Grow Your Business

The only thing harder than delivering excellent customer service consistently is motivating someone else to deliver excellent customer service consistently. Four motivation strategies can help your organization succeed, one professional at a time.

1. Get excited.

As managers, we have to motivate ourselves first. If we lack motivation, employees will lack motivation. Motivation occurs from the inside out. If we want to motivate someone, we have to communicate to their inside. Emotions communicate on a deep level from inside to inside.

Dig deep—feigning excitement is impossible because people’s insides come equipped with an infallible phony-detection system that is always on and has an amazing range of reception. Are you genuinely excited about the work your team produces? Whether we manage rocket scientists or the custodial staff, we need to fall in love with our team’s contribution. A rah-rah attitude at the staff meeting, ho-hum attitude everywhere else will quickly be discovered.

2. Hire motivated professionals.

It’s easier to hire motivated professionals than it is to motivate professionals. Experts assert, “Hire smart or manage tough.” A COO of a healthcare organization I worked with declared, “We only hire people with ‘It’—a pathological disease to want to serve people.”

Do you believe that professionals exist who would revel in the kind of work your team produces? The answer is, they do exist. However, if we are not excited about the work our team produces, we will never attract and hire people who are excited to do it because like attracts like and birds of a feather flock together.

Are you keeping score? How long does it take, when two people are hitting tennis balls back and forth, for one of them to suggest playing a real game? In other words, is your department perpetually warming up, hitting balls around or are you playing for real?

Measure something, but make it relevant to your employees, your customers, and your bottom line. Measuring performance biases employees’ energy like a highlighter biases the eye on a written page.

Measurements motivate employees for different reasons. Some employees are very competitive and thrive on distinguishing their performance from others’. Some are very competitive and thrive on distinguishing their own future performance from their past. And some employees are not competitive at all. They are very dutiful and focus their energy on whatever is highlighted for them.

4. Institute profit-sharing.

Tie the measurement to a reward. An adage goes, “What gets rewarded gets repeated.” If you want to motivate employees even more, reward the results you reap from measuring. Sales professionals receive commissions based on their measured results: sales and sometimes repeat business or renewals. What about everyone else? A manager of a printing company told me that he measures wasted paper. He sets a goal for “waste.” If the production employees meet or exceed the goal by producing less waste, the company splits the profits with them. Rewards add precision to measurement-inspired motivation. By rewarding team measurements, we can influence internal customer service in addition to individual service efforts.