Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a powerful theory of motivation you can use to be a better leader and motivate your team.
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Most fundamentally, our physical needs for air, water, and food must be met or we will be unhappy and not much later we will die. Once these basic necessities are met, we begin to feel a need for safety, stability, limits, and freedom from chaos. Again, once these requirements are satisfied, we’ll want to belong, to feel loved, to give and receive affection. Next comes our need for competence and mastery of a set of skills–the basis for our self-confidence.
Even after all these needs are met, we have one more–self-actualization–”to become everything that one is capable of becoming.”
Maslow describes his passion for these positive aspects of psychology and human motivation in his book, Motivation and Personality (yes, it’s a little expensive, but worth it):
The study of [self-actualizing people] is unusual in various ways. It was not planned as an ordinary research; it was not a social venture, but a private one, motivated by my own curiosity… I sought only to convince myself and to teach myself rather than prove or to demonstrate to others.
(It sounds like he self-actualized himself to his study of self-actualization.)
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