Top Tips on Leadership – Motivating others
Abraham MaslowYou can’t be a leader without followers so you have to understand how to motivate people to buy into your agenda. Motivation is what makes employees act in certain ways so how can you achieve this? Understanding people’s motives – their reasons for doing something is the key to becoming a good leader.
One of the main theories relating to motivation is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. People have needs. A need is a lack of something- something we want. This produces the drive and desire which motivates us to satisfy that need. Satisfying this need, or getting the thing we want or lack is the goal. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a theory in psychology proposed by the American psychologist Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation”. This is a theory of psychological health predicated on fulfilling innate human needs in priority, culminating in self-actualization.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Maslow’s theory of motivation is called the “hierarchy of needs”. Maslow believes that people have five main needs in the following order of importance:-
Physiological Needs -
i) the need to eat
ii) the need to drink
iii) the need to work
iv) the need to sleep
v) the need to reproduce
MaslowSafety Needs -
i) the need for shelter
ii) the need to fell secure
Belonging Needs -
i) the need to feel part of a group
ii) the need for acceptance
Self-Esteem Needs -
i) the need to feel good about themselves
ii) the need to be recognised for their achievement
Self-Realisation Needs –
i) the need for personal fulfilment
ii) the need to grow and develop
Maslow believes that people would not move on down this list to be motivated by the next set of needs until the previous set(s) had been satisfied. here’s a short video which illustrates Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs by drawing on clips from the