Here are six things CEOs and other business leaders can take away about human motivation and creating an effective path to high performance from his most recent book, “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.”

1. Create Environments for Needs to Flourish Humans have three innate psychological needs – competence, autonomy and relatedness. By targeting your motivational tactics to activities that yield more “inherent satisfaction with the activity itself” – intrinsic motivation, creativity, self-direction, and genuine motivation – your employees will not only be more satisfied, but will contribute more to your company.
2. Creativity The strongest driver of a person being excited and motivated to participate in a project is how creative a person feels when working on that project – “enjoyment-based intrinsic motivation.” The best example of this is the new dynamic of open-source projects. To capitalize on creativity, businesses should think about optimizing their model to allow for more creative work flow.
3. “Renaissance of Self-Direction” Traditional management is not working as well as it used to. People’s basic nature is to be autonomous, curious and self-directed – new management styles should focus on a “renaissance of self-direction.” By giving your people autonomy over their time and how they accomplish things, it encourages them to contribute rather than to just show up, and often gets better results than a “traditional” model.
4. Genuine Motivation The single greatest motivator is making progress in one’s work. By creating conditions for people to make progress – and by recognizing and celebrating progress – organizations will encourage their employees to be more creative, more driven, and to achieve a state of “flow” that results in better work product.
5. Rewards Can De-Motivate Counter-intuitively, rewards (and punishments) often give rise to negative behavior. Rewards narrow a person’s focus – which can be useful for solutions to which there is a clear path, but harmful for projects that require creativity and broad thinking – that “intrinsic motivation” that really drives behavior.
6. Infuse the Mundane with Deeper Purpose Words are important. Do your employees identify with the goals of the company? Do they know WHY they are doing what they are doing? By giving your employees a deeper sense of purpose, you make it more likely that they will work efficiently towards them. Identify those goals in terms of words like “honor” and “truth” rather than “efficiency” and “value.” By humanizing the work, you humanize what your employees do.

Mark Twain may have said it best: “that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.” By recognizing how your employees think, you can structure your company so that your employees not only work towards its ultimate goal – but work smarter, more creatively and are motivated to achieve on a daily basis.

The recession is technically over; however, sales teams are still facing more competitors going after the same projects, price pressures, or the new competitor—prospects doing nothing.

 The recession is also testing sales managers to see if they can provide sales environments that keep their sales teams’ heads up and hearts engaged. Here are six tips for leading your sales team in this post-recession economy.   

#1 – Seek out good news. Assign each salesperson with finding good news and sharing it with the rest of the team.  

#2 – Step up your coaching efforts. Conducted role plays with your sales team to see if they know how to quantify the cost of the problem or the gain of an opportunity? This selling skill is KEY in a buying environment where cost justification is king. 

#3 – Decrease desperation. In desperation, salespeople don’t take the time to build trust, make deposits in the relationship account, and practice the law of reciprocity. Remember: processes are efficient, while relationships are not.    

#4 – Balance something old and something new. Social media is the new mode of prospecting. Teach your sales team to integrate new social media with old principles of influence and selling skills. Social medial marketing tools create the opportunity, but selling skills close the opportunity.

#5 – Revisit negotiation skills and strategies. Discuss with your sales team the mindset they need to possess during tough economic times. If your sales team is not convinced on the value they  can bring, why would the prospect invest with your company? Work with the sales team on strategy and tactics. Many salespeople drop price without any concession from the prospect which is a win-lose strategy, and leads to a transactional sale versus a value sale. Caving in too quickly on price also creates distrust. The prospect is thinking, “If you lowered your price that quickly, why wasn’t it lower in the first place?”

#6 – Inspire and motivate. As a sales manager and share “tough times” stories with happy endings. Never underestimate the power of motivation. Leaders are made famous by their inspirational rhetoric. There is a time to train and coach. There is also a time to inspire and motivate.

Put your leadership hat on. Help your sales team keep their heads up and hearts engaged. Good sales leaders are needed now more than ever.  Now, that’s good news.  

Source: Vistage International