How A "Core Story" Develops Team Motivation

Establishing and maintaining team motivation baffles many managers and leaders.

As the team leader or manager, by keeping your team motivated, keeps the auditor or the brass from breathing down your neck. Equally important, you need to keep your team happy, healthy, and charged.

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

You motivate few people by cold facts, hard numbers, and raw data. To stay motivated, people want emotions in their everyday working lives. Sure these numbers point out the state of your bottom line, but if you need to improve performance and motivation you're must let people know how the raw numbers impact them.

Emotions such as excitement, fear, and happiness 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 motivates them toward seeing how your product solves 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 the product and make buying it  a simple, logical result.

The same holds true for team motivation. You sell the product, core motivating factor,  or the concept behind your team. People want to experience the benefits of success. Your story should describe them in an easy to swallow pill.

Build Team Motivation Culture

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 into a story, goes a long way toward establishing a culture of team motivation.

Stories form the basis of every culture, this includes your team's culture.

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" makes your team "sing in harmony."

For your team to function, everyone must thrive with self-motivation. 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.