Influencing Human Behavior At Workplace - Leadership Essentials

 

Let's understand the frustration of many leaders and startup founders who dwell on the lack of productivity from their team in spite of having skilled and hi pots employees at their disposal. Why do many leaders find it difficult to build a collaborative culture, an engaged workforce, and a high-performance team?

Many a time people in the top management and leadership team do not ask tough questions to themselves. Why are my employees not committed enough? Why is my team performing much below their potential? The same goes for middle-level managers as well.

The answer is simple –the top management often fails to connect with people. They fail to establish a connection between the company's vision to actual needs and aspirations of the people. They don't do enough to motivate people, which is the fundamental requirement of a high-performance culture and a driver for extraordinary business results. They possess blind spots and as a result, they only get ordinary results from their team and continue to adopt the same approach which fails miserably.

Unless employees are motivated, they won't be actively engaged and if they are not actively engaged they won't be productive as desired.

Therefore, the first rule of leadership is to motivate and enroll people into your thinking, your vision, your dream, your fantasy, whatever that you are doing. Enroll them. It takes time. It takes effort. It takes continual reinforcement. But you don't dictate. You enroll. Period! After all, why will people help you achieve your dream and work for the company's vision if leaders can't sell what's in it for them? You as a leader have to induce the WANT in your people to do a good job.

"MOTIVATION CAN NEVER BE FORCED. PEOPLE HAVE TO WANT TO DO A GOOD JOB"!

People can never be forced to do an extraordinary job. They will perform extraordinary only if they want to. The challenge is to give them a reason to want to. And people will only want to perform exceedingly well and produce great results, if they feel like an important part of the organization. Financial motivation only works up to a point. Money is never a continuous motivator.

Sigmond Freud, the greatest psychologist says, There is only one way to get anybody to do anything. Yes, just one way. Remember, there is NO OTHER WAY! Action springs out from our fundamental desires. We all have common wants - Health and the preservation of life, food, sleep, money and the things money will buy, happy & joyful Life, sexual gratification, the well-being of our family. Almost all these wants are usually gratified – all except one. "The desire to be important"

So, its imperative for top management and mid-level managers to make their team members feel important. How? It's not that complex – Respect them, include them, empower them, trust their skills and abilities, let them fail and learn, recognize them, encourage them to take risks, train them, coach and mentor them, give them the freedom to work as they see fit and most importantly "be genuinely interested in them". Be interested in their professional development rather than thinking only about what's best for the company. Be only strategically rigid but tactically flexible.

Expressing genuine interest in others – there's no better way to make people interested in you. People respond to people who are sincerely interested in them. They can't help but respond. This one is one of the most basic facts of human psychology. Attention and Interest make people feel important.

You can't wait until you call everybody up and say, "Will you join me for a drink?" You make them want to come along. You ride and they want to ride along. You have got to make them want to ride along. It's a leader's job to foster those feelings. The leadership language and day to day communication should be uplifting and inspiring.

Motivate them, Inspire them, Win their hearts and they will give you their minds.