Regardless of the team’s level – youth, high school, college, or the pros – players need to be consistently motivated to be successful, even winning teams.

How will Spain motivate themselves for the next tournament?

Teams that are not motivated are flat and, unless they can totally overpower their opponent, unlikely to succeed. Motivation is giving players a reason to perform to the best of their ability to achieve team goals. This responsibility falls on the coach and the players. It takes a team effort to be mentally and physically prepared to play and to maintain a level of interest that puts your team in a position to win.

Try these four ways to motivate your players: Read the rest of this entry »

Are you a “good” boss?  One of the most important aspects of an executive’s/manager’s/boss’s job is to manage employees; it is also the most challenging.

Bonus Rule 6: Don't dance in front of staff, especially if you can't dance.

A boss can either create a team unit or keep herself apart. All of us are given choices every moment of every day. How we respond to difficult situations is a choice. How we choose to react in a moment affects not only us but our employees. Employees perform best in an environment that is supportive, consistent, has good two way communication, and where everyone helps each other.

Follow these five tips to become a “good” boss: Read the rest of this entry »

Ever wondered what motivates people.

This lively RSA Animate, adapted from Dan Pink’s talk at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), illustrates the hidden truths behind what really motivates us at home and in the workplace.

Despite rising unemployment recruiters of senior managers are claiming it is still far from easy to attract talent.  People in secure employment are far less willing to switch jobs than they were two years ago.

It's imperative to develop the talent within our organisations. This young man obviously has high aspirations but may be too young for the managment development training.

It is therefore imperative to develop the talent within our organisations, a fact supported by a Deloitte survey that found 60% of business leaders intend to increase investment in management development in the months ahead.  Another survey carried out by PwC reports that 85% of CEOs expect to overhaul the way their organisations manage people during change. Read the rest of this entry »

Always eat the same food?  Go to the same shop? – why not renergise yourself by doing it differently ….

Try a different mode of transport!

Change some of your routines and bring some energy to your life – thinking in different ways gets the brain to work harder.  Below are 10 new ways to do it differently: Read the rest of this entry »

It can take several days for your team to really get back into the full swing of things after the Christmas break so it’s imperative that you are already thinking of novel employee motivation ideas to kick start 2010.

January is a great time to motivate the workforce

Although the right attitude, application and work ethic are important throughout the year, we’ve assembled some employee motivational events that will inspire and invigorate your personnel during a gloomy January. Read the rest of this entry »

The idea that staff set their own pay, come and go from the office as they please, all within a business that has no written strategy sounds like a recipe for disaster. Not the story of a company that’s gone from $4m to $160m.

Is this man a management genius?

Semco is no ordinary workplace, despite the fact that it operates in an industry as ordinary as engineering. Read the rest of this entry »

Its not a real word I know but the principle of a ‘volunteam’ is an interesting one.

What can we learn from Moroccan builders?

I’ve been visiting a relief project in Morocco that is building new homes for widows and the very poor following the earthquake in 2004.  Incredibly over 5 years after 12,000 homes were destroyed an enormous number of people are still trying to survive without a home in the hills around Al Hoceima. Read the rest of this entry »

What do organisations need to do to be able to bounce back once this economically gloomy period is over?

Is your team motivated to grow?

A discussion on the radio this morning was about whether the first green shoots of recovery from recession were appearing. The discussion was inconclusive and extended the green metaphor to suggest that we could also expect a lot of weeds, but highlighted once again the fact that no-one really knows how or when things are going to pick up.

The thing is that once things do get start to turn around, recovery is probably going to take as many by surprise as did the speed of the downturn last year, and a lot of organisations may be caught on the hop. Having cut back, streamlined, pruned, and cut down again to make do with fewer resources, for many it will be tough to keep up once things start to speed up again if the organisation hasn’t kept its remaining staff motivated and its systems up to date. Read the rest of this entry »

When Southwest Airlines said that it’s important to them that staff have fun at work did anybody believe them or did it just sound like more corporate mission statement jargon?

It’s easier to put a mission statement on the wall than it is to put it into action. We know of organisations who have spent months of meetings carefully crafting and re-wording their corporate mission statements, only to find the life sapped from them soon after they’re finished. Or sometimes mission statements work for a while, but then turnover takes a toll and the new people never seem to really get on board.

It’s great to see the video, above, of David, a Southwest Airlines flight attendant, keeping some of their mission statement alive.  He and his colleagues make a great team because they’re committed to the same vision and they support each other.  There is no doubt that team work benefits everybody – customers and colleagues alike.  But sometimes people within an organisation forget they’re part of a team.  One department regards another as a thorn in its side and sometimes colleagues just don’t like each other.

A key factor to success during these hard economic times was summed up by Gary Kelly, CEO of Southwest Airlines, when he said “Our people are our single greatest strength and our most enduring longterm competitive advantage.” Long may it last.