Unit - 3
Motivation Skills
Motivation is the process that initiates, guides, and maintains goal-oriented behaviors. ... In everyday usage, the term "motivation" is frequently used to describe why a person does something. It is the driving force behind human actions.
Sources of Motivation:
In sum, people are a mix of motivations. They are motivated by different needs and desires. These various motivation sources help us to appreciate the complexity of how to motivate human beings.
Initiative; Willingness to Work
9 Ways to Take Initiative at Work
1. Be proactive
You can be proactive by anticipating what work needs to be done and doing it before you are asked to. Use your knowledge of the job to determine whether you have the competencies to make decisions on your own or whether you should present your ideas to your supervisors before proceeding. For example, if you are working on a project and your supervisor is out sick for the day, you may not have been assigned a project-related task to do. If you can think of a task to work on that needs to be done to move the project forward, they may commend you for taking initiative and being proactive during their absence.
2. Find opportunities for improvement
You can take initiative by looking for opportunities for improvement. For example, if you interact with the public and get consistent feedback from clients, you could look for patterns in issues clients encounter. You can then use this feedback to highlight weak points in current company practices and advocate for positive change within the company. To go even further, you could suggest sending out a survey to gauge public opinion and gather more data.
3. Voice your ideas
Sharing your ideas at meetings or individually with colleagues and supervisors is another way to take initiative at work. Expressing your opinion can help you establish your voice within the company and build your reputation as an employee who actively looks for solutions. If you have difficulty voicing your ideas, you can become more comfortable by offering suggestions to coworkers who are looking for help or advice. You can build your confidence and start sharing your ideas in staff meetings and eventually present more fully-formed ideas in group settings.
4. Be decisive
You may find yourself faced with challenging decisions where there are several courses of action you could take. To show initiative, be decisive and choose the best way to proceed. Come up with a few simple solutions to a problem, weigh the pros and cons of each solution and choose which course of action will work best.
5. Improve systems, procedures and policies
If you notice that a policy is outdated, a great way to take initiative is to review it and make suggestions on how it can be updated. You can assess policies by thinking critically about whether they serve your company’s and clients’ needs, identifying weak points and finding more efficient ways of doing things. To make sure the updated policy is comprehensive, you could draft a new version of the policy and have members of your department review it and give their input before officially implementing it.
6. Address and prevent problems
You can show initiative by recognizing and working to solve problems. By actively addressing issues, you can help improve your workplace and sharpen your problem-solving skills. When confronted with an issue, ask yourself questions to find the root cause of the problem:
You can brainstorm independently or work collaboratively with colleagues to find the best solution to the problem.
1. Be prepared for meetings
Attending meetings with suggestions and questions prepared demonstrates that you’ve taken the initiative to put time and thought into the meeting’s purpose. For example, if you present an idea at a meeting, such as implementing new software, you could do some research ahead of time on the following....
Cost/benefit analysis: These measures how making a decision will benefit the company and compares it with the cost of implementing the decision in terms of finances and labor.
Risk analysis: This identifies any issues that could adversely affect the company by making this decision. Analyzing these risks helps the company avoid or soften any adverse effects a decision may have on the company.
Impact analysis: This identifies the overall effect that making the decision will have on the company.
2. Anticipate questions and prepare answers
You can show initiative in the way you react to situations by being prepared to answer questions. For example, if your team recently missed a deadline on a project, you may be asked to meet with your supervisor for a performance assessment. If you arrive at your meeting having identified where issues occurred and with actionable ways to avoid these issues in the future, you will show that you’re willing to take the initiative to meet challenges and work to prevent them.
3. Set realistic standards
You can set achievable standards by taking initiative only on tasks that you have the time, energy and resources to contribute to. For example, you could help a colleague brainstorm how to improve a policy but allow that colleague to draft and implement the updated policy on their own. If you have an idea for improvement but don’t have the time to lead the initiative, you could present your idea to your team to see if another team member can volunteer to work on it.
13 Ways to Be More Eager to Learn and Succeed in Life
Every good thing starts with a desire or eagerness to do something. The same goes for success stories. The more you keep pushing yourself to be knowledgeable and eager to learn, the clearer the way to success becomes.
