He really just got me - he knew that travel was my love language and it was the ultimate thing he could do to motivate me at that point

INTRO:

Hey, thanks for tuning in to the Corporate Yogi podcast, I’m your host Julie Zuzek. This pod is YOUR dedicated time for growth, developing practical tools to use with your team and other relationships and to learning deeply about who you are and what makes you tick! Because you are a brilliant and powerful being, I want you to invest more time reflecting on WHO are being, not just WHAT you are doing. Doing is awesome, but BEING, well that is where the magic happens and what makes you truly feel fulfilled. You’re going to love this episode on employee motivation and how to apply this to your team. So here’s a look at what you’re going to learn today

1 – In the first segment I’ll explain the biggest mistake leaders make

2 – Then in the second segment I’ll explain the AMP model

3 – And in the last segment I’ll share the motivation model I share with all my clients

So get out of your head, into your heart and let’s dive right in, shall we.

SEGMENT 1

One of the most common requests I get from leaders is that they want their teams to work harder. They don’t want to make any changes themselves or do anything different. But they want their employees to be more engaged. I hear it all the time, “Julie I don’t want to do any of that touchy feely stuff or change anything, but I want my team to deliver more.” I find this really strange, because A – I love the touchy feely stuff. And as a leader part of your responsibility is to be involved with your team, so how can you possibly get them to change their behviour without you being involved in some way? As a leader it’s always important to be authentic, and never ask your team to do anything you wouldn’t do. But this isn’t the big mistake that we see leaders make. The big mistake is trying to motivate their employees with financial incentives. You see, many studies have proven that employees don’t actually respond to financial incentives, and it can actually have the opposite impact we want it to. The London School of Economics found that financial incentives can actually demotivate employees and have the opposite impact we want them to have. Let’s see how this played out with Amanda. She had very aggressive career goals and had many conversations with her boss about building out a team and getting to the next level to be a manager. Whenever she brought it up with her manager, he was very dismissive about the whole thing. He said he’d get back to her by the next promotion cycle. This was really important to her, she trusted him and just assumed that because he made that promise, that he would follow through on it. This my friends is a heartbreaking mistake I see over and over again. Assuming that promotions will just happen bc we want them or we deserve them. I wish we lived in a world where promotions were just handed out to people who were deserving of them, wanted them and were ready for them but sadly we don’t live in that world. There are a few organizations I’ve come across where HR initiates this, but it’s very rare. If you want a promotion, it’s up to you to initiate it and make it happen. Long story short, when it came time for Amanda to be promoted, she actually wasn’t included in the promotion cycle, and she was very disappointed. Recognizing this, her boss put a proposal forward to top up her salary and stock options. And although she was really flattered, she was really disappointed, bc it wasn’t money she was after, it was about furthering her career. So Amanda said she appreciated the salary increase, but it really wasn’t what she was after. She tried many times over 2 months to have this conversation with her boss, but he didn’t make himself available to meet or make it a priority. In the meantime, while Amanda’s boss had his head in the sand, Amanda received a call from a recruiter offering her exactly what she wanted - a leadership role getting her to the next level of her career and managing a team. When her boss found out about the opportunity, he said oh well, I’ll just offer her even more money for her to be incented and stay around, but it was too late, Amanda was already committed to the new role and the new team. Twice he had made the mistake of trying to motivate with money and both times it failed. He was severely out of touch with his team and what they wanted and it backfired on him. So bottom line here. With Amanda, as with so many others we can’t just throw money at problems to fix them, we have to understand what our team wants and what drives them. OK so let’s wrap up Segment One here - bottom line – money is NOT the #1 motivator for everyone in all situations. You have to know your team, know what they want and be ready to motivate them with appropriate incentives.

