Over the past couple of days I've written about Why you need self-motivated people and How to Create Self-Motivated people. Today, we're going to look at eight easy to implement communication techniques you can use to create a work environment that fosters self-starters, innovation, great attitudes and extraordinary customer service.

1. Study Other's Needs: Not everyone is motivated by the same things. Treat each person individually (just as you would your customers: not all their needs are the same). Find out what motivates each one and find a way to help them get it.

Example; with the changing demographic of working mothers, flexible hours and the ability to work from home are more valuable to many family women (and men too) than money.

2. Expect the Best: When you expect the best from people and communicate the fact that not only do you expect the best, but have enough confidence in them to know you'll get the best, you will be amazed at how often that prophecy comes true.

People will rise or fall to your level of communicated expectation. If you tell people they're no good, or incapable of doing the work: surprise! You'll get lousy work. But when you let your people know that you have lots of confidence in their ability to succeed, don't be surprised when they're successful. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

3. Set High Standards: In the best run companies a certain amount of individuality is not only tolerated, but encouraged. However, as the leader, you are responsible for creating the standards and setting the parameters within which people need to work. There is no need for you to accept mediocrity. Once the parameters are set and people understand the boundaries, allow them to go in any direction they choose within those parameters and boundaries. You never want to squash creativity. Remember, innovation is a bottom-up, not a top-down phenomenon.

4. Create an Environment Where Failure is not Fatal: Don't be one of those bosses who lies in the bushes waiting to pounce when someone does something wrong. What you will create is an atmosphere of fear and fear is a de-motivator. In that environment, people stop going the extra mile. Their only goal is to not do anything wrong for fear of getting yelled at. They stop coming up with good ideas and that's when burnout occurs in an organization.

5. Recognize and Applaud Achievement: When you create an environment that encourages innovation, risk-taking and new ideas people will make mistakes; that's how they learn. However, making the same mistakes over and over is not acceptable. Another one of your responsibilities is to point out mistakes and teach people how to correct them. Since there is no such thing as constructive criticism, you need to recognize and applaud their achievements in order to give them the incentive to listen to you and give you the credibility to point out their mistakes.

6. Use Role Models to Encourage Success: Most organizations are the same: 10% of the people are self-motivated high achievers; 10% of the people should be canned; and the other 80% are totally average. The best thing you can do as a manager, business owner or leader is to find ways for the middle 80% to interact more frequently with the top 10% than they do with the bottom 10%. Use your top 10% as role models and mentors. Let them run some of your sales, department or company meetings. Remember, high achievers like new challenges. They get bored easily; and the last thing you want is a bored high achiever.

7. Help Your People Build Winning Streaks: Set your people up to succeed, not fail. Give them tasks and assignments that emphasize their strengths, rather than their weaknesses. Create teams of people with diversified strengths. As a sales manager, team your best prospectors with your best closers. With new people, start by giving them tasks and assignments they can't possibly fail at. Once you've built their confidence, gradually increase the difficulty of the tasks.

8. Stop Touching Everything: You hired these people, let them do their jobs. If you don't think they can do it, why did you hire them? Besides, if you insist on doing the job of a staff person, why do you need that person on the payroll and why do you warrant an executive's salary. It would sure save the company money.