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Motivation in Management

What motivation does for management can be spectacular sometimes – it helps your employees reach their goals and objectives. You can usually find two types of employees in an organization: one of them has some internal self motivation, while the other one will only need motivation from time to time. Motivation can be temporary and external. If you’re dealing with the second employee type, emotions are what you’re dealing with, not logic.

If you want the output from your organization to be high, you should know that motivation is very important for your management. If an individual is motivated in a good way, you can feel the effects fast, even if the stimulus is external and they’re in a professional environment. It’s like when you go to a game and the crowd cheers the team that is playing.

Employees are the biggest resource that an organization can have. Even if you got the best equipment that money can buy, if you don’t have the people to operate it, your business doesn’t exist. Your employees should be taken care of like they are highly priced equipment. Just like you maintain your equipment, motivate your employees, to make sure they are prepared to work and they do it at maximum productivity. Motivation can be a simple pat on a manager’s back, but the best type of motivation is the timely one.

Some will want motivation to be goal oriented, so if reaching a target comes with a reward, the employees will be more performance geared. You can see benefits from this immediately, but the problem signaled by experts is that this type of motivation can make employees more competitive among each other, which can damage your organization’s environment of work. Basically, if we’re talking about motivation management, you should make sure that it brings the best rewards for the investment.

Failure and Success in Business

A few years back, when I started my first company, I really missed a real business plan. Actually, I didn’t even know what that was. Trying to look back at that time, it’s actually kind of scary thinking about it and that decision wasn’t very smart. Ask any business expert out there and he will tell you that you should always have a business plan for your company and if you don’t have it, the chances of success are limited. Even though most startups are similar, in the beginning and failing department they can be different. You can define an entrepreneur as someone that starts and works on a business. What I use as a definition is “one that starts and works on a business despite the problems”. Statistically, 19 out of 20 new businesses will fail in the first 2 years of their existence.

What successful companies have in common is that they want to succeed even though there are many obstacles in their path. Speaking from my own experience, there were plenty of days when I was ready to quit. But, I continued despite all the problems. The key here is not as much your desire to succeed, but your refusal to fail. Failure shouldn’t be an option. When you make a decision, the process lets you choose either pain or pleasure. Your decision is based on what pleasure you get from the result, or on avoiding the pain. For me, failure has always been my pain. That’s why in business and life I will do everything possible to avoid failure.

You should never start a company dreaming that you will be in a sports car or on a yacht someday. You also shouldn’t be influenced by failure. Consider your success as being only based on your own performance.

Creating Growth Opportunities

You know, nobody enjoys to think that they might fail. A leader though, should not even think about it. Still, in the real world, you should know that if you want to grow as an individual, failure is something that you go through and learn from. If failure is followed by insight and thought, you can grow and learn from it.

When there is recession, in times when businesses are closing and a lot of people lose their jobs, you should find ways that are less traditional, which allow you to perform better, both as an organization and as an individual. With the economy being as it is right now, you have a great opportunity to think over and re-evaluate yourself as an organization and an individual.

You can take NASA as an example, and their Sputnik experience. Once Sputnik was launched by the Soviets, NASA really kicked it off and scrambled to get back on track. The first rockets they launched without people crashed and burned. Still, they continued to work on it and eventually they were the first to step foot on the moon.

If you want to make sure you’ll regroup once you failed:

• Find perspective. Find out the failures of the past, like the early blunders that NASA made, or Edison’s and Bell’s disappointments. Your workers should be reminded that on the road towards success you will find failure.
• Examine the lessons. What I like about failure is the fact that it teaches you lessons. Remind yourself in the future, about the lessons that you learned.
• You should recognize the contributions of others. A lot of your workers have put as much hard work in that failure as you did. Their efforts should be praised and recognized.
Think about the successes of the future, learn the lessons of your failures and keep working.