Leadership: How America’s Top CEOs Motivate Employees & Get Results…What are the best ways to motivate your employees? We asked America’s Leading CEOs What it Takes.

Brian Mueller, CEO, Grand Canyon Education

FORBES: What are the best ways to motivate your people?
MUELLER: You have to do two things. First, you have to understand that everyone needs a path to significance that comes as a result of the work they do. GCU has 3,000 people, and I can’t meet with everyone individually. But what we try to do as a large management leadership group is make sure we’re looking at every job classification in the university and figuring out a way for that job to have significance, monetarily and otherwise, for the people who are doing them. People work, first and foremost, for themselves and their families. There has to be a path that leads to significance for them individually. That’s highly motivating.

Brad Cleveland, CEO, Proto Labs

FORBES: What are the best ways to motivate your people?
CLEVELAND: I’ve been fortunate to attract and retain some of the brightest people in our industry at each of our lead management positions. We have exceptional talent in our international leadership positions, research & development, program management, software development, finance, human resources, sales and marketing. To retain these types of high-level people, in my experience it works best to help identify the goals, set priorities, ask the experts what they need to get the job done and then get out of their way. This approach continues to work very well at Proto Labs and I do not anticipate it changing.

Behrooz Abdi, CEO, InvenSense

FORBES: What are the best ways to motivate your people?
ABDI: Communicating the vision, empowering the team to execute to the vision, celebrating their wins, and communicating more.

Mike Fifer, CEO, Sturm, Ruger & Company

FORBES: What are the best ways to motivate your team?
FIFER: Communication is key and it must be frequent and honest (whether the news is good or bad).  Backing that up, however, is the concept of “it’s all about the incentives.”  We have very simple, clear and concise incentives.The most important incentive is profit sharing for all of our employees and contractors, including employees provided by temporary services agencies.

We allocate 15% of the pretax profits every quarter to profit sharing.  The first year it averaged less than 5% of pay so it was important, but not yet a game changer.  Now it is more than 30% of pay and everyone is paying attention and pulling together in the same direction.  Typically this sort of incentive takes a couple of years to take root in an organization; junior participants have to trust that it is real, non-arbitrary, and here for the long term.

As a manager, you know it is starting to work when a junior employee takes independent initiative to save expenses or to push for higher efficiency.  Once the employees of an organization believe in the profit sharing, it becomes an incredibly important driver of day-to-day performance.  The keys to success with profit sharing are that everyone participates, pro-rata with their earned base wages for the period, and that it be based on a pre-determined formula that does not change.  It will fail if the employees believe it to be discretionary.

Arkadiy Dobkin, CEO, EPAM Systems

FORBES: What are the best ways to motivate your people?
DOBKIN: I do believe it is rather simple… While there are many different ways to motivate people and many of them are very critical to be present in the company…I think that our best people are motivated the most by tangible results they contributed to…And specifically, results recognized by clients themselves.In our business the real clients’ success, the significance and importance of  the solutions, their complexity and technical and business challenges solved on the way to deliver those solutions is the best motivation in my opinion. When client directly attributed the success to our people, our teams, and our experience and skills – it is BIG.

Bryan Shinn, CEO, U.S. Silica

FORBES: What are the best ways to motivate your people?
SHINN: I try to treat folks as I want to be treated and I think that’s one of the most motivating things to an organization, no matter where you are in the leadership hierarchy if you’re engaged and empathetic and just real with people I think it goes a long way, I also put a lot of effort into recognizing the small things, you don’t have to wait until someone has a major accomplishment. One of the things I’ve learned is don’t be afraid to challenge the rules or do something unconventional around reward and recognition, just calling somebody up to say thank you or finding a way to find out what they like to do in their spare time and reward them with it – it really goes a long way and can be tremendously motivational for a team.

Jason Rhode, CEO, Cirrus

FORBES: What are the best ways to motivate your people?
RHODE: Cirrus’ founding CEO Mike Hackworth often said that morale and motivation in the workplace comes from having a meaningful and worthwhile goal, a reasonable plan to achieve the goal, and being able to measure yourself making progress on the plan.  In my view, ensuring that we have such a vision, plan, and visibility at a corporate and individual level is a tremendously very powerful motivator.

