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Slackers, Salt, and Stars
No
place can be comfortable for everyone – do you want to make the good
folks or the bad folks uncomfortable?
Motivation is an interesting topic – if you speak to a group of people
about motivation, half of the crowd is normally expecting a
“motivational speaker”, someone who will get them pumped up and
excited. Imagine their surprise when they find out that “motivation” is
about the science of what makes people move – work – perform.
There
are a lot of myths regarding motivation, and we don’t have time to
address them all here, but my favorite is the belief that some employees
are not motivated. When the manager is talking about the unmotivated
employee he generally describes someone who does just enough to get by,
a slacker. Let’s talk about slackers and two other groups of employees
you have in your company – and look at how they are all motivated….
First,
let’s talk about a group we all love to have on our team – the folks I
call the “Stars”. They are motivated! They don’t want to “do enough”,
they want to do more, more than anyone else, more than their own best
performance, just more. They are indeed motivated, and their goals are
obviously aligned with the corporate priorities. We like these folks.
Now,
let’s talk about the Slackers. Not motivated, right? Wrong! The trick
is to understand their reference group, their source of applause.
I
needed to make a telephone call, and my cell phone wasn’t getting decent
reception inside, so in the middle of winter I found myself standing
outside the client’s office, waiting for my call to connect. That’s
when I understood slackers. A group of folks were taking their smoke
break around the corner, unaware I was there. It seems that one of
their group, a big time Slacker, had gotten fired. They were mad that
he had been so clumsy, especially because now management was going to be
looking at everyone a little closer for a while.
I
learned that the best Slackers are those who can slack right to the line
without stepping over it, without actually getting fired. They laugh at
the gung-ho Stars who do twice as much work for roughly the same pay –
Slackers have figured out how to get as much as possible from the
company while putting out the least amount of work. That is Slacker
victory. They are as motivated as the Stars – they just keep score
differently. Like the Stars, however, they need their job, because
that’s where the game is played…that’s where they can win.
The
group I call The Salt makes up the largest part of your employee team.
These folks are “the salt of the earth”, good folks whose work ethic is
“an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay”. Interesting, isn’t it?
The Stars ethic is “more” – how much can I give? The Slacker ethic is
“less” – how little can I do without getting fired? The Salt is wanting
a fair swap of work for pay.
The
Salt group is motivated by things outside of the work world, family,
fishing, the dart tournament. Work gives them the money they need to do
the things that are important to them, to spend time with the group that
gives them applause.
Three
very different groups of employees, everyone motivated, but not for the
same applause.
Sending Slackers to a training program isn’t going to improve their
productivity or get them more involved in the company – their problem
isn’t a lack of knowledge, it a matter of listening to an applause that
doesn’t come from the company’s management.
Training that sounds like “work smarter, not harder” is effective with
The Salt in your company – they enjoy being able to make a positive
contribution, as long as that “honest day’s work for an honest day’s
pay” equation is still in effect.
Stars
love the training if it shows them how to do MORE! Unfortunately, the
training is frequently geared toward others whose production is much
less, and the Stars are just waiting for the class to end so they can
get back to doing MORE…
Anyway, there is a lot to motivation, and this hasn’t even scratched the
surface….but at least we got to look at one of the popular myths! |
