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Motivation Management

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Motivation Management

Fueling Performance by Discovering What People Believe About Themselves and Their Organizations

Davies-Black Publishing,

15 min read
10 take-aways
Text available

What's inside?

When it comes to motivation, what your employees believe will happen is much more important than what you promise.

Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Applicable

Recommendation

Why do people work hard and try to perform well? Salary, status and security are the tangible pay-offs, but the core motivators that drive people to earn these rewards are less easily identified. Author Thad Green offers several simple but practical methods to inspire employees that go beyond the standard rhetoric perfected by other motivational authors. The upshot: Employees are not motivated by what you tell them will happen, but by what they believe will actually happen. This is a subtle point that’s often lost in build-trust-through-communication manuals. Using well-organized examples, anecdotes and charts, Green tells you how to cement the connection between positive performance and predictable rewards in the minds of your employees. The section offering questions that you can ask employees to unveil the source of discontent and poor performance will be an invaluable tool for any manager. Of course, some suggestions in this hands-on treatment may seem obvious (such as asking employees what they want, so you can select the motivators that will satisfy them). But otherwise, getAbstract recommends this solid book on a subject at the heart of many employer-employee relationships.

Summary

The Basic Motivation Model

Many managers are dissatisfied with their efforts to motivate employees, because they don’t get consistent results. If you understand the dynamics of motivation and use solid motivation strategies, you can get the results you want more consistently.

Motivation is always future oriented. Employees are motivated by what they believe will happen, not by what you promise. If they don’t believe what you say, they will not be motivated. This motivation-management model is based on the importance of what employees believe. By managing motivation this way, you can create the conditions necessary to effectively motivate employees.

Motivation is like the fuel for performance. Motivation makes employees perform well, and when employees lack motivation, performance will lag. To obtain the best performance you can get from your employees, recognize this "critical connection between motivation and performance."

The Belief Equation

What employees believe determines how hard they will work and how well they will perform. This motivational belief system is composed of a chain of events that follows this structure: Effort leads to performance...

About the Author

Thad Green is founder of The Belief System Institute - A Center for the Advancement of Motivation and Performance. Green has implemented motivation management with a wide variety of corporations, including AT&T, Delta Airlines, Lucent Technologies, Metropolitan Life Insurance, and NationsBank. He has written 11 books, including Performance and Motivation Strategies for Today’s Workforce and Developing and Leading the Sales Organization.

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