Fear is no way to motivate a team. Whether it be fear of losing your job if the team doesn’t boost quality yields from 90% to 96% by year’s end or simply fear that “something bad will happen” if a particular performance isn’t achieved, dread doesn’t motivate, say the hosts of Behind the Curtain: Adventures in Continuous Improvement.
In this latest podcast episode, hosts John Dyer and Mohammed Saleh delve into the motivational factors that can either accelerate team progress or stop it in its tracks. Fear fails as a winning strategy, they say. Showing empathy drives progress.
Long term, fear is “detrimental to the success of the teamwork and success of the company,” says Dyer. “It burns people out. It creates division, creates silos and trust goes out the window.”
More surprising, both Dyer and Saleh speak out against bonuses as motivational factors as well. Bonuses are a cloaked means of motivating by fear, argues Dyer, saying the negative consequence of motivating by bonus (which he also calls “bribes”) is that if you miss the goal, you don’t get the bonus.
Moreover, motivating by either fear or bonuses is a failure of leadership, adds Saleh. Both “deflect your responsibility as a leader to motivate the team, and so there's no ownership on your end to motivate the team,” Saleh says. “You're going to either scare them or you're going to buy them, and so there's no need for you to change.”
So, what does work as a motivational force? Leadership showing empathy by helping employees solve problems to improve their workplace is a good place to start, the hosts suggest. Build an environment in which employees look forward to coming to work because they see things improving. More success breeds more motivation until the workforce reaches what Dyer calls “enthusiastic productivity.”
“That's where everyone in the organization is engaged. They are talking directly to the customers. They're talking directly to suppliers. They're helping craft the vision of where the organization is going,” he says.
Saleh also addresses what he describes as the “umbrella of purpose” as a motivational force. Do employees feel like they have a purpose in what they do, he asks, emphasizing the key role leaders play in making sure the answer is “yes.”
Among the advice he offers to leaders in leading teams through change:
- Go to the floor every day and recognize the good things that employees are doing.
- While you are walking the floor, do the little things that could help create a better work environment. “Show them that you're not too big for it, and go sweep the floor, pretty much,” he says.
- Make these actions a daily ritual.
- Progress to acting on the bigger issues. “Start going and finding pebbles in people's shoes around things that matter,” Saleh says.
