~by Haley Lynn Gray~
Motivating people is one of the harder parts of both parenting and leading, and the two turn out to require the same skills — with one important difference: your employees can leave.
Here’s what actually works, and what reliably doesn’t.
Start by finding out what they want
Not what you’d want in their position. What they want.
Recognition, autonomy, money, security, learning, flexibility, a promotion, or simply to be left alone to do good work. People will usually tell you if you ask — and almost nobody has ever asked them.
Managing everyone the way you’d like to be managed is the commonest mistake there is.
What motivates
Progress people can see. The single most reliable motivator. Show what’s moved, especially on long projects where it’s easy to feel nothing is happening.
Ownership of something real. Not a task — an outcome, with the authority to make decisions about it.
Specific praise. “You handled that furious client beautifully on Tuesday” beats “good job” by an enormous margin, and it teaches people exactly what to repeat.
Knowing why it matters. Most employees never find out what happened downstream of their work.
And being paid properly. Money won’t motivate excellence on its own, but underpayment reliably destroys it — no amount of culture survives someone discovering they’re worth more elsewhere.
What demotivates, and it’s easier than motivating
This is worth saying plainly: it takes far less effort to demotivate someone than to inspire them. Careless words do it in seconds.
Tolerating poor performance from someone else. Nothing demoralises good people faster than watching someone get away with it.
Taking credit for their work. Once. That’s all it takes.
Micromanaging after delegating. It tells people you don’t trust them, and they respond by not deciding anything.
Moving the goalposts. Changing what success means after the work has started.
Criticising in public. The single most expensive thirty seconds available to a manager.
Being unpredictable. If people can’t tell which version of you they’ll get, they’ll stop bringing you anything — and the problems you hear about late are the expensive ones.
And ignoring good work entirely. Silence is a message. People conclude it wasn’t noticed, and calibrate accordingly.
The parenting comparison, honestly
With children you’re building judgement over years, and you can insist. With employees you’re renting capability from adults who chose to be there and can leave on a fortnight’s notice.
Which makes the workplace version harder, not easier — and means the influence has to be earned rather than assumed.
Find out what they want. Give them something real to own. Notice the work out loud. And avoid the seven things above, which cost nothing to avoid and a great deal to do.
