Regrettably, I don’t know of a great book (although there possibly is) that explains exactly how to get people to do what you want them to do time-after-time-after-time. Despite that McDonalds, and a couple of other shining examples, manage to get 16 year olds to do it.

So how is it that they can, I ask myself?

And the answer is that they are very effective in four areas— systems, training, measurement and reward.

Systems are scripts and checklists and they must be written down to ensure that there can never be any doubt as to what people should do. All too often, in smaller businesses, we tend to “show and tell” and after a few repeat performances what the team is doing varies hugely from what they were originally shown and told.

The best investment in profitability most businesses can make is frequent, comprehensive training. Regrettably, too often the training is left to the boss who is both busy and not particularly good at it so that the quality of training and thus the result is never what it should be.

Training provided by suppliers is generally product training rather than skills training so it rarely achieves much. Many external trainers are academics in disguise who know the theory but have never done it in practice.

The best way to increase the skills level of your team, and their adherence to your requirements, is to make sure that your team meetings are the place where this occurs. If you’d like some information on running great team meetings you’ll find it here.

Its incredible how often people aim at nothing and hit it with amazing accuracy! It means that there must be measurement of team members against known goals, standards, key performance indicators or whatever. Unless their performance is regularly measured and evaluated there is no reason for them to toe the line. It’s simply a matter of what gets measured gets done… if they know its going to be measured then they do it.

Finally, quite simply when it comes to reward, “what gets rewarded gets repeated” is an adage of mine and it works with team members just as well as it works with Sharnie my dog. When Sharnie does what I want her to do I reward her and I keep on rewarding her whenever she reproduces the desired behaviour so that it soon becomes a habit.

The question on their minds of our team members when we ask them to change the way they do things, is “Why should I do this, what’s in it for me?” And once they’ve been in the job for a while and are seemingly doing it to the boss’s expectations, they are rarely prepared to do more unless they can see a reason or reward to do so.

Those reasons or rewards do not necessarily need to be monetary— they can be recognition, responsibility, authority or any of the other satisfiers on Mazlow’s hierarchy of human needs.