What Motivates You and the People Around You?

What Motivates You and the People Around You?

A 2016 Gallup Poll on the State of the American Workforce indicated that 51% of the workforce is either looking for new jobs or watching for openings.  Whether you are an Employer or an Employee, this statistic affects you, and so does turnover at your organization.  If you are an Employer trying to retain talent, it’s helpful to understand what truly motivates your Employees.  If you are an Employee feeling underpaid and unsatisfied, it pays to get clear on what truly motivates you, and where you need to go from here.  In both cases, money or benefits are typically not the silver bullet that will make people happy enough to stay.

Let’s look at a few different perspectives and then compile some takeaways from it all

Ed Muzio, President of Group Harmonics, posts some very informative videos to YouTube; to summarize his video, “Six Hidden Factors of Motivation”, He believes that there are six major motivating factors, and when you understand which factor best represents you as well as the people with which you work, you will be better able to speak to their motivating language:

  • Truth: need for learning and getting to the bottom of things
  • Results: ROI, bottom line, numbers, metrics
  • Power: a person’s role or title, or ability to shape events
  • Assistance: helping others
  • Form: harmony, aesthetics, work environment
  • Structure: stability and concrete processes

With this perspective, if you are an employee who craves Structure and you are in an environment where there are few processes and things change from day to day, you might feel very unsettled and de-motivated because you constantly feel like the rug is being pulled out from under your feet and you don’t know what to do next.  With this realization in mind, you could approach your supervisor in a positive manner, explaining you want to be free to give 100% to your job, but you tend to feel unsettled by constant change, and you can ask if there are any job duty alternatives that might bring a more structured process to your day.

Supervisors and upper management tend to be Results driven by necessity, and they tend to think that everyone working for them is or should be results driven as well.  In truth, it takes all kinds to make the world go ‘round, and taking an honest stock of where your employees fall on this spectrum might inform you that by trying to push a square peg into a round hole (and expecting everyone to care as much about metrics as you do), you might inadvertently be de-motivating your staff.  You could take multiple approaches to change this around, and two suggestions would be to modify the job when possible, or to modify your message.  When modifying your message, for example, without using actual metrics terminology, you can highlight how an employee is assisting others, becoming more powerful, or creating a better work environment by doing what they are doing.  Encouraging the productivity levels you desire by focusing on the goals that drive them can show that you care enough to speak directly to their needs.

I know you’ve seen the t-shirt, “THE BEATINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES”!

Why do we Fail?

Tony Robbins is a popular speaker, and I’m not going to link directly to his TED talk on You-Tube because he has a potty-mouth and I don’t want to offend anyone, but in his talk on “Why we do what we do”, he breaks down a simple switch in thinking that can help you or your team move from frustration to the fast track.  He begins by asking the simple question, “Why do we fail?”, and to him the answer is that people choose to focus on a Lack of Resources, rather than adopting a state of Resourcefulness.

His basic point is that when you want to do something, you find a way.  When you don’t want to do something, you find an excuse, so to counter the statement, “I Failed Because I didn’t have enough”:

  • Time
  • Money
  • Contacts
  • Experience
  • Management

Tony suggests flipping the script and instead saying:

  • What I lack in Time I will make up for in Creativity
  • What I lack in Money I will make up for in Determination
  • What I lack in Contacts/Network, I’ll make up for in Curiosity
  • What I lack in Experience, I’ll make up for in Passion
  • What I lack in support from Management, I’ll make up for with Resolve.

Tony says that “Emotion is the force of life”, so in order to move from the idea of Lack of Resources to a mode of Resourcefulness, he suggests you ask three important questions;

  1. What am I going to FOCUS on? (Past, present, or future actions that affected you)
  2. What does it MEAN to me? (this creates an emotion i.e. do you think you are being punished or rewarded by the situation)
  3. What am I going to DO about it? (this creates action because either you give up or move forward)

In this sense, your Focus generates emotion inside of you; if you focus on a Lack of Resources, the emotion generated is helplessness and hopelessness, and the likely action is that you will give up. If you focus on becoming more Resourceful, creative, and passionate, you generate enough emotional force to power through whatever obstacle is in your path, and the likely outcome is that you succeed.

Here are some great personal stories about motivation and overcoming adversity here.

Above all, remember that the place where the rubber meets the road in motivation at an organization is Communication, and we must all take the equal weight of responsibility and accountability for communicating; first and foremost to ourselves by being as painfully frank and honest as we can in assessing our situation.  Once we have completed some serious introspection, then it’s important to clearly communicate your reality to those around you in the most positive way possible, which can be difficult, especially when you are feeling frustrated and de-motivated.

You can Google a thousand articles about improving communication in the workplace, but here is a good introductory start provided by Inc.com (who recently named us one of the Fastest-Growing 5000 companies in 2017 in case you missed it!)


Barracuda Staffing, Inc. cares about your success: check back next week for more tips on increasing your satisfaction in the workplace, and remember that one of the best things to have on your resume is Job Stability; however, if you are looking for a new place to spread your wings and grow into a leader in your department, we invite you to browse our current openings in Tulsa and surrounding areas, call to talk to a Recruiter, or simply Submit your resume online today!