Motivating Staff Morale - What Managers Ignore

I have been following an interesting debate over assessing motivation of employees, taking place on a social networking forum. These days almost all employers use some form of motivational assessment tools, psychometric tests, etc., to assess how a potential employee or manager’s primary motivation for seeking a job fits into the organisation’s values, culture and mission. However, even after rigourous processes of selection to calibrate the motivation of a new recruit, it is not uncommon to find recruiting managers complaining they don’t know there they went wrong. Or even the new recruit complaining that he/she does not think that they can work long in the organisation.

I have recently spent about two weeks with some highly motivated aid workers in Haiti who are doing their work to help the people affected by the earthquake earlier this year. Having met over a hundred of them, their commitment, mission and motivation to simply help the people left me amazed. These are a bunch of people who aren’t motivated by money or comfort or name and fame. External stimuli are less important to them than what they feel internally – their own sense of achievement, of being of service to people less fortunate than them. And they were working for some of the most amazing organisations on this planet whose record of service to humanity have been unparalleled.

It therefore surprises me to find that even when an individual’s, motivation and values were fully aligned to an organisation’s, after a while, many of the same staff and managers feeling that this wasn’t what they initially started with – the highly motivated individual or the-my-type-of-organisation thinking.

The problem is that during recruitments, both the candidates and recruiters, are looking at what motivate the individual. All the assessment tools and tests are geared towards that. The tools work at the level of conscious choices or patterns we follow. But human minds also work at sub-conscious levels, which sometimes some of us don’t even dig into. Consciously, I may be fully open to receive feedback, positive or negative, from my manager, and subconsciously I feel demotivated when I receive negative feedback from my manager in a certain way. The selection tools put lot of emphasis on what motivates us, but not enough to understand – for both the new staff and the recruiters – what factors could demotivate (i.e., what motivates one ‘away from’ something) an individual. When recruiting, managers look at individual patterns of motivation, but  when dealing with factors that demotivate, the same manager then falls back on organisational (generic, common) approaches to dealing with the individuals – salaries, best practices etc. Managers/organisations simply do not know how to handle individual differences in what keeps one from being demotivated.   

Non-profit Leadership – Three Lessons to Learn from Businesses©

Results in non-profits organisations have always been vague. Traditionally, to be seen as legitimate and worthy of our support, all that a non-profit had to demonstrate was its commitment to a cause. It would get rewarded (support, donations, funding from donors and governments) for what it represented, and that support was based on what it promised, rather than performance or results.

In the business sector, an organisation is rewarded based only on its performance or results it delivers in terms of profits, market share, stock prices, employment created, and similar measurable indicators which underpin the core purpose of the business. The core purpose of non-profits is often defined in terms which do not make them amenable to be broken down into success criteria. How do you measure the success of an organisation which defines its core purpose as removing poverty, or meeting the healthcare needs of the vulnerable population?

The core purpose of an organisation is to answer the question -- why does the organisation exist at all? This is different from defining goals or objectives at a particular point in time. In the non-profits, the core purpose is taken for granted by successive generation of leaders. This is partly due to the reason that the core purpose is often defined so broadly that it becomes axiomatic that the core purpose makes absolute sense, no matter what changes may have happened in the external environment. Who can question the fact that poor exist, and that they need help, or that poor people’s healthcare needs are not being met, and hence there is a need to address these?

So goes the thinking.

However, if you pause for a moment, and ask the question: what is the best way to help the poor? As the noted Economist, Milton Friedman, argued over three decades ago, the best way to help the poor is to help them become richer. If the core purpose of a non-profit was defined in this language, you could measure the performance in terms of wealth created, income raised, assets increased etc. This would also enable the organisation to define a clear and compelling vision, while simultaneously enabling it to measure and track its performance.

However, non-profits have historically shied away from such specifics, and donor and supporters (customers) are expected to take the organisations for who they are, what they represent, and what they promise, not what they deliver.

This paradigm is slowly shifting. There is increasing pressure now on non-profits to deliver and demonstrate results. Many donors have now been supporting businesses to undertake activities which were normally delivered in the past by the non-profit sector. Corporate social responsibility is breaking new ground in terms of how companies engage with society. Caring for the society and the vulnerable is no longer the preserve of the governments and the non-profits.

It is heartening to see that some of the corporate giants have moved beyond their corporate social responsibility, and started redefining the core purpose of their businesses. PepsiCo is reshaping relationships between business and society. PepsiCo is examining the health implications of its products, it’s partnership with governments and NGOs, and initiating approaches to empower the younger generation to take responsibility early in their careers. It has launched a partnership with Waste Management Inc. to create innovative public recycling kiosks offering incentives for consumers to deposit empty bottles and cans. The company has been running a competition to find the best not-for-profit organisations whose social innovations can solve significant world problems.

Procter & Gamble is another company which now defines its stated purpose as improving “the lives of the world's consumers, now and for generations to come." In 2009, the company launched a new business strategy, called "purpose-inspired growth" to "improve more lives in more places more completely." In smaller organisations, too, entrepreneurs are creating businesses that reflect their social and environmental values shaping the core purpose. Anita Roddick’s Body Shop’s involvement in activism and campaigning for environmental and social issues including involvement with Greenpeace and The Big Issue are well known. In 1990, Roddick founded Children On the Edge, a charitable organisation which helps disadvantaged children in Eastern Europe and Asia. These are a few examples. There are thousands others. As espoused by C. K. Prahalad in his widely acclaimed book ‘The Fortune at The Bottom of The Pyramid’, the business case for making poverty eradication a core business of businesses is immense.

