Individual drivers are a key consideration of leadership

Motivating a team needs more than just a stick or carrot approach.

At a professional level, many talent management experts are somewhat obsessed with the various motivations of their organisation’s employees.

Be it striking salaries, quirky perks or a sense of making a difference, trying to understand what drives employees to work at their best is a major part of most human resources initiatives.

From the perspective of a manager, probably the longest-discussed aspect of these motivations is the question of whether reward or punishment is better for maintaining and improving team performance – the classic question of the “carrot and stick” balance. If you can, for a moment, boil off all of the other intrinsic and extrinsic motivators, the issue in isolation is essentially whether an individual or group will drive harder because of threats or encouragement.

Most people probably have a natural inclination either way on this issue, alternatively viewing the other option as overly harsh or overly soft. Take, for example, a manager who requires members of a team to each complete a report ahead of a brainstorming meeting. The manager considers each employee’s input is important, and that this input must be considered and researched in advance.

How does the manager best ensure the work is done?

If you approach it from the “carrot” perspective, you might believe a team is most likely to do this advanced preparation if the manager spends time explaining the expected benefits of the meeting, and underlining the great weight they place on every individual’s unique insights.

Conversely, the “stick” approach is likely to underline the importance of the meeting, the expectations the organisation has for individual performance, and the likely censure that will befall anyone who fails to do their share of the labour.

How you approach these two options ultimately springs from your own experiences of managing a team, particularly those most recent in your car­eer.

Those who view encouragement as too soft a motivator will probably have managed teams who appear to need regular direction and instruction, and who have operated most productively where they have been driven forward by a manager not averse to using threats and punishment.

If you baulk at such language, you might see this less as people management and more akin to parenting. You have, perhaps, led teams that perform best with the incentive of praise or rewards; who have delivered after careful communication of how end goals will benefit the team.

These personal experiences, and the perspectives they grant, are an essential part of every manager’s development journey and they should certainly not be discounted.

However, basing an understanding of a situation on how a single team has responded is really only half-answering the question.

At the end of the day, teams consist of individuals, rarely – if ever – operating as a coordinated whole, and what has motivated a majority of team members are likely to have ostracised others.

A whip-cracking manager could have spurred on some excellent results, but in doing so might have compelled some employees to start updating their CVs and LinkedIn networks.

One who has been more encouraging may have done so while individual employees floated along on the back of other’s work, not shaken into action by fear, and not moti­vated by the reward being proffered.

This is why the carrot and stick is rarely phrased as a realistic either/or question. While you might argue that a mule driven on by both a dangling carrot and a thrashing stick could end up more confused than anything, the reality is that your team members are considerably more complex creatures.

Most obviously, people may well be both disinclined to punishment and keen on personal rewards. They might also need potential censure on particularly tedious or difficult aspects of their work, but be put off by similar intervention in aspects of their work they love.

As a result, a manager who wants to drive their team’s performance effectively needs to consider the motivators at an individual level, and seek to find an approach that balances these many varied factors most effectively.

Ahmad Badr is the chief executive of Abu Dhabi University Knowledge Group