Explain the importance of a leader being able to motivate teams

Empowerment - Do not micromanage and don't punish for mistakes. By ensuring you have aligned objectives with clear expectations, and encourage open communication within the team, you should then trust your team to come up with the best ways to achieve them and with the open communication in place, should they experience challenges then they are comfortable coming to you. Mistakes should be treated as a key to learn valuable lessons and encourage them to try again. Also by showing appreciation and confidence in each team member, the team will be motivated and take responsibility for their actions which can have a positive effect on self-esteem, job satisfaction and overall commitment to the organisation.

Employees that are not being stimulated and developing in their role can be demotivated, when members of teams are constantly monitored and are not empowered to make decisions, they will not take responsibility for their own work and will display only minimal effort which further inhibits grow this and has a negative effect on their confidence levels too.

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I always represent the team as 'we' even when one individual may have made the mistake. I learned this trait from my previous manager. I made a huge mistake while working on a project, which had a huge financial repercussion this could have resulted in the termination of my employment but manager acknowledged the mistake and represented the team as 'we' thus protecting my identity. As a team this experience just made us more responsible, confident and continued to empower us to take risks within reason to allow us to try out new ideas.

Reward and recognition - One of the effective ways of inspiring the team is by recognising their efforts and celebrating their successes. Acknowledging by saying a simple 'thank you', or 'well done' can boost motivation as it reassures the team that their efforts have not gone unnoticed. This can also be achieved by simple non-expensive gestures such as organising drinks and nibbles for larger projects or some time off in lieu, extra day holiday entitlement etc. You need to be specific when giving praise and positive feedback as this emphasis on the expectancy levels of achievement. Also to keep motivation going on larger projects, acknowledge interim successes. Also share your team's success with the wider organisation, this could be in the next leadership meeting, company newsletter, on the intranet etc.

On the other hand when a leader fails to reward and recognise efforts for both individuals and teams for their work, they quickly start to feel that no one cares and could result in not putting in the extra effort, and also doesn't take long to bring the team morale low too.

We have just completed a major migration where multiple teams were involved. At every interim success the head of the department brought in pizzas to celebrate. This kept the team motivated and knew that their efforts were being acknowledged. Once the project completed successfully the company organised a night out to celebrate where the catered for the drinks and food. By doing this it not only brought people together but also increased team morale.

Leading by example - Be a role model to your team, display behaviours you want them to display. By being positive and upbeat you can help energise your team and encourage them to adopt a similar mind set. You can demonstrate these behaviours in many ways, the way you respond to challenges, problems and generally how you manage your workloads. As a leader the way you approach your role can also have an impact on your team members' motivation. Giving your 100% and going above and beyond, making time for your team members can have a positive rippling effect.

Whereas it has the complete negative effect when you do the opposite by preaching and harping on people all day long about the behaviour you want to see has a tiny fraction of the impact you achieve by demonstrating that behaviour yourself.

Quite a few examples that I could use here but I will use the example where I take the initiative to whomever to get to the root cause problem in order to get it resolved. In a support environment you often have to work with different teams, we are an infrastructure team and look after Unix and Linux operating systems which means that when there is an issue it could be anywhere at the networking stack or application etc. so when an incident ticket comes to our team the common theme I used to hear in the team was "why has this come to us?, there just isn't enough information etc.". As the team begun to see how I tackled the situation they soon got into the same habit of taking the initiative to talk to the relevant teams to the root problem, this solved the issue a lot quicker as there was less procrastination resulting in meeting service level agreements in a timely manner.

Therefore in conclusion, we can see that motivation not only benefits the organisation but also the individual, motivation is important to an individual as it will help them achieve personal goals, will have job satisfaction, help in self-development of individual and always gain by working in a dynamic team. Similarly, motivation is important to a business as, the more motivated the employees are, the more empowered the team is, the more contributions from the team work and individual the more profitable and successful is the business.