Understanding and managing people and their motivations

The one common, underlying aspect to all areas of business and life itself is people. Whether we are trying to market, sell, run a business, or handle employees, we need to understand people.

How often have you produced a wonderful ad only to be disappointed in its results, or thought you had a great sales meeting only to discover that your prospect chose someone else? Most of us have had such experiences.

Most business owners and managers have also experienced the many frustrations that seem to be a commonplace occurrence when dealing with employees. These issues span the realm of hiring, training, and employee production. Coupled with the usual employee issues is a further complication of lack of ethics in the workplace.

The question then is what can be done to better understand people and their motivations. By really understanding people, we will be able to better market and sell our products, and we will be better able to be in control of our employees.

Just as sports teams keep both general and specific stats, you can develop both general and specific statistics for your team.  These would include the team, or business, stats as well as individual stats. Just as coaches use individual player statistics to help improve the performance of the players and ultimately the team, you can establish individual staff performance statistics for members of your team to assist your business in becoming more profitable.