As a team leader you will very often deal with the challenge to motivate your project team. So you know: that’s difficult. To motivate someone is an exhausting and stony way. Also common practices like the motivation matrix will reflect this long way. So what do you think if I tell you: “There is a shorter alternative route”? Within this article I show you this alternative route to increase the team motivation.

 
Motivation vs. demotivation

It is very hard to motivate your team, but it is very easy to demotivate your team. Often I see project leaders focused on the hard way of motivation. So they do some maybe little mistakes and don’t prevent demotivation. But these little mistakes will absorb all the work spends in motivation of the team.

Therefore you should primarily focus yourself on the more effective and simultaneously easier way and try to prevent demotivation. But what will demotivate others. At first you should ask yourself what you don’t like when working together with others. And then try to ask yourself: “Why do I demotivate my team by doing things which I hate if they are done to me”. At next you should listen to the feedback of your team. So allow them to give you feedback and improvement suggestions at any time and strengthen this process with defined feedback meetings like a scrum retrospective. And last but not least there are a lot of common demotivation factors which you should prevent in any case. Following I will show you some examples.

 
Demotivation factors

The following list shows some typical demotivation factors. So try to prevent these actions:

• Missed deadlines
• Not fulfilled agreements
• Unclear goals
• Unclear meaning (Why to do the task?)
• No interest
• Task flooding
• Unjustified ignorance
• Different notions of work performance
• Lack of information
• Lack of communication
• Unrealistic timelines
• Unrealistic tasks
• No esteem

 
Summary

If you want to motivate others then stop Demotivation.