It doesn’t. And lack of motivation and employee turnover in the car business is a chronic problem, despite the pay plans that are largely based on incentives.
The reason is that people eventually turn a deaf ear to all that motivational talk. Especially vulnerable are people who answer to a manager for their performance or lack thereof- they grow numb to all the managers’ efforts to ‘motivate them.’ Why is that?
It happens because your people are already motivated. Treating them like they are not motivated to be successful breeds resentment. Long ago a scientist named Maslow showed us that all humans are born with three basic lifelong motivations:
Here’s where things backfire. What happens when you give employees what they already possess? It demotivates them. They see all the incentives as insulting. That’s because offering rewards for production or threatening punishments for lack thereof gives your people the message that they are lazy.
That’s how they interpret incentives to a degree, they see them as derogatory and manipulative. And if you project to your people the message that they are lazy, that is exactly how they will act.
After World War II, the prevalent management theory was that workers were basically lazy. Therefore, managers thought the only way to motivate people to work was to offer rewards for performance and threaten them with punishments for underachieving. That’s what managers believed, and that’s the message they sent to their people.
It’s no wonder that workers reacted to all those motivational perks by:
Is that what you are experiencing in your dealership? To some degree, it happens everywhere people are paid on commission.
Look at it like this. Imagine a family with several children. To motivate the children to excel, the parents pitted them against each other. Only the ones who had achieved something very recently got praised. The others were treated as less valuable, in the hopes of goading them on to do better and to win recognition, at the other sibling’s expense.
What do you think would happen over time? The children would withdraw from their parents, grow distant from them and from each other, and lose interest in helping each other. That sounds like the typical problems we experience at work.
When workers are constantly compared to each other and ranked from the best to the worst, they lose willingness to support each other. The group underperforms, despite the production of one or two overachievers, because everybody else is feeling like an underachiever.
So that’s how they act, they underachieve. You lose the synergy you would have had if they were supporting each other. Teamwork disappears.
Leadership. People crave it. They naturally want to be led, trained, and better than they were before. That’s what Maslow’s work tells us. The more great leadership you can put into action, the less you can rely on incentives to motivate people.
Before World War II, the Japanese culture was extremely competitive. Almost everybody was paid on piece work and by incentives.
After the war, a management scientist convinced them to institute a spirit of cooperation and to reduce competition among workers. Over time his ideas took hold, and we all know how successful that nation became in the global markets.
If you want to learn the details and read ‘how to’ advice on what that scientist taught them about leadership, look for books written by W. Edwards Deming. You might become the great leader you know you are.
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