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I love hearing managers complain about unions.

“You can’t get those guys to take responsibility,” they complain. “They’re just not motivated. Don’t blame me — they belong to a union!”

Union members who won’t take responsibility? Didn’t I just hear the manager refuse to take responsibility for motivating employees? It would be one thing if motivating union members were impossible, but it isn’t. I’ve seen it done, and in small ways I’ve done it myself once or twice.

Employee motivation is one of your most critical responsibilities as a manager. Last week we talked about the five great motivators, learned from my personal marketing guru (aka Dad): fear, greed, guilt, need for approval, and exclusivity. We explored fear and its limitations. A last thought: Don’t confuse fear and intimidation. There’s never an excuse for bullying an employee. Bullying is simple self-indulgence.

How about greed? Managers misunderstand and abuse greed more than any other motivational technique. Managers who don’t understand how to motivate union members share a mentality with those who rely excessively on the compensation system as a motivator — they think employees do it for the money.

Outside of sales, greed has big problems as a general-purpose motivational tool. You can apply it in four ways: salary, spot bonuses, annual incentives, and stock ownership. Salary is the worst. Let’s take an employee who earns $50,000 annually and try to use his salary increase as a performance incentive. Let’s imagine your company has established 4 percent as its standard raise for average employees. You squeak out a 7 percent raise for a great performer — way above the average. Wow! After taxes, your great performer will take home less than $20 a week more than an average one. If you think that will motivate someone to excel next year, you’re living in a fantasy world.

How about spot bonuses? They’re very nice to receive. You see an employee who does killer work, so you give her a spot bonus of a few thousand dollars, for which she’s thrilled. “That ought to motivate everyone,” you think to yourself.

How so? Every other employee is thinking, “When is it my turn?” And the employee who received the bonus? She’ll continue to work hard, but if she doesn’t get another spot bonus she’ll become grumpy too. Add it all up and you lose more than you win.

Annual incentive programs and employee stock ownership programs, or ESOPs? When structured properly, these are pretty good ideas. They work well because they deliver enough money to be meaningful. They work well because they give employees a stake in the company’s success. And they work well because they mitigate the enervating sense that bonuses are a management perk. (Management perks deliver a simple message: “Managers are better than you are.”)

Most of all, though, annual incentives and ESOPs work because they’re great communication tools. The money isn’t as important as the message, and the message says, “We really mean it when we tell you about the kind of behavior and results we value. You know we mean it because we’re putting our money where our mouths are.”

If you think of money as a communications vehicle you’ll stay on track with spot bonuses and salary increases, too. Present the salary increase as your understanding of the employee’s quality. Deliver a spot bonus privately, and say, “We don’t give out a lot of these. You’ve done a lot to earn it, and your work on the new payroll system is just the most recent example. This is just our small way of saying we appreciate the great work. Thanks.”

Delivering money unfairly demotivates employees as much as anything you can do. Using it to motivate is risky.

But used properly, it’s a great communication tool. After all, money talks.

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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

When cultures collide, two things can happen: Tragedy can strike, as in Spain’s conquest of the Aztecs, or both can enrich each other, as when St. Patrick brought Roman literacy to Ireland. (If you’re interested, read How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill. It’s a wonderful read, and you’ll gain important insights into Western history.)

IT and marketing departments are equally divergent cultures, and they’re colliding all across the business landscape. Tragedy can strike here as well, through the creation of just-too-late applications. (The tragedy is to your career.)

Enrichment can strike as well, and it’s going to happen to happen to you today through the simple expedient of reading on.

This will be a family affair: I’m going to pass on some wisdom from Dear Ol’ Dad (DOD) who in other circles is known as the Great Guru of Direct Marketing. (He’s also the chairman of BJK&E Direct, and a tough act to follow).

DOD proposed five great marketing motivators several years ago, and they demonstrably work (which means that using them makes the cash register ring more than not using them in side-by-side tests). They are fear, greed, guilt, need for approval, and exclusivity.

Yes, I know they sound like several of the deadly sins, but hey, we’re talking about effective marketing, not moral purity. Real people really respond to these, whereas they don’t respond when you appeal to their better natures.

You want to be a good manager, and to be a good manager you have to motivate people. Here’s where you can learn something from great marketers: Use their insights into motivation. Yes, you too can get people to do what you want through the appropriate application of these motivators.

Sound manipulative? Sorry. Either you can learn to motivate people or you can’t. If you can, you’ll do so by learning specific techniques better than through vague generalities. And if applying specific motivational techniques is manipulative, then so be it: By that definition all of management amounts to nothing more than manipulation.

So how do you apply these five great motivators to management? The same way porcupines mate: very carefully. Why? Because they’re not equal. Each has its own uses, contexts, and consequences, which you need to understand.

Let’s start with fear, the most powerful motivator known. Take someone who’s overweight and out of shape and scare them. Zoom! They’ve run a 5-minute mile!

You have plenty of power to instill fear in your employees, and it can be a useful tool.

“You’re underperforming, Clyde,” you might say, “and if you don’t pick up the pace I’ll have to find someone else who can do the job.” Zoom! You won’t make friends this way, but you’re likely to get more work out of Clyde, whose job really is in danger.

Don’t rule out the use of fear because it’s somehow “wrong.” When you need to create a sense of urgency for any reason you’d be wrong to not instill fear.

“If we don’t change how we do business, we’re out of business,” is a perfectly valid message to give employees if it happens to be true. And without a message like that, few employees will embrace painful changes.

Here’s what you won’t get when you motivate with fear: creativity. Why? There’s another response to fear: diving for cover. Creativity involves risk, and fearful people won’t be in the mood to take risks. “Be creative or die!” is a useless message.

OK, let’s practice using fear as a motivator. Here goes: Don’t, under any circumstances, miss next week’s column, when we’ll explore how to use some of the other great motivators. Your career hangs in the balance!

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