Jon Miller hosts Management Improvement Carnival #149 looking at blog posts examining motivation, highlights include:
- a wonderful cat photo
- Kevin Meyer found some bright spots on his trip to India and documented them in several fun articles in Evolving Excellence. My favorite was leadership lessons from Ganesha, a set of mindsets and behaviors that are both motivating personally and constructive in motivating others.
- On productivity and motivation, one article began by explaining how researchers found that doing or saying something nice, even if this was a very small gesture, has proven to improve the job performance of people including doctors. The premise is that positivity promotes performance.
- Addressing the question of “Where do I start?” in learning lean thinking and putting it into practice, Mark Rosenthal suggests adopting the find the bright spots advice from the book Switch. Finding brights spots is always good advice. While companies fail at thing for a wide variety of local and specialized reasons, success tends to cluster around a handful of factors; motivated people; removing waste, variation and burden; a long-term view. We need to drill a level deeper in each one of these.
I agree that motivation is a very important topic. I think trying to improve management without a good understanding of how people are really motivated is very difficult and weaknesses in this area end up frustrating many improvement efforts.
Related: Incentivizing Behavior Doesn’t Improve Results – Motivate or Eliminate De-Motivation – You’ve Got to Find What You Love
On the point of positivity, Modeling is the key. There are many leaders who are pessimistic, talk about employees negatively to other employees, etc. Then they are frustrated that people are not more motivated to improve performance.
It’s amazing how far small compliments will go in creating the right culture.