Motivating and Rewarding Employees: New and Better Ways to Inspire Your People

I recently picked this book up on the discount rack at one of my local bookstores. It only cost me $3 plus tax. I'm glad I bought it because it does a nice job explaining the important role an employee's motivation in doing his or her work can have on his or her productivity. Leaders and managers should not underestimate his or her employee's motivation level to perform and be productive while at work. Most of this book explains ways that leaders and managers can raise employee motivation levels. I highly recommend leaders and managers give this book a quick read. Unfortunately, the book is kind of wordy and uses the first person way too much. What took 319 pages could easily have been done well in about 150. And I don't think the title is entirely accurate when it claims that the book will provide "New and Better Ways to Inspire Your People." There is nothing "new and better" included in this book. When a person is not motivated much to do something, then that something usually does not get done very quickly. And the slower something is done translates into lower productivity. Workers can be motivated to do their work by encouragement, praise, rewards, and other positive means, or they can be motivated by negative means, i.e. punished, threatened, yelled at, or intimidated. The author suggests that positive means are better than negative means, but he fails to acknowledge that it is not always practical. When positive means are used to inspire, then both employees and managers benefit. When negative means are employed to enforce compliance, then managers benefit more than employees. The author seems to make a judgment call in his book that positive means should be used exclusively. But the author does not mention that not all jobs are created equal and motivation of employees at jobs cannot always be increased by positive means. Some jobs are lousy by definition, and nobody can be motivated positively to do them. One such job that comes to mind is a crew job at a fast-food restaurant. I think the author should have avoided making a judgment call that positive means of increasing employee motivation is better than negative means. That topic was really beyond the scope of the book. Leaders with subordinates who are just putting in their time at work will learn a lot about how to motivate their subordinates to higher productivity levels by reading this book. Leaders with subordinates who are working hard, but not smart, will benefit from reading this book. But managers with subordinates who are working hard and smart probably will not. And it doesn't matter if this last group of subordinates is motivated by positive or negative means. However, it they are being motivated by negative means, then you may be able to figure out how to motivate them through positive means by reading this book.

As Hiam puts it, "Life in the workplace is increasingly like a Dilbert cartoon." Most managers are blinded to some extent by the common myths of management. Even though many authors have been loudly proclaiming what the guiding principles of management should be - Drucker, Buckingham, Blanchard, among others - the noise of other discordant models is drowning out their message. Too often, managers fall back on the use of traditional controlling modes of management, sacrificing long-term gains for short-term advantages. Hiam provides practical advice for how to manage people in a more human way. For example, three important points I took away from the book: 1) Use empathy and understanding over excessive control and inappropriate delegation - Hiam advocates developing your own emotional intelligence and supplies an emotional checklist in order to practice emotional motivation. This requires work.  As Hiam points out, "In general, people have to raise their own interpersonal intelligence quotient in order to get more and better efforts out of their employees...because it simply takes more than average interpersonal intelligence on your part to create higher than average motivation and performance in others." 2) Design work around your team's strengths - Hiam advocates changing the job to suit the person and defining tasks jointly with the employee: "Once you have the detailed information about the task requirements and the employee's competencies, it will feel perfectly natural to adjust their work to make sure it is appropriate." This is sound advice and agrees with the conclusion Buckingham comes to in his book, "The one thing you need to know," which is: "Discover what is unique about each person and capitalize on it." 3) Use informational feedback over negative or positive feedback - Hiam recommends tapping into intrinsic motivation, rather than relying on rewards or punishment, arguing that "The coaches who get the best developmental results are the ones who track individual needs and set individual goals, then provide constant feedback about how their players are achieving their individual goals. They create lots of little scoreboards, each one unique to a player's needs." Hiam was a professor at business school for a number of years, and then worked as a manager before founding his own company focused on corporate training and business consulting. As a result, his book covers all these perspectives and supplies everything you need to know about motivating your team. The author has read widely and uses well-selected ideas from Drucker, Blanchard, Csikszentmihalyi, Seligman, Goleman, Herzberg, and others. This furnishes the work with solid context, content, and philosophical depth. This is in contrast to some of the more popular business books, which take an overly simplistic approach to their subject. I think it is a mistake to read any one of these books without drawing on contrasting views from other writers and other disciplines

Streetwise Motivating and Rewarding Employees is one of the best books about motivating that I have ever read. It is full of so many great ideas for motivating employees. I highly recommend it!!!

I recommend this book as a problem-solver if you have a difficult employee, or for boning up on how to be a more effective manager and supervisor in general. Lots of useful methods and guidelines, covering everything from how to give good feedback to how to design effective incentives and boost performance. Hiam goes much farther than other authors to articulate the core elements of employee attitude and motivation. A user-friendly framework for time-pressured managers to help their people become the best they can be. Just paste a Post-It note on this book saying: 'No smoke 'n' mirrors here...only solid content.!'