Your job title is irrelevant in leadership; you can lead from any position. And as a library person, especially in many of our libraries where you are a solo worker, your motivational leadership can be important to all kinds of people!

CMLE is here to help you with all kinds of information and ideas!  This series provides weekly small bits of training on leadership, management, and supervision skills. We have heard from our members that this is an issue they would like to have more training to meet. And I have been a researcher and trainer for many years, focusing on library management, leadership, and administration.

Follow this series using our Leadership Training Bites tag; and if you want to talk about your own leadership development, or to set up some training in your library, we are here for you!

This week we talk about Motivation!

You have had “those” days. The ones where it is just hard to get going, to push yourself to do good things, or to encourage the people around you to do their best work.

Some days are hard.

But being a leader means keeping up your own motivation levels, and helping others to be successful! You want to be successful at work – otherwise, why bother showing up? Motivation is what lets you do that.

Figuring out how to encourage people is important – and more complicated than people might assume. You can say “good job!” after every success, but how long until that loses its meaning? You can yell and scream when things don’t work out the way you planned, but does anyone want to work with someone who acts like that?

For some good suggestions, we are turning to an expert: Dan Pink. “Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don’t: Traditional rewards aren’t always as effective as we think. Listen for illuminating stories — and maybe, a way forward.”

Check out his TED talk here:

 

And check out his book: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. “Most people believe that the best way to motivate is with rewards like money—the carrot-and-stick approach. That’s a mistake, says Daniel H. Pink (author of To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Motivating Others). In this provocative and persuasive new book, he asserts that the secret to high performance and satisfaction-at work, at school, and at home—is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.

Drawing on four decades of scientific research on human motivation, Pink exposes the mismatch between what science knows and what business does—and how that affects every aspect of life. He examines the three elements of true motivation—autonomy, mastery, and purpose-and offers smart and surprising techniques for putting these into action in a unique book that will change how we think and transform how we live.”

Can you incorporate any of these ideas into your own work – for yourself, or to motivate others? Give them a try! Tell us how it worked out for you!