No matter how strong your leadership skills, your team won’t be motivated to their fullest 100% of the time. It ebbs and flows, but if you notice a negative trend, you may need to revamp your work culture to nurture and support them.
Find out some strategies that can motivate your team, unite them toward a common business goal, and reignite that spark they once had.
Encourage Regular Communication
If your meetings involve a lot of you talking without much discourse and a lot of awkward silence, it can be discouraging to continue regular meetings. But you can’t give up that easily. As a leader, part of your job is making the meetings what you want them to be.
Holding spontaneous meetings without a clear agenda or context keeps your employees on their toes, leading to more organic discussion. For example, you could turn a meeting into an event with agendas and action items you want your employees to consider, sparking their interest.
It’s important to make your discussions productive. Define the objective for each meeting, allowing time for employees to voice their opinions free of judgment. Your employees will feel heard and respected, encouraging them to converse more openly in the future.
Be Proactive
Managers have to take a proactive approach to issues, rather than waiting for situations to escalate before stepping in. Being proactive with your team’s development and support nurtures a stronger company culture.
However, this doesn’t mean just picking out issues and solving problems. While this is an important part of proactive management, you should also find ways to encourage employees for showing initiative and reward them for their efforts.
It’s about accomplishments just as much as finding areas for improvement. Balancing both aspects in your leadership builds trust with your teams and helps them grow in their roles and careers.
Focus on Diversity
If you have a team of the same people with the same education, background, and viewpoint, you’re not likely to get innovation and creativity. Instead, you want people with varying professional and personal backgrounds and different approaches to their roles.
Diversity in your teams can make discussions livelier and introduce new and creative perspectives. Work with your HR department to ensure they’re using diverse hiring practices to get a talented and varied group of candidates to fill new roles.
Encourage Shared Responsibility
Hybrid and remote teams working from different locations, time zones, or even work schedules can be excellent for productivity, but there can be issues with lack of visibility and confusion about who’s responsible for what tasks or projects.
Unfortunately, there’s also an opportunity for employees to shirk accountability. When managers aren’t communicating project roles and responsibilities clearly – or checking in on progress – it’s easier for employees to “pass the buck.” Eventually, this attitude will permeate the entire team, leading to everyone being out for themselves.
The responsibility to promote team accountability with your employees falls on you. Nurture a culture in which employees are quick to help each other out – and receive help when they need it – to ensure that project milestones are met without anyone shouldering too much of the load.
Define Objectives
If your team doesn’t know what objectives they’re working toward, the projects aren’t likely to succeed. This applies whether the project has strict deadlines or coordinated efforts, such as getting ready for a conference or tradeshow.
There needs to be transparency about the full objective and goals, as well as the milestones each team member has to reach to ensure the project is completed on time and with the highest quality.
You can help with this process using both project goals and individual employee goals, which ensures everyone knows what their role is and how their work impacts the rest of the team. Make sure goals are realistic and achievable, however, or you’re just overwhelming your team.
This is not only important for your project, but your employees’ satisfaction. People want to feel like they have a purpose in their roles and like they’re contributing to larger business goals. Keeping them in the loop and showing them why their work matters can make a huge difference in morale.
Learn to Love Change
Just when you get the perfect flow in the workplace, change can come along and disrupt your harmony. Most people aren’t good with change, especially when it comes to business or their workplace. No matter how adaptable you think you are, change can make anyone uncertain, stressed, and off balance.
As a leader, your job is to help your team prepare for and accept change, viewing the circumstances as opportunities for growth instead of doom. This comes down to your attitude. If you’re indifferent or defensive, you’re going to pass that along to employees.
Conversely, if you’re excited and see the possibilities in the change, such as improved efficiency, better workflows (and more work-life balance by extension), you can help your team adopt a more positive outlook on the situation and adapt accordingly.
Cultivate a More Motivated Team
There will always be challenges when you’re trying to motivate your team, especially if there are curveballs along the way. However, these leadership strategies can help you inspire your employees to do their best work, keep an open mind, and share ideas and opinions openly for a more dynamic and productive work culture.
Author Name: Cameron Magee
Author Bio: Cameron Magee, the owner of avad3 Event Production, is a passionate and dedicated professional who began his journey in event production as a curious 12-year-old at his childhood church. Today, he leads a team of hard-working production professionals, having built avad3 from his college dorm room into a national production company, committed to both client success and the well-being of his team.
