The best employee motivators connect emotions to responsibilities

Effective leaders motivate employees. But what exactly does that mean?

According to your generic internet dictionary, motivate (v) means to give (someone) a reason for doing something.

That isn’t a bad definition as these things go, but it’s too transactional to be satisfactory.

If you as CIO are trying to motivate an employee, you probably aren’t trying to get them to understand and accept an assigned task. More likely you want the employee to bring more energy to all their efforts, as well as more creativity and focus.

Above all you want them to care about their contributions to the overall organization’s success. Motivation is about connecting emotions to responsibilities.

Effective leaders have six concrete techniques they can use to motivate employees. Here’s a rundown of these magical motivators, in decreasing order of utility.

Approval

Most people, most of the time, value the opinions of others. That, along with the fact that it costs nothing to use, is why, when it comes to motivation, approval is the leader’s workhorse.

Effective leaders use approval through the simple expedient of noticing and complimenting an employee for well-done efforts and results.

Effective leaders actively seek opportunities to give compliments. But there’s a balancing act. A leader’s compliments must pass three tests: (1) they have to be specific, connecting to something important; (2) they have to have been difficult enough to accomplish to be worth mentioning; and (3) they must be given in a public setting.

Approval done right: “Jim, thanks for helping Melissa figure out how and when to use Teams Channels. She seems far more comfortable with it than she was before, and this helps the whole team be more effective. Well done. And Melissa, thank you for wanting to acquire this skill. While I’m at it, everyone else: If you haven’t figured out Teams Channels, now you know who to ask.”

It’s specific, important, and given in a public setting.

That’s as opposed to: “Thanks for everything you’re doing on the project, Jim. Keep up the good work!” Which is vague and not attached to anything important.

One more bit of guidance: Don’t turn yourself into a Compliments Factory. Approval must be difficult to earn. It must be meaningful, but not so difficult to earn that you get a reputation for being impossible to please.

Exclusivity

Back in the day, the US Marine Corps ran television ads extolling “The few, the proud, The Marines!” Becoming a Marine was a coveted achievement, and this motivated many aspiring soldiers to expend the great deal of effort necessary to become a member of this exclusive group.

Exclusivity is a powerful motivator. Use it with caution, though, because it can backfire: US Army troops are likely to be less than enthusiastic for the implied insult — that they are, compared to the Marines, second-class soldiers.

Which isn’t a problem unless you need those in your Exclusive team and those who haven’t achieved exclusivity status to collaborate.

Greed

As motivators go,greed is the most widely misunderstood. Those who like it figure that if they dangle the possibility of spot bonuses, everyone eligible will jump through hoops to get one.

Maybe they will; maybe they won’t. But if they do, and you award the requisite monetary reward, all that does is set a new baseline; the bonus becomes an entitlement, while everyone else, who didn’t get a bonus, wonders when it will be their turn to drink at the spigot.

Which doesn’t mean there’s never a time or context for which awarding a spot bonus makes sense. It’s all in how you communicate the rational for giving one. The trick is recognizing that money isn’t a motivator for additional effort. It’s the organization’s loudest voice, which makes it an excellent tool for demonstrating a leader’s sincerity when they say, “Thank You!”

Fear and anger

While these are separate “magic motivators,” for our purposes, we’ll lean on their complementarity to address them together as one.

If you want to get someone to up their level of effort, fear and anger are your go-to motivators. If we’re afraid of something, we’ll find ourselves running away from it faster and longer; if we’re angry about it, we’ll run at it faster and longer.

That’s all to the good, except for fear and anger’s inescapable side effect: Fear and anger make a person stupider, too.

Fear and anger lead to mistakes that can be more costly than what you’d get from using approval or exclusivity.

Also, take care when you choose fear or anger’s target. Make someone afraid of you and you’ll turn yourself into a bully. Don’t do that. Bully bosses make sure everyone tells them what they want to hear, while nobody tells them what they need to know.

Make them afraid of the situation instead. “If you don’t pick up the pace, I’ll fire you!” turns the leader into a bully. That’s as opposed to this: “If we don’t all up our game the company will be thinking of us as layoff targets.” It might still make the newly motivated employees dumber, but they won’t be afraid of you.

Guilt

What are you, their mother?

“You let the team down. What are you going to do to make it up to them?”

Maybe it’s motivating, but it also isn’t fostering a culture of adulthood. You should want employees who take responsibility because that’s how successful employees in your organization approach their work, not who wring their hands, hoping nobody will notice or be too critical of them.

Isn’t all this being manipulative?

If by “manipulative” you mean consciously using techniques that improve performance, as opposed to unconsciously using techniques that improve performance, then yeahbut. Sure, consciously deciding how to interact with employees to get them to perform better is manipulative. That isn’t the question you should be asking.

The better question is, Why should being intentional about such things seem unethical? If it strikes you that way, you’re probably imagining a leader soliloquy along the lines of, “Hah! You’re performing better than you did last year. Fooled you!

As is so often the case, intentions are everything. If one leader uses these techniques to trick employees into performing better while a second one uses them to encourage employees to bring their best energy and creativity to the party, then we might judge one of the two to be a better person.

But being a better person is qualitatively different from being a better leader. If you’re looking to be a better person, contact your favorite clergy. If you’re looking to be a better leader, stick with me.