Motivating your staff in challenging times
by Lesley Thompson and Carole Milligan

Whether you’re leading or managing staff through downsizing, upsizing or simply keeping things afloat, taking time to create a motivating environment and culture can play a big part in helping you weather and emerge from the storm with a high performing team. Here are our top six tips for creating a motivated workforce in 2010:

1. Start with your own behaviour

It is wise to remember that we cannot motivate someone else, we can only create the conditions in which they can choose to motivate themselves. Nor can we change someone else’s behaviour, we can only change our own. This mindset can massively enhance your success in enabling those around you to generate their own motivation to succeed as individuals and as a team.

2. Create shared mini-visions rooted in your values

When facing a tough way ahead, creating a set of short term, achievable goals generated and owned by your team and rooted in your values can be a powerful way of generating energy and commitment in the most challenging times.

Referencing your values puts the ideals of your organisation at the heart of senior management behaviour, creating a powerful ‘glue’ that can help unite and steer behaviour which might otherwise be influenced and even overtaken by more commercial forces. And remember - behaviour is catching. You can be sure that whatever behaviours you and your immediate line reports exhibit will most certainly be copied by those who experience it. Adversity can be a golden opportunity to redefine and shape the culture of your developing organisation.

3. Are you an instructor or coach to your staff?

A manager may be tempted to ‘show and tell’ or issue detailed instructions on how a task should be undertaken – particularly in a crisis or when tough decisions loom. Whilst this is an easy way of getting something done it is a stifling and deeply demotivating approach in the long term. It shuts out what can be a hugely valuable contribution from others as well as the opportunity for them to share in and take responsibility for dealing with the challenge in question – a huge enabler when it comes to implementing difficult decisions.

Instead, consider how you can enable individuals and teams to participate in problem solving. Form task groups and design projects to draw on your staff’s resources, abilities and creativity to develop their own way of doing something. The most difficult decisions can be made by a group with a clear goal and the freedom to arrive at their own solution. If there was only one ‘right’ way to do something, Fosbury would never have developed the flop!

4. Are your team working towards or away from goals?

It can be easier for some people to talk about what they DON’T want, not what they DO want – particularly when things get tough!” I don’t want to lose my job”, “I don’t want to be a middle manager for the rest of my life”. Encourage your people to identify what they do want – within the parameters of what is possible.

Promotional opportunities may not be on the cards this year, but the opportunities to learn new skills and stretch existing ones in readiness for this is within your power to create.

Encourage and reward this kind of positive approach and optimism – in adversity. Acknowledging the reality of tough times and fostering a sense of ‘rising to the challenge’ and ‘being in it together’ goes a long way in modelling the kind of resilience and supportive behaviour that will help everyone ride the tide of changing fortunes.

5. Are you talking the same language as your staff?

It matters little what we say if the way we say it leaves people cold. One of the early discoveries of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) was that influential communicators use language in a way that creates a climate of trust and understanding.

One of the keys to building trust lies in the speaker’s ability to match the language of the person to whom they were speaking. If you can identify and use their language they more likely to be engaged with what you are saying and connect with it. So if you are talking to an individual listen out for the language they use – and use it too:

Visual – Things are a bit hazy, things are looking up
Feelings – In touch with reality, I’ve got a handle on it,
Auditory – I’m glad to hear that, things clicked into place

If you’re addressing a large group of staff, use all three senses in your words.

6. Acknowledge and enjoy the journey

Is your glass half full – or half empty? Yes times may be tough – for whatever reason. But constant reference to austerity and challenge can be tedious – and ultimately demotivating! So celebrate achievements within task groups, a birthday or the contribution of departing colleagues. These moments and their quality are arguably more significant to your staff than all your late nights, analysis and decision making put together! To those you lead, they are a mark of your personal and organisation’s respect for their presence and contribution - and a powerful incentive to be a part of it.

With these six points in mind you can form a well motivated and focused team.

Learn how to motivate teams with Executive Coaching