How A "Core Story" Develops Team Motivation

Establishing and maintaining team motivation baffles many managers and leaders.

Whether you're a small business owner or manager, keeping your team motivated is very important to keep the auditor or the brass from breathing down your neck. It's equally important to keep your team happy, healthy, and charged.

Though everyone's team is different, people are the same. . .

Few people are motivated by cold facts, hard numbers, and raw data. To stay motivated, people want emotions in their everyday working lives. Sure these numbers point out how your bottom line is doing, but if you're looking to improve performance and motivation you're going to have to let people know how the raw numbers impact them.

Excitement, fear, happiness these are all emotions that motivate people. Depending on your situation, you can use peoples' feelings to your advantage (without sleazy manipulation tactics).

Stories Sell. . . and Motivate

Want to know the best way to sell somebody anything? Tell a pertinent, compelling story that moves their emotions and motivated them toward seeing how your product is a solution to their needs.

Every good salesman knows the effectiveness of a good story. Stories translate emotions, feelings and promote motivation on the listeners part more effectively than some boring feature/benefit presentation.

Stories encapsulate the features and benefits into them and make buying something a simple, logical result.

Team motivation is much the same, the product you're selling is the core motivating factor or concept behind your team. People want to experience the benefits of success. Your story should describe them in an easy to swallow pill.

Stories simply communicate knowledge and the ideas that motivate people much better than a boring PowerPoint presentation.

Build Team Culture With It's History

Strong core values build strong teams. The story behind your team is either it's biggest strength or it's most glaring weakness.

By condensing the ideas that inspire you and your vision for the future can go a long way toward establishing a culture of team motivation.

Stories are the basis of every culture, your team's culture is no different.

Good stories get results because they motivate people.

Chet Holmes, often called "America's greatest business growth expert," says building and training around a "core story" is what makes your team "sing in harmony."

For your team, self-motivation should be the standard everyone lives by. With the right integrated training regimen you see regular predictable growth and a higher level of motivation throughout your team and organization.

When your entire team knows, without doubt, what's expected of them, they can rapidly improve their levels of motivation and performance. This type of team performance and motivation comes only through establishing an effective training program wrapped around a compelling core story.