Motivating people

Leadership is about getting people into action and ensuring that they continue taking that action in order to achieve the task. It is therefore very much about motivation. This can be defined as the process of getting to people to move in the direction you want them to go. As a manager, you still have a major part to play in deploying your own motivating skills to ensure that people give of their best. You want them to exert the maximum amount of positive discretionary effort- people often have a choice about how they carry out their work and the amount of care, innovation and productive behaviour they display.

The three components of motivation are:

direction -- What a person is trying to do;

effort -- how hard a person is trying;

persistence -- how long a person keeps on trying.

Motivation can be described as goal-directed behaviour. Well-motivated people are those with clearly defined goals who take action which they expect will achieve those goals. Such people may be self-motivate, and , as long as this means they are going in the right direction to achieve what they are there to achieve, this is the best form of motivation.

I guess, the message that I am trying to send here is that if we all pull our weight and work together as a team to achieve our common goals we will more then succeed.