Your employees are your company’s assets. They are part of your business. Your management team is very essential if you mean serious about achieving your goals. But keeping them motivated towards achieving your goals is one of the biggest challenges. Experienced managers and entrepreneurs can tell you this. You probably have heard of complex theories about what motivate employees, or strategies spoken in a technical terms about how to keep them enthusiastically working for you. But how do you simply motivate employees? The answer is “patience”, according to Dick Cross, author of Just Run It!: Running an Exceptional Business is Easier Than You Think.
They say patience is a virtue; yes, we have heard that a lot of times. But how do we employ this as a strategy in the context of employee motivation? Here is how (based on the article written by Jeff Hayden. Read full story here.)
Patience as a Strategy to Motivate Employees:
- Make employees understand why things are urgent.
Time is money in business, which is why certain things are really treated as matters of urgency. But how do you instill that sense of urgency? Do you rant at your employee to get things accomplished?
“The best way to get people to go fast is to let them know why there’s a need to go fast, and then be encouraging and patient with their progress” says Cross.
It is very true that the more you press your staff by ranting to get things right, the more frustrations you’ll get for the undesirable results. I have seen this often in many organizations, and such observations prove how counterproductive ranting bosses can be. It’s either that they resort to some sort of mental “system failure” as staf struggle to organize their thoughts, or they end up facing the wrath of their employees’ “nonviolent resistance” by not complying and following through at all.
Cross says that “People, including kids, don’t like to be threatened. Threaten me and I’ll resist. Spank me, ground me, reprimand me, put a letter in my file, demote me, and you’ll fail to change my attitude. In fact, you’ll increase my resolution not to comply…Physically you might overpower me, but you’ll never get me to do any more than the minimum required to get by…And that’s a huge problem, because minimum compliance efforts never produce great organizational accomplishments… But if employees like how you treat them, know you believe in them, understand what needs to get accomplished and understand why it’s so important… They’ll generally accomplish great things.”
- Get people to want to help you
According to Cross “The key lies in getting them to want to help you, which is only possible when you 1) exhibit an understanding of what is possible, 2) care about them, and 3) are willing to accept the absolute best they can deliver…Under those conditions, most people will give you their all.”
Each person feels the need to be appreciated for their efforts. It is extremely important that you send the message to your employees that their contribution to the company matters. No person in your company should feel belittled over what they do for the organization. A genuine care results to people giving more than you expect from them.
It’s a mistake for entrepreneurs to expect their employees to be patient over their boss’ attitude and disposition towards work and expected output. Getting the most from employees entails a lot of patience. There are mistakes to forgive and time to allow improvement. Patience nurtures respect in the workplace, and this in turn creates a good motivating factor for employees.
Is patience a motivator? Share your thoughts with us by writing in the comments below.
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