After watching the TED video in class, I wanted to research more about how better to motivate people by not just throwing money at them and calling it a day. I want to find new ways to motivate people to perform at their best, while keeping their sanity. I have a personal example of this. I have noticed a dramatic difference in a friend when he moved from one place of employment to another. The first place, everything was about money and using it as a motivator. He was miserable there because he just went there, did his work, for a paycheck. The new place, it is a much more fun environment and he is constantly praised and told how great it is to have him working there. He feels like he matters at this new place and he is more happy at work and has become more productive than ever.
I found a interesting article at Forbes.com that helps point out areas and way to make your employees productive and motivated without resorting to huge cash bonuses.
"Recent studies by David Rock, an executive coach, and Jeffry Schwartz, a neuroscientist, have identified several motivators that influence behavior more effectively than money. For one, people want to elevate their status. Organizations often assume that the only way to raise an employee's status is by a promotion, but status can be enhanced in many less costly ways. The perception of status increases significantly whenever people are given credible informal praise for daily tasks rather than waiting for annual results.
People are also motivated by having autonomy, but more money doesn't often equal greater perceived autonomy. In fact, you usually have to give up autonomy to rise up the compensation ladder. The real heart of autonomy as a motivator, however, rests with the perception that you are executing your own decisions without a lot of oversight or rules, which is hardly common in the corporate world today.
Similarly, feelings of relatedness and fairness are motivators. They are determined more by informal interactions, social networks and daily perceptions than by money or formal promotions.
This is not to suggest that money doesn't motivate. Certainly it encourages self-serving materialism. But those who rely on money as their sole or primary motivator are on perilous terrain, particularly if they ignore other more powerful and emotional sources of human motivation.
A few years ago we did research with elite military units that included the Navy Seals, the Green Berets and the Marines. Not surprisingly, we found that money is not what motivates an emotional commitment to such groups. We also learned that pride in daily training exercises was almost as important a motivational force as pride in the unit. And the Marines spend 75% of their military life in training exercises.
The Marines' boot camp takes 12 weeks while other services take 8. Those 12 weeks are devoted to exercises designed to inculcate the Corps' emotional values of honor, courage and commitment. During that arduous period, recruits are required to do all kinds of anxiety-producing things like leap off high towers, swim in deep water with full backpack burdens and run miles up and down hills.
Their drill instructors are master motivators whom they initially hate and fear. Before long those instructors become aspirational role models who breed respect, courage and commitment. A drill instructor is up at the crack of dawn before his recruits, works into the night preparing for the next day and changes his uniform several times a day. (He always looks the part of a Marine leader.)
To understand the emotional commitment that drill instructors engender, we conducted a focus group discussion with some eight recruits 10 weeks into their program. One of them was a young woman about 5 feet tall who weighed less than 100 pounds. She looked a bit out of place to us, so at one point we asked her what had attracted her to the Corps. Her impassioned reply remains a permanent fixture in our memory: "Gentlemen, the Marines make me shine -- every single day!" That is pride in one's work at its best, with money irrelevant."
I completely agree with her quote. Money can only go so far, but personal achievement and a sense of importance can last a lifetime. Money comes and goes fast and it feels like a rat race. Money causes people to be narrow-minded and forget what is really important in life. I want to work for a company that knows how important it is to encourage and praise their employees.
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Friday, April 9, 2010
How to Run a Successful Business
With graduation rapidly approaching, I have been wondering about having my own business. Not like a franchise, but a real business that is my own. I am not sure what the business would be, most likely something involving the automotive industry. I know how to start a small business because I already did in the past, twice actually. Once, was with my Dad, he became a broker, thus he started his own realty company. The second time was starting up a catering company with my sister, in which I ran every financial aspect and managed all of the staff. What I am looking for is how to be more successful when running a business. I constantly want to improve, and when you own your own business, you want to do everything necessary to make sure the company grows big and fast. While researching ideas and tips, I came across an article that discussed Sam Walton's book, ""Running a Successful Company: Ten Rules that Worked for Me." I remember hearing about this book and that many business owner are using his steps from the book. Here is an excerpt:
"Rule 1: Commit to your business. Believe in it more than anybody else. I think I overcame every single one of my personal shortcomings by the sheer passion I brought to my work. I don't know if you're born with this kind of passion, or if you can learn it. But I do know you need it. If you love your work, you'll be out there every day trying to do it the best you possibly can, and pretty soon everybody around will catch the passion from you — like a fever.
Rule 2: Share your profits with all your associates, and treat them as partners. In turn, they will treat you as a partner, and together you will all perform beyond your wildest expectations. Remain a corporation and retain control if you like, but behave as a servant leader in your partnership. Encourage your associates to hold a stake in the company. Offer discounted stock, and grant them stock for their retirement. It's the single best thing we ever did.
Rule 3: Motivate your partners. Money and ownership alone aren't enough. Constantly, day by day, think of new and more interesting ways to motivate and challenge your partners. Set high goals, encourage competition, and then keep score. Make bets with outrageous payoffs. If things get stale, cross-pollinate; have managers switch jobs with one another to stay challenged. Keep everybody guessing as to what your next trick is going to be. Don't become too predictable.
Rule 4: Communicate everything you possibly can to your partners. The more they know, the more they'll understand. The more they understand, the more they'll care. Once they care, there's no stopping them. If you don't trust your associates to know what's going on, they'll know you really don't consider them partners. Information is power, and the gain you get from empowering your associates more than offsets the risk of informing your competitors.
