The goals of any company or of any division within a company are to improve productivity, improve profits, increase employee retention, and enhance customer service.  All of these goals can be accomplished by motivating each of your employees to achieve their peak performance.  Although your team may be filled with high performers, you have an obligation to make sure you are getting the absolute best from each of your employees. 

Differences in employee capabilities

It is true that each employee will have a different skill set and different ability level.  As a leader, it is important that you capitalize on each person's strengths and don't waste time trying to change their weaknesses.  Rest assured, you will likely have enough variety among your employees that what one person can't do, another will be able to.

This is not to say you should have different standards for your various employees.  You need to expect a high level of performance from each employee, but your job is to make sure that each employee is in a position to best use his or her own particular skill set.  When each employee is properly matched to a job, you can have consistently high expectations for the entire group.

It is also important to recognize that although you have high expectations for each employee, you will not likely treat all of them the same way.  Think about the different ways in which you treat your own children.  You may have one child who is easily controlled by "the look", one who requires a specific consequence (such as time out or writing sentences) tied to misbehavior, and one who learns everything the hard way.

Differences in motivating factors

Similarly, your employees will each have unique needs, styles, and motivating factors.  Some may be motivated primarily by money, although this is rare.  While everyone wants to make a living wage, most people will not increase their productivity solely for the promise of more money.  Others may place a high priority on professional development.  Still others seek to please you, the boss.  Some people are happy with repetitious jobs that offer the comfort of doing the same task day in and day out.  Others require the mental stimulation of rotating tasks on a daily or even hourly basis.

Learning what motivates each of your employees will place you much further along the path to getting the most from them.  It does no good to offer a chance at professional development to someone who wants only more money, or to people who have no plans for advancement because they are perfectly happy doing the same thing every day for the rest of their working lives.

In Part II of this series, we'll discuss how to assess the motivating factors that are most likely to work with each employee.