To foster an environment of personal growth, leaders and managers need to be part-time psychologists. They need to understand what motivates their people and create an environment where employees are engaged, happy, and productive. Most people have a low tolerance for routine. They need to be given new challenges that stretch their abilities. Organizations need to provide their workers with all the tools needed to learn the skills necessary to meet these challenges. This includes learning content, time to learn, etc. The role of leaders is to match up challenging assignments with the right individuals (The challenge can’t be too hard or too easy). Leaders must be encouraging, supportive, and must understand the people that report to them on a personal level.

How does a manager begin this process?

You need to clue into the human factor – look at your employees as individuals with their own unique set of behaviors, norms, values and perceptions that may be the same or different than your own. Realize also that an individual’s psychological profile permeates team behavior as well and team behavior has an even higher degree of complexity and difficulty due to the individuals that make up the team. Finally, a company’s culture is a web of individual and team dynamics brought together under the stressful conditions of company performance. You need to understand all these factors to begin the process.

Leaders need to embrace their role in defining the culture of an organization. I believe wholeheartedly that old-school, Jack Welch-like leadership is dead or on its deathbed. There’s no way at all the newest generation of workers will put up with punitive, hard-nose managers and leaders. If you have that leadership style currently in place, then you need to change it quickly.

You mentioned that you need to communicate with your star performers, what’s the right approach?

Keeping the very top talent happy and motivated is very very hard. These high performers have achieved a lot and quickly get bored and unhappy. Many will sabotage their careers as an opportunity to rebuild and achieve new successes. The solution for these individuals can often be to allow them the opportunity to meet new challenges outside of the firm. The Google approach of giving these top performers 20% of their time to work on their own projects is brilliant and indicates that Google understands the psychological needs of its workers.

In general, leaders need to understand the need for time away from work. Mobile technology has created an always-on work culture and too many organizations are exploiting their ability to ask workers to be available 24/7. Expecting workers to always be working is like expecting an athlete to succeed by training hard every day. Successful athletes have scheduled rest days to recover and get motivated. Lack of a work-life balance will not keep your people engaged, happy, and productive.

What about the rest of the team, how do you motivate and stimulate them?

I can share with you from personal experience how to make this happen. As a leader of a company, I realized early on that you cannot ride the backs of your star performers to truly be a sustainable and successful company. I spent a considerable amount of time with my lower level non-managerial staff to understand what motivates them and how they could have a greater impact on the success of the organization. What I found was they had unique insights and perspectives that were exciting and well thought out about how to grow our company. They were just waiting for an opportunity to prove their ideas were sound. In the end, I promoted a significant number of these individuals to management and gave them opportunities to put their ideas to work – it was one of the best moves I ever made in my career.

The key to really being successful is to identify projects and initiatives that align with people’s interests and the goals and objectives of the company. This is by no means an easy task and may lead to a little organizational restructuring to make it happen. However, it is not as hard as you think if you are willing to take the time to get to know your people. I have to say as a manager, it is one of the most rewarding things you can do. If you focus on people’s innate interest in personal learning and growth, you will always have a motivated and engaged workforce.

The full interview is located at http://acgrowth.com/blogs/39-ac-growth-executive-interview-with-richard-nantel.html