If you're a business owner or a manager, what do you do when the job simply isn't meaningful or satisfying enough for your people? What do you do when they're asking themselves, Why am I wasting my time here? Money is seldom an adequate answer.

Warren Buffett claims that he really only has two duties. The first is allocating capital. "The second is to help 15 or 20 senior managers keep a group of people enthused about what they do when they have no financial need whatsoever to do it. At least three-quarters of the managers that we have are rich beyond any possible financial need, and therefore my job is to help my senior people keep them interested enough to want to jump out of bed at six o'clock in the morning and work with all of the enthusiasm they did when they were poor and starting out. If I do those two things, they do the innovation."

Those who work for you may not be quite that wealthy. But few of us are going to leap enthusiastically out of bed every day at 6:00AM just for the money anyway. We may crawl out. We aren't going to leap. So how can you fill the glass for your people and fill it so high that you can generate that kind of excitement and enthusiasm?

Well - short of filling their morning coffee cup with liquid amphetamine - you probably can't. But you can certainly do a far better job than most companies are doing now.

Meaningful Motivational
People are motivated by having a goal, a way to judge their progress towards that goal, and rewards for reaching it. To keep them motivated long-term, the goal and the rewards have to be both meaningful to them and attainable. And the more control they have over the outcome, the better.