The Best of All Worlds for a Workplace is to Have a Manager Who Has Good Leadership Skills
Managers who have good leadership skills are frequently the visionaries who bring about a better world. They inspire their employees with their dreams and their employees help to make it a reality.
Good managers are good at getting employees to do their work. True leaders are good at inspiring employees to do more willingly and are good at raising the bar to a higher level of ethics. Leaders can have a powerful effect on employee morale, employee motivation, and job satisfaction. Employees choose to follow leaders willingly.
Here are a few ways that can happen.
1. Set a Good Example - this covers so much - from honesty, fairness, showing respect and expecting respect to putting in a good day's work yourself. Don't just talk the talk - walk the walk. Leadership by example is very powerful.
2. Don't Let the Workplace be Ruled by Politics and the Good Old Boys - etc. There are few things more demotivating to the majority of your employees than this. If you do choose to award your buddies unfairly, your good people (who can leave) will leave and the others will be demotivated and it will affect employee morale and employee motivation. Job satisfaction will also go down.
3. Do Reward Those Who Do Well in Their Jobs – this is great for employee motivation and employee morale.
4. Hold Your Employees Accountable - Make Sure There Are Consequences Appropriate to the Situation - if you tolerate poor performance and/or poor behavior (without dealing with it in a timely manner) you create a very bad situation that only gets worse with time.
Tolerating poor performance and/or poor behavior are not attributes of a good leader. It is a real employee motivation killer. Your good employees will have no reason to go the extra mile especially if they have to do it to make up for someone who is coasting, getting away with it, and being paid the same amount of money. Others will decide they might as well stop or slow down working as there are no consequences. Employee morale will suffer also. Job satisfaction will decrease.
5. Performance Standards - Have Reasonable Expectations of Your Employees and Communicate Them Clearly and Award Appropriately- Make sure you create a performance evaluation system that gives employees the opportunity to create a win for themselves by working hard and smart to exceed your expectations and a win for you (with increased productivity, etc.).
If you have only subjective performance elements that are moving targets and only you know and decide at a whim what is good, ok, or not alright you take away your employees' motivation to do well. True leaders want to encourage the best from their people and you can’t get this with a system that is clouded in mystery to employees.
6. Keep Your Employees Informed and Share Your Vision with Them - have regular meetings to keep them informed and show them what you see for the future of the company. Give them the chance to have input also. You can do this with joint management-labor meetings. Having input into decisions creates buy in and a sense of ownership for employees for it is their decision now also. You will enhance employee motivation, job satisfaction, and employee morale by allowing them to give input into decision making.
If you have built trust and they have confidence in you they will gladly follow you and do all they can to make that future happen.
7. Keep an Open Door Policy, Make It Safe for Your Employees to Come in and Share Whatever They Want in Confidence and Then Listen to Them - You will be surprised how much you will learn about your workplace that will help you be a better manager. I am not talking about encouraging gossip.
I am talking about an honest exchange of information intended to improve conditions. The input you will receive will show you ways to improve employee motivation and employee morale when you understand the problems that may be holding your employees back.
Good Leadership is a Powerful Skill for Managers
If you are a good leader, in addition to being a manager, everything will go better. You and your organization will reap the benefits - employee motivation will be high, employee morale will be high, employee performance will be high, employee retention will be high and job satisfaction will be high. You will have the high five!
Author Resource:
Lois Moncrief is the author of this article on Employee Motivation .
Find more information about Employee Engagement here.
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