Are you incentivising your team?
One of the most important things I want to see from my clients (business owners in the Glasgow area) is intentionality. Understanding what it is you’re trying to achieve, and communicating this to the rest of the team, is a vital skill for any leader.
A great way of spreading a level of focus throughout the team is by rewarding the behaviours you want to see. Business owners are busy people with lots of things to balance at once. As a result, we are often quick to criticise and slow to praise. But isn’t this sort of counterintuitive? Rewarding the team is a great way of encouraging particular behaviours that you want to see.
Incentivising Your Team
Here’s a little story to demonstrate intentionality and the importance of rewarding positive behaviours:
My 13-year old son had a competition at his school where a £20 Amazon voucher was rewarded to the pupil who could memorise the most french words.
For school students it’s rare to have this sort of reward handed out by a teacher. What was the result? My son became focussed, organised, and disciplined in his approach to the competition. With a clear goal in sight – and the promise of a A4 paper certificate and £20 to spend on anything he wanted (within reason, of course) – he worked in the sort of dedicated, methodical way that gets results. The outcome? He won!
What does this tell us?
We achieve results when we are intentional and focussed about doing something
If you know what you’re working towards, you can be far more successful in getting there. Translated to the workplace, a team that knows its expectations will be far more focussed in the way they work.
Incentivising the behaviours you want to see can incentivise your team and spark them into the sort of committed way of working that gets results
One of the best ways for business owners to motivate their team is through incentivising and rewarding them. A reward doesn’t have to be something like an Amazon voucher, though. Simply praising someone when they do something you’re pleased with is a great way of encouraging repeat instances of that behaviour in future.
Create an Environment of Praise
The advantages of incentivising your team are clear. Knowing there will be reward at the end of a well-completed task will make the team focussed and driven to get good results. Making expectations clear is important for getting work done in the best way. By congratulating and rewarding the behaviours you want to see repeated you not only communicate to the team what they should be doing, but also cultivate a positive environment.
An environment of praise and reward is a far more positive one than one where business owners and managers focus only on negatives. Are you as quick to congratulate your team as you are to criticise when things go wrong? Praising your team for good work will lead to more good work in the future.
Read my articles on communication for leaders in business and the importance of empathy and language for more information about getting the most out of your team.
