By James A. Baker · Founder, Baker Communications
 Managers, of course, differ greatly in their approaches to motivating their employees. This difference is often based on their past experiences and the assumptions they make about their team. Sitting in the manager’s chair can lead to a dangerous distortion of perspective. The pressure of making sure your employees are on target to reach their production goals can cause you to become overly focused on “monitoring” their progress (or lack thereof). However, focusing exclusive on data can turn even the most gifted manager into nothing more than a “nagger” who is constantly riding employees to get those numbers up. As a manager, you must never lose sight of the fact that your success, and that of your entire team, does not rest on your ability to read production schedules and nag them if they are falling behind. Instead, your best hope for success is to discover how to motivate them with the feedback, training and coaching that will meet their needs and help them get back on the fast track. As a wise person once said: “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
One fascinating way to view the idea of employee motivation involves treating employee satisfaction and employee dissatisfaction as two separate issues. When people are dissatisfied with their work, they generally complain about the lack of need fulfillment in areas such as pay, physical working conditions, administrative or supervisory practices, benefits, status, company policies, and interpersonal relationships. On the other hand, when employees describe times in their working careers when they were really satisfied and particularly motivated to produce, they often refer to things like a real sense of achievement in doing something worthwhile, a feeling of recognition for their work, the satisfaction in the work itÂself (actual tasks), the feeling of responsibility and trust given to them in the performance of their work and the feeling of advancement ?#148; primarily theopportunity to “grow” as a person through increased competence and ability to realize one’s potential.
