28. Elevate Your Leadership: Proven Strategies for Boosting Employee Motivation and Performance

And your job as a manager breaks down into four areas. Planning, leading, organizing, controlling. A lot of managers are just like, I'm a manager, you need to respect me. You need to go and do this task right now. That's not how humans are. Humans are logical. They're psychological, you know.

Welcome back to another episode of the Benedberg show when we are talking crypto, business and personal growth. We have an epic episode for you today for all you managers out there that are dealing with, you know, employees that may need a little bit of motivation, may need a little bit of performance management. Bergs has the MBA qualities you need to level up. I've learned a lot from him and he's going to walk us through exactly what you need to move on. Struggling employees get the most out of them with some NBA models. Bergs.

Matt. I'm doing well. How you doing?

I'm doing fantastic. I'm ready for this episode, mate, so I can manage you out.

Hell. That is not what this is about. This is about the manager, not about pushing people out of your organization. Jesus, Ben, why is it always see this? This is exactly the challenge that we're facing with new managers and people that are just poor at management like yourself. So really, I see a heap of people struggling with this, with employee, you know, behavior, performance. And this is kind of my one go to MBA model that I have in my head all of the time whenever I face an employee challenge or just any kind of person challenge at work. And it just helps me to frame the situation. And I see a lot of people saying, this person's just not performing. I'm going to get them out. They don't know what they're doing. And that's just a very surface level way of thinking about stuff. How can we actually go a bit deeper and understand more? So I'm going to bring up this model now and I'll define the model and then we'll go through it and I'll give you some examples. So this model is. It's like the favorite MBA model. Everyone loves this, right? So it's an organizational behavior model and it's called the Mars model of individual behavior. So what this is if it's ever going to load. All right, I'll keep talking while it loads. So this is the Mars model of individual behavior. On the left, we've got all the kind of things that go in from the person. So this is values, personality, perceptions, emotions, attitudes, stress. That's everything that the kind of human is, right? We don't really need to know all of that for this model, it's a lot simpler than that. So for those people listening on the pod, I just want you to imagine an arrow going from left to right. So the back of the arrow is on the left and the tip of the arrows on the right. And the basic model is on the left. You've got two prongs on the back, motivation and ability. Go to the tip of the arrow and. And you get individual behavior and results. If you've got the motivation and you've got the ability, you will get individual behavior and results. And behavior and results is, I'm acting the right way for the job, my performance is good. Basically, they're going to get to where they need to be going. So let's just go through motivation first. I'm going to describe each of these aspects and then give you examples. And this is just going to help you so much in management because people get promoted to management roles. It's like, oh, you've been doing really well. You're in this kind of, you know, technical role, or you're an engineer. And then bam, you're a manager. And you have to look after 10 people and you're like, what the hell? You've had no training. You don't know what to do. This will help you out. So, look, when we talk about motivation, it's like internal forces that impact three things. Direction, intensity, and persistence of, you know, a person's voluntary actions. So if you think about this motivation, think about dip, dip, direction, intensity, persistence. Direction is the path I'm going along, where I engage my effort. And intensity is like, how much effort I put into that goal, how hard I go. And persistence is continuing it along. So where am I going? Am I putting in the effort and do I keep going even though I get stuck? That's motivation. And I also like to upframe this into intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. And this is really important because this is really kind of. This is outside of the model, but it just helps so much to put it in. So intrinsic comes from within the person. So, Ben, these are things like feeling satisfaction from doing a good job, being part of a team, being aligned to a vision, seeing my future in the business, just getting satisfaction from doing that task and being part of a team that comes from inside. And extrinsic is rewards and recognition, or I want to avoid punishment. So, like in our meetings, we do things like we call someone out every single week, you know, for displaying the company values. That's recognition. So that's motivation. Now Ability and again remember motivation, ability, behavior and results. Ability is the kind of, they call it natural aptitudes and learn capabilities needed to complete a task. And really all this is is does this person have the skill to do the job? Are they able to do it? And if we break those down like do they have aptitude so the natural talent to do the job, do they have the learn capabilities which is the skills and knowledge and are they competent to actually do that? So think about this. If people have the motivation so they got the direction, intensity and persistence and they have the skills and ability to do the job, you should get individual behavior and results. But a lot of the time you don't. And the reason for that is there are two modifying factors. And the first one is called role perceptions. Now this is very important and I've talked to you a lot about this Ben and this, this happens in every single business. And role perceptions are the extent to someone that someone understands their job duties and what is expected of them. And the second modifying factor is situational factors. So these are conditions that the, that interfere with the employees tasks or goals. So could be crazy deadlines, dealing with a difficult team member, budget, tooling. A lot of these are kind of out of their control in the short run. So I want to run through this model with a couple of examples. And if you just look at this in totality, motivation, ability, role perception, situational factors. I have those four things in my head all the time when I have a challenge at work. So I'll give you, I'll give you a few examples. In my previous role we had a data scientist and he was a brilliant guy but, and he worked really hard but he was always behind the eight ball and I could see he was doing work, but he just wasn't achieving all the goals we needed him to achieve. He was in another team and his manager asked me to help out. And he's competent, he worked like a madman. So he was motivated to do what he wanted to do. He definitely had the ability. He was a wild unit. So what was going on. So I looked through it and it came down to being role perceptions with this guy because it was either going to be role perceptions or situational factors. And what had happened with this guy was he was in a role in a certain department in a unit and he got taken out of that and put into another one where a role that he really wanted to be in. The challenge was that he still thought he had to do his other role, finish off the projects that were going on and he couldn't prioritize all the work. So he was working like a mad bastard. He was getting really grumpy and he couldn't finish all the work. And it was a simple thing, but he couldn't articulate it. He just saw it all as work. Not, you know, one department, another department. What do I need to do? And his manager was a very new manager. So I said, look, you need to sit down with this guy and just clarify what he needs to do. Say over the next two months, you can polish off all those projects. I'll give you the time, and then you work exclusively on your new role. And that's what we're going to do going forward. And he was so happy. He smashed out all that work in three weeks. And he was one of their highest performing employees. And just by looking through it at a different lens, not like, this guy's working, is he faking it? Why isn't he getting the work done? You can really unlock all of those insights for employees and really drive performance and motivation. So I'll give you another example. A person I sort of indirectly reported to, it was like a team that was off to the side. He was a director and we had these amazing conversations and he would, he would say, like, oh, you know, I'll be like, we need to build this. We need to. That. He'd be like, yes. And, and you know, the conversation we had be great. We'd make a plan and he'd always kind of come back a week or two later just defeated. And he'd be like, look, we, we can't do that. We're going to change this. I'm like, but bro, you just said this two weeks ago. What is going on? What is happening? And I'm like, what is this guy? Is he like, feeding me bullshit? Like, you know, is. He's just like leading me along.

