What does the need for competence mean, when talking about motivation?
We continue our series of blog posts about what makes us motivated, and what you as a manager can do to create the right conditions for high motivation in your team. As mentioned in the previous blog posts, we all have three basic psychological needs that we as leaders need to work with to create the right conditions for coworkers to feel and perform well: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
The need for competence means that we want to feel good at what we do, develop, and be challenged. In this blog post, you get concrete tips on leadership behavior that promote the need for competence, and we also give examples on behavior that counteract competence, thereby reducing employee engagement.
What leadership promotes competence?
Leadership that promotes competence means that you as a leader create a feeling in your coworkers that they are good at what they do, that they develop and that they are challenged. Here are some concrete examples of behavior in a leader that promotes competence:
- Set very challenging targets that are realistic but hard to achieve
- Emphasize the small steps of progress
- Give lots of positive feedback: '5 times more love'
- Give developing feedback – show that you want to support and help
- Allow mistakes and learning from these
- Ensure that your staff have knowledge and tools to reach their targets
- Stop talking about talent and talent development, and start talking about training, hard work and effort
- Praise performance, not just results
Behavior that is negative for the need for competence
Here are examples of leadership that is negative for the need for competence, and thereby reducing employee engagement as well as the performance in your team:
- Too much negative feedback and less positive
- The manager does not allow mistakes – you don't dare challenging yourself and take risk
- Too difficult and unrealistic targets
- Too easy targets – no challenge
- Too difficult tasks, requiring skills that you don't have or are able to develop
- Too easy tasks – no challenge: Comfort – Challenging – Panic
