Motivate Smarter - not Harder!

One of the continuous tasks of all good leaders is to motivate the team, keep them moving in the right direction. The leader needs to take care to maintain a constant effort in effective motivation, so look to motivate smarter not harder!

As the leader it's not always possible to motivate every team member once our team gets bigger than a dozen or so. In this situation the smart way to make your motivation work is to look at the popular folks and keep them well motivated as they will in turn motivate those who look to them.

Try this, size up your team and choose the 10-20% who have the most influence across your team, maybe the guy who organises the social functions, another maybe the receptionist who chats to everyone as the come in and out, look to the union rep and so on. If this 10% of the team pass the message to another 6-7 people then the message is gaining access across the team to reach a critical mass position, in that most people have heard the story/reason/resolution of why things are happening as they are.

Once you have identified these people you need to target your motivation towards these guys, as they will pass on the important points to their friends and colleagues keeping the whole team motivated and moving towards the team goals.

Develop a routine to closely interact with your selected personnel passing on your motivation pitch. A little more effort on these 10% will reap rewards from the greater team.

By following this simple strategy you will have more precious time and your team will be helping to maintain their own position. Give it a try I'm sure you'll find you get better results for your team with this small step to improve your leadership skills.

Plan to succeed with the new year

With the new year just ushered in, it's time to take stock and plan out how we want the new year to pan out.

While we may see some doom and gloom around the globe, we should also look for the positives to help drive us forward. By focussing on the positives we can get in the right frame of mind to tackle our own plan for this year.

We all hear about people who make their New-Year vow - get fit, spend more time with the family and so on. lots of these plans are quickly forgotten and we bumble our way through another year. However this is precisely the time for us to sit back and make a rational plan about how to tackle the new year, what we want to achieve and when we want to get to each milestone along the way. we have spoken at length several times about taking the team's goals and breaking them down into manageable pieces. The next step was to pace some time limits onto to each task so we cannot continue to ignore a call to action and finally getting on and making each small step count towards the achievement of the years' goal.

It is important this week to take some time and set out the years goals, so we can start persuading our team-members to align and work towards these common goals. get the goals written down, develop your rational for each. you don't want to waste the whole January waiting for some guidance on where to be by the end of the year else you may have almost lost a tenth of your time to get on your way to achieving them.