Team Motivation: Ideas to Energize Any Team by Peter B. Grazier

After 25 years of working with teams, it was time to collect our thoughts and share those highly-prized secrets of team motivation. What we have seen through the years would fill volumes, but since most of us don't have the time to read them, we've condensed the best of these ideas into a single book of 36 pages.

These are practical ideas we have used and gathered over the years that will energize any team, and provide a foundation for sustainable team motivation.

The book contains 54 motivation ideas divided into the following categories:

Recognition Challenge Camaraderie Relationships Communications Vision & Mission Exercises

Training Community Service Measurement Fun Responsibility Involvement Meetings

Available in downloadable document (you get it right now!)

Excerpt from Team Motivation

Challenge     Many people will say that their most rewarding team experiences resulted from some sort of challenge. You have probably heard the stories of mediocre groups that responded to a challenge with heroic success. The challenge itself was the motivator. So for ongoing teams, periodic stimulation in the form of a worthy challenge is another method of maintaining motivation. An important consideration for a challenge is the level of difficulty. If a challenge is too difficult, perhaps perceived as impossible, then team members may give up before they start. However, the same result may occur if the members perceive the challenge as too easy. Little energy is required to accomplish something so easily obtained. 1. The Team Special Project – Most of the time we feel we don’t have time to do our work, let alone a special project. But sometimes people’s juices begin to flow when they become engaged in some challenging, but interesting, task…even if it is “extracurricular.”   EXAMPLE: In 1983, I was managing a work group for a large construction organization. It was a 10-year project, and senior management had discussed conducting an open house for the workforce. Management, however, had always nixed the idea, fearing the difficulty of coordinating an event that would encompass seven thousand workers and their families. My work group heard about the idea, however, and asked to take on this assignment. There was enormous interest in conducting this event within the workforce, so with considerable support from others in the workforce, my group planned and successfully coordinated an open house that ultimately attracted over 10,000 people. The challenge for my group was enormous...but achievable. The challenge created a high level of motivation while planning the event, and the sense of accomplishment after the event sustained motivation even longer. I don’t suggest by this example that every work group take on such a formidable task, but simply think about the implications of taking on a new challenge periodically.

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