How many of you have been excited about having the dream job? Who has not been unemployed counting the days to reintegrate, struggling not to fall into despair? It is inevitable to compare what a person feels who falls in love at first sight and goes through that stage, where everything is beautiful and any "misunderstanding" is forgiven, with another in which the person enters the company seduced by a good salary or the brand prestige. Like any relationship, that illusion can easily be broken if we do not know the other party, beyond the first impression.
I have had the opportunity to dictate many sessions on motivation in the company. I remember the first time I heard about the theory of motivation, it was a tremendous help to understand where my needs fit and to understand that true motivation lies within oneself and not in external things. Not for something there are so many people who keep looking for happiness in material things, like the cat that wants to bite his tail and only ends up wearing himself down uselessly.
Recently I was talking to a friend who said to me: "When the alarm clock goes off and I know I have to go to work at the office, it gives me a strange feeling of looking for some excuse not to go". Other people told me how his neck hardened when he was close to arriving at the company where he worked. I have witnessed cases of people who have been seduced by a place, with very good pay and after 30 days they do not know how to run from the company; because they feel cheated, having received a "bomb about to detonate" instead of a job. It is unfortunate that there are managers who have not stopped changing "fuses in the company" as when changing an old-fashioned cell phone. It seems that they would have missed a "small" detail… they work with people who demandrespect and consideration !:
Juan Luis Urcola, in his book "Motivation begins with oneself" raises four essential factors that are the cause of the lack of motivation:
1. The person himself refers to those who have been born with a great predisposition to demotivation, those who walk everywhere with the gray cloud and who only need to see them to realize it. In this case there is very little to do.
2. The work they do, when the nature of the work contributes to motivation or demotivation. It is not the same to do something that you are passionate about as something out of obligation, and worse if you do not have much to choose from. Here the lack of attractiveness, the routine, the excessive pressure, the lack of goals, among other aspects, are combined.
In these cases, you may have the best predisposition to achieve the objectives, however the wear caused by any of these factors, sometimes ends up submitting, lighting candles so that the days and hours pass quickly.
3. The boss, who is attributed the greatest cause of the lack of motivation of the staff. That is why it is said that people resign their boss and not the company, due to unpleasant experiences with him. Having an authoritarian boss who always looks for culprits and does not recognize the merits, the one who is able to "step on what he finds in his path to access the medal" causes feelings of failure and mistrust and can become a headache while remain in the organization.
4. The company, when living in hostile environments, where people walk with their backs against the wall to avoid "poison darts", where the most repressive policies, without the right to claim.
These factors, which might be familiar to some readers, have unfortunately become a constant in business. Changes in the world have led us to identify a new profile of the worker. The needs and expectations that people had 20 years ago are very little like those of today.
Some of the changes that have occurred and have impacted on the current profile of the worker are:
It has gone from physical to intellectual work.
From a job where only the boss thought to a scenario where both must think and act.
The boss has moved from a foreman role to one of facilitator, change manager.
From an organization with a pyramid structure to one that is more horizontal and flexible.
From an individual job where the worker only limited himself to do what the boss ordered to another where he is integrated as part of a team, which does not depend on a leader but on interdependence.
The next time the alarm clock rings, remember that motivation starts with yourself…
Until next time!