Why is this happening? Why is he saying one thing and then coming back? And it turned out that, you know, this guy was motivated, he had the ability, he understood his role and he wanted to crush it. But this was a situational factor. So I thought through, put myself in his shoes, acted with empathy, and what was he doing in that time in those two weeks? And he, he, he might not have even known this or articulated it to me, but through his actions and what he was saying, it was a situational factor he couldn't control. In those two weeks, he would go and talk to his boss, who had a completely different alignment and wanted to work on personal pet projects instead of what the Business actually needed. And then he was talking to the CEO who basically cut him off at the knees, cut his balls off and took his budget away. And he wouldn't articulate any of that. Maybe he felt like he couldn't talk about it. But me thinking that through and just hearing it around the traps was able to put that together. Okay, that's what's happening. And I could have a much better conversation with him. I could actually tackle that head on and say, hey, you know, have the challenging conversation. Look, we're talking about this. And then you go away and you come back, what's happening? Is it your boss? Is it the CEO? What's happening? And then we talked it all out and we made a new plan and then we created some awesome projects from there. Another one and classic software developer. So this was a software developer that needed to get an integration done for the app. This is a software developer I'd worked with in the past. Absolutely weapon, machine motivated and full stack developer insane. Knew exactly what he needed to do. And I'm like, why is this guy not getting it done? And again, we are the worst at mediating our own thoughts and communicating what we're doing. Especially if something is not done. Talking to your manager and telling them why it's not done is just like the hardest thing. You'll come up with excuses, you might not know exactly what it is. And it turns out with this guy, I literally had to sit down and be like, bro, walk me through it. What are the things that are going on? And it was just a situational factor. He was waiting on someone in a big bureaucratic organization and he kept contacting them and, you know, phone calls, emails, and they just weren't doing the work. And it was just a blocker there. And once we found that out, he just escalated it to me, I called the other person's boss. I'm like, look, you need to sort this out. And with the day it was done. And we just flew from there. We just accelerated months ahead. And look, an example that was in our own business, Ben. So we had marketing and dev and marketing, dev butt heads all the time in every single business. And this was a really interesting one where one side was about their role perceptions and what they had to do and what they wanted done for them. And I think both sides were a situational factor where it was with communication and especially in remote teams, if you're not communicating, you'll fill in the blanks and be like, oh, these guys just want this. They don't know what they're doing. And you know, it's hard to communicate across all of those challenges. A lack of comms. And once you and I kind of pick that apart, we're like, oh, great. All this needs to do is communicate and we'll set the expectations. So we created a meeting with all of the people and we're like, hey, we just need to talk to each other. What do you guys really need help. It will solve it. Together we created a cross functional team and we set the expectations for those teams are saying, hey, this is, these are our roles. This is what we need you to do. Go and do this, talk to each other, come away next week and we'll have another meeting. And my blockers that we had for months were just ameliorated. They just went away and it was absolutely phenomenal. So really, this comes down to having productive conversations with your employees, having a wider lens and really understanding, you know, the different aspects of just humans and what might be going on, rather than, it's the individual, they suck. You know, it's ridiculous. And it just really, really helps from a solution perspective. And I use this all the time. So to new managers out there, give this a crack. It's called the Mars model of individual behavior. Have a look at it, apply it to your employees and see how you go.

