Creatively Managing Team Motivation is Key for Employee Engagement

A Gallup poll released in 2013 is still having ripple effects on the way managers deal with team motivation. The poll revealed that employee engagement in 30% of American workers was dismally low. 2+ years later and things aren’t much better, according to thought leaders at Gallup.

Employee engagement and team motivation go hand in hand.

Dr. Jim Harter, a Gallup expert on employee engagement, says part of the problem is managers who don’t build relationships. Good relationships are a natural by-product of good communication and vice versa, so nailing communication skills at all levels is paramount to almost everything else.

Dr. Harter also says managers who don’t motivate their teams are also part of the problem when it comes to poor engagement at work.

Few managers have everything it takes to fully engage their teams.

In fact, the Gallup poll (which, by the way, was called State of the American Workplace), disclosed that only one fifth of the population possesses all five skills necessary to be a great manager.

Those skills, according to Gallup and Harter, are:

The ability to motivate.
Assertiveness
Accountability
The ability to build relationships.
The ability to make decisions and plan ahead.

Here’s how to develop two of those skills.

Luckily, there’s something very concrete managers can do about numbers one and four on the list. All it takes is a little creativity when it comes to how you approach everything.

Management training that focuses on learning about personality types is a major contributor to improving the ability to motivate and the capacity to build relationships.

Building Skill #4: Creating Better Relationships

Understanding how personalities work is the key to understanding behavior. Once you can identify the personality type of each member on your team, you’ll have insight on how they prefer to communicate. Once that level of understanding is reached, you’re well on the road to building better relationships (#4 on that list of good managerial traits!).

Building Skill #1: Driving Team Motivation

Good communication and better relationships bond a team together and make the team stronger. Having everyone pitch in the right way and the right time means your team also become more efficient.

The key to achieving that is, again: understanding personality styles and how the influence behavior.

When managers can use their knowledge of personality styles & behavior to allocate team resources more efficiently, they bring out the best in everyone. Each team member gets to contribute in his or her own unique fashion, according to their unique blend of skills and talent.

That, in turn, leads to higher performance and better job satisfaction. There’s no better path to powerful team motivation than that!