Mark Oliver, Author at

It’s Impossible To Motivate Unmotivated Staff

December 22, 2023December 29, 2023 Mark Oliver

Reading Time: 4 minutes It can certainly be hard to motivate people and strictly speaking it is true we cannot make others motivated. Command-and-control managers often get frustrated because they believe that motivating employees is about their authority and tangible things such as money. Exerting authority is a common management approach but that is different to leadership. You can compel people to do what you want, but that’s not leadership, and it tends to be a good way to turn engaged staff into disengaged staff. According to a 2023 Gallup survey, some 77% of…

Making Your Most Important Investment Work

November 30, 2023 Mark Oliver

Reading Time: 3 minutes To get the best performance from your employees, it is critical that you provide structures and systems (including pay systems) that motivate them. To understand and predict what these are, you need a very good model or framework describing human motivation. Only when you have achieved this, it is worth investing time and money in training your employees. If you do it the other way around, not only may your employees not use the new skills acquired in their training but they are more likely to leave the organisation. This…

Human Intelligence & the IQ Myth

August 31, 2023 Mark Oliver

Reading Time: 3 minutes Have you ever wondered about the level of human intelligence as you look around you? As a leader, I’m sure you’ve had that moment where you’ve looked at one of your staff members and wondered: “how can they be so unintelligent?” It is easy to think and is of course it is pretty judgmental. There is the “IQ myth” that thinks intelligence is all about IQ. But that is only 25% of the picture and is why we can all be ‘unintelligent’ in some areas and ‘highly intelligent’ in others.…