INNERGISE!

Each month Innergy research an area of business that is pertinent to our customer database, carrying out a brief survey and providing some practical ideas that can be immediately implemented to help individuals, teams and organisations overcome some of the key challenges they face and exploit any opportunities available to them.

In February’s review we asked those polled what they thought were the most important skills of a great manager, and by the huge number of responses we had, this is clearly a subject that many are very passionate about.

There were, of course, a number of other skills and traits that respondents highlighted outside of our list (such as empathy, communication, visionary and so on), and we will refer to these individual comments at a later date.

The key trait, however, that was clearly the most desirable for a manager was the ability to effectively motivate and engage their employees.

For many managers, the art of inspiring employees to achieve above and beyond their potential can be very challenging. Often managers tend to be promoted to managers based not on their ability to manage necessarily, but more because they may have been the most successful sales person in their business and therefore by default, they are given the opportunity to move up to the next step in their career (typically with limited support and training in how to actually manage people).

With only “15% of UK workers consider themselves ‘highly motivated’” according to some statistic, we have to ask where are managers getting it wrong?

Of course, there have been literally hundreds of business books written about the subject (the works of Covey, McClelland, McGregor and Mayo are ones that are most often referred to), but for me the three pivotal components of engagement where managers often get it wrong are based around these three facts:

• Every employee is different and therefore has different motivations
• Every employee will change as time goes by and therefore so will their motivations
• Every employee needs to have an individual purpose that is linked to the organisational goal

Let’s start with the first one. Have you ever wondered why there are always one or two people who never go your company social events? Why is it that some incentive schemes only seem to inspire a small percentage of sales people to increase their productivity? Why is it that some employees just don’t feel as enthused or excited about the corporate three year plan as perhaps the management team do?

It’s because, as individuals, employees all have individual reasons for both coming to work and for working harder when they get there. Using a carte blanche approach of engagement across the whole team will only work for some, but not all.

This requires a bit of effort on behalf of a manager, not only to uncover individual motivations, but also to come up with individual motivators to ensure engagement is both targeted and effective.

We spend so much time and effort trying to attract the best people to join our organisations that it is criminal that we don’t spend as much time trying to engage them when they get here!

We also need to understand that the life journey of an employee changes during their time with an organisation. They start off needing more support, more guidance and direction, demonstrating high levels of commitment and passion for their role. Six months later they will have changed. Their passion may have waivered slightly but their ability will have increased so need less hand holding and more inspiration.

Does your organisation and managers have clear frameworks of management and engagement that change according to people’s circumstances and length of employment or, again, is it one style fits all?

The risk you have in treating existing employees in the same way as new starters is that your leadership / management style can become both patronising and disengaging.

Finally, there is the question around purpose.

The key to delivering greater performance for an organisation is to align an individual employee’s purpose with the organisational purpose. This gives an employee some form of ownership and accountability in where an organisation is going and for many can be very inspiring.

It reminds them that they come to work every day because that is what they are paid to do but there is a very real reason why they should work hard when they get there.

Similarly, if an individual’s purpose is not in line with the organisation, then there is a risk of an organisation going one way and the employees going another creating confusion both internally as well as externally within your target markets.

Engagement and motivation is not just about the plethora of theories and rhetoric that experts have developed over time, but also about the individuals that are living and breathing in your business today.

Make an effort to get to know them as individuals, identify their individual motivations and support them through their journey of change and development in their careers and you will find that levels of engagement will significantly increase.

Contact james@innergy.co.uk if you would like some more information on how to identify the key motivators of individuals for your business.

We will be focusing on some of the other identified traits of managers (managing change, innovation and creativity, problem solving and developing people) in one of the next Rapid Reviews.