Motivating people - training for people in positions of leadership

The first thing you need to learn about motivating people is that you can’t motivate people and that it’s a waste of effort trying.  No-one can put motivation into people.  Motivation’s wired in.  It’s part of human nature.  It’s our life force.  But many managers feel they are to blame when they find their people unmotivated.  They see it is as a sign that there’s something deficient either in them as a manager or in their people.  They spend money sending people to inspirational lectures – a very short term solution.  Or they become heavy handed, or perhaps heavy booted – all based on the crazy assumption that motivation is something which if only you had the necessary charisma, and if only your people had a better attitude, you could inject into them.

But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do when you find your people demotivated or unmotivated.   What you can do is identify and deal with the specific obstacles that are preventing them from being fully motivated.  Your job as a manager is not motivating people but simply doing intelligent trouble-shooting when their motivation falls short of what you need.  For this you need the skills you can acquire on the London based "Skills with People" course.  See Skills with People course contents. 

With these skills and insights you can be confident you know how to motivate people, because you no longer spend energy trying to do it.  Instead, what you do when motivation slips is talk about it with your people and find out what’s going wrong.  There are very few obstacles that can’t be easily overcome once you identify them accurately.

Can you see how much more positive an attitude towards your people this approach shows than behaving as though you think they depend on you to provide their motivation?