Motivating Your Team Creates a
Healthier Work Environment
I
can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this question over the last decade or so, “Hey, DJ can you come motivate my people?” Every year without question, I would receive a similar call from one dealer who owned 4 different car dealerships. His dealerships were doing okay but his people needed periodic motivation. Without question, he would let it go on until almost too late to correct it. This dealer would beat up his people, never say a kind word to any of them, but needed me to put motivational band aids on their wounds. Since he’s passed on now, let me tell you exactly what he was like. According to this man, no one that worked for him had a brain. They were all stupid. As he said, many times to me, “You can’t fix stupid.” Unfortunately, he never told anyone who worked for him thank you or that they did a good job not even if they did something right or gave a customer good service. NEVER! Until I got there, they never celebrated a birthday of a team member either. After I was hired to help motivate his team, there was a Christmas tree in every store. They started participating in
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TOW PROFESSIONAL | Volume 11 • Issue 1
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www.towprofessional.com
the Marines Toys for Tots campaign and gave food to the soup kitchen located near each store. When an employee had a birthday, there was a birthday cake in the break room that day for everyone’s enjoyment. Soon, we started a gift exchange program with fellow team members. What I really liked was if an employee did a good job, he or she would receive dinner for two at a local restaurant. From then on, all his employees worked hard to earn that reward. In connection with that reward, we also started an “HATTABOY” program where other employees would recognize someone going out of their way to help a customer. With the way culture is now, they’ve probably changed that program’s original name to something else by now. As the years progressed, the bad and negative change occurred, creating something healthy and positive, and their motivation went from bad to good. Change didn’t happen overnight, but it certainly was unmistakable. Saying “thank you” isn’t hard to do; it takes only a second to recognize someone for a job well-done, but for some
