Engage and Motivate

Thursday, November 25th, 2010

Getting the Best from Others

Leadership is about being able to motivate your staff to operate at their best. Bringing out the best in your people is the difference between ordinary performance and excellence.

To be inspiring, you need to be personally motivated. This requires a strong understanding of your own values and motives – an essential component of the emotional intelligence competency of self-awareness.

Having the skill to motivate others means you can recognise and uncover attitudes that may be blocking the performance of some of your people and shift these so they are more resourceful. The ability to do this has a significant impact on how well those people are motivated. As a leader, to motivate others you need:

• A good level of self-awareness
• A good level of rapport or relationship with the person you want to motivate
• An understanding of what they value – what is important to them in the context of their work
• Empathy
• An understanding of key motivation traits including:
  • Motivation Hot Buttons – how to uncover a person’s criteria (what is important to a person, what they value)
  • Motivation Direction – what will trigger a person into action
  • Motivation Source – where a person finds motivation
  • Motivation Reason – how people reason

Contact us to improve your motivation skills and leadership results or return to the Stepshift Leadership Blog for more business advice.