Motivators: taking care of your team

As you go through the process of building your teams, which is really a process of creating strong leaders (a good overview of my key posts on this topic is here), you’re going to be asking a lot of your folks.

You’re going to be asking them to change. You’re going to be asking them to work outside their comfort area. You’re going to be asking them to take creative initiative to make things / products / environments / processes better.

Asking these things really boils down to asking people to take risks that carry with them a chance of failure. Most of us recognize that failure is hard to take, and if you’re even a tiny bit empathetic you know that when someone falls they at least need a little pep talk to get them going again.

Even success in an environment of change takes a toll

But this is the bare minimum; in general, people need much more support than this.

Here’s why: carrying around all this risk of failure is tiring. Even if your team members don’t actually fail big in a given timeframe, doing new things mean living with the daily risk of failure, and this places a constant stress on your staff. They may not complain about this stress for fear of looking “weak”. They may not even know that they’re experiencing this stress. But the odds are pretty good that if you’re doing a lot of new things with your staff, or trying to catalyze a lot of personal development, they’re going to eventually wear down.

What you can do to help

You can’t prevent the strain itself—change and development are hard—but you can manage its impact by remembering to take care of your team’s human needs. Certainly after big events, but also in between as all the little events add up.

Here are a few good ways to motivate, encourage, and otherwise lighten the load for your team. I’ve ordered them by my own scale of value: the higher the significance of the contribution or accomplishment, the farther up the list I go for the recognition.

The formal “big deal”

I’m really focusing here on the continuous encouragement that everyone needs on a more ongoing basis, even when they don’t realize it, but there is a place for the formality of a Big To Do. Call an all-hands meeting, have a lunch, give out a plaque, that sort of thing. You have to do these sparingly because a) they are usually corny and people can only take so much and b) if you do them too often they’ll lose value.

1. A word of thanks

Find an opportunity to tell your folks, individually, that you recognize the value of their contribution and the challenge of whatever new thing it is (public speaking, project management, whatever) that they’re trying to master. Just a simple word of thanks is enough: in and out.

2. A quick email

Basically the same as number 1, but this time in “writing.” The advantage for the employee is that it feels a little more permanent, and they can print it out and put in their performance folder for their next review meeting. Good stuff.

3. A letter of commendation

Unlike the email thanks this one is almost guaranteed to make it into the employee file, so spend a little time on it. You might want to reserve something like this for an accomplishment that’s bigger than everyday heroism: a major milestone, for example. But it’s formal, and can also serve as an organizational thank you, especially if it’s printed on letterhead.

4. A handwritten letter of thanks

I reserve this one for those times when people have gone above and beyond the call of duty and have done something that I’m not only proud of as a representative of the organization, but that I’m also personally proud of and grateful for (extraordinary personal sacrifices for work always get a handwritten letter, for example). In this day and age a handwritten note of thanks is a rare beast indeed, and if use sparingly can have a wonderful impact on your team.