To help your staff reach their goals: Will you push or pull
MOTIVATING EMPLOYEES to achieve their goals is always the biggest quest for leaders. Gary Kelly, Southwest Airlines CEO once said, “A pay cheque is usually enough to get most people to work on time, but only an inspiring purpose beyond a pay cheque will encourage people to go the extra mile.”
Leaders will find this statement to be somewhat true, especially when considering the Gen Y workforce who has grown up amidst a consumerism economy and disruptive technology, along with the journey of defining “me”.
Hence, flaunting the compensation and benefits and job security in front of them is not going to do much to Gen Y.
Looking back at the major trend of the past 20 years, it is apparent the approach of employee motivation has shifted greatly over time.
Influenced by Jack Welch, the performance management system ruled the workforce market for a long time. Welch was known to bring GE to tremendous success by his ability to drive people to break their limits.
He was famous for his quote “Be number one or number two … or get out” and also for his “rank and yank” system. People were ranked according to their performance, and the top 20 per cent would be taken care of like kings – and the bottom 10-20 per cent would be asked to leave. This tells us a lot about his management style and his belief in motivating people performance. Welch believed that if you gave people a clear goal with justified reward and punishment, they would do whatever it took to achieve that goal. This method was simply known as the PUSH method and it has been proven to be effective.
But as the world keeps turning, Welch’s absolute “Push” method has received resistance from the new generation of workforce since they would naturally refuse to be managed and driven. Rather, they want to be inspired.
This brings us to the second approach to motivate people: the PULL method. Steve Jobs once said “If you are working on something exciting that you really care about, you don’t have to be pushed. The vision pulls you.” The pull method involves communicating the vision and meaning of success, highlighting the benefits that would be created for a greater community – empowering them, and emphasising the sense of growth in life and career. When you use the pull approach with someone, you inspire them and instil a more sustainable energy to work toward their goals.
In practice, I’d say the push method is still effective in many situations and with many groups of people – but so is the pull method. Hence, you can mix and match the two approaches depending on your objective and strategy.
For example, when you want to give people a jolt, to get a “quick-sprint” performance, and to drive them to move forward using energy, you can use the push method. And you can do so by setting a challenging target, telling them what their rewards would be, acknowledging the punishment of failure, and even letting them know on a regular basis where exactly they stand on the performance score.
Southwest Airlines is a great example of combining both push and pull approaches in a positive way to motivate employees to accelerate their game. To do this, Southwest is rallying employees around a vision and a common purpose. In detail, Southwest announces its vision “To become the world’s most loved, most flown, and most profitable airline,” and gives its staff a purpose in their existence “To connect people to what’s important in their lives through friendly, reliable, and low-cost air travel.”
The bottom line is that when you conduct a push conversation, you need to practise communicating fact-driven, clear, and even tough messages; whereas when you conduct a pull conversation, you need to practice talking about something more intangible, and touch more on the intrinsic and emotional side to make it powerful.
I personally believe that in our realistic work situation when dealing with various groups of people, the ability to use both push and pull method will not only help your staff reach their goals, but will also grow your business sustainability to the next level.
Let me know your idea of using “push” and “pull” factors. How do you combine both methods to help your people reach their goals? You can reach me at [email protected] [email protected] or discuss with me in person in the workshop “Performance Alignment” conducted by APMGroup on March 20.
Orapun Parapob Gilman is a senior consultant and B2C Business Leader at SEAC (formerly APMGroup). She can be reached at [email protected] [email protected]
