For any business, the key to success is to get the people who must do the work to be fully committed to that work the largest majority of their time. The motivation to be committed and to do any work ebbs and flows. How much that motivation flows towards the necessary work will depend on the amount of energy those workers receive from the various sources that exist in their lives.
For a business owner or manager to expect workers to leave the world beyond work out of their work-day world is not only unreasonable but it is also impossible. Things happen. Our energy is sapped by an illness of a loved one, a quarrel with a significant other, a needed home repair – you get the picture. Workers cannot turn off their life outside of work. Life happens and it can steal the energy we need to be our best at work.
What a business owner or manager can do is to utilize every resource they have to maximize the flow of energy to their workers. It is the one huge lever we all have but a lever so few actually use. Too many owners and managers behave in ways that further deplete workers energy and then wonder why on earth these lazy louts just don’t measure up. So what’s a manager to do? How do we infuse energy into our business systems and stop the energy loss? The answer is quite simple but not always easy to do.
The first step in the energization process is to become aware of what energizes your workers and what depletes their energy. It would be much easier if our work force was monolithic in nature but it is not. People have different expectations and desires. It falls on the manager to figure out what makes different people want to get up and come to work on their good days or want to stay home on their bad days.
Fortunately, most people will be energized by just a few categories of factors. For some it will be the opportunity for financial gain. For others it will be the opportunity to help others and build strong relationships. Some will enjoy the challenges of learning new things, while others will work best when everything is highly organized and orderly. There are those that are seeking a leadership role; either formal or informal. And then there are people that need to see the beauty in what they are doing. Finally, a few will just want to know what is expected of them and then be given the freedom to go out and meet those expectations.
As a manager, if you play the wrong hand with the wrong worker you create friction between that worker and yourself. Too many managers make the mistake of assuming what energizes them is what must energize others, and this leads to a great deal of friction between many managers and most of their workers.
The second part of the energization process involves learning new behaviors as a manager. If everyone was exactly like me, I could treat every worker the way I’d like to be treated. But, reality tells me that only a small percentage of my workers will be energized by the same factors that energize me. If I am to maximize the performance of my workers, I must learn how to maximize the energy flow from me to each of my workers.
To do this I must learn to behave, as best as I can, in a way that minimizes the friction between me and each of my workers. This means I must learn at least six new energy languages. If my most proponent source of energy is financial reward, I will need to learn to speak the languages of altruism, aesthetics, politics, regulation, theoretics, and self-determination as well. This is not easy because I am most comfortable speaking in terms of economics and these other languages are foreign to me. But just as practicing speaking French, Spanish, and German can help me become fluent in those languages, practicing these other motivational languages will help me become fluent in these other motivational languages. Additional, it is not just a verbal language. These are both verbal and behavioral languages. You can’t just talk the language; you must to behave the languages as well.
How do you learn these other motivational languages?
Step 1. The quickest way to do this is to spend time with people who actually speak that language. Find workers that speak from an aesthetic, altruistic, theoretical, political, regulatory, and/or self-determination point-of-view.
Step 2. Have these workers tell you how they would like to be communicated to and how they would like to be treated.
Step 3. Start doing what works best for each of them.
As time goes on, if you are diligent in your studies, you will become fluent. You will always speak economics best (if that’s your language) but you can become very adept at any of the other languages if you try.