First, Do No Harm

The Hippocratic Oath says “First, do know harm.” Google says “Don’t be evil.” I have been known to say “I don’t need you to help me…I need you to get out of my way.”

Before you worry about how to motivate your employees, you might want to focus on not demotivating them.

If you hire the right employees (and if you didn’t, you have other problems you need to deal with), odds are they are already pretty motivated before you walk in the door and try to lead them. You probably do not need to motivate them too much, so you might think instead about things you do that could wreck that motivation.

What might you do wrong? Well, micromanaging is generally a bad idea when you have got talented people working for you (and if they aren’t talented, why are they working for you anyway?). Ignoring their suggestions (which is different from “listening but not agreeing,” which is ok) will give them the feeling their unique talents are not recognized or appreciated. Failing to get them the resources they need will make them wonder why they put in the effort when you don’t seem to be doing your job.

Many large companies in the US started to figure this out over the past few years. They have gone to flatter, less hierarchical organizations so they don’t have extra layers of leadership and management getting in the way. They started recognizing individuals’ abilities rather than just the number of years they have been with the company or the pieces of paper they have earned. And they have finally begun to realize that telling people they’re doing well when they really aren’t is more damaging to morale than honest feedback is, because let’s face it, people are not stupid, and they know when they deserve praise and when they don’t.

Expectations are changing in Asia as well, and with that change comes the potential for leaders to mess up and reduce performance rather than promoting it. As knowledge-based industries grow, your newer employees have seen the way some other nations are going and they want their countries to go that way too. Whether they have studied abroad or just read about working conditions on Twitter, they want their leaders to give them the tools they need and then step back, rather than acting in an authoritarian way. They know what is possible, and if they don’t get it, their motivation may drop and their efforts may not be as strong. If the traditional relationship between elders and juniors does not change, those juniors may not turn in the quality they’re capable of producing…or, they may just leave the country altogether, a phenomenon that a number of countries are seeing already.

So when you go looking for books on motivation techniques, stop and ask yourself if that is what your employees really need. When it comes to motivation, you often have a better chance of messing it up than you do of increasing it. So be careful!