As the leader of a team, you have the authority to sanction, encourage or restrict most aspects of their working day, and this places you in a position of power and responsibility.
Consider your behaviour. Consider the effect you would have if every morning if you walked over to Alex's desk and told him what he was doing wrong. Of course you would never be so destructive - provided you thought about it. Simple habits can have a huge impact upon your rapport with your team.
Take another example: suppose you are a 'busy manager' type you respond brusquely to questions and interruptions; guess what will happen?
Probably your team will leave you alone. They will not raise problems, they will not question your instructions, they will struggle on bravely, feeling unsupported. Your simple behaviour may result in errors, mis-directed activity and frustration. So if you do want to hear about problems, tell the team so and react positively when you hear of problems.
Motivation. When thinking about motivation it is important to take the long-term view. What you need is a sustainable approach to maintain enthusiasm and commitment from your team.
To motivate, look at: achievement, recognition, the work itself, responsibility, and advancement. These are what your team needs; loads-of-money is nice but not nearly as good as being valued and trusted.
Achievement. As the manager, you set the targets. This, will have a dramatic effect upon your team's sense of achievement. If you make them too hard, the team will feel failure; if too easy, the team feels little.
Recognition. is about feeling appreciated. It is knowing that what you do is seen and noted, and preferably by the whole team as well as by you, the manager. If people do something well and then feel it is ignored, why would they bother to do it well next time.
The work itself should be interesting and challenging. But few managers have only interesting, challenging work to distribute: there is always the boring and mundane to be done. Therefore, this is a management problem for you to solve. You must actually consider how interesting are the tasks you assign and how to deal with the boring ones.
Responsibility is the most lasting. Assigning responsibility is a difficult judgement since if the person is not confident and capable enough, you will be held responsible for the resulting failure.
Advancement. The long-term issues of promotion, salary rises, job prospects; and the short-term issues of increased responsibility, the acquisition of new skills, broader experience. Your team members will be looking for the former, you have to provide the latter and convince them that these are necessary steps for advancement they seek. They must feel that they are learning everyday.
People-problems. There are bound to be problems - as a manager, you have to solve or at least contain them. Some problems should be ignore at your peril. Problems such as: "Alex is just lazy". Such people can poison the working environment, however, these descriptions could also be totally unhelpful.
As a manager, you must provide the solution. It is best to work on one problem at a time because this simplifies the analysis. Remember, by addressing one, other related problems are often affected also.
Finally, look carefully at how you behave and whether the current situation is due to your inattention to the human factor: you might be the problem, and the solution.
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