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Brian's
Introduction
By
Brian Walsh (Founder & CEO of
Entrepreneur.co.za)
“People often say that motivation doesn’t last.
Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we
recommend it daily.” - Zig Ziglar, American
motivational speaker and author.
Motivation is not an every-now-and-then thing –
it is something you have to address daily. The
key is not to motivate all the time, but also to
teach your staff how to motivate themselves. In
this introduction, I am going to share a simple
but extremely effective tool that you can use
for motivating your staff.
One of the most wonderful things I discovered
some time ago is the power of achievement. I
don’t mean major achievements, but rather
getting through a day and knowing you have done
a lot. That feeling is incredible – close to
euphoric. It is so easy – just make lists of
things you need to do and do them. By monitoring
what we want to do and what we complete, we
create an enormous sense of achievement. And
this allows us to be less stressed and feel
great about ourselves.
Now it sounds really easy, but truthfully it
requires great organisation. You need to
organise yourself and your staff with detailed
tasks and challenges and inspire them towards
achieving them. Without organization, we often
do a lot but achieve very little. Another thing
to bear in mind is that you need to identify
what is important and ensure those priorities
get done first every day. Studies have shown
that many people do a lot but don’t do what is
most important. For instance, sales people may
do a lot of admin and following up on clients
but they often leave their most crucial
activity, which is prospecting, to the end of
the day, and as a result often do very little.
The truth is that sales people have to prospect
every day in order to ensure continuous sales.
It should be the first task undertaken every
day, and should involve a lot of their time as
it more than anything else, produces the
results.
Lastly, there is one big key to motivating your
staff to achieve, and that is you must praise
achievement. The power of praise is incredibly
understated and under-utilised. People thrive on
feeling good about what they do, and to be a
successful entrepreneur and achieve the maximum
from your staff, you need to master this art of
praising. You should praise much more than you
criticise. This ‘unnatural’ balance will lead to
far greater productivity and longevity of
service of your staff.
So go and work with your staff, get organised,
praise them for even the smallest of
achievements, and help them achieve incredible
results.
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