natural reaction; a change in their emotions and thinking. A supervisor armed with this paradigm shift will only be as successful as what she believes about herself at the time. If her self-esteem is high, this thinking is not a threat to her self-concept, but when the supervisor’s self-esteem has taken a downturn, introspection is hard to do. Until this change in perception happens, how can she watch her employees grow?
In the book Supervisor Savvy, Laverne Ludden and Tom Capozzoli present three key questions supervisors need to ask. The first question is “Do I punish good work?”. Employees have another way of saying this, “No good deed goes unpunished.” Most supervisors give extra work to key employees because they trust these employees will get the job done, correctly the first time, and do it safely. Has the supervisor discussed with his key employees the reason for this extra reliance? What kind of acknowledgement has he rewarded them? Maybe these employees like the extra work, like to have everyone know they can always be counted on, but also may harbor resentments for lack of acknowledgement and /or rewards. Mr. Supervisor, have you asked them how they like to be recognized?
“Do I reward poor work?” is the second question. One employee was turned down when requesting time off to go hunting. In retaliation, he purposely was late to work three days in a row. This tardiness and the resulting discipline happened to coincide with deer season; the punishment he received – a three day suspension! Another example: have you every taken work away from a slower employee and given it to another more productive employee? What message did the slower worker received? This decision may have been necessary to handling the immediate crisis, but is this the way to encourage responsibility or growth?
The last question is truly the trickiest, “Do I give meaningful rewards for good work?” the supervisor needs to know her employees in order to give a reward that fits the individual person. I distribute the DiSC Personal Profile™ for the InScape Publishing Company. This year’s promotion was a Caribbean Cruise. If I achieve this sales target, I would be awarded a free trip. As tempting as this prize was to some, it was not a motivation to me because taking a cruise is not something I enjoy. Give me round-trip tickets to a location of my choice or substantially discount my next year’s purchases! By asking the employee how they like to be acknowledged, this knowledge provides the supervisor with the ability to tailor rewards to fit the person. And the only accurate way a supervisor can know this is to ask; how novel!
Your employee will never be as honest as Joy’s five-year old and tell you, “Watch me grow” but you can be sure there is a part in all of us that wants recognition for the work we do. Using this simple yet powerful concept will build better teams simply because you took the time to acknowledge their performance and to “watch ‘um grow”!
©Copyright 2008 by David W. Earle. All Rights Reserved. Permission to publish granted to GoodTherapy.org. The following article was solely written and edited by the author named above. The views and opinions expressed are not necessarily shared by GoodTherapy.org. Questions or concerns about the following article can be directed to the author or posted as a comment to this blog entry.
Click here to contact David and/or see his GoodTherapy.org Profile