Motivating your team

Right now it’s easy to be busy with frantic business-as-usual activities due to a tightening market, and for some anxiety and panic.  

Often we can get caught up in our own stresses, sometimes self importance, of our role and function in our business that we leave behind our most important assets – our people.

I’m sure no-one reading this has done that, except for when you have! A condition I remember getting caught up in well. Welcome to the human condition.

As discussed last week, it’s hard to engage and motivate others without looking at yourself. To build on last week’s blog today I wanted to add some tips on what you can do to support and motivate your team?

Getting to the heart of the matter will greatly assist you in supporting and motivating your team. Ask them what they need from you. I find that the most dangerous thing to do is make assumptions.

Establish the cause of the issue(s). Is it environmental? “I can’t do this here.” You can explore what’s missing here? Where could they do this? Where do they work best? What time of day do they feel at their best? Is it behavioural, identity or belief based?

“I can’t do it here”? Ask them: What if they could? This will cause a shift in thinking, keep on this track and guide the person to possibility.  

Show your confidence in them: “You’re the kind of person that can… I believe you can, you can do anything you set your mind to.”

Is it about capability? A way of supporting this situation is to acknowledge their capability, “knowing how capable you are I know that you can do this”. Connect them to what they have achieved, what are they most proud of? What would they like to learn, move on to next?

Practice listening to how people construct their sentences, where is the emphasis? This can give you a clue. And of course the easiest way to establish what’s at the heart of the issue is to ask.

The structure above will give you more places to look and help you with your questioning. Remember there is a difference between interrogation and questioning!

For more tips on how to motivate your team refer back to one of my previous blogs, Stark choices.

Pollyanna Lenkic is the founder of Perspectives Coaching, an Australian based coaching and training company. She is an experienced facilitator, certified coach and a certified practitioner of NLP. In 1990 she co-founded a specialist IT recruitment consultancy in London, which grew to employ 18 people and turnover £11 million ($27 million). This blog is about the mistakes she made and the lessons she learned building a business the first time round and how to do it better second time round. For more information go to www.perspectivescoaching.com.au

For more Second Time Around, click here.