 SEGMENT 2

OK welcome to segment 2 where we actually dive into AMP. This is a 3 segment model that stands for Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. It was developed by Dan Pink, Author of many books including Drive and to Sell is Human. Here’s an insider tip though, you can learn all about his concept of AMP in his Ted Talk, The Puzzle of Motivation, just in case you don’t have the bandwidth to read one of his books right now. Let’s break down each element of the AMP model. Autonomy is the urge to direct our own lives, Mastery is the desire to get better and better at something that matters and Purpose – the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves. Basically what he’s saying is that money is NOT the be all and end all to engage our team members, we need to look at these 3 components for our team members. Think about Autonomy, it’s the opposite of micromanagement, which is often the biggest complaint I hear from employees, that they’re frustrated when they don’t feel like they have the space or ability to do anything on their own, they don’t feel like their ideas are being seen or heard, which leads them to not feeling valued or appreciated in the workplace. Each day you make a colossal investment at work and you want to make sure your investment is being appreciated. How many hours of each day do you spend working? It’s likely more than any other aspect of your life, especially if it’s a full-time job. You want to know that the time is being invested wisely, that it’s being appreciated, and I can totally respect that. When I think back to jobs that I’ve had in the past, it’s always the ones where I had lots of space to do my thing, express my creativity that have worked the best. One of the best quotes I ever heard from a manager was, I’m going to give you enough rope to hang yourself. The meaning of the saying was kind of morbid, and I wished he had picked a different way to say it, but the intention was there, and I knew exactly what he meant. And what translated through that was, I trust you, and I know that you’re mature enough to do what you need to do. And it was amazing to see the levels of productivity in that company. People had a “do whatever it takes” attitude and always got things done. There was no checking in on us to see what and when we were working. We just did the work. And I have to say hands down it was the most productive company I ever worked at with the highest levels of Ownership. I sincerely hope that you have had or will have the opportunity to work at a company like that someday. OK that’s the summary of Autonomy. Let’s take a closer look at Mastery now. Mastery is the desire to get better at something that matters. That’s important, I’ll say it again – Mastery is the desire to get better at something that matters. The important part of this definition is the “that matters” part. It’s not about improving at anything, it’s not about improving at something you don’t want to do, don’t believe in or doesn’t align with your values, progress in a direction you don’t want to be going isn’t real progress, it’s just like moving rocks around in different piles. True fulfillment comes from true mastery, and that is doing things you love, not things that suck your soul. And when we improve at things that matter to us, that align with what we believe in, this makes inspired and motivated, the ultimate formula for employee motivation. So that is the 2nd component of AMP – Mastery. The 3rd component of AMP is Purpose, and we talk about Purpose a lot. Purpose is the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves. Again - Purpose is the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves. This is so core to who we are and why Books like Start with Why are such critical reading material for us. The significance of something bigger than ourselves is that we need to visualize something to grow into so that we at a personal level can expand and grow. This is part of the continual improvement process, we need to be upleveling and bringing in new information at all times. And we all know that we can’t expand if we just sit around and do the same thing all the time, purpose is about doing something new and inspirational. OK let’s wrap up this 2nd segment by defining the 3 different components of AMP. Autonomy is the urge to direct our own lives, Mastery is the desire to get better and better at something that matters and Purpose – the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.

