What rewards do you use to motivate your team? (118-3)

Effective leaders use rewards to bolster motivation and performance. Read Nehemiah 3:1-32.

Rebuilding the walls around the city of Jerusalem was a daunting task. There was over a mile of wall to be built and some of the foundation stones were very large. The Babylonian army had torn down the walls creating tangled and twisted piles of rubble that needed to be unraveled before those stones could be re-used in the wall. There were steep hills on the eastern side of Jerusalem and many of the stones had tumbled into valleys making retrieving the stones for the wall difficult. The people had little or no specialized equipment to lift the stones and the people living in the city were not expert in construction.

It was one thing for Nehemiah to convince the people the “wall project” was of God, worthy and needed for their safety but keeping the people motivated for the task once they got into it and saw the difficulties would require exceptional leadership. By assigning each group to reinforce the wall in the area in which they lived, Nehemiah provided built-in motivation for the people to do their work with quality and diligence. He tapped into their self-motivation and their reward was that whatever portion of the wall they completed not only helped the city but directly affected their own family’s security.

The Biblical portrait of God in both testaments consistently presents God as the lover of our soul who delights in rewarding us with His joy. Effective leaders understand the human need for reward. A reward can be as simple and effective as regular encouragement or as extensive and long range as a profit sharing program. Wise leaders know how each member of their team responds to various kinds of rewards and finds ways to reward both the team and the individual.

What rewards have you received in the past for a job well done? How did that make you feel? What rewards do you presently use to encourage those on your team?