My very first experience with truly understanding the power of employee motivation occurred long before I became a manager myself. At the time, I worked for a small company where I wore many hats. One day, my manager informed me that she was restructuring and bringing someone else in to take over (my favorite) part of my job because she felt my workload was too heavy.
She was shocked to learn that I was unhappy about the change. She felt she had done me a favor by reducing my workload without reducing my pay and didn’t understand why her actions upset me. In turn, I couldn’t understand how my manager could be so insensitive to the fact that it wasn’t the money that I loved, but the part of my job that allowed me to do good things for our people and help them in their personal lives.
The experience certainly wasn’t pleasant, but in retrospect it helped shape me into the manager I am today. I understand why motivating employees is critical to being a successful manager because I know what it feels like to work for someone who doesn’t understand what brings you joy.
How are people motivated?
There are two primary types of motivation, intrinsic and extrinsic. People that are motivated intrinsically will do things for personal satisfaction, often without any form of additional recognition. For example, we once had a receptionist who truly enjoyed being the first to the office simply so she could greet everyone on their way in and start their day with a smile.
Those individuals with extrinsic motivation are motivated by external factors such as rewards or recognition. This is one of the reasons so many mortgage companies host “Presidents Club” events to honor top sales performers.
Some people may be primarily motivated one way or the other, but motivation often occurs with a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Successful leaders take the time to learn how each of their employees is motivated and use the employee’s unique intrinsic or extrinsic desires to engage them to their highest performance.
You may have to apply multiple tactics to motivate an entire team. Some team members may be motivated by contests, physical rewards, and public recognition, while others will work simply for the satisfaction or a few words of gratitude. Applying a broad plan to motivate all employees the same way will not work.
How can you tell what motivates someone?
Uncovering motivation sounds like an easy task, right? Throw out a contest and see who pushes the hardest to win. Surprisingly, while a contest may help reveal those motivated by extrinsic factors, it will not help you understand exactly why any one employee is motivated to win. If an employee appears interested in winning a particular contest does their lack of enthusiasm mean they do not respond to extrinsic rewards?
Of course not.
To get to the heart of understanding what motivates someone, you have to take the time to understand the person. Why do they do what they do?
Thinking back to my personal experience with job motivation, I had taken on multiple roles out of necessity. There simply were not enough people to do all of the jobs we needed to get done. I did not set out to take multiple roles, in fact, at times, I grudgingly took on more.
However, of all the tasks I did, I got the most reward from handling payroll. Employees came to me when they didn’t understand the calculations on their paychecks or needed help with a payroll advance. I loved being the “go-to” person.
How do you use interpersonal skills to drive motivation?
While there are many different leadership styles, leaders who engage and truly seek to understand their employees, empathize with them, and help them develop, will see a higher level of performance than those that do not build the same level of trust and rapport.
I often joke that one day I should write a book called, “All I Really Need to Know About Managing I Learned from a Bad Boss.” But as soon as I write that book, I will also need to write the book “All I Really Need to Know About Managing I Learned from My Favorite Boss.”
Fast-forward many years and several bosses later. I became a manager myself and motivating employees wasn’t as easy as it looked. I went through some really tough learning experiences where I discovered I was not truly connecting with my employees.
In my early management career, I mistakenly believed that all employees would operate as I did and that I could build the most successful team by surrounding myself with people exactly like me. The problem was, even the people that I thought were just like me weren’t like me at all. They all had different desires. Different drives. And yes, different motivations. I tried to create a small army of cookie-cutter employees and discovered I did not know how to manage them. I was saying what I thought they wanted to hear and trying to motivate them to do their jobs without really understanding what my employees wanted from me.
It took one really great manager for me to learn the difference it makes to work for a leader who truly engages with their employees.
My great manager made it her personal mission to learn about each person in her organization (and she had several hundred). She knew every one of them by name, their position with the company, and some personal details about them. She remembered those details the next time she saw them and was sure to ask how their home renovation project was going, how their pets were doing, or about the newest book they were reading.
Successful leaders learn what they can about their people. They uncover the drives and desires that motivate people to achieve their goals. They help their employees align personal goals with team and company goals. This critical building of interpersonal relationships? It’s the not-so-secret superpower of managers who excel at employee motivation.
My original manager never took the time to really learn who I was as a person. She never asked me what I liked or disliked about my job, how she could help me, or what I would like to do differently.
As an early career manager, I believed I had to govern how I interacted with all of my employees in the exact same way. I used the exact same tactics to manage their productivity and their personality.
Luckily for me, I learned from observing that my employees were much more receptive to a warm, open, and caring management style. Once I realized that, I shifted my entire leadership style. Although I continued to use extrinsic motivation tactics, my approach became far more individualized. I did not realize the depth of how much that would mean until I had to lead a core team of business subject matter experts (SMEs) through a loan origination system conversion.
This core group of SMEs worked insanely long hours with absolutely no complaints. No one called in sick. No one left early. They sacrificed every single weekend and every holiday for nearly 10 months. They traveled for months on end, and they put their personal lives on hold without complaint. The project was enormous. Having it fail to come to fruition would have had disastrous implications.
This team did the job, not for the glory or honor, and not even for the money, as there was nothing extra in it from a comp standpoint! To this day, I am still deeply humbled they followed me into the depths of a project unlike anything any one of us had done before. I am thankful I learned from my former boss how to connect with my employees on such a personal level. Had I lacked that knowledge, I never would have been able to manage that level of high performance during my early career.
Looking back, I realize my first painful personal experience with learning employee motivation was the perfect learning experience for me, and I hope it helps you, too.
High-performing teams are built on rapport, trust, and most importantly, motivation. Develop the first two, then use them to continually explore the third. Once you know what motivates your employees, you can levy that insight to create more joy and success for them, for your teams, and for your company.
Jennifer Folk is senior vice president of national operations and operations support for Planet Home Lending. She has worked in mortgage operations since 2002 and spent some of that time with companies such as MetLife Home Loans and Stearns Lending.
