They Need to Want

Anyone in sales will tell you: People buy what they want, not what they need.

This is true on your plant floor as well. Your team is motivated by their wants, not necessarily your needs. They are not even motivated by their own needs. To be successful, in sales or management, you need to convert needs to wants. Once someone wants something, they will do anything to make it happen.

Needs are based on logic and reasoning. Consider a machine on your hypothetical line. There may be a number of good reasons why it needs to be replaced. It might be at the end of its useful life. It may cause excessive downtime. It may not be able to run potential new products. It may be any number of reasons.

If there is no want (only need), it will be possible to find a dozen other reasons not to replace the machine. Wants are based on emotions, not logic. The hypothetical machine above may be perfectly fine and in no need of replacement on any logical basis. If the plant manager decides they want to replace it, it won’t matter whether it needs to be replaced or not. A new machine will be purchased, assuming they can finagle the money somehow.

The folks on the floor are no different. They are motivated by wants rather than needs. These wants may be negative. They want not to get yelled at or fired, for example. When they are motivated by negative wants, they will tend to do the minimum required to prevent them. This will keep the plant running but perhaps not as efficiently as it should. Even small efficiency losses are expensive. Each 2% loss costs a week of annual production.

The wise plant or department manager is going to look for ways to use positive motivation. When people want to do better, they will. Some of this may be addressed in hiring but for the most part people want to do better tomorrow than they did yesterday. Give them the tools and encouragement and they will.