Harry Herington, CEO, NIC

FORBES: What are the best ways to motivate your people?
HERINGTON: It all comes down to culture and trust. There is no better way to motivate employees than to establish a culture of trust. Employees must trust the person who is leading the company. Most employees are not involved in setting the strategic direction of the company — in many ways, my decisions dictate their future. That’s why I believe trust is so important, and I created a special program called, “Ask the CEO” to help establish trust.

John Foraker, CEO, Annie’s

FORBES: What are the best ways to motivate your people?
FORAKER: Annie’s is a mission driven business, and our employees are highly engaged in delivering on that mission.  They really care about it, and also about how we achieve success.  We operate the business according to a set of well-defined values around quality, sustainability, honesty, and doing the right thing even and especially when no one is looking.  Because of our mission driven approach we attract really smart, highly engaged, and highly capable people who care and want to make a difference in the world.  This set of common values and mission is highly motivating to people, as they see their work furthering the success of the business beyond just simple financial metrics.  Pay, benefits, and a comfortable work environment are all important, but being bound by a common higher purpose is motivating to our employees.

Jim Koch, Founder and Brewer, Boston Beer Company

FORBES: What are the best ways to motivate your team?
KOCH: The best way to motivate is to lead by example and encourage creativity. One way I’ve done this is something I call the “string theory.” In the middle of graduate school, I decided to take a break and became an instructor with Outward Bound. At the beginning of each four-week course I gave everyone a supply of Alpine cord (a kind of string for lashing gear, pitching tarps, etc.) Consistently, if I gave my group plenty of string, they would run out and need more. But, if I gave them less and told them they had only two-thirds of what they really needed, they would get incredibly creative and make that cord last. They’d splice, they’d share, they’d save; they’d forage for bits of rope left behind by others. Through this exercise, I learned that culture and values can substitute for money and resources. Since we were on a tight budget in the early days, we used every piece of “string” we had, and that created a corporate culture of innovation and creativity. I’ve found that this motivates people to do the best and achieve terrific results with what they are given.

Steve Fredrickson, CEO, Portfolio Recovery Associates

FORBES: What are the best ways to motivate your team?
FREDRICKSON: If you have the right team, the best way to motivate them is to hand them a challenge, provide appropriate resources, and then get out of their way, while monitoring progress and results. Then, once final results are delivered, insure that fair rewards are provided.

Kevin Thompson, CEO, Solarwinds

FORBES: What are the best ways to motivate your team?
THOMPSON: At my company, SolarWinds, we focus on creating an environment where employees have the opportunity to create a unique place within the company – their “sweet spot.”  Like the manager of a playoff-bound baseball team, we fill out our line-up so that everyone has their own role to play and brings their unique skillsets to the game.  That line-up is calibrated to combine skill and passion, and we work hard to make sure that each employee plays a position that complements the rest of the organization.  It’s how we win.

Wallace E. Boston, CEO, Amerian Public University System

FORBES: What are the best ways to motivate your people?
BOSTON: Establish a mission that everyone can relate to and rally around.  Reinforce that mission with actions from the top down.  Be consistent, through good times and bad.

Cheri Beranek, CEO, Clearfield

FORBES: What are the best ways to motivate your people?
BERANEK: When we started Clearfield, my COO and I wrote the core values of the company on an airplane. We didn’t need a focus group or multiple committee meetings, because we were living the values every day – They start with LISTENING and conclude with CELEBRATING our every success – in the early days we didn’t have many successes, so we hung a ship’s bell that we ran with a $10,000 order. Later, as we grew, we hung a $100,000 bell. When we got our first million dollar order, we didn’t yet have the $1,000,000 bell – but today, all three hang on our sales floor to remind us where we’ve been – and where we need to go. The culture of celebration, builds upon our philosophy that while we may feel like a family, we choose to operate our business as a small town – with each individual motivated to make active choices to continue to belong to the group – not feeling any level of entitlement.

Mike MacDonald, CEO Medifast

FORBES: What are the best ways to motivate your people?
MACDONALD: The best way to motivate a team is to create a very open work environment where people have the ability to make suggestions and comments.  At Medifast, we encourage a leadership style that is highly participative and allows for open communication between all levels of the organization to accomplish business objectives.We’ve found that when you empower people to do their jobs within their style, they enjoy their work and can achieve their goals.