Motivation is a Two-Way Street

Managers and leaders everywhere want employees that are highly motivated and committed to their company's goals and overall success. To build this high performing team, you need to learn how to motivate the team members. Coaching will provide you with ways to help motivate your employees. Coaching is different from managing as coaching provides guidelines to help an employee become more successful. Leaders and managers who coach focus on driving employees to perform better by concentrating on skill set development, attitude improvement, increase knowledge and behavior enrichment.

The following are some areas that you need to focus on to provide a more motivated environment:

Create a vision and set effective goals. You need to have clear and achievable goals for your employees and continuously monitor these goals. This will provide a more motivating environment because employees are more informed and are making progress toward these goals.

Involve employees in goals and decisions. Employees will be more motivated to work harder if they have a personal interest in the goal that they are working toward. Whenever possible, managers should involve their team with the decisions and goals that need to be made. It will be easier to get them to "jump on the band wagon" if they feel they contributed in some way.
Understand what really motivates your team. It would be easier if the whole team was motivated by the same things but that's obviously not the case. You need to find out each team member's individual's needs and what motivating factors to provide to each. This is necessary to help build a motivating workplace.

Provide positive reinforcement and recognition to your team. This is one of the greatest tools you can use to motivate your employee. One of the coaching techniques that you can use to provide reinforcement is with 30 second coaching. This is a technique that is designed to be a short positive reinforcement that has great impact. It encourages continued effort and progress.

Non-verbal coaching such as notes on the employees desk or cards to their home saying "a job well done" type message is very powerful. Why because they typically read and open such notes around co-workers and family who ask "who is the notes from"? The manager's leadership brand begins to grow!

In a study by Theresa Amabile, employees were asked what motivated them the most. The answer was not reward or recognition, like many assumed, it was the feeling of progress or achievement. Managers and leaders need to fully understand their employees inhibitions, skill sets, needs and what motivates them. This will create greater success for the employee, as well as, the team.

If you are interested in learning about your employee's motivation level check out our coaching assessment system that provides scores in motivation: click here