Moves when moved, otherwise he won’t

What percentage of the employees need direct control and how many don’t? The answer is surprising: more are able to act by themselves than we would think.

A recurring dilemma of practising managers is that they can only ensure smooth workflow by being constantly present. As if they should keep their employees on the move at each and every moment. This pressure is very tiring; often it becomes the primary cause of manager burnout. It should not, however, necessarily be like that.

If we take under scrutiny the whole spectrum of personality profiles, only 13% of them are incapable of self-motivation. For all the other characters it’s not a problem. Then why do we see so many passive people and why do we so frequently go back to the “direct control” motivator?

We should go back for the answer in time, to the area of inappropriately selected incentives.

When we repeatedly approach someone in the wrong way, they will become demotivated and they will slam on the brakes. After that they will only get going if we force them to do so by our personal presence as leaders - or not even then.

For instance, such a case of demotivation may occur when we try to motivate a creative innovator with “modeling” or an analytical personality with “monitoring”, etc. Besides these two situations we can choose at least a hundred types of bad combinations, unless we prepare a personality-based motivation preference matrix in advance.

“Direct control “ as a motivator can be inappropriately chosen in many cases as well. Among all personality profiles only 8% would respond to this with an improved performance. Many would take it neutrally and even more would experience it as negative if someone accentuates their supervising intentions by being constantly around.

“Direct control”, as a Hungarian specificity, should be used very carefully. 69 % of Hungarian employees (statistics from 2010) switch to hidden or overt resistance if we try to force them to work with “direct control”. They would rather earn less or live worse but they would not give up their self-esteem.