motivation resource … misdirected
In this age of cheaper-faster-better resource management is critical to organization survival. The resource that poses the biggest organization management challenge, more than finance, more than time: motivation.
Organization health is the alignment between internal, employee, motivation as well as external, customer, motivation.
Each day when the closing bell chimes, whether that bell chimes in your head or on the production floor, the organization, management, and leaders need better awareness that the employee who left for home, often comes back tomorrow with a completely different mindset.
People are not linear, but emotional.
Organization risk is expecting an equally motivated employee to return the next morning.
Leaders, managers, and coworkers are all under intense pressure to manage their motivation to show up at work and deliver within themselves, yes, and within their organization.
An added complexity to motivate comes when juggling our own professional motivation as well as motivation of others to work with, and for, you.
A rule of thumb I adopted from project management estimations is to only expect 6 hours of effective work from an employee per day. No matter how long they work, 8, 10, 16 hours, do not expect more than 6 hours of progress towards a goal (project).
The motivation challenge takes additional gravity when an organization identifies the motivation linkage each employee has to motivate the customer.
Many times talent management defines customer as an internal customer or external customer. I strategically agree with this, but I would like to direct all eyes to only the external customer and the concept that strategically and tactically every action an employee has should relate to revenue.
No customer, no revenue.
No revenue, no job.
The current customer, potential customer, or lost customer is motivated towards only those services or products that meet their need. Marketing today has put the ball firmly in the court of customer transparency. What motivates and influences a customer is the degree their problem is solved; in both for-profit and not-for-profit worlds.
Today your customer can reach out to any social connection to get advice, testimonial, caution, or endorsement. I look at this ability as less crowdsourcing and more crowdsurfing to find answers. Brand loyalty is a hope and hope is not much of a strategy.
The bottom line to your organization really is managing motivation as a finite resource. And to look at motivation as a resource that is easily expendable, easily stored, easily dissipated, and easily wasted.
Adding to this challenge is that the sum of the parts of organization motivation and customer motivation will never equal 100%.
Managers maximize resources. Motivation is a resource. A resource managed, both by the employee and the customer and can not be mutually exclusive to be collectively exhaustive.
Leaders motivate the future state. Motivation is required to journey to the future state. The future is opt-in-only by both the employee and the customer and can not be mutually exclusive to be collectively exhaustive.
How can you manage motivation? Knowledge, communication, trust.
Not an either or/neither nor option, but to build confidence, knowledge and communication transparency is critical.
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