Non-profit leaders need to demonstrate a stronger appreciation of these changes happening globally, and realise that they can not take their donors and public support for granted – mere good intentions and promises which sustained them in the past are not enough any longer. One of the reasons why the non-profit sector globally has been steeped in a static mode of thinking is the (perceived) success non-profits have had in the past. Despite not having clear measures and benchmarks to achieve, there is no denying that some of the work done by non-profits have made immense impacts on the lives of millions of people all over the world. However, future cannot be seen as an extrapolated extension of the past.

There are three critical issues non-profit leaders of today and future generations ought to grapple with, drawing lessons from the business sector:

1. Redefine the Core Purpose: Although the needs of the poor and vulnerable remain as they were in the past, organisations still need to examine the rationale for their existence and the special and specific contributions it makes. Core purpose needs re-visiting continually to make sure the organisation remains at the cutting edge of delivering what it intends to deliver.

2. Define Performance Measures and Tangible Success Indicators: It is important to realise that if your core purpose remains fudgy and vague (‘helping the poor’), the organisation will never know if and when it achieves its purpose. Clearer the core purpose, clearer the goals and objectives the organisation delivers, and the organisation knows when and how it is delivering these.

3. Know Your New Competitors: Non-profits need to know that they are no longer competing with themselves. The new businesses and enterprises are setting new benchmarks which have potential to transform the entire non-profit sector landscape for the better. These offer new opportunities for collaboration.

When Change Fails, Change again. And again!

All of us are familiar with this phenomenon of never-ending changes in organisations. As a concept, change is fine, and shows signs of an organisation adapting to its changing environment. Except that, the type of changes I am referring to are primarily about changes in structures, or more appropriately, organogram. Some organisations have this unbounded faith in the powers of structural change to bring about magical changes in the organisation that before the dust has settled on the last round of musical chairs, another round of changes to the organogram has already begun.

In my consulting career, I have seen organisations who play around with their structures so much and so frequently that it is not unusual to see them come back to what they had moved away from five years ago. Every ‘big idea’ of change usually comes with a proclamation from leaders about how wonderful the future will look like, and yet they end up looking pretty much the same! The staff have by now seen this ritual year after year, and the ‘survivors’ among them have learned to live with these, and the rest live from one day of uncertainty to another.

There is another type of organisation where structures are not the focus, but they systems and procedures keep changing continuously, at a pace where no one is quite sure what the current regime is. Manuals and procedures are churned out at such regularity that managers who have the responsibility to operationalise these spend most of their working lives trying to figure out what the latest commandments are. Everybody in the organisation complains about the heavy bureaucracy and ‘red tape’ that results from heaps of manuals and procedures laid on top of each other. Yet with every new situation or challenge the organisation confronts, the default is to go into the print room and bring out another set of guidelines and procedures, hoping against hope that from some of those pages will emerge a solution. And everybody will live happily ever after.

Unfortunately, the ‘ever after’ moment never arrives, and the leaders complain of staff’s inability to adapt, and the staff walk around like zombies lost in the labyrinths of the organisation.

A fundamental element missing in most change processes is a lack of focus on the culture and style – i.e., corporate culture, shared values, work ethic and leadership styles.

Let me share with you an example, which is not uncommon in many organisations:

Some years ago, I was involved in helping a large international humanitarian organisation to put in place a systematic performance management system. We undertook extensive consultation at all levels of the organisation and introduced something which was developed through months of iterative exercises. This had buy-in from all managers and senior leaders of the organisation. A detailed roll-out strategy involving briefings and training for all managers and staff was implemented over a six-month period. The system was as good as one could get, and the commitment, so we thought, of the organisation was clearly there to use it to bring about fundamental changes in the ways of staff development and performance management.

Some months ago, I was back again in this organisation to assist with a review of their humanitarian work. This gave me an opportunity to see for myself how the staff appraisal system actually worked in practice after three years it was introduced.

The system on paper, the forms, the guidelines and the instructions are all up-to-date, and couldn’t be better. However, in its actual use, things were different: although managers were trained, it is not integrated into the development of managers, and many managers do not believe that it (staff appraisal) is actually important to do and may be actively discouraged by more senior managers from using it as this was not valued by the management.

This, coupled with the fact that the performance appraisal was not linked to any management decision-making processes (training, promotion, sanction), influences the collective belief about its (ir)relevance. Staff and managers now engage in a game of going through the motions of conducting the appraisals which are now reduced to the task of filling in forms once a year.

Work ethic, collective beliefs and values demonstrated by the management didn’t quite nurture the appraisal system in the organisation.

Three important things to remember in any organisational change process:

1.     Most often leadership is preoccupied with changing structures or systems (procedures, policies, etc), and ignore a key element in organisational systems – the culture which embody and reflect the values, beliefs and work ethic within the organisation.

2.     Leaders need to live the organisational values by bringing to life and demonstrating what it values most in its day-to-day work.

3.     Good leaders know that structures and systems can take you only this far, but if issues of culture are not addressed, business practices don’t change.