Motivating Factors (page 1 of 2)

If you don't know what motivates you, do you know what motivates those around you? Your secretary, your co-workers, your boss or your staff? What about your wife/husband and children, what motivates them?

Here's an exercise for you to do: sit down with your partner (business or personal) and ask them what is important to them in their life. Keep asking until they have given you a substantial list (to do this simply ask 'What else?' after they have said everything that comes to mind. Keep asking to get to the deeper values and then stop when they start repeating themselves)), then get them to put into order or importance their top five, number one being the most important. Write your own list of what's important and number the top five accordingly. Are the two lists exactly the same?

Our true motivations come from deep inside our subconscious, from our inner values. Our values represent what is important to us. They dictate how we spend our time, how we live our life and give us a scale of how to judge what is right or wrong according to our experiences. We believe that our values are THE right ones and that others will have the same ones and act accordingly and if they don't then they are wrong.

Our values come from our family, society, school, the media, religion and the internet and as no two people will ever have had the same life there are no two sets of values the same. It is from our values that we get our motivation. Put it this way, if you place no real value on an aim or goal, you will have no motivation to achieve it.

What we tend to do is to manage people according to our own motivation. Culturally we are accustomed to being told what to do, starting with our parents, school and then our bosses until we are in a position where we are managing others. At each level the person telling us what to do is using what they feel is important. Our parents base their advice on their generation's values and history and our teachers are driven by exam results and test scores.

When we get into the work place quite often it is our first boss who then influences us about what is important in business and where to place our emphasis and energy. We in turn continue this cycle and create another generation of managers who dictate to staff, believing that what motivates them will motivate their staff and again miss that fact that we are all unique and will therefore have a unique way of being motivated.

There are two ways to be motivated; towards something or away from something. When managing others we use the carrot or the stick. Traditionally when we tell someone what to do there is either an implied, or a very real threat of the consequences should they not comply with what we have asked for and the other way of course is to promise financial rewards or a promotion.

If you think of the towards/away from motivation as two ends of a continuum, most peoples' management techniques are somewhere along that line using a combination of carrot and stick.

However , the result of this is limited as it is based on what we think is motivating for us and is ultimately ineffective in terms of getting the most out of your staff.

There is another way.... Inner motivation. If you can find out what it is that really motivates someone internally to perform to their full potential and communicate with them in their language ,what you will find is that there is little need to manage that person in the traditional meaning of the word. In traditional management the boss dictates, persuades, debates and cajoles his staff to get the results he wants.