A leader plays an important role in team building. As a team leader, you have to be responsible for duty assignment, human resources management, and planning. You also have to care about your subordinates’ feelings and find the ways to encourage the team members to feel the need for working as a team and to accept urgent assignments or additional duties when necessary. The article, “Practice the Five R’s to Motivate Workers,” written by R. Brayton Bowen and arranged by Prakal Panthapalangkoon, suggests that workers can be motivated by the five denominations of responsibility, respect, relationships, recognition and rewards as follows:
1. Responsibility: When giving more responsibility to an employee, the communication must be clear to prevent the employee from feeling that he has got additional workload. An employee should take part in making a decision on how to work more efficiently so that he will be proud because his supervisor trusts him to try new and challenging ideas. This will make him feel the ownership and try his best to complete the assignment.
2. Respect: All employees should be accepted and treated equally without any bias. They should have the freedom to express their opinions with their colleagues or supervisors. If the employees have good performance, the leader should show appreciation or admiration. On the contrary, if they made a mistake, the leader should explain the reason for such mistake.
3. Relationships: A team leader should create a friendly environment where team members feel that if there are any problems that may affect the team, they will not be afraid to tell team leader what is going on and why, and help each other to solve such problems. Furthermore, if team members have problems with each other, the leader has to get in to make the situation better by allowing each team member to clarify from his perspective so that everyone in the team can continue to work together. All of these efforts will make the team more successful and stronger. Smiles and laughter in the team are also important as a part of making everyone work together happily.
4. Recognition: Employees should be admired and accepted for the job that has been successfully completed, either in part or in whole. Recognition can highly motivate and make the employees proud. As a result, they will try even harder to achieve the even better level of performance. On the contrary, if an employee cannot do very well on a task assigned to him, the supervisor has to figure out what is missing or wrong and how to help him improve.
5. Rewards: Praise and rewards are main factors that motivate and inspire employees to work harder. Rewards may come in various forms, such as incentive, bonus, or a raise. However, rewards may not always come in monetary forms, but they can be promotion, assignments to join a special project, training, and tour of inspection to improve the performance, because after a while the employees may not feel special by the money they have got as rewards. The supervisor should give the employees an opportunity to try new assignments to prove their competency, which will be beneficial to the organization in a long term.
However, you must not forget that all employees have different personalities, preferences, and ideas so different methods should be used to motivate and inspire them to make progress in their career.
How to motivate your subordinates
