Few things are more important than keeping your team motivated and staying motivated yourself.
I was reminded of this last week when a successful advisor – let’s call him Bob – described challenges he has with his staff: “My two assistants are great with clients. I get all kinds of compliments,” he said. “My issue is that they lack any fire in the belly. I’ve offered a bonus if we hit targets in new clients and referrals. Three years ago, I even paid for them to join me for a weekend to hear speakers sharing their secrets to success, among them Donald Trump. But nothing seems to get them to show much in the way of initiative or demonstrate any passion for growing the business.”
Bob is right to stress the importance of passion among his team. Here’s what the CEO of Accellion, a rapidly growing maker of software for mobile file sharing, had to say on this topic: “The best indicator I’ve seen is how passionate someone is. When people are passionate enough, they are willing to do whatever it takes to keep the momentum going. When people are focused too much on whether something is just a good career move, they can easily get distracted by other things.”
“What the mind can conceive and believe …”
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Some advisors look to motivational books and tapes to maintain their passion. Advice on self-improvement dates back to the Greeks and Romans. However, the self-improvement industry didn’t really take off until the early part of the last century.
Some of the best known self- help and motivational books and training programs go back to the 1930s, including Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People and Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich. Hill contributed perhaps the best-known summary of the thinking behind the self-motivation approach: “Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.”
These were followed in the 1950s by Norman Vincent Peale and in the 1960s by Og Mandino, Maxwell Maltz and W. Clement Stone. The past three decades have seen the emergence of popular names like Jim Rohn, Tony Robbins, T. Harv Eker and Rhoda Byrne, author of The Secret.
For most advisors, the difficulty with these books, CDs and seminars is that they seldom have a lasting effect on motivation. Like the weight-loss industry, none of these programs have subjected themselves to rigorous measurement of outcomes, preferring to sell via hype and an emotional appeal to people’s hopes and dreams.
Insights from academic research
The good news is that there is a growing body of research on what achieves sustained motivation. The consensus is that to increase motivation – our own motivation or our employees’ motivation – more than a change in mindset is required. We need to design jobs in the right way. There is growing evidence on the qualities of the jobs that lead to motivation:
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Compensation can achieve short-term results: There is no question that creating the right incentives can trigger short-term behavior. This article describes how one advisor reassigned responsibility and compensation on his team to boost performance.
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But sustained motivation stems from variables related to the job: In 1968, the Harvard Business Review published an article by University of Utah’s Frederick Herzberg that almost 50 years later is still its #1 most reprinted article. Titled “One More Time, How Do You Motivate Employees?”,it describes research among Pittsburgh accountants and engineers that led Herzberg to his two-factor theory of motivation:
- Hygiene factorsare things that create dissatisfaction if they’re not at an acceptable level, but once you get to that threshold, further advances don’t generally lead to sustained motivation. These include working conditions, company policies and salary.
- Motivatorsare what create long-term passion and enthusiasm. These include achievement, recognition, responsibility and the work itself.
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External motivators can actually undermine performance: In a recent New York Times article, two researchers measured over 10,000 West Point cadets and divided them into three categories:
- Those who were motivated to go to West Point by internal factors such as the desire to become a better leader , service and the desire to make a difference.
- Those who were driven by external variables such as status and long-term career opportunities.
- Those who were motivated by both internal and external factors.
The researchers found that cadets motivated by both internal and external factors performed weaker on every measure than those with strong internal motives alone. Where external motives played even a partial role, “cadets were less likely to graduate, less outstanding as military officers and were less committed to staying in the military.”
The elements of a motivating job
Harvard’s Richard Hackman and Tulane’s Gary Oldham created a formula that defined the motivating potential score (MPS) of a job:
Skill variety means the extent to which a job requires different skills and ability rather than being routine.
Task identity reflects the degree to which people see a visible outcome from their work. Employees are more motivated if they are involved in an entire process rather than just being responsible for a part of the work. This desire for visible outcomes has been supported by research on The Progress Principle by Harvard Business School’s Teresa Amabile.
Task significance is the extent to which the job impacts other people’s lives. I’ve written in the past about how advisors have increased their own motivation and that of their team by focusing part of their weekly meetings on one positive outcome for a client or one client who’s thanked them for their work. Indeed, purpose is one of the three factors that best-selling author Dan Pink writes about in his book
Drive – The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.
In Hackman’s and Oldham’s models, for jobs to be motivating, they have to score high on at least one of those three metrics and also offer both autonomy and feedback.
Autonomy is another of the variables that Dan Pink highlights in his book. The degree to which a job provides the freedom to plan work and structure the role plays a big difference in employees’ motivation level.
The final variable is the degree to which employees get clear feedback on their performance. That’s why as an advisor, providing your team with clear, consistent and constructive feedback ranks among your most important responsibilities.
If you’re like Bob, the advisor frustrated by the lack of passion among his team members, you could try to fiddle with compensation or look to self-help books and motivational programs. But the odds of seeing results are low. Your chances for success are much better if you look more fundamentally at the way your employees’ roles are structured – with a particular emphasis on their freedom to operate autonomously and the feedback they get.
Dan Richards conducts programs to help advisors gain and retain clients and is an award winning faculty member in the MBA program at the University of Toronto. To see more of his written commentaries, go to www.danrichards.com or here for his videos.
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