Employees who try to accomplish goals set forth by themselves or managers will eventually run into failure. Failure to reach a goal doesn’t always indicate a lack of effectiveness on part of your employees. Employees fail to meet expectations for numerous reasons, including time constraints, a lack of resources or a high turnover rate. Reassuring employees that failure is just a road bump and not a blockade helps increase their motivation and improves morale.
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Step 1
Meet with all employees who failed to achieve their goal. Do not meet with employees individually, unless a single employee failed to reach his goal. Conduct the meeting in the morning or after employees return from break; avoid interrupting their work.
Step 2
Touch on the goal that was set forth and explain that it wasn’t reached. Don’t skirt the issue or try revitalizing your employees by pretending to not understand why they lack morale and motivation. Use “us” when you explain how the employees failed to reach their goal. Never say “you” or mention a department by name.
Step 3
Explain that while everyone should strive for success, failure is inevitable at times. Tell the employees that failure is a sign that at least they’re trying to achieve something. Do not criticize employees for failing to reach their goal. If you berate employees for failure, you lessen the chance that they’ll apply themselves and risk failure in the future.
Step 4
Talk about what the employees accomplished en route to attempting their goal. When employees fail to meet expectations, they often think about the negatives rather than the positives. Make sure that employees realize they had success, even if they didn’t reach their ultimate goal.
Step 5
Touch on what held the employees back from accomplishing their goal. Don’t appear accusatory or overly negative. Talk about what you believe everyone could improve on to meet future goals. Always offer ways to improve on weaknesses.
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Whether you are an experienced public speaker or just flirting with the idea of sharing your message with the world, you probably know that giving a great presentation involves much more than just reading from cue cards.
The good news? Learning about the essential qualities of other great presenters is an easy way to become one yourself. The following four essential qualities of all public speakers, in particular, will ensure you are delivering presentations that will influence, inspire, and make a meaningful impact on your audience.
1. Introspection & Self-Awareness
To be an effective speaker, you must first understand who you are as a speaker—and as a person. What are your strongest interpersonal qualities? How do you best connect with others? What qualities do you need to work on? The most effective speakers are constantly working to capitalize on their strengths—whether that’s great storytelling or a talent for getting the audience to participate—and also to improve upon their weaknesses. Tapping into your most powerful interpersonal qualities is an excellent way to make yourself accessible, engaging, and unique.
To start, make a list of your best traits and the areas in which you excel. Then, think about how each of these traits is expressed when speaking or presenting in front of others. For example, if you’re great at explaining complex concepts in simple terms or if you have a dynamic, engaging personality, make sure you’re incorporating and highlighting these qualities throughout your presentation. (Need help identifying your interpersonal strengths? StrengthsFinder 2.0 is an excellent resource.)
2. The Ability to Tell a Story
Audiences show up for information, but they stay for the stories. Told well, stories can be the key to a compelling presentation that excites, energizes, and truly engages the people sitting in front of you. As my friends and mentors at Story Leaders™ have told me: “Others may not think what we think, but through a shared story, they can feel what we feel.”
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Motivation is the key ingredient for success in any organization. You can have all the technical skills in the world; however, if you can’t motivate your team, you will not achieve success. As a leader, a majority of your job is to motivate others to succeed so that everyone’s goals are accomplished.
The following are eight quick tips to motivate your team:
1. Everyone Has Motivation
Your employees are motivated on some level. It is your job to find the level of their motivation and move your employees to the next level.
2. Listen to WIIFM
I wake up every morning listening to a very important radio station, WIIFM. I hope you do too. WIIFM stands for What’s In It For Me? To truly be a motivator, you must always be in tune to your employees’ WIIFM. Find out why it is beneficial for your employees to do a task, etc. Once you find out the employees’ motives, you find out how to motivate them.
3. It’s about Pain or Pleasure
Motivate your employees toward pleasure or away from pain. You motivate toward the pleasure by providing recognition, incentives, and rewards for doing a good job. You motivate away from the pain of a corrective action, losing a position, or doing a poor job. The key to this motivation is to be consistent with all your employees at all times.
4. Give Me a Reason
Do it because I said so! Well, with our educated workforce these days, that doesn’t work anymore. Employees like to know why tasks are being requested of them so that they can feel involved and that the task has worth. Let your employees know why doing the task is important to you, the organization, and for them.
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Dress Like Your Audience is Dressed
Different speaking situations call for different clothing styles, but you are usually pretty safe if you are clean, tidy, and dressed as your audience is dressed. Why?
1. Ethos (your credibility) is one of three pillars of persuasion.
2. To develop ethos, you emphasize your similarity to your audience.
3. One practical way to achieve this is by dressing similarly to them.
So, how do you know how your audience will dress? Do your audience analysis! If the venue is a recurring conference or setting, go with what people wore last time. If you are presenting at a venue which is new to you, ask the event organizer what the usual dress code is. If there is a strong dress code, adhere to it!
This doesn’t mean you have to wear the identical suit or dress that everyone in your audience wears. There’s obviously quite a bit of latitude here. The point is that you don’t want to be significantly over-dressed or significantly under-dressed.
But I’ve heard that I should dress better than my audience?