Curiosity not only helps you in excelling at the professional front, but a study found that it also improves memory and learning.[1] The study revealed that curiosity releases a chemical linked with motivation, dopamine. Dopamine could motivate you more than any words ever could!
Undoubtedly, without a genuine interest or curiosity to learn, you cannot expect yourself to be naturally inclined to learn new things. Eagerness to learn is where your success starts. Let’s not forget that Newton discovered gravity when he was curious as to why the apple fell on the ground rather than going upwards. The list is endless.
So, how can you be more eager to learn and grow into a more successful person?
Here are 13 ways you can naturally increase your eagerness to learn and keep feeding your curiosity to stay focused on your learning goals.
1. Show Your Eagerness
Express your eagerness to learn more in your workplace. Take up every learning opportunity that is presented to hone your skills. You can also continue taking informational interviews and job shadowing opportunities to keep your curiosity burning. Keep asking more questions and show that you are enthusiastic to learn. Also, reflect your curiosity towards learning by attending seminars, getting certifications, and enrolling yourself in online courses. Here are more ways to train your brain to crave learning.
2. Stay Updated
Be it technical or general news, try to be updated on current developments. Stay on top of the news as it can be fodder for all your conversations and could play a vital role in widening your network. Keep an eye on the latest trends in your field of work. You never know when something new will pop up and become the next big thing.
3. Don’t Stop Developing Your Skills
Make it your goal to update your resume with new skills now and then. Acquired skills and knowledge can help you have an edge in your career. With job requirements changing every day, learn to be eager to learn to stay ahead.
4. Look for Challenges
The best way to learn something new is to start doing something new. Don’t put off your personal or professional projects when you can do them now. Challenge yourself continuously and look for ways that can help you evolve your career. Gain expertise in what you want to master. Taking up difficult tasks can unleash your capabilities and help you discover your strengths and weaknesses.
5. Learn Lateral Thinking
Thinking outside the box lets you look for answers that could lead to innovation and improved solutions. You never know when a single thought could prove to be a seed for something huge. Don’t restrict yourself to conventional methods when it comes to learning and developing your skills. Find out what works for you and apply it to your life.
6. Be Open to New Experiences
When you are offered something new at work, try to accommodate it. If it’s a new task with an unfamiliar technology, don’t hesitate to take it up. If it is something that you have not tried before, accept the challenge. Trying out new things can be a great way to have new learning experiences. Get over the fear of failure if you want to achieve true success.
7. Start to Be Interesting
Being genuinely interested in something makes you interesting as well. It also makes you endearing to the people who are willing to share the knowledge. By asking the right questions to satiate your curiosity, you can show your passion for learning and start up conversations with people of higher authority with confidence. Your strong sense of curiosity shows you as you truly are. Your ventures get the extra appeal from your mentors or leaders when it shows its ability to continuously evolve.
8. Gain Initial Knowledge
While it is quite common to be curious about something you don’t know, what keeps you more curious is when you start learning it. Having an initial knowledge of any subject will let your curiosity flow in the right direction and help you become eager to learn. You will know what questions you need answered, and this also makes way for focused learning.
9. Ask Questions
Put yourself in a place where it is easy for you to ask questions. An environment that is welcoming of curiosity is a great one for intelligent minds to thrive. Remove any barrier that could stop you from being curious.
10. Surround Yourself with the Right People
You are an approximation of the people you spend the most time with. It is inevitable that your close circle has a definite influence on your behavior and life path. Hence, it’s important to collect wisdom from those who are around you, and by surrounding yourself with the right people, you can stay curious and keep evolving.
Here are some examples of the people to surround yourself with:
Having these three kinds of people in your circle helps you have open-minded individuals who can share their knowledge and experiences you need to keep pursuing your goals.
11. Find More Meaning to Life
Not being curious can make your life monotonous and boring, especially when you aren’t eager to learn. When you have the drive to find meaning in all things around you, you become naturally curious. A curious mind is more satisfied as it knows there is more to life than existing. You will keep finding new ways to enjoy and experience life. Never settle, and keep expecting bigger things from life.
