Sep 10, 2019
Welcome to our first Midweek Motivate. As the name suggests, these episodes come out in the middle of the week - right at the point where your enthusiasm as a leader may be starting to dip. The goal of midweek motivate is to give you one practical idea you can try for yourself or with your team right away. Our main Leadership Today episodes that come out on Saturdays are short - coming in at under 8 minutes each. But midweek motivate is even shorter, so let’s get into today’s topic - removing frustrations.
Even the most engaged employee can become undone by frustrations. Those annoying obstacles that get in between our motivation and our performance. It might be the computer that needs rebooting, a clunky process that takes way too long, or a colleague who seems to be working against us rather than with us. Tools, processes and people - so many opportunities for frustrations.
But your most engaged team members probably don’t want to speak to you about their frustrations. They don’t want to be seen as negative or complaining. So they take all these small frustrations and put up with them for as long as they can, until it all explodes.
I had a team member whose computer keyboard had an unreliable letter T. If they typed a word with the letter T in it, sometimes it would work, and sometimes it wouldn’t work. How frustrating is that? They had gone to IT but they didn’t have any spare keyboards. So they just put up with it - day after day after day. That is until we had our monthly meeting, and I asked one simple question. “Is there anything that’s frustrating or getting in your way at the moment?”. 30 minutes later I was back from the local stationery store with a new keyboard. But what if I hadn’t asked the question?
So this midweek motivate challenge is to ask that very question of one of your colleagues or team members - “Is there anything that’s frustrating or getting in your way at the moment?”. Then listen, provide suggestions, or just help them to get it out of their way.
Give it a try and let me know how you go.