How To Bake The Tasty Cookies

5. March 2010  Email This Post  Print This Post

Do you know this fine smell of self-baked cookies that passes through your house after these little friends have been lying in the oven for a while?

It is spreading this unique feeling of coziness and closeness which we all know so well and which we just can’t escape.

Children are standing right in front of the oven, waiting for their cookies to get finished. But even for the adults it’s a hard challenge to wait for these small happy-makers until they finally arrive upon the table.

I guess regarding this wonderful mental image of melting chocolate and creamy fillings makes everybody’s mouth water.

Pleasant anticipation, serenity and some kind of impatience determine this spectacle.

Tasks, projects and activities … sounds also good, doesn’t it!?

It sounds like professional work structuring, active goal realization and busy activity. At least an executive would say so.

But don’t forget: as executive you are probably highly motivated by the company’s targets and your own personal desire to realize things. Perhaps you want to make the next step on the job ladder.

As executive you must present and show yourself again and again. But this isn’t that upsetting. You’ve chosen this way consciously and voluntarily. It meets your personal disposition in some kind.

It is quite a different thing with your employees. In most cases they don’t give a damn about presentations and job ladders. Why? Well, either they don’t want to make any career or they are not able to make one.

They just want to do the job they’re paid for. Their main motivation is the decreasing period of time ’till their leisure-time which they want to spend with their families.

In my opinion this is a very good motivation. But should this really be the only source of motivation for the whole working day!?

What a waste! A waste of mental and emotional ressources that could be utilized for the achievement of your goals.

Imagine your folks heading for their daily tasks with pleasant anticipation and serenity.

Imagine them how they force you with impatience to start the next steps in the running projects.

How would you feel if your folks don’t perceive you anymore because they’re totally focused on their projects while working sunk on their different activities.

Imagine a bureau that’s empty because all your folks are running through the company gathering new information for their tasks.

Wouldn’t that be amazing?

I guess it is not difficult to divine how productive and effective the internal working climate in such a team would be.

You’re not leading your staff directly any longer.Your initialized tasks and projects lead your folks.

You think this in not possible? Just unrealistic wishful thinking?

Believe me, it is not. It’s even quite simple to realize such a reality.

All you have to do is to bake the tasty cookies.

Motivation By Suitable Tasks

Deduce your pool of tasks, projects and activities from your strategy and your goals. Look at them very accurately and try to assess which qualifications, requirements and contents are connected with them.

What does this task require? Is it rather an administrative or a technical one? Is the content a commercial one or do I rather need a methods engineer? Does this task lead to routine activities or does it require to make up a project because the content is very special and unique.

Try to assign all of your your tasks to your folks after having evaluated them accurately. Some assignments are very obvious others are taking time, gut instinct and knowledge of human nature.

It is very important to take care of your folks’ affinities. Each person has a unique profile of strengths, weaknesses and personal affinities. Consider this in your assignments.

Motivation By Contribution

Sit down with your employee and explain what the contribution to the whole of his or her task really is. To do this you necessarily need something like a superior framework. Something like a strategy, a scorecard, a vision or just your personal goals.

It doesn’t matter what you use but it is essential for your discussions to have a basis that aligns all your activities with the superior goals and visions of the organization.

Take this piece of paper and use it as basis for the discussion with your employees.
Explain accurately what is important and crucial for the success of the company.

Do this in detail just until you achieve the point where the specific task of your employee comes into play.

Avoid platitudes like:”Quality is our decisive goal. This means the quality of your project contributes necessarily to our superior goals.”

These sentences could motivate your folks to spit your cookies right on your feet.

Freely adapted from the slogan:” If we all behave in a decent manner, the results will be decent too.” Foggy, intransparent, clever shit.

You should rather try to explain why the quality of your products is a crucial unique selling point of the company. Why the increase in quality costs due to reclamations i.e. become more and more a threat to the organization.

Explain which failures of departments, machines or processes have directly leaded to this situation. Now come to the point. What has the specific task of your opponent got to do with this situation. Why do you tell all these things?

Tell him or her:” You have the chance to put this threat down by …”

Your employees must get a feeling for the deeper sense of their individual tasks. They must know in detail what they can contribute to the whole.

Motivation By Relevant Tasks

Always try to express the concrete tasks in monetary dimensions:
“An increase in our quality costs of 2.5 million dollars per year” sounds quite different from “Our quality costs have increased dramatically”, doesn’t it!?

Very often executives try to conceal these monetary facts. This intransparency is due to a bad management style. They try to constitute this with enforcements of privacy and discretion. But who is more discrete than your folks? Do such executives have trust in their employees? I guess not. And I assume their folks have already perceived this exactly in this way.

So gather all the facts and use them to emphasize the relevance of the various tasks.

Make clear what it would mean to leave the tasks undone. What would be the harm for the company or even for the employees themselves?

Pique the curiosity of your folks by emphasizing the relevance of their tasks and let them divine which appreciation they can receive as soon as they accomplish these tasks.

Helping to avoid 2.5 million dollars of quality costs ist very relevant, isn’t it !?

Motivation By Challenge

Tell your folks that this task is not easy. Based upon my own experiences I can report that there is probably nothing more demotivating than a task that is supposed to be solved very easily. In most cases executives add this comment because they suspect their employees could ask for more time or money to solve a task that is not easy to accomplish. So they try to reduce certain spaces of their staff.

But believe me, the loss of motivation overcompensates the won spaces no matter wheter they’re monetary or concerning appointments.

Do the opposite. Tell your folks that you explicitly do not have any solutions down pat.
This increases the interest and curiosity concerning this task dramatically.

Avoid to suggest any half-hearted and half-evaluated solutions you have already in mind but just no time to deal with it.

You folks would feel like better secretaries who should try to guess your thoughts just to bring them to paper in some way. Not very motivating, isn’t it?.

Difficult tasks without known solutions appear exciting and challenging. These tasks are perceived as respectable tasks. An ambrosial cookie …

Motivation By Learning Effects

But how do your folks directly benefit from the enthusiastic commitment to your tasks?
More money? More fame? More status?

In the best case you are able to deliver such incentives in the medium term. They can be very powerful for a long period of time and many different tasks.

But these incentives depend on lots of various influence factores.
In many cases you are not able to outline such prospects.

In this case you should try to change the perspective of your team members. Help them to see their personal development as some kind of asset.

Each task, each project has its own unique learning effects:
Linguistic, technical, commercial or just methodical improvements. No matter what! There ist always something to improve and to learn.

Try to peel out the essential points and explain how they contribute to the personal development of your folks. Perhaps there is a concealed opportunity to take part in
even more challenging and more relevant projects. Present this cookie and find every thinkable positive future perspective.

But be careful with that! Maybe you have the chance to let someone climb the job ladder. This would be great! But in most cases you just have the chance to push your folks in their personal development. This is probably your main motivation concept.

So don’t make any direct or indirect promises which you cannot fulfill.
Your folks feel and perceive this instantly.

Work with the palette of learning and developing effects combined with possible postive future scenarios concerning new challenging tasks and projects.

You want to win your folks for various endeavors in which they partake highly motivated and confidently together with you?

You want to avoid demotivation in order to allow an undisturbed and effective working climate?

Don’t buy expensive psychological books concernig motivation issues. The benefit will not be more than a nice looking stack of books.

My tip – Bake the tasty cookies for your folks based upon the recipe described above.
When you do that and follow some simple rules this recipe will make the mouths of your folks water as soon as they perceive the pleasant smell of your tasks.

Tell me: What’s your personal cookie recipe?