Sensible Motivation Strategies
Chief executives must get the best out of their staff—whatever their mentality. This webpage does not aim to be comprehensive, but to provide a guide for thinking, so sensible adjustments can be made to suit a specific organization.
TOP Note on Motivation. This topic is dealt with in several places e.g. in relation to achievement, creativity and goodness. Its origin is to be found in the interaction of purpose and experience.
Common errors:
- failing to combine motivation with control;
- assuming all employees are motivated by money;
- assuming money is purely a hygiene matter—i.e. the rate for the job.
It's nonsense to assume … that everyone in the organization is alike. The promotion and use of one set of incentives (or controls) for all is a recipe for mediocrity. This framework suggests a more targeted way to harness the energies of staff members by recognizing and working with the grain of their preferences.
Market-centred Employees
Financial rewards are particularly important for Market-centred staff.
Risk: Lack of loyalty—the employee may join a competitor or set up a competing business.
Motivating strategies:
- Pay at the upper-end of the pay scale for the job
- Use performance-related pay and bonus schemes,
- Move to a sub-contracting arrangement
- Develop optional share-ownership schemes
- Encourage enterprise and profit-generating ideas
- Enable leadership of subsidiaries that are spin-offs
- Make a career path visible
- Assist promotion via training, experiences and counselling.
Controlling strategies:
- Ensure contracts include non-compete and confidentiality clauses
- Set clear rules about moonlighting or leaving to compete.
Power-centred Employees
The ambition and drive to dominate and control is a useful but ancillary quality in a manager. A likelihood of bullying, irrationality, risk-taking and borderline dishonesty exists and this could be dangerous to the firm.
Risk: Creation of a sphere of near-absolute control—the employee may develop a fortified mini-empire within the organization.
Motivating strategies:
- Pay the rate for the job
- Provide status symbols and grand titles
- Use carrot-and-stick methods
- Provide a hierarchy with visible promotion routes.
Controlling strategies:
- Define authority and responsibility with care
- Set specific tasks and independently monitor results
- Determine policies for whistle-blowing and staff protection
- Rotate through other appropriate posts
- Set well-defined and properly communicated rules and procedures
- Affirm values and make an example of transgressors as a warning.
Cause-centred Employees
Professionals dedicated to their discipline rather than to management are the most common Cause-centred staff. The challenge is to ensure they channel their energies in support of the business, at best seeing the business as an extension of their cause.
Risk: Splintering the organization—factional conflict, turf wars, and energy diverted to the promotion and defence of a profession can obstruct progress or even tear the organization apart.
Motivating strategies:
- Re-affirm, repeatedly, the value of specialist knowledge
- Resource specialist services appropriately
- Support additional training and qualifications
- Provide opportunities to champion their cause via special projects
- Create specialist departments with a critical mass and provide a specialist head.
Controlling strategies:
- Re-direct energy into corporate assignments
- Establish and use representative and consultative mechanisms
- Put limits on time spent on discipline-based but extra-organizational activity, such as work on national professional bodies and government commissions.
Community-centred Employees
This class of employees will be found throughout the organization. They enjoy the social dimension of work and believe in achieving through teamwork.
Risk: Loss of focus on the task—energy tends to be put into people rather than into getting results.
Motivating strategies:
Controlling strategies:
- Quantitative evaluation of performance and confrontation with results
- Well-run focused meetings with pre-defined agendas.
Kinship-centred Employees
For those who put family welfare before work, ways should be found to bind them to the firm through family care.
Risk: Distraction—bringing family problems into the work place; using insider information to benefit the family.
Motivating strategies:
- Provide remuneration packages with measures like job-sharing or flex-time
- Assist family relocation and neighbourhood introductions
- Provide family-friendly facilities: e.g. crèche, parking for spouses
- Give liberal compassionate time off for illness, births, school events
- Fund and organize family-focused entertainments and events.
Controlling strategies:
- Insist on a quid-pro-quo for special favours
- Define procedures which clarify boundaries between work and home.
Perspective-centred Employees
These employees will be recognized as «thinkers» in the organization. They restrain impulsiveness and seek to make dispassionate analyses. Their output informs debate and decision-making.
Risk: Overcomplicated outputs—so pragmatic action is inhibited or no-one reads or listens.
Motivating strategies:
- Assign projects requiring thinking and inquiry, and allow adequate time
- Establish staff posts in HQ freed from operational pressures
- Ensure dissemination of output and formal recognition of its value.
Controlling strategies:
- Set parameters and boundaries for inquiry, time, and outputs
- Provide communication support, ensuring reports are readable.
Reality-centred Employees
Such people are difficult to accommodate in any organization. They should either be restricted to advisory responsibilities or otherwise placed in a relatively isolated position where they are unlikely to destabilize or frighten others.
Risk: Telling the truth—leading to a disturbing awareness that essential values and goals are being violated for pragmatic, personal or corrupt reasons.
Motivating strategies:
- Provide maximum freedom and responsibility
- Offer work involving complex personal and social issues
- Use their capacity for thinking the unthinkable
- Listen carefully and draw out practical, relevant insights instead of being angry and rejecting.
Controlling strategies:
- Set challenging goals in discrete areas
- Provide a minder to mediate
- Direct attention to something entirely new
- Orchestrate inputs to minimize disruption
Recognizing Sector Differences
Private sector: Business attracts Market-centred people. But because money is a necessity, and the private sector is (or should be) the largest employer, it attracts all other types as well.
Public sector: Services politically controlled and publicly funded attract Power-centred people. Cause-centred and Community-centred people may be well represented too; the former are attracted by working on something meaningful, and the latter are attracted by working on communal improvements. Perspective-centred individuals are required in the upper reaches of a civil service.
Voluntary sector: Charitable organizations attract Cause-centred &/or Community-centred people, depending whether the body promotes a particular dogma or provides a social service. Some organizations have both qualities.
Originally posted: July 2009