Unto Him (God) ascend all good words, and the righteous deed does He (God) exalt (surah Fatir 35:10 Quran). ¹

It is so important in any environment to know that the spoken language must be motivational to lift up the spirit and to charge the atmosphere with positive energy and to avoid being toxic. It sounds so wonderful when you find your colleagues doing their work from the depth of their hearts and willing to participate more and coming to work with passion, power, smile and trust.

Transparency at work is one of the keys that any leadership should start with because any employee or subordinate will work with peace in mind if they know that there are no hidden agenda or when they are confident enough that rules are clear and fair. Keeping in mind that we remain humans not angels, we cannot be ideal or infallible, we do commit mistakes every some time, this is part of our nature and this is how we learn. We do not talk about whether these mistakes are considered sins or not. We discuss here in general that we do learn from mistakes and this is how we build our experience. It is essential to admit the mistakes and without doing so and realizing that there is a mistake we will not grow with our personality and experience, but only the ego will build up more by time.

People with their nature love to hear good words no matter if it is a compliment, praise or a word of appreciation it will always keep a positive impact. What if this word of appreciation was followed by a reward especially when a real achievement was accomplished, you cannot imagine the traces of influence it would leave behind.

It is not advisable to use the language of threat and intimidation, the language of punishment and suspect, it is not a good approach neither it does speed up the achievements and innovations. It is God who said ‘My Mercy has preceded My Anger’. ² The language of reward before the punishment spreads motivational feeling, we do agree that people should be held accountable this is because accountability does push people to be more careful, responsible and that consequences are always there if x or y job was not performed well, but in the end this must not become the primary and the ultimate goal, it will kill effectiveness and efficiency, it will dry up the general feelings of the team work among the peers.

Disciplinary works out when there is accountability, there are people who are too casual about their life and they will end up a casualty, they are too apathetic and this can be seen from the way how they handle their day to day tasks, poor follow up, weak communication, lack of participation, moody, unreliable who must be always reminded. If the the motivational language and spoken good words did not work out with them, then the following stage is to jump into holding them accountable and this is what we used to say “The last resort is cauterization, which is disliked”.

People may argue here by saying “give me and I will give you” instead of “give him and he will give you”, we do rationalize differently and it does also depend on the environment criticality, there are work environments that do not bear to have faults and there are profitable businesses built in this way, if you do not perform well we will kick you out and will bring somebody else as simple as this. Believe it or not, motivation helps in bringing more profits to the companies if it is used wisely and in balance.

For example, employees at work must feel more engaged, not underappreciated, the presence of incentives do really help in preserving the employees from quitting their jobs and resigning. The balance between work and personal obligations must be considered in any work environment.

There are studies online prove that highly engaged people increases profitability and reduces absenteeism and that they are less likely to resign. People who are prone to stress are less productive, but if they receive more recognition they will work harder and companies will be benefited from this, it will increase profits.

In reality, many cases people do not quit their jobs, but their bosses. In one hand it sounds funny, on the other hand it is so sad to find people stressing out up to this extent. You name it, wellness and health conditions, we want to see people healthy not depressed undergoing medication, in the end people are the core of the society and it has to be healthy.

I do believe that leadership in any company must be educated on motivation strategies and goals and the importance of doing so and the revenue and crops they will gain out of this.

Being in balance is something valuable, not soft nor too strict, depending on the situation controlling the emotions and deploying more wisdom. It is not easy, but with this journey we learn a lot on how to be more patient, wise and seeking to understand then to be understood, listening with an intention to understand not with an intention to talk.

1. Surat Fatir, versr 10, The Holy Quran ↩︎
2. Sahih al-Bukhari 7453 Book 97, Hadith 79 ↩︎