In 2019, No Raise, No Promotion, How Will I Motivate My Team?!!!

Dear Bahar

One of my most important roles as a manager is to make sure that my employees' contributions are properly recognized by the company. I do this by expressing my appreciation, through annual performance reviews, salary increases, and occasionally through promotions.

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Difficult Days

Dear Hard Times,

Your team is very lucky to have you as a leader. I can recognize the compassion and care you have for them. Love is the foundation of good leadership and you have it in spades.

However, many managers misperceive their core role. Many of them unwittingly take it upon themselves to advocate on behalf of their teams, thinking that their job is to fight for resources for their teams and to obtain some privileges from the company on their behalf. The closeness of these managers to their teams creates in them a sympathy for the needs of their own employees. On the other hand, their distance from other stakeholders makes them indifferent to issues such as budget discipline, shareholder payouts, and the needs of other executives or employees they don't really know. Your job becomes fighting only for "your" people.

I say this to illustrate my first point: the fundamental role of a manager is to put the needs of the customer first. The hierarchy of needs works like this:

Customer > Organization > Department > Person

This means that your job is to stand up sometimes, when necessary, and tell your team that it is the right decision to give less bonuses according to this hierarchy. On the other hand, because as a manager you have a broader view across the organization, if you believe that your department is where some of the company's resources should go, you should advocate for your people to get bigger rewards. Having these Critical Conversations is an important leadership competency. When companies make financial investment decisions, they are often hampered by managers who put the needs of their department above all else, jostling with each other and with senior management. The result is a budget that is more in line with internal politics than it is reflective of purpose. The condition for exponential growth of organizations is that when decisions are made, each manager brings the expert perspective of his or her area of responsibility to bear on those decisions in a manner consistent with the hierarchy of needs above.

Enough preaching. Let me return to your question, remembering that your role is to do what is right for customers, your organization and your team. Let me offer you some tips to keep your team motivated while ensuring that they are properly compensated.

1. Do you emphasize all the Engagement elements? Years of research show that money is not the most important work motivator. Don't get me wrong, money is important, of course! However, when other motivators are missing, money becomes the most important thing. While motivational needs vary from person to person, research shows that the most profound motivators in the workplace are meaning, autonomy, development, influence and belonging. Do you creatively connect the personal purpose and meaning of the people on your team to the purpose of the business? Do they have autonomy, that is, do you give them space to organize the work and the environment to do their best work? Do you support individual team members to have motivating developmental experiences that give them a sense of mastery and growth? Do you enable your people to realizethe impact of their work on the overall company? Do you invest in developing satisfying trust, intimacy and belonging among team members? These are the foundations of motivation.
2. Do you understand the work? Before you advocate for your team's compensation or promotions, make sure you have a broad view of the value your team brings to the organization and understand the relative contribution of your people. Also, do you understand and support the economic realities that senior leaders are following, for example: Are you in a growing market or a shrinking market? Are your budgets increasing or decreasing? Are you working in a growing area of your organization or a declining/obsolete area? As your motivation shrinks, your influence with senior management diminishes. If everything you do is only about "your" people, be prepared to face resistance from management. If senior managers believe you have a broader organizational vision, they will be much more open to your views.
3. Are salaries fair within the organization? Are they competitive outside the organization?The more informationyour viewscontain, the more effective they will be. The two strongest arguments for salary increases relate to internal fairness (do similar contributors earn similar incomes?) and external competitiveness (is your team's salary lower than the market?). Note that I am not suggesting that everyone in similar jobs should be paid similarly. This is not about the job description, it is about the contribution. When evaluating, you need to take into account not only the skills a person uses, but also how meaningfully that person contributes to the most important challenges facing the business.
4. Can you create more value? The only sustainable salary principle for organizations is that salary should be based on contribution to the company. It is not about tenure, title, level or classification. It is about how important your contribution is to the critical issues facing the organization. But when you believe that your employees' salaries are not commensurate with their contribution, you should ask for more. And if you do, you need to find a way to convincingly demonstrate that difference. Otherwise, work in the other direction: help your team see ways they can increase their contribution to strengthen their case for a salary increase (such as activities focused on creating a good customer experience).
5. What are the natural consequences of the difference? If salaries are clearly inappropriate, the best way to influence upwards is to show the natural consequences of the current policy in a meaningful way. Ask yourself:
   
   
   • What problems does the current salary gap create? What evidence do I have about these problems?
   • If the pay gap continues, what problems do I believe will arise? What evidence do I have that these problems will materialize?
   • Which of these issues is most important to senior management?
   • How can I present these issues in a powerful way? For example, a hospital administrator who had complained for years that his staff were underpaid was able to get results when he showed the correlation between increased staff turnover due to underpayment and increased patient dissatisfaction.

I congratulate you on this outstanding leadership responsibility and wish you all the best.

Love

Spring