12. Take Action to Stay Motivated
Set a goal and be motivated to commit to accomplishing it. You can draw up work schedules or learning schedules to keep you on track. The sense of pride and satisfaction you get from accomplishing something adds all the flavor you look for in life. Don’t give up on yourself and stay motivated to keep tasting the sense of accomplishment. The more driven and motivated you are, the more naturally curious you will be.
13. Get Better at What Makes You Happy
A core need for a healthy mind is confidence and self-efficacy. This comes from your conviction on your abilities. When you learn outside of your own interests, it shows you new ways to get better at something and helps increase your confidence and self-esteem. Your achievements and accomplishments cement this feeling.
14. Initiative: Learning Ability
Initiative is a self-management skill, and self-management is one of five key life and work skills for Young Professionals. When you use your initiative, you do things without being asked, solve problems that others may not have noticed needed solving, and go out of your way to continue learning and growing.
15. Going Extra Miles
Learning needs analysis, the 5 steps
1) Determine the Organisation’s Objectives
First and foremost, you need to come to grips with the company or organisational objectives. The objectives are what will allow you to understand what the desired level of performance is. For example, if one of the objectives is to increase sales figures, you can review the performance of the sales team. What are their current figures, in comparison to the figures that need to be reached? After acknowledging the objectives, it then becomes possible to pinpoint what needs to be done in order for those goals to achieved, before eventually addressing the team members whose performances need to be further investigated.
2) Identify What Training is Required
In order for a learning needs analysis to be a success, it is important to identify exactly who requires training and what training they need. It is futile to train the sales team to improve their marketing skills, for example, if those skills are not necessary for them to meet their sales targets. In this case, the sales team might need extra customer service training or training to improve their sales techniques. Additionally, different members of the team will have different needs. For example, some team members might only need a refresher of the required skills whereas others might need training from scratch. In order for these differences to be fully understood, further research needs to be carried out.
3) Research and Investigate
Once the objectives have been determined and the areas that need improvement have been identified, the research and assessment process can begin. There are several different ways in which team member performance can be assessed and usually, multiple methods are used within a learning needs analysis. For example, there are qualitative research methods such as interviews, focus groups and observations as well as quantitative methods like surveys and questionnaires.
An example of a simple way to collect data on the team would be through individual interviews with all staff ranging from senior members to those in junior and entry-level positions. Interviews allow you to get an understanding of how the team feels about their own performance and the issues that they may be experiencing. There are instances where a lack of training is not the root cause of poor performance. A lack of motivation or an inadequate workspace environment, for instance, could be factors that have not been taken into account.
Once interviews have been undertaken, conducting a task analysis is a necessary next step. Using the example of increasing sales, observing the sales team is a useful way to witness team performance and how they execute tasks. Observation also enables you to compare high-performance employees with under-performing employees to identify any differences in their knowledge or task execution.
4) Understand the Causes of Performance Gaps
Once the research and assessment process has been completed and the current level of performance has been examined against the desired level, the next step in the analysis process is to determine the cause of the performance gap.
From observing and interviewing the team, it should then be simple to determine the cause(s) of the disparity between the current performance and desired performance. The desired performance likely requires a specific set of skills that the team currently has not yet mastered to the standard that is required of them for optimal performance. Therefore, these are the skills that need to be improved in order for the organisation’s objectives to be met. The aim is to recognise the reason for the current level of performance and also to understand if extra training is actually needed for everyone in the team. Understanding the cause of performance gaps is essential, as this will ensure that the content developed for the eLearning training course will be addressing those specific performance issues.
5) Develop a Training Strategy
Having figured out the causes of the skills and performance gap, you can now begin to create a training strategy. When developing a training strategy, the organisational objectives should always be used as a compass, guiding the overall development of the course. The training strategy can then be used to create an eLearning training course for the team. Once the course has been developed, learners should be able to give feedback on how their experience was and their performance should be re-evaluated. You will then be able to generate reports on the effectiveness of the training and if successful, the same training can be used for future employees to ensure that the whole team is operating at the same high standard.
The Four Forms of Motivation are Extrinsic, Identified, Intrinsic, & Introjected
Four different types of motivation drive people through the tough times, make them high performing, and maintain focus on commitments. These are defined as being either from an external or internal source as well as being an action or non-action. The four resulting forms of motivation are extrinsic (external source, action), identified (external source, non-action), intrinsic (internal source, action), and introjected (internal source, non-action). The understanding of these different forms of motivation are important both for the individual and for organizations seeking to promote higher performance or goal achievement.