Rule 5: Appreciate everything your associates do for the business. A paycheck and a stock option
will buy one kind of loyalty. But all of us like to be told how much somebody appreciates what we do for them. We like to hear it often, and especially when we have done something we're really proud of. Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They're absolutely free — and worth a fortune.
Rule 6: Celebrate your success. Find some humor in your failures. Don't take yourself so seriously. Loosen up, and everybody around you will loosen up. Have fun. Show enthusiasm — always. When all else fails, put on a costume and sing a silly song. Then make everybody else sing with you. Don't do a hula on Wall Street. It's been done. Think up your own stunt. All of this is more important, and more fun, than you think, and it really fools competition. "Why should we take those cornballs at Wal-Mart seriously?"
Rule 7: Listen to everyone in your company and figure out ways to get them talking. The folks on the front lines — the ones who actually talk to the customer — are the only ones who really know what's going on out there. You'd better find out what they know. This really is what total quality is all about. To push responsibility down in your organization, and to force good ideas to bubble up within it, you must listen to what your associates are trying to tell you.
Rule 8: Exceed your customer's expectations. If you do, they'll come back over and over. Give them what they want — and a little more. Let them know you appreciate them. Make good on all your mistakes, and don't make excuses — apologize. Stand behind everything you do. The two most important words I ever wrote were on that first Wal-Mart sign: "Satisfaction Guaranteed." They're still up there, and they have made all the difference.
Rule 9: Control your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find the competitive advantage. For twenty-five years running — long before Wal-Mart was known as the nation's largest retailer — we've ranked No. 1 in our industry
for the lowest ratio of expenses to sales. You can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation. Or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient.
Rule 10: Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there's a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction. But be prepared for a lot of folks to wave you down and tell you you're headed the wrong way. I guess in all my years, what I heard more often than anything was: a town of less than 50,000 population cannot support a discount store for very long."
These rule make complete sense to me and I believe that these are not all impossible to master. I want to make my business great and having these steps and rules in place, I know it can succeed!
Read more at PowerHomeBiz.com
"Rule 1: Commit to your business. Believe in it more than anybody else. I think I overcame every single one of my personal shortcomings by the sheer passion I brought to my work. I don't know if you're born with this kind of passion, or if you can learn it. But I do know you need it. If you love your work, you'll be out there every day trying to do it the best you possibly can, and pretty soon everybody around will catch the passion from you — like a fever.
Rule 2: Share your profits with all your associates, and treat them as partners. In turn, they will treat you as a partner, and together you will all perform beyond your wildest expectations. Remain a corporation and retain control if you like, but behave as a servant leader in your partnership. Encourage your associates to hold a stake in the company. Offer discounted stock, and grant them stock for their retirement. It's the single best thing we ever did.
Rule 3: Motivate your partners. Money and ownership alone aren't enough. Constantly, day by day, think of new and more interesting ways to motivate and challenge your partners. Set high goals, encourage competition, and then keep score. Make bets with outrageous payoffs. If things get stale, cross-pollinate; have managers switch jobs with one another to stay challenged. Keep everybody guessing as to what your next trick is going to be. Don't become too predictable.
Rule 4: Communicate everything you possibly can to your partners. The more they know, the more they'll understand. The more they understand, the more they'll care. Once they care, there's no stopping them. If you don't trust your associates to know what's going on, they'll know you really don't consider them partners. Information is power, and the gain you get from empowering your associates more than offsets the risk of informing your competitors.
Rule 5: Appreciate everything your associates do for the business. A paycheck and a stock option
will buy one kind of loyalty. But all of us like to be told how much somebody appreciates what we do for them. We like to hear it often, and especially when we have done something we're really proud of. Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They're absolutely free — and worth a fortune.
Rule 6: Celebrate your success. Find some humor in your failures. Don't take yourself so seriously. Loosen up, and everybody around you will loosen up. Have fun. Show enthusiasm — always. When all else fails, put on a costume and sing a silly song. Then make everybody else sing with you. Don't do a hula on Wall Street. It's been done. Think up your own stunt. All of this is more important, and more fun, than you think, and it really fools competition. "Why should we take those cornballs at Wal-Mart seriously?"
Rule 7: Listen to everyone in your company and figure out ways to get them talking. The folks on the front lines — the ones who actually talk to the customer — are the only ones who really know what's going on out there. You'd better find out what they know. This really is what total quality is all about. To push responsibility down in your organization, and to force good ideas to bubble up within it, you must listen to what your associates are trying to tell you.
Rule 8: Exceed your customer's expectations. If you do, they'll come back over and over. Give them what they want — and a little more. Let them know you appreciate them. Make good on all your mistakes, and don't make excuses — apologize. Stand behind everything you do. The two most important words I ever wrote were on that first Wal-Mart sign: "Satisfaction Guaranteed." They're still up there, and they have made all the difference.
Rule 9: Control your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find the competitive advantage. For twenty-five years running — long before Wal-Mart was known as the nation's largest retailer — we've ranked No. 1 in our industry
for the lowest ratio of expenses to sales. You can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation. Or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient.
Rule 10: Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there's a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction. But be prepared for a lot of folks to wave you down and tell you you're headed the wrong way. I guess in all my years, what I heard more often than anything was: a town of less than 50,000 population cannot support a discount store for very long."
These rule make complete sense to me and I believe that these are not all impossible to master. I want to make my business great and having these steps and rules in place, I know it can succeed!
Read more at PowerHomeBiz.com
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