Wednesday, February 24, 2010
How to Motivate Unmotivated People
Ian's Messy Desk: "If you walk around a Walt Disney World resort or theme park, you are likely to witness something that in most other settings would seem bizarre. Not the presence of a large animated character, although you may witness that also. Rather, at any given moment, a person in dress clothes will be walking from one destination to another and will stop, pick up a piece of paper, a cup, or other piece of trash someone dropped, and throw it in a trash can. Executives do it, front line managers do it, hourly employees do it, everybody does it."
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4 comments:
These at first seemed like they would be pretty common sense but, I realized that although they seem obvious, I don't really do these. two of them seem to be based on Dale Carnegie's teachings. If you explain to people what it is that you are actually trying to do instead of just give instructions, then any nonsense questions that may come up may normally be answered by the team member themselves without having to stop production. Also, it seems like the best one out of these in my opinion would be the one that adivises the leaders to involve the people that they are trying to motivate with any creating that goes on. If they aren't doing that, then they've basically just become really expensive laborers instead of a member of the team.
I have to echo Jacob's thought that at first, these would be common sense, but in fact they are not really. In particular, the fourth point about learning what people's real goals are and incorporating those into how you interact with them, is complex. Though as a manager you must have the company's overall goals in mind, keeping the individual goals of your team (and even your own personal goals) in mind will help keep your team tighter. None of us are in it for the same thing (just look at our class). It should also be noted, on the fifth point, that from this we can take the reminder that we should not be the negative person on a team.
This article makes great use of its examples. From the very beginning I was intrigued, simply because the article began with the story of Disney employees working together to keep it clean. Then, as the article mapped out ways to motivate people, which all seem as though they could be beneficial, it continued to use examples to elaborate upon each of its topics. This in itself can give us a better grasp of how these techniques can be very effective.
This article does a pretty good job of helping explain how to motivate, perhaps your crew for the upcoming Inspector General Strike! We've had lecture to this effect that were interesting as well. The notion of trying to ally your crew's goals to that of the production or your own goals, is harder than it seems, but often does seem to be the best way to get people on board. There's something about really making it a team effort instead of "hey, you're working for me" that is appealing. Often though, in situations like this, its hard to ally your crews personal goals with that of the production -- ie. help them get something out of it. There just generally isn't enough time I find.
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