How to motivate your chapter to achieve its goals

A little known fact is that on your BNI director’s chapter appraisal is the question: “Chapter has posted goal sheet”. This check box is not often ticked off. Not because the chapter doesn’t have goals, but because leadership teams don’t often take advantage of visual cues, like posted goal sheets, to motivate their chapters.

Most chapters will have goals for their leadership terms, like number of referrals, new members, ‘thank you for closed business’ targets etc. This is usually discussed at the beginning of the leadership team’s term, but rarely referenced again, except perhaps for the odd update.

But visual cues are a great way to motivate the chapter and keep your goals front and centre, and they needn’t be anything too fancy.

For example, some years ago, administrators of a certain hospital were frustrated by wastage. The hospital had two types of gloves. There was an expensive powderless, yet comfortable, latex glove for long, technical medical procedures; and a cheap, powdery glove intended for short procedures.

Staff really liked the powderless gloves because they were comfortable, even though they cost ten times as much as the cheaper gloves. Regular pleas by administrators for clinicians to use the cheaper gloves fell on deaf ears.

One day, somebody put a ’25 cents’ sign on the box of cheap gloves, and $3 sign on the box of expensive latex gloves. Use of the expensive gloves dropped dramatically.

In another study, two call centres were set the same sales targets. By the end of the study, one call centre had outperformed the other by a substantial margin. The reason? The higher performing team had posters on the walls of a female athlete breaking the winner’s tape at the finish line.

Think about what visual cues you could use to motivate your chapter…

Some common ideas include:

• A goal setting thermometer poster

• A plain laminated goal sheet

• A race-track poster showing which member is leading the race for most dances

You may choose to have all your chapter’s targets or goals represented on one poster board, but beware… it’s too complicated updating the visual cue will become a chore (contest type posters fall into this category. While they can be fun, they’re also hard work.)

Whatever creative idea you come up with, keep it simple – awareness, motivation and easily update-able should be your primary goals.

Do you have any good ideas for visual cues? Any examples your chapter has used? Please share them with us.