How Leaders Accidentally Demotivate Employees

Life is too short to settle at work. Staying in an unhealthy environment drains your energy and steals your joy. While some workplaces won't change, most can with the right effort. Sometimes the first step is recognizing where you might be unintentionally holding your employees back.

Through helping hundreds of companies, there are four main reasons workplaces demotivate employees. When you eliminate these issues, morale improves, and the organization profits.

4 Ways You're Demotivating Your Employees

1. Conflict Avoidance

When there's an "elephant in the room," get it out and face it. There are often unaddressed issues because people fear the repercussions of being open. Your team will quickly lose trust in you as a leader if you're passive and afraid to face reality.

Solution:

Make it safe to have conflict. Create an expectation of transparency amongst your leaders. Enforce a "No Gossip Policy". Insist team members to address issues directly with those involved. Hold people accountable for performance and deal with incompetence swiftly through training, reseating, or termination.

2. Lack of Trust

Can your co-workers rely on you? Untrustworthiness is demotivating. Trust is built over time through consistency. Lack of follow-through, exaggeration, and low transparency erode trust. If you forget to do something you committed to doing - apologize. Good people will forgive you when you own your mistakes, but lose faith in you when you don't.

Solution:

Create opportunities for connection by celebrating birthdays and work anniversaries, having positive conversations, engaging Ice-Breakers, and learning about each other's personality types. Own your mistakes.

We created a FREE DISC Personality Assessment to take and share with co-workers and friends. Once completed, your results will be emailed to you automatically.

Take The DISC Personality Assessment

3. Procrastination

You're discouraging your team by not taking action. Behind procrastination is fear, a fear of failure, judgment, letting people down, and rejection. All procrastinators are perfectionists succumbing to damaging core beliefs like, "If I can't do it at a high level, I won't do it all." They use procrastination to avoid tackling the most important tasks and problems.

Solution:

Let go of perfectionism, trust your instincts, and make decisions. When you make mistakes, keep your head high because you're doing your best. Encourage employees to take risks by modeling this yourself. Address the fear behind your indecision.

"Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It's the courage to continue that counts." - Winston Churchill

4. Lack of Clarity

Ambiguity causes anxiety! Don't be unclear. Over-communicate the essentials like values, purpose, mission, and vision. Share examples of your team living out the core values. Post and share company goals over and over again. Talk about the company's history frequently.

Solution:

Revisit, highlight, post, and creatively communicate the essentials over and over. People forget unless reminded frequently.

How DYL Can Help - Contact Us

Individual Coaching
Review your DISC results with a Decide Your Legacy coach and uncover practical insights to help you thrive at home and at work.

Team Coaching
Have a Decide Your Legacy coach guide your leadership team through the DISC Personality assessment. Gain a deeper understanding of each other, strengthen trust, and build greater team cohesiveness.

If you found this information helpful, SUBSCRIBE TODAY to access my free video & worksheet, Shatterproof Yourself Lite: 7 Small Steps to a Giant Leap. 

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