Are you our new Head of Motivation?:  Your 'chair' is brand new. You will report directly to me. I am the company's managing director. You will be tasked with managing engagement in our company. By that I mean that all managers and all employees are interested in the job and are committed to doing it. Your new title will be 'Head of Motivation'. Your task will be to keep track of the commitment of all our managers and employees. They have earned it. And it's not something I just write for fun. I mean it so emphatically that you must follow the commitment so closely that we know the level on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Then nothing gets behind us. Our employees must be committed every day and all day. You will monitor this and alert the managers so that they can motivate timely and properly. Let me start with a few examples. First, example #1 One Saturday I stood in a queue at a checkout in a supermarket. The belt was full of goods. The front customer had ...

Individuality kills the excitement:  Four out of five employees are disengaged. One of these four is even hostilely disengaged. The manager can do something about it. When work tasks are to be solved, it requires teamwork. The leader must ensure that the entire group succeeds through collaboration. However, the manager takes a myriad of individual considerations into account from recruitment, salary negotiations, review conversations and retention. These considerations are misunderstood and kill employees' commitment to collaboration. Two Danish business consultants have mapped what goes wrong and what goes well when the manager stands up in front of the group of employees to engage them in the common cause. Business consultants Mette Berner and Michael Meinhardt have taken their 15 years of course work as their starting point and have used all their experience to design a practical model for Strategic Motivation. 'The model means that motivation no longer happens spontaneously...