Extrinsic Motivation
Extrinsic motivation is an external influence that impels people to act in certain ways. External influences may include rewards, promotions, prizes, etc. The problem with extrinsic motivation is that it is prone to expectation. If the reward for doing something is consistently applied, people tend to see it as part of the effort not as a reward. There also is the problem of extrinsic motivation lacking meaningfulness. The effect of motivating someone with rewards does not work always or even consistently over time. If it did, offering bonuses for doing specific jobs would always garner individuals for those jobs and make them perform the jobs properly. Yet, human resources struggle to fill jobs with the most productive, creative people.
Intrinsic Motivation
Intrinsic motivation refers to an internal motivation. This form of motivation is subjective by is believed to occur as a result of actions aligning with values or with pleasure for doing a task. This form of motivation is subjective but can be accessed in a variety of ways such as providing rewards that reflect value such as “employee of the month” or giving out a coffee mug printed with “best salesmen.” The key to understanding this internalized motivation is the relation to a person’s values or desires. People tend to place higher value on the boss saying things like “Good job,” then being given a bonus at the end of the year. However, intrinsic motivation is subjective and can be difficult to balance and utilize depending on the workforce and what appeases the staff.
Introjected Motivation
Introjected motivation is an internalized motivation like intrinsic motivation, but it is a negative form of motivation which results from non-action such as the job being done poorly or not at all and the person feeling guilty. This form of motivation is similar to negative reinforcement but the stimulus for the person’s motivation is internal rather than external. This form of motivation is more common than people might believe and takes many forms such as bosses making comments about the poor job some one performed. These statements are often intended to induce feelings of guilt within people to motivate them to perform better. This form of motivation has many negative aspects as it can anger or confuse people when the person feels constant negative interactions or by not being able to satisfy the themselves or the person causing them to feel negatively.
Identified Motivation
Identified motivation refers to a form of motivation which occurs as understanding or feeling the need to perform or accomplish some tasks but not yet acting on this need. This is powerful form of motivation as it is intrinsic to the person and prepares the person for acting. Often people believe the influencer of behavior such as a reward or punishment is enough to motivate action but more often motivation is a building process. For example, if lung cancer’s risk could motivate a person to quit smoking, many people would easily quit smoking. The need and desire to quit smoking often takes time to actualize; however, this presents the problem of the person dying in the of lung cancer before becoming motivated enough to quit smoking. This form of motivation is powerful because its actualization often creates lasting accomplishment or performance enhancement but it is often impractical to wait for someone to become motivated.
Types of motivational techniques
Here are some techniques you can try in your own workplace:
Ask for employee input
Regularly survey employees for their satisfaction. Conduct anonymous polls to show employees that you care about their opinions and value their input. Ask for suggestions of ways that you can improve working conditions. You also have to take action after getting the results of your poll back. This will show employees that you truly value their opinion, want them to be happy in their positions and will take the steps necessary to make that happen. It will show that you are loyal to them just as you want them to be loyal to you, which will go a long way towards motivating them to perform at their best.
Offer personal enrichment programs
Creating a personal enrichment program could mean that you offer tuition reimbursement or send employees to workshops and seminars where they can improve their skills. This will allow you to more easily promote from within. Look for opportunities to encourage employees to engage in professional development.
Validate good work
Help inspire the efforts of your team members by validating their good work. And show your appreciation in person—compliments or expressions of gratitude usually have the most impact in this fashion. Give specific examples of the things that they did that benefited the team, the organization or you personally. You may also want to consider taking the time to write a handwritten thank-you note on stationery, as this extra effort will have a bigger impact on the recipient.
If you’re speaking to someone in person, you might say something like, “I can tell you worked really hard on that presentation. You did a great job presenting it to the team and the effort you put into it really shows.”
Set intermittent goals
Smaller, measurable goals are a valuable way to stay motivated during work on a project. Whether your team has a system to keep track of completed work or you develop a tracking system of your own, helping your team to set goals that are reasonable and achievable can keep employees motivated and encouraged when they hit notable milestones.
