Home Health & Hospice Week

Employee motivation techniques can be as different as the people who work for you.

One of the most crucial tasks of any team leader is to motivate his or her team to achieve more.

"Why Teams Don’t Work" authors Harvey Robbins and Michael Finley have identified three key skills a team leader must have to motivate people effectively. They are:

1. Versatility. Robbins and Finley define versatility as the ability to provide information in the manner in which others are best able to process it. A versatile leader, for example, would convince a practical person to accept a new idea by stressing facts and figures and would sell the same idea to a "people person" by emphasizing how it would help the team get along better.

2. Pyramid learning. Motivational leaders pass on knowledge and make sure that knowledge is distributed far and wide. If they teach one person a new skill, they expect her to teach two others and so on down the line, creating a "pyramid" of learning that extends throughout the team. Instead of hoarding their knowledge, good leaders use it to make their company one that learns and grows.

3. Using feedback appropriately. The best leaders, Robbins and Finley argue, are those who give regular feedback to others to help them improve. Such leaders are skilled in offering criticism tactfully and don’t mind making themselves a public figurehead.