“The key is that you look professional and respectful. Once you start talking, they shouldn’t be noticing what you are wearing anyway.”
Conventional wisdom says that you should dress one notch higher than your audience is dressed. Why a notch higher?
• To stand out?
• To earn respect?
• To hint at your success and affluence?
I don’t think any of those are particularly strong reasons for dressing above the level of your audience. Instead, I think the motivation for the “dress one notch higher” advice is that it buys you a little insurance in case your audience analysis was flawed.
• If you dress one notch higher than your predicted audience dress code, and the audience is dressed fancier than you predicted, then you are still safe.
• Of course, if your estimate is wrong the other way, you can show up significantly over-dressed.
I wouldn’t worry too much either way. The key is that you look professional and respectful. Once you start talking, they shouldn’t be noticing what you are wearing anyway.
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Public speaking is a difficult art to master. If you have previously achieved success with a presentation, a speech or even a wedding toast and are passionate about it then you may have the potential to become a great motivational speaker.
The job of a life coach has recently gained a lot of popularity and many people are considering a profession in this industry, potentially earning $1,000′s – $100,000′s per seminar.
A number of efficient tips and strategies will help you achieve this goal. Today we share these tips with you.
1. Do You have a Special Message to Deliver?
The greatest life coaches have something special to say, something that is derived from personal experiences. These people are successful because they speak on the basis of personal stories. Personal stories are convincing and easy to relate to.
If you are interested in a life coach career, you should determine the specifics that you want to get across. What does your audience want to hear and can you deliver that kind of message? Being too general or vague will simply minimize your chances of success before you have even gotten started.
2. You May Need a Mentor
You have always been a good public speaker and you believe that a motivational speaking career is right for you. The bad news is that it seems to be much easier said than done. Motivational speakers are a very specific group of orators. They influence the lives of others and as such, they hold tremendous responsibility. Learning from the best life coaches is a good idea.
See what others are doing. Establish connections. Talk to highly professional speakers and find the right mentor who will show you the tricks of this profession. Having a mentor will help you refine your skills.
3. The Target Audience
Decide what your target audience is before you start writing the motivational speeches. Each group of people will have to be approached in a specific way. If you have no idea who will be receiving your speeches, you will fail making those highly specific and relevant.
4. Work on Your Public Speaking Skills
What's the secret to a great team? Think small. Ideally, your team should have 7 to 9 people. If you have more than 15 or 20, you're dead: The connections between team members are too hard to make.
Two and a half years ago, AOL was feeling hamstrung at the technologies level. There was a bottleneck at the top. We decided to make that division team based, and created core teams that were empowered to make decisions about products.
It was the best thing that we could have done. The core teams spun off satellite teams (also made up of small groups of people) that focused on specific projects, with specific goals and expectations.
The management challenge is to understand that the people who report to you may get most of their direction from another person or from several other people: their team leaders. And people can be on more than one team, of course. It's the manager's job to think about whether this person is being stretched too thin, or whether that person needs some special training.
Size is the key. Have the smallest number of people possible on each team. Another rule: no delegates. You don't want people who have to take the team's ideas back to someone else to get authorization. You want the decision makers.
Teams work when they are created for the right reasons, and when they
are created in the right way. The organization that I think does the
best job of meeting these requirements is the U.S. Marine Corps. Most
people think of the USMC as a command-and-control organization. But when
they put a team together, it's in the right place for the right
reasons. The corps is extremely disciplined about assessing whether it
really needs a team for the task at hand. The notion that a team is
always better is misleading, yet all too often, that's the path that
managers choose.
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Ask any self-employed person what motivates them, and the answer is likely to be simple: money. But owner managers who think money keeps them motivated may be fooling themselves, say experts. Recognising what motivates you is likely to be rather more complicated.
Being your own boss comes top of the list for most small businesses, says Professor Andrew Oswald, professor of economics at Warwick University, followed closely by flexibility and flexible hours. Money comes a poor third for most self-employed people, including those who believe they are driven by the clatter of pound coins and the rustle of large cheques.
"Self-employed people have higher levels of job satisfaction and are happier than most of the population," believes Oswald. A whopping 49% of the thousands of self-employed people he has studied call themselves very satisfied, compared to 29% of employees. And yet the popular view that self-employed people are happier to take risks is unfounded, he argues: "Their gambling behaviour is no different from the rest of the population."
The factors which motivate small businesses are entirely more complicated, argues Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology at UMIST and himself a director of business psychology consultants Robertson Cooper Ltd. "People who start their own businesses have typically worked in a larger organisation and enjoy the amount of control and autonomy that self-employment gives them, when they see the direct rewards for their labour."
But though that autonomy may make most self-employed people happier than the average wage slave, Professor Cooper's studies of top business people has shown that the desire to prove themselves is often drives them.
"Money is not the big motivator. Many top entrepreneurs have had unhappy experiences in childhood, and are motivated by something negative. They want to go on and prove they can succeed, and are driven by control and power."
And while those negative experiences may drive many to set up their own businesses in the first place, motivation grows with the enterprise, argues Professor Cooper. "As the business grows and they employ people, it's like an extended family with everyone depending on your success. The drive that keeps you going then comes from your feelings of responsibility to everyone who depends on you."