For example, if your team has been tasked with updating the office space of a client, you might encourage them to set smaller goals such as interviewing general contractor candidates, setting up a contract with the one they choose, meeting with architects and making design and finishing choices. Each of these tasks brings your employees closer to the finished office space and it can be rewarding to check these items off the larger list to show measurable progress.
Celebrate milestones and achievements
Particularly if a project has a long-term goal, celebrating smaller milestones along the course of the project can help everyone on the team stay connected to the work and focused on the larger goal. Gratitude and validation are an important part of recognizing those milestones, but tangible rewards can also help. Financial bonuses, a lunch party, time off or a gift certificate for meeting milestones can motivate everyone.
Radiate positivity
Creating a positive culture is a great way to maintain the motivation of your employees. The easiest way to do this is to radiate positivity yourself. Play music, joke around, play games, laugh and just have fun. Research shows that happiness can significantly boost the productivity of your workplace. Enjoy being in the office and consistently showcase high energy.
Create a mentorship program
A good mentor can offer encouragement, advice and understanding about the trials and successes employee’s encounter. If your employees work in a specialized field that friends and family do not understand well, a mentor can be invaluable in helping them sort through concerns and appreciate their successes. Create a mentorship program within your department where you pair more experienced employees with ones who have less experience to guide them along their career journey and offer words of advice and encouragement daily.
Create a comfortable and inspiring workspace
Establish an office environment that is both comfortable and inspirational. Add color to the walls and put-up motivational posters. If your workplace uses cubicles, encourage your employees to decorate their own space in a way they enjoy. Also, encourage your team to keep their workspaces clean and tidy, as clutter can rapidly begin to feel chaotic.
Encourage mindfulness
Encourage employees to de-stress and take breaks during the workday. This could mean a brief walk outside on a nice day or a trip to a nearby coffee shop. You might consider offering yoga or meditation classes over a lunch break or encourage your team to participate in these activities when they feel stuck about the direction of a project or need to take a short break. Sometimes just taking a few moments of quiet can provide the motivation they need to meet tight deadlines.
Share profits to improve performance
By offering a profit-sharing program, employees will recognize that they have a stake in the financial success of the organization. Profit-sharing gives employees a sense of pride in what they have accomplished and a feeling of accomplishment seeing their earnings increase. It can improve performance and reduce turnover as well.
Take benefits to the next level
Employees generally expect standard benefits like paid time off, health insurance and even flexibility. You can motivate employees by taking your benefits to the next level. Add game rooms to help employees de-stress throughout the day, a snack bar to keep energy levels up or even implement a work-from-home day each week or month. Childcare or wellness compensation plans are also a great way to incentivize employees. These kinds of benefits boost health, increase team motivation and encourage people to stay with your company longer.
Offer an incentive program
Create an incentive program that rewards employees for consistently working hard—separate from celebrating milestones or successes. You could implement non-financial incentives like extra vacation days, compressed work weeks or a choice of parking spots. Your incentive program doesn’t even have to be connected to performance. For example, you could use it to encourage your team to participate in training programs—the team members who watch the most videos each week could receive a reward.
One To One Correspondence;
One-to-One correspondence is an important beginning math skill for preschoolers. It can take months, or even an entire year for preschoolers to begin counting objects with one-to-one correspondence. For this reason, it’s important to provide young children with plenty of opportunities to practice counting one-to-one all year long in your preschool classroom.
Understanding
The sum of your knowledge of a certain topic, is your understanding of it. This can change, or deepen as you learn more. But being an understanding person doesn’t take a lot of studying — it takes opening your heart to appreciate what someone else feels or experiences. If someone says to you, “I thought we had an understanding,” you must have done something unexpected. Here, understanding means “an agreement
Intrinsic motivation comes from within, and it’s usually driven by individuals’ needs to do something for themselves. Each person has unique desires: they may want to learn a language or skill, or reach a goal of finishing a 5K in a certain amount of time. Intrinsic motivation is the reason why people climb mountains.
Mobilizing Optimal Performance
Praise and Compliment
Compliment is a polite expression of admiration – for what you are or represent. Praise is a warm expression of approval – we approve a person or something done.
