What motivates and rewards your team?

"People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care." — Theodore Roosevelt Motivation and rewards for a team often come from recognizing individual and collective achievements. Provide meaningful feedback, celebrate successes, and offer opportunities for growth. Tailor rewards to personal preferences, whether through public recognition, professional development, or flexible work arrangements. Ensuring that each team member feels valued and understood drives engagement and productivity.

aking time to understand your coworkers' priorities is key to fostering engagement. It provides valuable insights on how to make their lives easier and more meaningful. As a leader, you can't always focus solely on performance; engaging coworkers involves getting to know their personal lives and asking questions. Simply inquiring about their well-being or helping with personal challenges humanizes you as a boss. Additionally, recognizing non-monetary values, like supporting a manager's cycling passion or knowing what sport their kids play and involving the company as uniform sponsor, demonstrates genuine care and fosters a strong connection

It's crucial to understand their individual needs and expectations. This involves assessing their personalities, strengths, weaknesses, goals, values, and motivations. Use surveys, interviews, feedback sessions, personality tests, or performance reviews to gather this information. By tailoring your communication, feedback, recognition, and incentives to their unique profiles, you can effectively boost their morale and productivity.

1. The feeling that you know them and associate with them and take ownership makes them feel that they belong to this team. 2. Balanced work allocation makes the team feel equal. 3. A leader's message to the team of being open to communicate and being reachable adds on to their confidence. 4. Acknowledge and reward the efforts of the team publicly. 5. Communicate any critical feedback in private.

Make sure your team can connect the goals to the work of the team, department, and organization. But first, the team must be clear on WHY the goals are important to them, individually, before you can achieve buy-in. The identified goals should be documented and stored somewhere easily accessible, and connected to your team's work. Review them regularly as part of your meetings, so that orientation of the work and goals become part of your team norms.

As a leader, I have found it beneficial to help your team set slightly bigger goals than they would typically set for themselves. By helping them see the vision of what could be, while also making it clear that you believe it is possible for them to achieve those goals, you can instill a sense of confidence into your team members. This also helps to push people outside of their comfort zone. Often, even if these bigger goals are not fully met, you will see significantly more growth and creativity from your team members as they have to engage new processes to attempt to meet these stretch goals.

Team members are motivated by feedback and recognition. This shows that their hard work is appreciated and that they are making a difference. It also helps them to learn from their mistakes and improve their performance.

Food and free gift cards, while nice, are not the ultimate solution. They should follow recognition and meaningful one-on-one interactions. Simply showering employees with food and gifts is a short-term remedy. Individuals who are stressed, undervalued, or disengaged will persist in these feelings until the underlying issues are addressed.

A strong leader will remember that there are many valid paths to achieving a goal. Set your team up for success by collaboratively identifying the goal; ensuring team members have a clear understanding of the goal (including deadlines); providing necessary resources; and being available for questions, coaching, and problem-solving - then encourage your team to find the best path to the objective.

Autonomy is a powerful motivator, yet it can be challenging to attain in less developed or mature organizations. In situations where there are managers who tend to micromanage or guard their authority, achieving autonomy for employees can be difficult. Addressing leadership issues is the initial step to facilitate autonomy.

Delegation is a great way to support your teams' growth and feeling of value. There are a few key steps to delegating well and they include: 1. Evaluating your team's skillset and interest. What are they good at, what do they enjoy doing, where could they use more support or improvement? 2. Categorizing and prioritizing the team's goals and tasks. This is an important step in delegation and requires a leader to be comfortable trusting. 3. Delegation. Delegating tasks is not sending an email and throwing it over the wall it needs to be delivered properly. 4. Monitoring, coaching, and follow-ups. It's almost more important than the #1 evaluation of skillset that a leader makes the time to support their teams when tasks are delegated.

É fundamental que liderança e equipe tenham uma relação de confiança e transparência e a principal forma de o líder conquistar isso é agindo com coerência. A liderança pelo exemplo, a empatia e a autonomia reforçam a segurança da equipe, que passa a ter mais tranquilidade em sugerir e desenvolver melhorias para os processos.

Trust and collaboration are key to motivating and rewarding your team. When team members trust each other and work together effectively, they are more likely to be productive and engaged. To build trust and collaboration, be honest, respectful, and reliable. Promote teamwork, share information, resolve conflicts, and celebrate diversity.

In my experience, the quickest way for a leader to build trust with your team is to get into the trenches with them. Understand the details of the work they are doing, help move roadblocks when they encounter them, and act as a voice for them to other leaders in the organization. By showing your team you are willing to do the work and not just manage the work, the team will start to see that your focus is on what is best for the whole team and not just for yourself.

Quando ocupamos uma posição de liderança em uma organização, precisamos ter clareza da responsabilidade que temos. A entrega dos resultados é importantíssima, mas o como são entregues, que passa pelo desenvolvimento e motivação da equipe, é fundamental para que sejam sustentáveis ao longo do tempo. Ter metas claras e definidas em conjunto com o time, dar feedbacks e orientações constantemente, ser acessível e participativo, agir e comunicar com transparência e coerência, reconhecer e comemorar os resultados e, atuar com empatia são fundamentais para que um líder possa manter a equipe motiva e comprometida.

While working with teams, it is important to remove any sources of unhappiness, which is a powerful de-motivator, and its causes need to be addressed. Everyone will experience unhappiness differently, so careful observation is needed to notice what’s occurring and then alleviate the issues. The other elements needed to create a motivated team are setting clear objectives, recognizing good performance, offering the ability to develop and providing a cooperative team environment. A happy workplace is a productive workplace.

If you find that ‘sweet spot’ of talents, skills, experience and interest that can be aligned to a compelling vision that matters to the individuals, that’s where magic happens. As a leader, this means you making time to understand, deeply, what matters to them and help them gain clarity on their goals and aspirations. To become a partner is helping them understand what their stretch goals are, the leaning and experience they need to gain, they’re then ‘on a mission’ that keeps them fired up and ready to go!

Traditional team building activities are consistently beneficial. Although employees may initially express reluctance to participate, they often find enjoyment in the activity, gain insights into their colleagues, and reignite their enthusiasm for each other and the company.