How to motivate others to succeed?

Six particularly effective tips to motivate others

1. Understand the type of personality you want to motivate

What motivates people varies according to their personalities. Some people are sociable and like candid feedback, while others are introverted and prefer quiet, positive feedback.

So, when you want to motivate someone, make sure you understand the nature of their personality and what gets them interested. Otherwise, all your efforts to motivate someone will be in vain, because you may use a motivation technique that is not appropriate for the person.

By understanding the target personality type, you'll be able to pinpoint the things that motivate them. To understand personality types and what basic things motivate them, you can resort to several techniques or principles.

The most common of these are personality tests, such as the Meyers-Briggs test. Another method is cards that are given to people to fill out in the form of forms. This helps you to know what's important to the people you are trying to motivate.

However, there are two very effective ways to understand personality type:

• The Myers-Briggs test, a quick, easy, and less than 12-minute test, divides characters into 16 types based on their answers.
• Engagement cards, a set of cards intended to help facilitate open communication between you and the person you are trying to motivate -usually an employee- and these cards are divided into categories, such as “Learning and Development” and “Job Satisfaction”, which help to make the conversation.

Using one of these tests to understand the personality type of the target employee is the first step to motivating them, by using this understanding to create the approach to motivating the employee, which will be explained later.

2. Provide them with the skills to succeed

Having understood the type of personality you are trying to motivate, the next step is to equip them with the skills to succeed. If you don't, they'll quickly become dispirited, because they feel that they don't have the ability to reach a consistent level of performance and success.

Otherwise, people get more motivated when their performance improves and leads to high levels of success. So if you don't equip people with the skills to succeed, it's like trying to build upon a weak foundation.

You may motivate someone just right, but if they don't have the skillset needed to achieve high performance, they'll get disheartened quickly, which is definitely your fault, not theirs. So to equip the people you're trying to motivate with the skills needed to succeed, precisely define the requirements for the task, project, or goal to be accomplished.

For example, if you're trying to motivate a salesperson and you know they'll need to deal with customers over the phone, train them on the best ways to handle leads, move the conversation through and close the deal, as well as how to quickly persuade a customer.

The best way to do this is to use a skills matrix, which clearly defines the requirements for the job or task at hand and classifies the person according to these skills between "needs improvement" and "excellent".

This way you clearly identify the skills needed to succeed, and you can also identify the skills you need to help the person you're trying to motivate in order to succeed. The easiest way to create a skills matrix is by using Excel or Google Sheets.

Remember that people usually want to do well, but if they're doing their best and not getting satisfactory results, they can quickly get demotivated. If you're trying to motivate others, make sure they have the skills required to succeed, otherwise you'll have to help them obtain the skills so that they don't become demotivated for not getting the results they expected.

3. Clearly define the objectives required of them

Having identified the personality type and equipped it with the essential skills to perform well in the job, task, or project, the next step is to set clear goals and expectations.

Because if you don't have a comprehensive understanding of the ultimate goal and the desired results during the work, people are very likely to lose their drive, as they'll soon feel like they have no specific destination or that they're confused.

It's very hard to maintain motivation with the same momentum without striving for something specific, so it's easy to motivate others when they have a common goal that they all strive to achieve, which pushes them forward.

For example, when motivating employees, try setting the company's annual goal, such as creating a new production line, and then turn this annual goal into a set of individual goals that the employees you motivate must work on.

If you're working on the marketing team, you may have set a quarterly goal, such as devising a go-to-market strategy and applying it to the new product by the end of the second quarter of the year. This gives employees or team members a sense of a defined path, as well as a clear benchmark against which to measure their progress, then, do a monthly review with the people you motivate to make sure you're on the right track.

These actions help the people you motivate understand the motivation behind their work, as well as the clarity of expectations, which is critical to motivation as it keeps people from losing the destination or purpose of their work.

4. Give them an arm's-length to do their job

Having understood the type of person you're trying to motivate, helped them gain the skills necessary to succeed, and set clear goals and expectations, what needs to be done next is to give them the space and freedom to act on their own.

