Motivated employees are great but inspired employees are even better. You might not have thought much about the difference between motivation and inspiration but it could be well worth a few minutes to do so. For the formal definitions we turn to the dictionary:
inspire – to exert an animating, enlivening, or exalting influence on
motivate – to provide with a motive (something that causes a person to act)

While not exceptionally helpful these definitions do offer some insight into the differences. Inspiration is described as an influence that is “animated, enlivening, or exalting” while motivation is described as just something that causes one to act. Lots of things can cause someone to act including fear, disgust, hatred, love, hunger, etc. Would you rather have an employee who is acting out of fear or because of an exalting influence? I know which one I would prefer.

Before we tackle the question of how to inspire someone, let’s discuss how people try to motivate employees. As a young manager, I was taught that people are motivated by one of five things: achievement, respect, responsibility, advancement, and growth. However this list isn’t at all complete. As we discussed above, people are motivated by lots of other negative things as well as the positive things in this list. More importantly, motivations are short lived. The excitement over a potential pay increase, a better title, or even fear of losing your job can only last so long before we become immune to them. Think of walking into a room and smelling a strong aroma but in a few minutes our olfactory sense becomes accustom to the smell and we stop being aware of it. The same goes for motivations. Inspirations on the other hand are much longer lasting.

When an employee is inspired, they are working for a cause, they believe in the mission, they have a higher calling. The word inspiration from its origin means “breathed upon.” In Greek mythology there are muses responsible for inspiration but there are no such equivalents for motivation. The way we inspire employees is to make them feel part of something that is bigger than themselves. Treat your employees like team members, tell them why the work they do is important, and share with them your passion. Work on inspiring your employees instead of just motivating them and you’ll have better results that last longer.

With the economic downturn in full force, you are probably spending a great deal of time thinking about how to cut cost, reprioritize revenue generating features, or delivering more in 2009 with less resources.  You might think now is not the time to care about “creativity” and “energy” but we think this it is even more important.  Having a team that is fully engaged with all of their creative forces focused on your business is crucial to achieve any of those other objectives.  The way to achieve this is by creating an environment where people know where they stand in terms of performance, get to own deliverables, can openly question decisions or standards, and show each other respect.  

A couple ideas that we have either read about or seen in practice in organizations are team or individual training events, four day work weeks, allocated time to work on personal interests, self selection of features/stories, and mentoring.  Training can take the shape of many different forms including formal classes at universities, external workshops (WARNING: self-promotional plug….such as our Technology Workshop), or internal classes taught to each other by members of the team.  Everyone knows different things, sharing this knowledge is good for both the team as well as the presenter, giving her practice explaining technical items verbally  and ensuring she knows the subject completely.  

Mentoring is another low cost method of helping foster a more open and creative environment.  Pairing junior and senior engineers together provides both parties the opportunity to practice different skills.  Additionally, it helps facilitate what are likely two different groups to begin a dialog.  Mentoring can be extended in many different forms.  Ask the CEO to take a different engineer as a mentee each quarter, meeting with them for lunch or breakfast every second or third week for the quarter.  This is a great way to remind the top executive to appreciate the engineers and gets engineers exposure to the business challenges that the CEO faces daily, a real win-win proposition.

Some of the more radical approaches for developing a creative environment are already well documented by some very popular companies including Google and 37Signals.  If you haven’t read the 37Signals book, we recommend this as a great source of ideas for fostering a creative and unique environment for your team.