The 15 Skills of Leadership and Management: Motivation

A person becomes motivated when a want or need influences his will and causes him to act in a way that will achieve that desire.  Motivation is not solely the person’s desire, but a combination of the desire and him working toward its fulfillment that constitutes him as having motivation.  This same principle can also occur within a group.  For example: The group members want a three-day weekend, but their task has to be completed this week.  The group agrees to work extra hours and completes the task a day early.  Thus, the group’s will was influenced strongly enough that they were able to attain their desire.  In this case, the impulse came from an “I want…” within each of the group members.  Producing and sustaining this impulse within the group is where the leader may find motivation to become a difficult skill to master.  Even though the group has a task to complete, the leader may not always know what incentives will cause them to pursue it.

When trying to generate motivation, the leader has at his disposal two forms of incentives, positive and negative.  The leader can imagine these as two keys, each in a lock with many notches.  What the leader is trying to do is find the right notch that lets him open the door.  In other words, he is trying to find what he must say or do to motivate the team.  Positive incentives are used to reward good behavior and negative incentives are used to discourage bad behavior.  Using them in other ways will cause confusion, resentment, and eventually mutiny.  For example: for every 1,000 units a person sells, he receives a $10 bonus.  This is a positive incentive linked to an acceptable behavior.  On the same note, for every 15 minutes a person is late for work, he will receive a point, if a certain amount of points are reached in a month, the person will receive a formal reprimand.  This is a negative incentive linked to an unacceptable behavior.

The park is the type of working environment that will quickly deplete all of a group’s motivation.  Working 12 to 13 hour shifts, six days a week, in the summer sun, with short breaks, and constant aggravation from guests will take all a person has just to get through the day.  One of management’s answers to this was a motivation seminar for supervisors.  It was held about three or four weeks into the season when they felt morale levels would start to drop.  Unfortunately, I found this seminar to be of little help, all the suggestions on how to keep ourselves motivated seemed silly and unrealistic; and the ones for motivating our crews were geared towards elementary school students rather than high school and college level.  Aside from this, the park also offered two employee ride nights and two employee picnics which were big successes.  Other motivational offers from the park included: free admission tickets, water bottles, and t-shirts for working a certain number of hours, our IDs equaled season passes, and there was a bonus wage paid on each hour we worked provided we did not break our contract. 

While these extras were great to have, there was still the need for day-to-day motivation.  Tactics I used for this included: praising employees as often as I could, making light reprimands, pep talks before and after work, stepping between them and irate guests, Friday ride night, longer lunch breaks, telling jokes and funny stories, and rotating position every hour.  Nobody quit and complaints were usually about rude guests so I think these worked out well.