Motivation Plan

Motivational Plan

Deric Little

LDR/531

March 10, 2014

Anita Orozco

Understanding different behavioral traits and knowing how to motivate employees are two very important activities that leaders must have a strong grasp of when leading others, especially in today’s rapidly growing technological and current globalization age. For any company to retain the best possible employee’s they can, the company should be able to transform these employees into valuable assets to the company. Many companies are now realizing the importance understanding employee behaviors and ways to motivate employees to keep them happy in their jobs. There seems to be a strong connection between behavioral styles and employee motivation. An employee’s motivation will show itself through the employee’s behaviors and how well they perform for the company.  There are four distinct personality types that leaders will have to deal with, and these leaders will have to find ways to motivate these different styles.

This is why there have been various tools and theories developed to understand behaviors and ways to create motivation. These theories are quite important to the development of creating an effective motivation plan for employee’s that will be very useful in ensuring all employees are effectively and efficiently motivated. Companies that provide good motivation are companies that have “interesting jobs that provide training, variety, independence, and control satisfy most employees”, (Robbins & Judge, 2013).

Motivational plan

A motivational plan for a company would be one that would outline the various strategies that would be utilized to motivate employees with different behavioral styles in an information technology company. Before a motivational plan can be created, we must first know what the different behavior types of employees there are by utilizing the DISC Platinum Rule Behavioral Style Assessment. In using the DISC Platinum Rule Behavioral Style Assessment, a plan will be created to help employees with different behavioral styles perform their jobs with satisfaction. This motivational plan will be formulated and structured to fit each individual employee’s behavioral styles to increase employee effectiveness and job satisfaction.

Disc Assessment Analysis

        A DISC assessment is a tool that will give leaders the characteristics of the four behavioral styles so that the leader can understand each style and use the DISC tool to create more effective employee interaction. The four basic behavioral styles depicted from a DISC assessment are the Dominance style (D), Interactive style (I), Cautious style (C), and Steadiness (S) style. An individual who has the dominant behavior style, is a person who is fast paced, who seeks productivity, are very poor listeners, has to be in control, and are quite efficient when performing their work. An individual who is of the interactive style is a person that gives their attention to other people. These types are into relationship building instead of work tasks and they pay close attention to detail when they do perform work. The cautious style individual is a person that is very methodical when they are working, very detail oriented, work at slower paces, are more formal, and are problem solvers. Finally, the individual that displays the steadiness style is a warm type of person who gives priority to a relationship, has effective listening skills, very supportive and loves to work in teams. This assessment is very useful to understand behavior styles in order to develop an effective employee motivation plans.

Mentor’s Department

My mentor is a software development manager whom managed a team of software developers and support specialists in providing on-site support to the health care industry for IBM WebSphere products support.  His team is primarily responsible for the integration of WebSphere Application Server and Process Server used in the health care industry.  These were companies such as Kaiser, Blue Cross and others.  His team Interacted on an on-going basis with IBM level 3 supports for critical issues.

In forming the plan for my mentor’s department, the various key behavior style characteristics will be considered to help with motivating the team’s performance and to find ways at improving it. For my mentor’s department, they are developing a variety of methods to understanding behaviors of their employees. The directness and openness level of the department’s employees will be changed to a much better one because each individual would be able to develop their own adaptability to situations.

 To increase directness for the employees, the motivational plan will be geared at increasing those individuals of the cautious style to speak up more, to speak a little faster, to use more direct statements instead of beating around the bush, to use a very confident voice when speaking and make challenges to things they question when it is appropriate to do so. For the dominant style, the plan will be have them learn to slow down, to let others help, to be more patient and to not become disgruntled when things are not going their way. As for the interactive style, the plan will help them to do more work instead of trying to please others and trying to be everyone’s friend. To increase the openness of employees, this will be done through increasing the employee’s adaptability through the sharing of their feelings, using a more friendly tone when speaking, communicate more often, and to take the time to go out and develop workplace relationships.