That's epic, man. It's fascinating how it actually all I can. Even in my head, I was thinking my own scenarios. It fits into one of those categories.

Yeah, it's always absolutely.

And then you can go and either work on that, coach it through, or understand better, like why something might be not working or why someone might not be right for the job or how teams are working together. It kind of all fits under that.

Oh, definitely. And your job as a manager breaks down into four areas. Planning, leading, organizing, controlling. And a lot of managers are just like, I'm a manager. You need to respect me. You need to go and do this task right now. That's not how humans are. Humans are logical. They're psychological. You know, you need. You need to understand a lot of aspects about your employees. And if you want high performing employees that go above and beyond, you need to talk to them. You need to work out on an individual level. What is this people? What is this person like? What do they kind of dislike? What do they look at as, you know, rewards? Is it intrinsic? And they like being.

Talked about in front of their team as being, you know, a high performer or the job they did, getting that recognition or is it being rewarded? You know, rewards Only go so far. Generally they're like the last 10% really. We go and do things because you have a feeling of belonging, a sense of purpose. So once you talk to your employees and utilize this framework, you understand them a lot better and you will unlock significant benefits. So I actually use this model a lot in our team. Ben, when I came in with the software development team and for us it was setting a vision of where we want to get to, challenging the team. Because these are a team of creative people, they wanted to do amazing work, they wanted to build on things. So setting that vision for them, allowing them the freedom to create things and then having those meetings with them, going through it, you know, adapting to change, but then also, you know, recognizing them for the effort that put in what, what they've built and that just motivated them. So like the amount of output was just like up and to the right. It was insane.

Yeah, I remember when you came in because I was butting heads, I was like, man, I can't communicate what's going on, why can't I talk software engineering language? And he came in and, and just allowed that flow, free flow communication. It could talk that language, understand. But the situational factors, it was not allowing, you know, departments together.

And honestly it's not always the person as well those situational factors, it might be you as a manager a lot of the time. You might not be clear in your instructions, you might give too many instructions to people and they don't know the priority on those instructions. You might not, your communication might not be the greatest, it might not be direct the way that you're goal setting. You might be sending too many emails when it should be a face to face conversation. You know, the tone you might be using, the briefness and people will just get an email go, oh, not another thing. It's going to take me so long. Don't they understand I don't want to do all this work. So you've got to look at yourself within this framework as well and say, hey, it's not always the other person. I might have some deficits. And you can ask them like Ben, next week we're doing a series of one on ones and we're asking our employees a bunch of questions. So we've got maybe 10 questions we're giving to our employees and we're saying, hey, go away and answer these, then come back to us, we'll ask you the questions. So it's all about them. They're pre prepared and we're going to find out like the Best things in the business, the worst things, what keeps you around, what motivates you, you know, how do you feel? A sense of reward and achievement. And it's going to be different for everyone, but we need to know those things so then we can build them into our plans and have it more individualized for those employees.

