How to Inspire Workers in Tough Times

Jon Katzenbach explains how "master motivators" can help employees stay emotionally connected to their work throughout the recession

Despite living through possibly the worst economic recession since the Great Depression, some offices may still be filled with truly motivated people—energetic, driven, ambitious, hard-working, competitive. These are just the sort of traits needed to turn a company around. But most CEOs these days are struggling to figure out how to deal with downsized workforces populated with employees who suffer from a long list of a very different variety of social characteristics. Among them: dread, apathy, passivity, carelessness, and possibly even resentment.

Jon Katzenbach, CEO of Katzenbach Partners, has built a career out of cracking the code to inspire people. The author of The Discipline of Teams and The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization, Katzenbach argues that the key to encouraging people has more to do with figuring out how to connect them emotionally to their work than throwing money or promotions at them.

Recently, Shell Refining improved the performance of its Port Arthur (Tex.) refinery by following Katzenbach's approach. It empowered top supervisors, called "pride builders" at the company, by asking them for their advice on how to improve the plant's performance as well as how to cultivate more supervisors like them.

So what is Katzenbach's secret? BusinessWeek's Emily Thornton recently talked to Katzenbach about how his philosophy can be applied during this recession. Below are edited excerpts from their conversation.

What do you believe is the best way to motivate people during this recession?

We see the same problems in turnaround situations. That's analogous to what happens during a recession. It's when companies have to restructure and do all sorts of painful things. If you don't also concentrate on the more positive aspects of motivation, you don't get nearly as far in terms of behavior change and performance gains.

Relying on mandating, making tough decisions, and telling people that this is the way life is and you have to get through it, is not the same thing as getting them motivated to do it. The motivation impetus for most employees is at least as much emotional as it is a rational process. So you have to do something to connect with the emotional side of the employee.

How do you suggest managers make positive connections with employees?

It helps if you're adept at using some of the informal aspects of the organization along with the formal. That's counterintuitive to many leaders in tough situations who tend to fall back on the formal elements that they can control. Thus they work down that axis by changing objectives, changing programs, changing incentives, changing structures, redesigning processes.

[Such tactics] may change the cost structure. But the more successful companies in turnaround situations give at least as much attention to getting people to feel good about what they have to do in their daily work, and that's more of an emotional challenge. To address the emotional challenge, you have to actively influence the informal interactions of the organization, rather than sitting back and watching it or even worse, undermining its positive influence. In my mind, managing in this different world will put a premium on actively influencing the informal elements in ways that complement and accelerate the formal efforts.

What do you mean by informal elements?

In every organization, there are communities of common interest that exist. For example, people who smoke gather together wherever they can smoke; people of different gender and ethnic backgrounds tend to form communities. You want to have a sense for what those are, and which of them might be influenced in ways that are helpful in influencing key behaviors .

We find a practical way to do that is to go right down to the front line and find what I call the master motivators who are already recognized for their unique ability to gain the emotional commitment of their people.