As long as you apply the previous three tips correctly, the target people are ready to start working and prove their abilities. This doesn't mean that you shouldn't provide support or supervision, but that you should trust the people you're trying to motivate. It'll make them more motivated to take initiative.

If you don't, it means that you're micromanaging them, which will eliminate any motivation they have to take initiative. Micromanagement reflects negatively on you and will make your work much harder. Therefore, give your employees enough independence, and support them so that they can help you.

The best way to do this is by scheduling regular meetings. For example, if you set clear quarterly goals, you have to hold a meeting on Sunday with the employees you're trying to motivate and give them guidance on the work they're doing during this week, which will bring them closer to the quarterly goal you set earlier. Then, you'll have a second meeting on Tuesday to make sure things are on track, and then a final meeting at the end of the work week to review progress for the entire week and plan for the week ahead.

The best application for this purpose is the Scrum Framework used mainly by software developers but can be used to manage any workflow.

If you create a meeting schedule similar to the Scrum Framework, you ensure regular meetings and ongoing support for team members, as well as give the people you're trying to motivate the freedom to control and run their own business.

5. Provide them with feedback and coaching

Just because you give employees autonomy and freedom to do their job doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't provide coaching or feedback to them. If you don't give clear feedback on their performance, or don't provide the coaching needed to improve it, you can quickly get them demotivated because they don't realize if they're doing things right or not.

Specifically, feedback and coaching are used in the following ways:

Feedback

It is information or responses provided based on the employee's performance, for instance, when you tell an employee, “You did a good job” or “You didn't do it right,” you are giving them feedback.

Coaching

The educational aspect is in the context of actions taken to improve employee performance based on your previous work, such as when you say to an employee, "It looks like you're having a hard time with this task, try doing it this way."

Both techniques are important to motivate the person, and both are required to make them understand what they've done, and how they can improve their performance in a way that's motivating rather than demotivating.

To make sure that what you're telling your employee increases their motivation, be sure to provide very clear feedback and coaching. It's not enough to just tell them they did or didn't do well, you must explain to them exactly what happened, what part didn't go well, and how they can improve it next time.

6. Apply a system of incentives and bonuses

After doing all of the above, incentives and bonuses are necessary too for the employees' efforts. These incentives can be internal or external, and in many cases, the two types can be combined. Therefore, it's important to praise the person you're trying to motivate when they're doing a good job because praise drives them to keep up the good work at the same pace in the future.

If you don't praise the person for their accomplishments, they're likely to become discouraged, even if you follow previous advice, because most people respond to positive reinforcement, or expect it when their performance improves over time. Often, all a person needs in order to keep doing a good job is to be praised. On the other hand, indifference to the efforts of the person leads to discouragement.

FAQs

1. How to motivate someone to study?

Most motivation is about rewards and incentives. If you're motivating someone to study, make sure that they have a reward system that gives them some joy in return for their efforts. Then, you should help them divide their large materials into smaller parts, and activate accountability as part of the study routine.

2. How to motivate people to help others?

It depends on rewards and incentives, in which case the reward is the increase in the safety and well-being of others, and the value one feels as a result of the happiness one has achieved for others.

Remember that we are inherent to help others because this guarantees our survival in groups. This means that there's a sense of reward that we get when we help each other as human beings, and that's what you have to take advantage of.

3. What factors motivate people?

These factors include many things, such as achievement and progress, praise, career improvement, independence, personal growth, as well as love for work. While you don't need all these factors in order to motivate someone, you should rely on one or two of these factors at a minimum or your efforts will go down the drain.

4. What are some fun ways to motivate employees?

Turning business goals into a game in which employees compete is a great way to motivate them. Another way to motivate employees is to give them autonomy in their work, allowing them to form self-organized workgroups capable of tackling complex problems on their own.

Bottom Line

Motivating others is a little different than motivating yourself. First, make sure you understand the type of personality you want to motivate and understand what motivates it. Then, provide them with the skills necessary for success, set clear goals, and give them autonomy in their work side to side with coaching and continuous feedback.