Leadership Skills

You and Motivating a Team

Knowing your preferences, attitudes, communication styles, and behaviors will help you work best with your team. All people are different, and being clear about yourself will help when you encounter differences. For example, if you have a positive outlook, those who have differing attitudes may cause your frustration or stress. Knowing that there are differences in perceptions and attitudes can help you communicate and work together.

Consider the following:

What are your top values, and how do your values guide your decisions?
What are your strengths, and how do you use those skills when working with a team?
What is your preferred style of communication? Are you aggressive, passive, or assertive? (For details, see this page: http://veldaa.com/ed/lead/individual-commstyle.html)
What is your leadership style, and how do you work with people with different styles?
How do you handle conflict on a team?

Motivating a Team vs. Motivating an Individual

Motivating a team is different than motivating individual team members. As a group, the team may be motivated to complete a project or task that has nothing to do with any of them individually. However, knowing how to motivate the individual team members can certainly help you with motivating the group as a whole.

Motivating an individual team member requires that you know what the person values. It could be money, recognition, advancement, time off, gifts, or security. On the other hand, teams often find satisfaction with less tangible motivators. For example, teams may be motivated by having an impact, helping others, making a difference, being creative, overcoming challenges, implementing new processes and procedures, or being connected. According to Dan Ariely, motivating a team is finding how to make people feel good about their work and for the work to have meaning.

Leading & Motivating
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Velda Arnaud, Ph.D.
Executive Director
Lead, Educate, Serve Society
leadeducateserve@gmail.com