Tips on Motivating Teams in the Shipping and Maritime Industries
Chris Wincott is a Consultant with NJC Associates Ltd and has worked with shipping organisations in UK, Europe, India, Singapore, Philippines, Dubai and Kuwait on a range of Consultancy and Training projects. He has spoken at shipping conferences and has published articles on Management and Leadership development in the industry. He has a Master’s Degree in Change Agent Skills and Strategies from the University of Surrey. What follows is his guest blog post on the topic of employee motivation in the shipping and maritime industries.
Motivation is one of the most frequently requested topics when we design management or leadership training. How do we motivate our people? Why are some people so difficult to motivate? Everybody seems to have their own views of how to motivate people and what needs to be done to improve performance. Within the views there are some interesting conflicts and opinions that are not supported by the research carried out on Motivation. The aim of this brief article is to explore some of those contradictions.
When you ask questions about what motivates people the answer you get depends on how you ask the question. If you are talking to managers and ask “What motivates you?” you get one answer, but if you ask “What motivates your people?” you often get a different answer. This was neatly demonstrated in a study by Kenneth Kovach as long ago as 1980. In his study he asked managers to look at a list of 10 motivators and rank them in order of importance to their staff with 1 being top and 10 being bottom.
The managers said that the top three motivators for their staff were:
- Money
- Job security
- Promotion
He then gave the same list to the staff and asked them to rank them in order of importance to themselves. The staff said their top three motivators were:
- Appreciation
- Being an ‘insider’
- Sympathy for problems
We use a similar questionnaire when we ask people what has motivated them at work in the last two years and our findings reinforce these results.
In some ways the results are encouraging. Giving people: money; job security; or promotion is expensive and may not be within the power of a line manager anyway. Giving people appreciation, making them part of the team and dealing sensitively with personal issues costs far less and is normally much easier for a line manager to deliver.
The results also raise an intriguing question – When did the Managers change their view? Why do managers seem to adopt a different view about what motivates people when they become managers?
Senior officers we work with often say that they don’t have time to express appreciation or say “Thank you” and that their people are just doing their job and would not expect to be praised for that. On the other hand they also say that their managers in the office do not appreciate what they do onboard and never say “Thank you” when they have resolved a difficult problem or dealt with an unexpected difficulty. When we ask about the characteristics of an ideal leader the list will always include: saying “Thank you” or expressing appreciation. Again we seem to see the paradox that managers seem to believe that they are motivated in one way, but there people are motivated differently.
What about money?
You cannot look at the topic of motivation without the subject of money coming up. It is frequently the first item mentioned in a discussion of motivation and creates strong debate. The good news is that it is also a topic that has been studied many times and we can draw some conclusions about how money seems to operate as a motivator of behaviour.
- Money influences our decision to join or leave an organisation. People look at the money being offered for a job and decide whether it is an attractive enough offer for them to do the job. If the money being paid drops to a level that they see as unacceptable they will be motivated to look elsewhere.
- Money varies in its power as a motivator at different stages of our career. At some points we may be willing to do almost any job in order to obtain the income we need. At others we might be able to be more selective and even take a lower paid job if it is in an area that interests us.
- Increase in money is a short-term motivator. An increase in salary or a bonus provides a short-term boost, but we rapidly get used to the new salary level or forget the bonus we received a few weeks ago.
- Money is rarely mentioned as the thing that motivates you each day.
Dan Pink carried out a study to answer the question “Do people work harder if you offer them more money?” He asked groups of people to do different tasks for an agreed amount of money and then offered them increased money for more work and studied the results.
What did they conclude? Do people work harder if you offer them more money?
Yes – if the work is manual and repetitive. No – if the work requires cognitive or creative skills. In fact performance went down for these tasks when people were offered more money to do more work.
If we want people to: think clearly; solve complex problems; demonstrate creativity; and balance competing demands then offering them financial incentives to do more work is exactly the wrong thing to do!
Maybe it is worth reviewing how much attention we give to: expressing appreciation, involving people, and supporting people if we want to motivate them.
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