Creativity
Creativity continues to gain importance for employers, and thus for you as an employee to be successful in your career. Everyone is creative to an extent and in their own ways. There are proven ways how you can improve your creativity and creative thinking. Some of them are as simple as walking, picking up a new skill or even doing nothing at all.
Complex problem solving
Complex problem solving is closely related to your creativity as well as analytical and logical thinking. It also remains one of the skills that differentiate humans from robots. You can improve your problem-solving skills through various techniques such as focusing on a solution rather than the problem itself.
Cognitive flexibility
Cognitive flexibility is defined as “a unique cognitive ability that is linked to resilience and the ability to deal with unpredictable change.” Some people are born with better cognitive flexibility than others but do not worry. There are ways how to enhance it for everyone including self-awareness, physical exercise and changing up your routines. Physical exercise makes your body release feel-good chemicals (dopamine, serotonin, opioids, endorphins and endocannabinoids) that enable your body – and brain to learn. Additionally, changing your routines promote metal flexibility as they make your brain adapt quickly to new stimuli.
Emotional intelligence
Emotional intelligence is one’s ability to process emotions (both their own and other’s) and come to sound decisions based on that. It is crucial skill for collaboration and working effectively as a part of a team especially considering customer service among others.
Transdisciplinary skills
Having understanding of an organization from different perspectives and understanding the alignment between different departments is progressively imperative in businesses.
People management
Collaboration and teamwork proved to be essential for driving innovation across organizations. Whether you are an employee or a manager, being a team player and having a strong ability to motivate others is fundamental. Therefore, having strong leadership skills and communication skills is a must have in a modern work environment.
New media and virtual communication
New media and communication channels are constantly emerging in the modern workplace. Over the past years we have seen growth in the number of remote workers, collaborative spaces and use of various communication and productivity apps such as Slack and Trello as well as video conference calls. Therefore, it is essential to be literate with these new tools and how to filter through the information and prioritize what is important.
Cross cultural fluency
The increasingly globalized world requires cross-cultural awareness of individuals in order to communicate effectively as well as being able to work collaboratively. Being aware of your own culture as well as respect the culture of others will help you to communicate effectively and work well as a part of a team.
Negotiation skills
Negotiation skills are imperative not only to sales representatives but to every individual in a business. It is a skill through which a mutual agreement in a realm of professional and personal life is achieved. Strong negotiation skills help you to improve relationships and reach common ground in case of a confrontation. Negotiation is also essential for career progression and achieving your goals. There is really no reason why you should not strike to gain strong negotiation skills.
Decision making skills
Having strong decision-making skills is essential for successful leaders. It is a skill that is quite difficult to develop but by being aware of your actions and actively improve your processes you can achieve significant long-term results.
Individual Cultivation of Skills;
Although our area of expertise lies in web development and design, these five soft skills are a great fit for almost any field. If you make an effort to grasp all of them and incorporate them into the way you work, you should see positive results over the long term.
Learn to Communicate Effectively
It sounds like a cliche, but communication is key in any workplace. Just as with relationships, if there aren’t any effective lines of communication, you’re probably in for a rocky road.
For example, imagine a client wants you to develop an app for them. Your first move as a web developer should be to understand the scope of the project. In other words, ask what kind of features are needed, ascertain the timeframe, and more.
If you can’t communicate effectively with your client, you’ll never have a clear idea of what they’re looking for. This means the app will probably languish in development hell. Plus, if you’re part of a team, you won’t be able to tell them what it is you need from each member.
In our experience, the key to effective communication with clients is to ask as many questions as you need to get a grasp on what it is they need. Sometimes, they might not have fully formed ideas, and it’s your job to figure out what’s possible, what isn’t, and to tell them that in a way they can understand.
Only once you have a clear picture of your client’s needs, you’ll be able to communicate them effectively to your team and new projects off on the right foot.
Be Able to Offer and Receive Constructive Feedback
If you’re not learning from your mistakes as a professional, you probably won’t get far in the tech world. Take web design, for example. A lot of design work can be very subjective given the preference for different styles. If you’re a web designer, therefore, you’ll probably need to deal with a lot of negative client feedback based on some aspect of your deliverables that’s subjectively off the mark.
