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.   

If You Want Success, Be Prepared to Burn All Your Bridges©

We live in an age of options and choices. The more the merrier. Right from childhood, I grew up believing what I was told – ‘always make sure you keep all options open, whether it be what field choose to study or in your career’. Looking back over my career, some of my most successful moments came when I was pushed against the wall and had no choice left. Over fifteen years ago, having worked for a large charity in several countries, I decided to launch myself into consulting work. I spent days visualising and planning my career as a consultant which I knew I would love doing. However, when it came to taking action, I could not bring myself to take the plunge as the uncertainty of starting a consulting business on my own was too much of a risk. My reasonably comfortable job which brought an assured paycheque every month was a strong attraction, although I was trying to take gradual steps towards my launch. To leave my job I needed to make sure that I had obtained enough work for at least the first 8-12 months.

That moment, however – the day I would have enough work in my hand before quitting - remained elusive even after five years of planning. Meanwhile I changed job and started working for another organisation, in a position which brought me still bigger paycheque. The idea of consulting career was still lurking in the back of my mind. However, the right moment to quit and launch into a new career remained elusive for another year. Things then started to take a turn for the worse in my job. After a brief honeymoon period in the new organisation, I became increasingly frustrated with what I was doing. I did not quite like the working culture of the organisation, and my own performance on the job left both me and my employer dissatisfied. It soon came to a point where I knew it was pointless to continue there. I also realised I did not want to get back to the kind of job I was doing in the previous organisation. Further, I feared, having changed job only a year ago, putting myself back on the job market was hardly going to do my career a favour.

This is when my idea of launching my consulting business took a grip. I did not want to continue where I was working, I believed my chances of finding another interesting job were slim – if for nothing else, my relationship with my then employer meant that I would have difficulty even getting a good reference. In other words, I had burnt all my bridges – I could no longer rely on another employer to give me a paycheque every month.

It took me only another two weeks to quit my job. I still had no assignment in hand, had no idea where my first assignment would come from. I even did not have a business plan for my consulting business, but I knew whenever I would have one it would be great. It took another six to eight weeks before I registered my company, had a business plan, and had a loan for £ 40,000 from a bank – my consulting business was launched. I had no idea how I was going to repay the loan, but I knew I needed this to make sure that at least I didn’t have to worry about cash flow, and I also knew by then that I would make a good success of the consulting business.

Fortunately, I did not have to regret these decisions even once in the last eight years.

I have often wondered since then, what made me take this risk – with a family of three children to look after - when I could have continued to have a reasonably comfortable risk-free job, fetching me an assured income?

It lay in making the switch in my mind from having a goal of setting up a consulting business to making it a MUST – convincing myself that I had no other option except to set up a consulting business. I was not prepared to find myself or accept another job. I made my level of expectation a ‘MUST’.

As I think about it, I begin to realise that whatever I have achieved in my life has been the result of the level of acceptance I set for myself. I have ever only got what I was prepared to accept, not what I expected.