What is a manager's role in motivating employees? Is it true that today's American workers are less motivated than those from years gone by? Can supervisors manage by intimidation and expect reasonable results from their employees? Sharon Nelton takes on these issues and more in the article, "Motivating for Success," in Nation's Business. Nelton suggests that workers are innately motivated, and that supervisors do not so much motivate employees and supply the ingredients necessary for employees to lose their motivation. Instead of offering quick tips that can be applied once and then forgotten, Nelton offers a series of suggestions that require companies to change the way they do business in order to respect the needs and value of their employees.
At the heart of successful motivation, according to Nelton, is the golden rule: treat your employees the way you want to be treated. While this is a simplistic view of management, its practice can be much more difficult to enforce. Employers today work in a complex legal environment in which many of their actions can be judged not only by the employees, but by other interested parties, including customers, vendors and even the courts. As a result, maintaining good relationships with employees, a key to keeping motivation high, becomes a business necessity, not merely a business luxury.
In order to put the golden rule into practice at companies, Nelton makes the following 10 recommendations.
Have a clear vision for the company and make sure employees know what it is. Nelton recommends the use of a mission statement to accomplish this, and suggests that if everyone is aware of the company's overall mission, they are better able to make decisions creatively in order to help the company achieve its goals.
Recognizing employees is another of Nelton's key ingredients. Everyone has the need to be recognized for doing a good job and management by exception, that is, only talkin...