There are two ways you can take this feedback. You can get defensive about it and ignore what your clients want, or you can be open to it and look for ways to incorporate it into your work.
To be fair, there will be a lot of times when clients or superiors might not make the best design choices. However, you have to learn how to roll along with the punches and take feedback like a champ if you want people to think of you as a team player.
Effective communication also plays a key role here since it can help you give better feedback to team members and even clients. If you’re convincing enough, you might even be able to sway people over to your way of thinking and get away with design choices you wouldn’t otherwise (and the same goes for development work!).
Cultivate Self-Awareness (Particularly of Your Weak Spots)
Everyone has a weak spot in their skillset. It might be you’re a talented WordPress developer, but you don’t really have an eye for design. You could also be a talented web designer, but have little experience when it comes to good User Experience (UX) practices.
However, if you want to grow as a professional, you need to be aware of what your weak points are. That way, you’ll know exactly what areas of your expertise you need to hone. If you’re part of a team, you can also use this knowledge to figure out who can complement your particular skillset.
Take our earlier example of the developer who doesn’t have a good eye for design. In this case, an ideal combination would be to work with a talented web designer who can help them create a stylish front end for the functionality they develop.
On the other hand, if you refuse to take a look at what your weak spots are, you’re going to keep making mistakes that will affect your professional life. This also ties in with being open to accepting feedback. If you can receive feedback without taking it personally, you’ll have a much easier time figuring out what you need to improve about your skillset. After all, other people are often much better when it comes to spotting our weaknesses.
Understand How to Negotiate
A lot of people are scared of negotiating prices and salaries, due to fear of backlash. However, knowing what your value is and being upfront about it can be incredibly helpful throughout your career.
If you’re a freelance web developer, for example, how much money you make will depend on three factors:
There are a lot of talented developers that excel when it comes to this first factor. However, they might not be as good at drumming up new business, and when they do, they undersell themselves.
The same happens if you’re employed at a company. Many will seek to hide information about salaries from you, even in fields like web development. In either case, your ability to drive a bargain without coming across as abrasive can mean the difference between a nice living and a great one.
To be an effective negotiator, you’ll firstly need to know what your value is. Fortunately, web development and design are the kinds of fields you can find a lot of data about online. A quick Google search should enable you to figure out what the median income is for someone with your level of experience in your region. With this information, you can easily calculate what your income should be and use it to back you up in a negotiation.
To be fair, being a good negotiator is about a lot more than just having numbers on your site. You’ll also need to be an effective communicator, which goes to show how closely linked most soft skills are.
Learn to Adapt
If you’re working in a field related to tech, such as web design or development, one of the best indicators of future success is your ability to adapt to changes.
Take the WordPress ecosystem, for example. The launch of the Gutenberg editor is imminent, and there’s still fierce debate as to its inherent value. As a WordPress developer, this means your workflow is probably going to change drastically within the next year.
Facilitating Active Involvement
Encourage everyone to actively listen to others as well as participate in discussions. Manage group dynamics. Recognize the need for breaks. Create engaging options for virtual participation (via conference calls or webinars) should illness or other issues prevent in-person attendance.
Trust in the Working Hands.
Your ability to motivate your employees is built entirely on trust. Your employees must believe in you and be confident in your decisions so they can do their best work. By creating an environment of trust in the workplace, you make it more likely that employees will be committed to reaching their peak potential.
There are simple ways of building trust like doing what you say you will do, but you’ll also find a range of more detailed tactics to improve their faith in you. An employee’s trust in their superior greatly influences their perception of the company. If there is a disconnect between what you do and say, your employees will not be as engaged in their work.
Trust is important because your success or failure is often based on your relationships. Every professional relationship should be built on a foundation of trust. For you to agree on a solution or reach a compromise, this confidence will be a key factor.
When you have trust in the workplace, you improve morale among your employees and team members. You also reduce the amount of time it takes to solve problems and discuss issues during meetings. As a result, you can work effectively as a team and boost your team’s productivity.
Trust is built from the top, down. For your employees to be committed to doing their best work, they have to trust in you. By adopting the following twelve techniques, you can quickly build trust and inspire your team to put forth their best work.
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