Motivate, Challenge and Influence for Productive Teams

Some days we just want to throw in the towel. No one’s listening to you and everyone is doing their own thing which isn’t helping the team to reach their goals, get the sales in or meet deadlines. Here we’re going to look at how you can motivate, influence and challenge the people around you.

And if you feel you need some motivational injections yourself, this information may help for that too.


What is motivation?

It can be described as ‘an emotional state and that propels a person to engage in actives that fill a need. The word ‘emotion’ is the one to focus on here.

So in order to motivate we need to provoke that emotional response. One way of doing this is to create a powerful and compelling vision of what life could look like if we reach our goals/got the bedroom tidy/hit sales targets.

A compelling vision will make the project personal, give it depth and keep it moving forward because participants want to make the vision real.

Think of Martin Luther King’s vision – he wanted a day when ‘Youngsters will learn words they dont understand. Children from India will ask ‘What is hunger?’ Children from Alabama will ask ‘What is racial segregation?’ Children from Hiroshima will ask ‘What is the atomic bomb?’ Children at school will as ‘What is war?’ You will answer them ‘These words are not used any more, like stagecoaches, galleys or slavery words no longer meaningful. That is why they have been removed from dictionaries.’

Create Vision.

The process of creating this vision needing be long and difficult and it should be fun. Start by trying it for yourself or with your kids and then role it out to co-workers.

In your imagination, think about what you want to achieve. Make it a big colourful picture, think yourself into it so that it feels like the present reality.

Let rip – don’t hold back. Just get it all onto the paper.

The vision should be tangible so that you know you’ve reached your goal.

Similarly, goals should be SMART – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound.

Who else is or needs to be involved? What’s their role and what’s in it for them? This last point will be their motivation to help you or be more fully involved.

Write your vision in the present tense so that you get the feeling it’s happening right now and it becomes more real for you.

If the emotion doesn’t pop up straight away, keep asking ‘why?’. Why is an intrusive question that has the habit of getting to the nub of an issue. Use it to dig for the emotion until you feel it.

Progress charts and list help you monitor how far you’ve come and how far there is still to go.

How to Challenge and Influence

If you’re a manager in the workplace (or a parent or spouse) you might want to challenge and influence your team. This may help them improve their performance or change direction to a more productive path.

If you’re a coach then you may want to help someone reach better decisions than they might have done alone.

Questions are the answer when we’re challenging and influencing others. We need to use different types of questions with different people in different situations.

Picture a continuum with directional help at one end and coaching or non-directional help at the other. Directional help tells a person what to do and non-directional help enables a person to think for themselves. Moving backwards and forwards between these extremes may be appropriate for certain circumstances.

Questions at the non-directional end of the spectrum are open, probing questions such as who, what, how, when, where and why.

In the middle of the continuum, you might ask a person to choose between 2 alternatives or to examine a proposal – ‘We have x and y, what do you think will happen?’ for example. Helping people reach their own conclusions is invaluable because what they tell themselves (ie the answer to your question) is more powerful than what you tell them to be so.

When we influence people we may need to challenge them. No need for a show-down any unpleasantness, this can be as simple as asking someone to explain why they work the way they do. You could be more formal and ask them to be accountable for their actions so your role as a manager/coach means you may have to ask them difficult questions.

Motivating and challenging can be difficult even if you have loads of charm. But if it’s a role you need to undertake for work or as a parent, try stepping into that role and acting ‘as if’ until you feel more at ease.

Remember to listen for the answers you get that will help you better read the person and understand them.


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