SEGMENT 3

OK I promised to share the motivation model that I give to all my clients, and here it is. So the context is that this isn’t a stand-alone tool or resource, it’s actually part of my Relationship Design tool that I share out with leaders to use with their team. Relationship Design is hands down one of the most robust and valuable tools I give to clients, It’s a tool to use at the start of the relationship that sets out the norms of how you are going to be working together, preferences, working styles, And within the Relationship Design, there’s a dedicated section to motivation. Because leaders often come out and ask me, how to motivate their employees, because they don’t know the aspects of what specifically motivates them, and I tell them the simple truth, the easiest way to motivate your employees is to have a conversation with them and ask them what motivates them. And this is a situation where an open-ended question probably won’t serve you, so what I’ve created in my model is a list of 4 different items, then your team member has a starting point to rank these items in order of importance. Here’s my suggested list of the 4 motivators – 1-Having an impact, 2-Personal growth & development, 3-Salary/bonus, 4-Advancement & title. Ask your employee to rank these items in order of importance for them. Remember, there is no right and no wrong, this is by no means an extensive list. It’s just a start. it’s simply about understanding what is important to them. The order of their list might be different than your list, and that’s ok. This is a process of understanding your team member, and what makes them tick individually. I remember years ago being given a gift of appreciation, and the person, of note was a female, bought me one of those charm bracelets, I can’t remember the name of the place, but it was a chain retail store here in Canada, and their model was that you start out with the charm bracelet and you keep adding to the charms over the years for special occasions, until it weighs about 10 pounds and you feel like people can hear you entering the room with all your jingle/jangling. Just kidding. Now there’s nothing wrong with these charm bracelets, I think they’re a great idea to be honest, BUT if anyone knows even a little bit about me, they know that I am a minimalist and this doesn’t align with who I am at all. Which is why I was so shocked when I received it to be honest. But the interesting thing is, the person who ended up buying it for me, had one herself and she loved it – loved the jingle jangle. So that’s a perfect example of buying something that is NOT for me and not aligned with who I am. I’ll contrast this with another example of a boss who knew exactly who I was and how to motivate me. Whenever I would finish a great event, launch, party or campaign, he would always proudly come up to me and say well that was phenomenal, I want you to get on the phone tomorrow and contact the travel agent and book yourself a trip – anywhere I wanted to go. You see, he knew that travel was my love language and it was the number one thing that I wanted and to be able to book trips through work and be covered by work was a brilliant perk. I don’t think I’ve ever received a better perk than that. He understood the motivation, knew what I wanted and delivered on the promise. What a brilliant leader, who followed great guidelines of employee motivation. So far we’ve been talking about core motivational principles. I’ve shared a list of a lot of big things you can do for your employees, things like compensation are really big factors, for motivation, as are career development. but remember there are many, many regular day to day things you can do as a leader that are going to motivate your employees. Remember that saying from Maya Angelou, I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel” And the feeling is really what creates the loyalty and connection. So here’s a list of 5 motivation investments you can do to motivate your employees on a regular basis. 1 - Listen 2 - Be consistent, 3- Push them 4 – Appreciate them 5 – Hold their vision. Let’s go through each of these more clearly. The first one is Listen– be enamoured with their ideas, be interested in their perspectives and care about their opinions. Our core need at work is to be seen and heard, so that a leader isn’t organized and doesn’t know what they’re doing honour that. The second one is Be consistent. No one wants a Manager who is constantly moving meetings around and changing priorities. Inconsistency sends a message, and these are not the people we want to be working for. The third I’ve listed here is “Push them”, meaning push them out of their comfort zone, hold up their potential in the mirror and make them step into it. People will never forget those who are associated with their growth and expansion, it’s a magical feeling and you’ll be lucky if they remember you every time they think of it. The fourth motivation investment is Appreciate them. Remember, you can never, ever, ever acklowdedge someone’s greatness too much. Give compliments, give acknowledgements, it never gets old and you can never give too many. The fifth to dive into here is Hold their vision. What an honour to be able to hold their vision – no matter how big or small, whether it is work related or personal, it can be a career plan, qualification, personal financial goal, family goal. Doesn’t matter what it is, if its important to them, it should be equally important to you to cheer them on and help bring it to life. OK, let’s recap those 5 5 motivation investments to encourage your employees on a regular basis. 1 - Listen 2 - Be consistent, 3- Push them 4 – Appreciate them 5 – Hold their vision. 

WRAP UP

OK it’s time to wrap up this episode on Employee Motivation. As always, if you’re inspired by the content today, please share this episode with a friend, colleague or on social media. You can also subscribe to this podcast on my website at thecorporateyogi.com. If you want to book a time to chat with me directly, to discuss motivation or coaching in general you can find my booking link on LinkedIn or Instagram @thecorporateyogi. And as always, remember, that any fear, or resistance you hold inside of you, is simply just your greatness in disguise.