A Humanistic Approach to Team Member Motivation
Powerful Strategies to Motivate Your Team Members

The enthusiasm team members exude while performing their duties is directly proportional to how enthusiastic they are about their job. Satisfying team member needs leads to job satisfaction. For team members to provide great service to patients, they must feel really great about their work and career. It is not enough for them to feel happy at work, they need to be ecstatic. They must have the urge to jump out of bed Monday mornings and yell "Thank god it’s Monday. I’m going to work!"

With that goal in mind, here are strategies to inspire team members. Encourage team members to:

• Evaluate how their job supports their emotional needs (receive attention, respect, and praise; feel important, loved, and secure; be right, a leader, and creative).
• Decide which aspects of their job they love. While performing the duties they hate, ask them about the positive feelings they experience while doing the duties they love.
• Think of themselves as the CEO of YOU Inc., even though they work for someone else. Develop the mindset that everything they do in their job is to promote THEMSELVES to others.
• Perform their job in such a way that customers/patients return to the business/practice just because of them.
• Take on the most menial projects to accentuate their importance to you and co-team members. All team members, including the dentist, should inspect the office (bathrooms) throughout the day for cleanliness.
• Learn new skills. Not only does it make them more productive and valuable but also makes work more interesting.
• Talk with someone they admire in their field once a month.
• Celebrate their successes. Learn from their failures.
• Decide where they want to be in five years and use their job as a means to achieve that goal.

How does the dentist encourage them to think this way? The dentist walks the talk. The dentist doesn’t tell them to think this way, he/she sets the example. If the dentist wants team members to be inspired about their jobs, the dentist must be inspired by their job.

After working in a job or career for 15, 20, 30 years, it is easy for it to become mundane and lose its initial attraction. The dentist needs to reinvent their career if they want to continue to succeed. As the "boss," the dentist has to show the same enthusiasm for their job as they would like the team members to show for their jobs. If the dentist feels less enthusiastic about getting out of bed Monday mornings than they used to, they should follow the above strategies themselves to rekindle their enthusiasm.