How to manage and motivate your team

Growing a business is very exciting. You can make money, get lots of opportunities, and generally achieve more than you can in most jobs; however, you can’t grow a business very big on your own. Eventually, you will need a team and that comes with its own challenges.

At that point, just being good at what your business does won’t be enough; you also need to be good at managing and motivating your team. This shift is something a lot of business owners find really hard. Even if they’ve managed people before, doing it as a manager in an established business and doing it as a business owner for a new team are two very different things.

Why focus on motivation?

Some days, motivating yourself can be hard enough. Keeping your employees motivated is even harder. However, it’s something you must tackle. Highly-motivated people are key to a successful business. Motivated people are energetic and creative. They’ll provide ideas to grow the business and solutions to solve your problems. In short, motivated people will contribute as much as they can because they want to.

Poorly motivated people (or people motivated poorly) will only work as hard as they need to and no harder, or they’ll just quit, which might be even worse. So you should make it your mission to have a workforce full of properly motivated people. But how do you manage and motivate your team?

It’s actually very hard to directly motivate other people. When it comes down to it, people can only motivate themselves, so your job is to create and nurture a motivational environment.

A lot of business owners jump to money as the primary motivator. While money is certainly a factor, a good strategy will consider a range of internal and external motivations.

Internal motivation

As the name suggests, internal motivation comes from within. Simply put, the person is motivated because what they are doing is something they enjoy. This is about allowing people to work to their natural preferences, doing something they are good at, and letting them shine. Get the right people in the right places.

This seems straightforward, but it’s very easy to get it wrong. Start with some personality profiles. I use the DISC profiling, which is a great way to learn about how people prefer to communicate, what type of management they respond well to, and what motivates them. Before you go giving all your staff personality tests, you need to understand them and implement them properly to get the value. You can read about this online or you can get me to do a workshop in your business (contact me for more details).

When carried out properly, personality profiles can give you tremendous insight into how to motivate people. You’ll find that everyone is different. While one person might be motivated by constant interaction with other people, someone else will find that unbearable. Get those people in the right role and environment for them.

External motivation

Also consider external motivations, which come from you and the business. The most obvious one is salary packages, but don’t just focus on pay, also consider extra holidays, great pension schemes, childcare vouchers, flexible hours, etc.

This seems like the obvious, easy route, but be careful here. Not least because you need to consider your finances, but because it also has diminishing returns; although being underpaid is hugely demotivating, people aren’t particularly motivated by being overpaid.

Business culture

When talking about external motivations, it’s much better to focus on the culture of your business. One thing to think about is having clear goals and targets, and celebrating when they are achieved. It doesn’t have to be a huge thing, but this must be consistent. The point is that people need to know what is expected and that they’ll be recognised for achieving what is expected.

People are also motivated to be a part of something they can be proud of. Can your business do something that makes people feel good? This might be something like a green initiative or raising money for charity. A great way to go about this is to check your personality profiles and ask the right person to take charge of this. Let your team choose and create something they can be proud of.

Learning

The last external motivator I want to talk about is learning. Learning a new skill or polishing up on an existing one is highly motivating and will increase productivity. There are two ways to incorporate learning. First, expect and accept mistakes. They are learning opportunities. Employees who are afraid to make mistakes won’t try.

The second is to give people frequent learning opportunities. Try to send every member of staff on at least one course a year. You can keep it relevant to their job if you want, but don’t be afraid to let people try new things. Worst case, they’ll be motivated, but the best case is that you discover your next marketing marvel or sales superstar!