If you’re a typical high achiever, you can often be dissatisfied with the results that you are getting. That same drive to achieve tends to give you a feeling that you are accomplishing enough.
Do an honest assessment regarding your personal output. It is very well may be good enough. If your empirical analysis leads you to believe that you could do better, there are only a few things you can do about it.
- Try harder. The problem with the “Try Harder Plan” is that it almost never works because most of us are already trying hard. If you can look yourself in the eye and say, “Stop being so lazy,” then perhaps the Try Harder Plan could work for you. However, for 90% of people, the Try Harder Plan fails miserably.
- Try different. Sometimes, we just aren’t motivated to do the things we know need to be done because the things that need to be done don’t motivate us. Classic motivation theory requires all three legs of the stool to be in place before we can be motivated. Leg #1 is, do we value the reward? Most of the time, as salespeople, we do value the reward which is typically more money.
However, I see many spiff programs that don’t work because the prices are valued by some or all of the sales team. The second leg of the stool involves believing you can do everything necessary to achieve the goal. For instance, if I say I will give you $1 million to jump over a house, you would most likely want the $1 million, but you would know that physical limitations prohibit you from jumping over the house like a high jumper. The last leg of the motivation stool is usually where the stool tips over. This leg of motivation requires effort-reward linkage. In the movie Christmas Vacation, the grandson is offered a quarter to rub his grandmother’s bunions. Not surprisingly, he says no. When we don’t see the work as being worth the reward, we say no to motivation. The example above is pretty straightforward. It gets trickier when we can’t see the reality of the reward. For instance, many commission plans offer large incentives when you get to the top of the pay scale, and most salespeople are optimistic, so they think they can reach the top of that scale.
However, if you haven’t been in the top 10% for the last five years, do you believe in your heart of hearts that this is the year that you get that big reward? There’s a difference between optimism and believing in your heart of hearts something is going to happen. You can have part A, but if you don’t have part B, you will have motivation.
Going about work differently or simply doing different work could help you get better results. Rather than blame yourself for not working hard enough, look at the circumstances and see if they are more of the problem than your work ethic.
- Try smarter. We’ve all heard the phrase “work smarter, not harder,” but by this point in your career, I’m guessing you’re already working fairly smart. That doesn’t mean there’s no room to improve, and if you’re falling short of your goals, it certainly pays to analyze how you could work smarter.
- Add accountability to the mix. Accountability gets a bad name because it feels like a beat down too many people. That’s negative accountability… Do it or else! There’s not much need for that kind of accountability in business unless the building is on fire.
Because accountability has such a bad rap, many sales people avoid it like the plague, even though it could make them more money.
Positive accountability, on the other hand, offers the same benefits as traditional or negative accountability without the beat down. Think of traditional accountability as top-down, authoritarian accountability, whereas positive accountability is a collaboration between partners to find creative and fun ways to accomplish goals.
If you are looking for ways to increase your personal or corporate output, accountability, and performance coaching can go a long way to reaching previously unattainable goals.
Take our five-minute quiz to see if you could use more accountability.