Yeah, yeah. It's not a blanket rule. Everyone's different. Everyone's motivated by different things. Everyone wants to do different things, different dreams, aspirations, things that make them happy, skill sets. People are hard.

Absolutely. And for some people, might be I just need a little bit more money or I need a little bit of time off or I need flexibility or I want to work on this project or just grinding away on this data. Work gives me heaps of satisfaction. And once you find that out, and even the team building we did, like, you know how to communicate with people. Like, you know the, the sheet we got from, from our good mate T, you know, it's like, what are your. He facilitates this thing. What are your specific values? What are your superpowers? How should people communicate with you? And I'm. I tell people how they should communicate with me. I say use slack, like during the day, that's fine. If it's urgent, pick up your mobile, Pick up the mobile. Call me directly straight away. If you're writing out a huge thing, don't do it. I'm not going to read it. Pick up the phone or drop me a loom video. If you write me an email, it's going to be slow to get to. So they know how to communicate with me. And if you sending me work stuff, try not to send it on WhatsApp and all that. Keep it within your channel.

I started just, I was just like, I was in WhatsApp mode. You're like, oh, wait, if it's work. But, but. And that was like, that was good. I was like, oh, yeah. I don't even know, like, what am I doing over here on WhatsApp? I was just like using whatever app. You know what I mean?

Exactly.

But it's good.

And people don't know because you send it on WhatsApp. I start responding. You don't know that. I'm like, oh, why is he on my WhatsApp? Like, this is the way I have it set up and everyone has their phone set up differently. Right. Like, I've got all notifications, the soft notifications, apart from calls. I don't have slack on my phone. And if you're notifying me in that way, and really it's just up to me to tell people this is the way that you communicate with me. We're a small organization so we can do that. You might have blanket kind of rules and policies if you're at a larger organization. And really you could say, yeah, this is great and you can even work to modify those rules Where I know in the previous business I was in, especially in government, they used email and teams all the time. Like big email conversations all the time, where you spend 60% of your time in email. So I put a responder on just saying I check my email twice a day, once at 10, once at 4. You can get me on there. If you want anything else, give me a call. Yeah. And emails went down like 90% because I wasn't replying. The more you reply, the more other people reply.

We were having that conversation in Slack. Yes. They were going back and forth and spending like four hours on a conversations. Like we just like this. Let's just jump on a call. And I should just knock it out. Like just jump on a quick call. It's like so fast.

Exactly. This is so there's a communication hierarchy and it's a pyramid. I might actually go through this next week. But right at the top is just face to face talking. Under that is like, you know, video conference or picking up the phone. That is the highest level of communication. It's synchronous. As soon as you start to go down to like voice messages and then you go down to email, then you go down to text. It's asynchronous. You don't convey tone within text. You piss people off. That can only be done for certain things, like if you're sending a report. Email's great. If you need to change someone's mind or talk to them or explore a solution space. That's not email, that's face to face. That's a coffee or that's a phone call. I'm probably going to go through that next week because that's really important for a lot of people next week. All right, so there you go. I wanted to do that for quite a while. And there you go. There's a Mars model of individual behavior and I hope it helps you people out.

Nice work, folks. That's been really helpful. So there you go. Team strategies to be a good manager and how to solve employee Motivation performance. The Mars model of individual behavior. You can check that out. You can Google it. You can Google that Bergs. That little graphic will come up.

Oh, absolutely. You can Google the. Just Google Mars model. Organizational behavior or individual behavior. And again, the two things motivation ability lead to behavior and results. Motivation we talked about the start intrinsic extrinsic and direction, intensity and persistence. You can work on those things with your team and with ability. Do they have the skills to do the job? They're generally straightforward. You'll know with your people. But the role perceptions are situational factors. You know, put your brain to work. Spend 10 minutes thinking on that and you'll get much better results.

Brilliant. If you have a friend or colleague that you think needs to hear about how Bergs can manage your performance and employees, make sure to send this podcast and leave us a a review. We're on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and wherever you get your podcast. Also on YouTube if you're listening on podcasts we've got the video format. If you want to see our very rough lids, you can head over there. Bergs, thanks very much for another episode and I will see you next one.

No worries. See you folks.