There was a recent meeting I attended with my leadership team that got me thinking about motivation. We were discussing sales numbers, and I encountered a typical problem – the numbers were good, but they could have been much better. This can be difficult to communicate to staff, because some think that “good” is enough, and simply don’t have the motivation to improve their methods.
There are countless articles online that discuss how to motivate your employees. In fact, I encountered one great article from Inc.com that details three questions that you should ask your employees every few months to gauge their motivation. After reading this fantastic article, something occurred to me. At the end of the day, you need to make sure that you, yourself, are motivated to become a better worker, a better entrepreneur, and essentially a better person. Once you can keep yourself motivated to do better, you’ll understand how to motivate your team to do better. Here are three pieces of advice I can offer fellow entrepreneurs to help you motivate yourself:
Prioritize your Tasks: It’s easy to get bogged down by little tasks that may seem incredibly important to you at the time, but aren’t truly essential for day-to-day operations. If you keep getting distracted by little tasks, it will eventually drain you and leave you with little “juice” left to focus on the important items on your list. Take a step back and prioritize what tasks are truly essential to business operations, which will keep you focused and inspired to perform to the best of your abilities.
Realize That People Are Depending On You: They may not blatantly tell you to your face, but your team is depending on you in many different ways. They depend on you for guidance, mentorship and general leadership. Of course, it’s not just your team that is depending on you either – your family is depending on you too. When you realize that you have so many people counting on you, you’ll recognize that you have to become better in more ways than one.
Think about the Flip Side: As an entrepreneur, you ultimately decided to take the risk of running your own business for one central reason: you despise the idea of working for someone else. This one point alone is usually enough to motivate most entrepreneurs, but hectic days can make you lose sight of this. Remind yourself that you opened the doors of your business because you not only wanted to be your own boss – but you knew that you could do it better than anyone else.
What methods do you use to keep yourself motivated? Do you find that motivating yourself helps your team stay focused? I’d love to chat with you about this in the comments below.