What a delight to find someone else who recognises that companies have missed the point of employee motivation, by focussing on external rather than internal issues. It is the last vestige of ‘command & control’ management thinking, and arrogant in the extreme, to think that you – as an employer – can motivate your people! Will Marre – the co-founder of and former president of the Covey Leadership Centre and CEO of the REALeadership Alliance – recently made the point tellingly, stating that “by trying to create great companies that are ‘great places to work’ instead of igniting motivation from within” have missed the point.
You can read a fuller account of his address to senior HR executives and CEOs at the recent Employee of Choice Forum in San Diego here, but it is worth emphasising his comment, “The key is training all employees to think and act in ways that add value to both our future and our bottom lines. … Meaningful work occurs when workers harness their strengths, interests and creativity to create real value.” The problem is that you cannot do this while not looking at the whole person.
The focus on roles and competencies means you are not looking at the total person. Yet people are incapable of physically dividing themselves, which means you have to recognise that you pay them for what is effectively 30% of their life each day. For them not focus 100% of their capabilities on the task at hand at any point during their day is to waste a portion of that life, and to short-change both them and yourself as the employer, and is the real, root cause of employee disengagement.
It may not be perfect, but valuing people as assets, putting them on the balance sheet and making them co-owners of the business is the best way of redressing this injustice and making individual and organisation alike more effective. It is the start of “igniting motivation from the inside out” – the only way you can really do it!