Can a team succeed without motivating leadership? According the assigned article, Motivation (Shah & Shah, 2007), “Motivation is a powerful tool in the hands of leaders. It can persuade, convince and propel people to act.” The important information the authors present are the different types of motivation. To quote the late Tom Landry, former Dallas Cowboys Head Football Coach, “Leadership is getting someone to do what they don't want to do, to achieve what they want to achieve.”
Motivation can be defined as leading someone to do what they don’t want to do to become something they wish to become. A leader must know what makes the individual team member tic. What drives a team member to perform at the best of their capability? To know if the motivation is an internal or external factor that drives to peak performance. The ability to recognize that people are extremely complicated creatures and will change based on internal and external factors. Competence motivation, striving to be the best they can be may work one day. Using incentive motivation, striving for a reward may work the next.
In my own work situation, I was asked a question during a leadership seminar what my leadership style was. The question alluded to the six leadership styles listed in Leadership Communication ( Barrett ,2008) of visionary, coaching, affiliative, democratic, pacesetting, and commanding. The answer given was “all of them”. What I meant was each person needed to be motivated based on who they were at the given moment. Some were motivated by incentives, others by achievement, and still others by fear. I also learned that group dynamics played a factor in selecting a specific leadership style. To consistently pursue and attain established goals, achievement motivation was necessary in a pacesetting style.
Ethically the goal set before the team and individual must be a SMART goal (Donohue, 2009). Specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely elements of a goal will encourage buy-in from all parties involved. In conjunction with this, I realized during my time as a regional supervisor that some workers did not care about meeting their assigned goals. To ensure that team goals were obtained, I developed five sub-teams within the team, pairing up those who were high achievers with others who performed at a lower level. Immediately production increased as the team members performed cooperatively because they didn’t want to let the others down. This was a power motivation strategy that turned out to be successful. Peer pressure fixed any sub-par behavior on behalf of a few team members. Once success and recognition was achieved, each member performed at a higher level than assigned.
In conclusion, we can’t just shoot into the air and hope a bird flies by. A systematic approach; developing leadership and motivational techniques; of getting to know who your team members are and what truly motivates them within a situation, can help bring down the “Big Bird”!
References
Shah, K. & Shah, P. (2008.) Motivation. Retrieved July 10, 2007, from http://www.laynetworks.com/Motivation.htm
unknown, ThinkExist.com Quotations. Retrieved March 1, 2009, Web site: http://thinkexist.com/quotation/leadership_is_getting_someone_to_do_what_they_don/151191.html
Donohue, Gene Retrieved March 1, 2009, from Top Achievement Web site: http://www.topachievement.com/smart.html
Barrett, D. (2008). Leadership communication. (2nd Edition). Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill. ISBN: 978-0-07-340314-4.
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