The truth about man-motivation
In the first of his regular centre page spots in VitAL magazine, Noel Bruton* seeks to uncover the truth about motivation.
As the old joke goes, “I’m in shape – ‘round’ is a shape.” Perhaps my tendency to rotundity would have been lessened, had I paid greater heed some years ago to TV’s Mr Motivator. He appeared on UK breakfast television, clad in an outrageous spandex unitard and encouraged viewers to join him in a distant aerobic workout. But one thing ‘Mr Motivator’ could never have done was motivate me. Some viewers may have seen a friendly chap in a brightly coloured outfit, a persistent smile and a positive demeanour and decided to copy him as a way of capturing some of that joie-de-vivre, but not me. That’s only because I’m fundamentally non-athletic. I’d much rather exercise my mind than my body. Which is perhaps why what Mr Motivator motivated me to do was not what he intended, but instead to try to understand why what he does works for some and not others, and how I can make use of that understanding.
And therein lies the harsh reality of motivation, namely that it is not universal. One man’s motivator is another’s annoyance – which is why so much written about motivation is nonsense. Motivation cannot be applied by generalist technique. Any given attempt to motivate somebody in a certain direction may work, or it may just as easily drive them in a different or even opposite direction, if not bore them into apathy.
I would go further. It is actually impossible to motivate anybody at all. Motivation comes from within – it cannot be imposed from the outside. To be motivated or not is a matter of personal choice of the prospective motivee, if there is such a word. Which also means that motivation cannot be taught as a series of techniques, à la ‘do this and they’ll run faster’. The closest you can ever get might be ‘do this and some of them might run a little faster’.
But don’t let that discourage you from trying, because you can directly influence that choice, and allow them to create their own motivation. In other words, there are steps you can and should take to offer them the opportunity to approach their jobs positively. But it is important to be aware that whatever you say and do, it will not motivate or de-motivate your staff. Only they can do that and simply understanding that fact alone can give you a completely different and far more powerful approach to motivation.
Productivity
As their manager, it is your professional duty to get the best out of your people. Your company has hired you to deliver a given outcome of productivity. You achieve that by orchestrating and amalgamating the efforts of your team.
Inevitably, one arrives at the question of how much productivity is possible. According to De Marco and Lister, researchers and writers who have conducted extensive studies of productivity in IT, the difference between the outputs of unmotivated and highly motivated staff is not small – it is a factor of ten. So if you’ve got twenty people and they’re all ‘unmotivated’, you could theoretically replace them with only two ‘highly motivated’ workers, returning eighteen salaries-worth of assets to the balance sheet. Well, I say you could replace them, but in that scenario, the company would probably have replaced you first.
So we’re talking about achieving up to ten times the productivity. And if you have no real measure of that productivity to start with (and if you rely only on your support software and call logs for measurement, then you likely fall into that category), then you don’t know for sure whether your score is one or ten. Without accurate measurement, as a manager, you could be anywhere on an extremely broad scale, between a motivational superstar producing an outstanding return on headcount investment and a monumental underachiever pouring the company’s money down the drain.
It’s not all bad. Your service still exists, so it must be producing at least adequately. So it’s not a factor of ten. Perhaps your staff’s motivation isn’t ‘poor’, but let’s not be satisfied with ‘mediocre’ either. By definition, most IT support teams will be mediocre, making up the numbers in the statistical swell of the bell-curve. But again, the difference between ‘mediocre’ and ‘excellent’ is not small. It’s not a fraction, or a percentage; it too is a factor, in my common experience of between two and four. Highly motivated IT support staff do not simply exceed averages – they blow them away.
Job satisfaction
Our essential professionalism is not the only reason however, for seeking to get the best out of our people. If you go with me on the assumption that motivation and job satisfaction go hand in hand, that one produces the other, then the issue of job satisfaction is also paramount. A workforce that derives scant satisfaction from its activity is skating dangerously close to the edge of dissent and ultimately, rebellion. I’m not talking mutiny here, they’ve not been press-ganged and can always leave. But they can disrespect or even disavow management and ultimately company authority in tiny, invisible or internal ways, counter to the interests of themselves, their employer and their customers, in everything from secretly misdirecting their efforts to small acts of sabotage.
If you cannot make their job satisfying to do, then the best you can hope for is that they do it, albeit under duress, because they are grownups and professionals. Their hearts and minds won’t be in it, so the quality of their output will also be depressed. A failure to produce job satisfaction on the part of either the company, the manager or the employee, is ultimately a betrayal of the company’s objectives and the employee’s paid purpose, because it engenders a substandard end-product, counter to what the company intended and to what the customer needs and deserves. And the employee who consciously continues to turn out below what he knows is required is also breaking the promise he made when he took the job, which breach is both dishonest and unprofessional. The man-manager has a duty to pay attention to the state and creation of employee job-satisfaction.
Morale
It’s worth noting here the difference between motivation and morale. They are most definitely not the same. In fact in some respects, a high level of morale can work counter to the development of high motivation. This is because morale is a positive emotion set brought about by the agreeability of and thus employee satisfaction with the status quo. I call it the ‘It’s nice to work here’ effect. Good restaurant, a window with a view, pleasant colleagues, use of a gym, free coffee and so on, these are the typical trappings of a company that pays attention to the general level of morale. At a departmental level, common attributes might be a reasonable workload, satisfaction with a job well done, adequate resources and tools, a good working relationship with customers. All very pleasant of course, but this can ironically be restrictive as its very comfort can discourage change.
The concept of ‘change’ is important in any consideration of motivation. We all have a tendency to carve out for ourselves a way of doing our job in which we are as successful and stretched or as mediocre and untroubled as we want to be, depending on our personality and personal career agenda. Over time, this well fitted niche becomes quite a snug place to be – so much so that we may resist forces that would dislodge us from it. What if those forces are trying to encourage change and improvement? Then that too may be resisted by default. Resistance to change brought about by satisfaction with the present.
Motivation is required to move people from their niches. The very word ‘motivation’ implies a form of movement, not a state of rest. Motivation lies within the realisation that where we are moving to is better than here, therefore it is worth giving up this niche. Successful man motivation comes from a clear vision of where that better place is, what it looks like, why it is better and how to get there. It is the ‘why it is better’ that is crucial, however – for that is different for everybody who will forsake their niche, and it must be worth that cost to them as individuals. That knowledge of your team members’ individuality is your most powerful motivational resource.
*Noel Bruton is a long established, UK based consultant and trainer specialising in IT support management and delivery. He is the bestselling author of ‘How to Manage the IT Helpdesk’ and ‘Managing the IT Services Process’.
