Hasta La Gadget!

Leaders, if you think you can motivate all your team members with the prospect of more money or a corner office, think again. Individual motivations can vary like the flavors at Baskin-Robbins. Yet some leaders persist in offering the same few inducements to everyone, year after year. You wouldn’t give all your kids the same Christmas presents, would you? At least my three children don’t want the same things.

People don’t choose the same benefits package at work, because the motivations are different. Someone who’s married with children and a single person might choose different healthcare packages. Someone near retirement might select a different investment portfolio than someone who’s just embarking on a career. Most HR departments have long since realized the need for different motivators on the benefits front. If HR can do it, why can’t you?

Stepping Up to the Plate

What motivates your team members to perform? I have one that’s motivated by money. One that wants time off. One that wants to work from home more. You’ll have to get to know them in depth, so you can determine what drives them. That takes time (which may be why so few managers ever bother to put such an initiative into action). But if you do, you’ll jump ahead of 90 percent of your colleagues and competitors.

IT professionals, for example, often work long hours, and have to jettison their personal plans whenever crises erupt. They may be appreciative if you’re more liberal with comp time and pay for their certifications and product classes. Perhaps one worker seems perfectly happy not to move into management, so motivating extra productivity with bonuses may well work with them, whereas offering the opportunity for a promotion might work well for someone itching to climb the leadership ladder. Other people may just be working for your respect, for intrinsic reasons like the pleasure of doing a job well, or for public recognition. Others respond to sincere efforts to provide nice workplace amenities. It’s your job to find out!

You owe it to yourself to take the time to learn your team members well enough to dangle the right carrots when tempting them toward greater productivity. Thoughts, beliefs, ambitions, and goals all contribute to individual motivation, so take those into account when you motivate. You’re not creating the motivation — you’re cultivating what already exists.

Take the time to schedule a one-on-one meeting with each individual and have a candid conversation. We’d love to hear about what you’ve done to motivate your team members. What works best for you?

© 2015 Laura Stack. Laura Stack, MBA, is America’s Premier Expert in Productivity™. For over 20 years, Laura has worked with business leaders to execute more efficiently, boost performance, and accelerate results in the workplace. Her company, The Productivity Pro, Inc., provides productivity workshops around the globe to help attendees achieve Maximum Results in Minimum Time®. Laura is the bestselling author of six books, with over 20 foreign editions, published by Random House, Wiley, and Berrett-Koehler, including her newest work, Execution IS the Strategy (March 2014). Widely regarded as one of the leading experts in the field of performance and workplace issues, Laura has been featured on the CBS Early Show, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. Connect via her website, Facebook, or Twitter.

*Photo provided by Microsoft

Artist: Dimestore Prophets
Album: Be Yourself
Style: Groove, Reggae, Rock, Pop, Acoustic
Release Date: April 5, 2014
Reviewed by: Christopher Zoukis and Randy Radic

Dimestore Prophets (not to be confused with “Dime Store Prophets,” a Christian rock band that dissolved in the late ’90s and known for a song called “Hitler’s Girlfriend”) bills itself as a three-piece groove, rock, and reggae band — they may be Christians, too, for all I know! What I do know is they hail from central Washington State and have been together since 2009. According to their bio, they play “Feel Good Music.” Their musical influences include Bob Marley, Sublime, the Clash, and the Dirty Heads.

The title of their latest EP is Be Yourself — taken from the first track on the CD, which one review called “the embodiment of feel good reggae pop, groove music.” I disagree. It is certainly “feel good” music, but there’s no way it can be classified as “reggae pop, groove music.” To me, it sounds more like beefed-up west coast soft rock, like Bob Marley covering the Eagles or Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels covering Poco. It’s a bright, clean composition and it’s optimistic: mental health music.

“Draw for Love” is the fifth track and is definitely channeling Poco or Dan Fogelberg, which is meant as a compliment. The second track on the CD, called “Hey Darlin’,” strikes a harsher note. The song lacks direction, as if they couldn’t quite decide whether to make it reggae or dubstep or soft rock. The result is an abortive mish-mash that grates musically as well as thematically.

The rest of the tracks are excellent stuff: reggae with personality. The vocals are happy and peppy; the instrumentation crackles with energy and a light funkiness that sets it apart. Too often, post-Marley reggae struggles with vapid overcompensation because the musicians want to sound just like Bob Marley, which leads to a death spiral from which there is no recovery. Happily, the Dimestore Prophets avoid the swirling vortex of mimicry, choosing instead to pursue their own west coast version of reggae, one uniquely their own. The end result is listeners don’t have to cope with syrupy attempts at Marley emulation, which is simply too exhausting to deal with.

Members of the Dimestore Prophets include Ray Glover, who plays guitar and sings, John Wilson on drums, and Eric Groff on bass. And there’s a distinct party vibe to their musicianship. Obviously, they enjoy what they’re doing and do it well. If this energy carries over to their live shows, then a trip to the Pacific Northwest would be well-advised.

There’s much to like about Be Yourself. There’s funkadelic reggae that’s benign enough for the pop crowd, but it’s multifaceted enough for the reggae aficionados.

Today, as a marketer, you’re competing for customers’ hearts and minds in the context of their newsfeeds, where they’re getting the information that they care most about — friend’s messages and topics they’ve chosen to follow. You can’t interrupt something people care about with something they care less about (your snappy but one-way, brand-centric, produced story).

To get and keep their attention, you need to tell a story that they care about as much as the stories they’re telling and hearing from their friends, the stories that affect and lend meaning to their every day lives.

The best way to make sure your content matters is to enlist them in making it. Today, customers want stories that put them in the driver’s seat, either as characters, narrators, or authors.

— from The CMO’s Social Media Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide for Leading Marketing Teams in the Social Media World, by Peter Friedman, the CEO and Chairman of LiveWorld.

It’s horribly cold . So I won’t make you go outside this week. Instead, for this week’s Shooting Challenge, we’re going to call attention to something all around us that we take for granted: Texture.

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