My sister manages about 35 people in the benefits division of a large Long Island hospital. She’s responsible for producing certain results in her division. For example, each customer service rep needs to field x number of calls, resove x number of disputes, and route x number of those calls to a survey after resolving the issue at hand.
Some people do the job, some don’t. Some are consistent stars, others consistent slackers. The stars get rewarded, the slackers reprimanded. And, nothing changes. She’s stressed out, overworked, and despondent. She tries to motivate change in all sorts of ways. Besides rewards and punishments, there’s the motivational posters, the bagel breakfasts, the Mad Libs games in the morning, and all sorts of other completely ineffective strategies.
What’s required is teamwork. What’s lacking is a clear game that everyone is playing together. Clear rules. Clear agreements. Common interests. Obvious measures of success. Transparency of results. An all for one and one for all mentality.
If you’re managing people, you’ll never succeed by rewarding the few who meet or exceed the goals you’ve set out, especially if the rewards are ones YOU made up rather than THEM. Here are a few quick things you can do that will bring mindfulness into the workplace:
- Declare a breakdown-acknowledge the fact that you’re currently falling short of your objectives. Put your own failure on the table. You can’t move forward before declaring what’s true right now.
- Change the game from an individual one to a team one. Nobody wins unless everybody wins.
- Have the team choose the reward. Don’t assume that plaques or bagels are the motivating force.
- Clear the space for people to honestly share what’s in the way of doing what they’re supposed to do.
- Create a clear measure for knowing how everyone is doing day to day, and make those stats available to all.
- Teach the team how to hold each other accountable without blame or shame.
- Once you’ve created the opportunity for winning, step aside and let the team become empowered.
Unless you empower the group to work with one another in a way that leads to a sense of common growth and victory, you’ll never get engagement or a sense of ownership from your people. Give them a game to play and the tools to win it…together…and you’ll have lots less stress from trying to cajole them, scare them, or entertain them into doing their jobs.
At least, that’s what I told my sister.
So, how mindful are you? Well, you can get some idea based on your level of happiness and your freedom from stress. If you want a better idea of your degree of mindfulness; your level of UnHypnosis; take our free online assessment. Live Awake!