“The glory is being happy. The glory is not winning here or winning there. The glory is enjoying practicing, enjoy every day, enjoying to work hard, trying to be a better player than before.”                    -Rafael Nadal

WHAT MAKES YOU TICK?

For extra performance, you need extra state of mind! And it is a leader’s job to generate and enable this state of mind to develop – the words of Dr Attila Baranyai, senior trainer and Chief Learning Officer at Develor, the opening sentence at a recent seminar organized by HVG business weekly magazine in Budapest, Hungary.

But what inspires us to get into this extra state of mind? Attila, who has been researching organization effectiveness for more than a decade emphasized that a leader’s most important job is to help their team gain a sense of accomplishment from work, a sense of self-gratification; that is the biggest motivator. Leaders have a great   responsibility to help their team develop, to help them to realise their true potential and most importantly how to release it, encouraging them to perform to the highest of their abilities and empowering them to contribute in the highest possible way.

How do you motivate your employees to put in the extra effort and to reach their peak performance?  – this was the focus of the seminar, specifically exploring the leadership tools to help motivate, engage and retain highly qualified generation Y potentials and professionals. To generate wide range of solutions for these challenges, the audience were invited to work out a leadership tool-set in small groups brainstorming and sharing useful leadership practices and ideas – with the help of the introduced framework, the Employee Satisfaction and Engagement matrix. With this high level of interaction, we all gained new ideas and received highly valuable and beneficial tools and practices to employ, spanning from various fields and diverse backgrounds.

The presenter also highlighted how important it is to establish and maintain an environment that enables and encourages workers to achieve their objectives, exceed their own perceived performance limits and work to their greatest potential. High emotional intelligence is a must with generation Y to help create and nurture this empowering and inspiring work environment. The keynote speaker gave brilliant ideas on how to create this motivating and engaging environment that is, the precondition to long-term peak performance;

• e.g. how to increase the energy level of the employees to boost their creativity,
• how to set exciting task-goals that helps them grow and feel the development instead of result based goals,
• how to build on their strengths and on what they are good at
• and how to give constructive feedback that creates positive change allowing them to better get into the flow of work.

At the end of the seminar we all walked away with a big set of tools and a lot bigger and better idea of how to progress as a leader and a basis on which to build upon.