How to Keep Your Employees Motivated [ Leadership Insight ]

Foreign welcome to this Leadership Insights episode of the Enlightened Executive, where your personal evolution sparks your leadership evolution. In this episode, we're going to share what motivates your employees, and it's not what you think. Would you be offended if I said that you most likely don't know what motivates your employees? It's not personal. In fact, most leaders misjudge what motivates their employees. And it seems like most employees would be motivated motivated by higher pay or more vacation time, right? But surprisingly, a Gallup poll shows that more than money, people are motivated by development opportunities. In fact, 87% of millennials say development is the most important thing to them. And of that group, two thirds say it's extremely important. Another Gallup poll states that people are more likely to leave a job if they feel their unique strengths aren't being recognized. So how do we figure out what motivates our particular team members? Well, like most things, it starts with a conversation. Few leaders have ever had honest, direct, and open conversations with their team members about motivation. There's the yearly review, mostly focused on past performance, and that's about it. But we can do so much better. Use the beginning of each quarter as a reason to engage in these types of grounding conversations. Create the expectation with your team that you'll do this more than once a year, and together take action on the information they share with you. So here are three strategies that you can take to help understand what motivates your team. Number one, Ask your team members what project gave you the most energy last quarter? Or what had you feel the most engaged at work over the past few months? As strange as it sounds, directly asking your team members what motivates you probably won't result in the answer you're looking for. Humans are notoriously bad at understanding or communicating what motivates them. And even if they do know, they may hesitate to share that information with their boss. So instead of asking them a question they probably can't or won't answer, try asking them about the projects that energize them. Did they get energy from facilitating meetings, negotiating contracts? Maybe mentoring new hires? When you know what energizes your team, you can look for opportunities to give them more work that lights them up. Other potential questions could be what projects or tasks were the most draining? Where would you like to most grow? And how can I help you with that? Where do you feel like you're contributing most to the team? And where are you not contributing enough, but you'd like to contribute? Okay, number two. Add motivating aspects to less exciting projects. So not every project can be a dream project. But once you know what energizes and motivates your team, you can tuck in some of those fun tasks into each project. So if you know that Jess loves facilitating or presenting, make sure she leads sharing the findings of a less than super fun project to the client. Or if you know that Chris thrives when he's leading newer team members, put him in charge of a project managing the new hires for that somewhat boring project. And when you do this, when you add these energizing, motivating tasks to someone's plate, make sure they know that you did that on purpose. It can be as easy as saying, Jess, I know you mentioned that you really like facilitating, so I thought maybe you could present to the client. When our team knows we're listening to their needs and trying to meet them, morale and productivity go up. Number three Check in at the end of the quarter. After your team has spent three months doing more of the work that energizes and motivates them, check in again. How do they feel now? Do they feel energized? Empowered? Do they feel like they expanded their skill set? And then ask them the same set of questions you asked at the beginning of the quarter. Work together to create a plan that will help them continue to learn and grow and excel within your company. Motivation is a slippery thing and it varies from person to person and it changes over time. While it requires a bit of extra work to check in with each team member and tweak projects to fit motivations, it's an approach that will pay off better results and more engaged teams. So would you like deeper support in engaging and motivating your team members? Get in touch with us@susandrum.com we'd love to help you. And if you like this episode and want more leadership insights like these, hit the subscribe button and the like button and we always appreciate our five star reviews. Let's lead the way. Hope you enjoyed today's episode and I'd like to point you to the next important step. Hit the subscribe button and the bell to get notified when we release new content. I'll see you on the next episode of the Enlightened Executive. Sam.