100 Ways to Motivate Others: How Great Leaders Can Produce Insane Results Without Driving People Crazy. Scott Richardson
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Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.
You can’t motivate someone who can’t hear you.
If what you’re saying is bouncing off their psychological armor, it makes little difference how good you are at saying it. You are not being heard. Your people have to hear you to be moved by you.
In order for someone to hear you, she must first be heard. It doesn’t work the other way around. It doesn’t work when you always go first. Because your employee must first appreciate that you are on her wavelength and understand her thinking completely.
As leadership guru Warren Bennis has said:
The first rule in any kind of coaching is that the coach has to engage in deep listening. Which means that the coach must relate to the context in which the “other” is reasoning – they must “tune in” to where the other is coming from. In short, perhaps the basis of leadership is the capacity of the leader to change the mind-set, the framework of the other. That’s not easy, as I needn’t tell you for most of us, thinking that we have tuned into the other person, usually we are listening most intently to ourselves.
We were working with a financial services CEO named Lance who had difficulties with his four-woman major account team. They didn’t care for him and didn’t trust him and dreaded every meeting with him as he would go over their shortcomings.
Lance was at his wit’s end and asked for coaching.
“Meet with each of them one at a time,” we advised.
“What do I say?”
“Say nothing. Just listen.”
“Listen to what?”
“The person across from you.”
“What’s my agenda?”
“No agenda.”
“What do I ask them?”
“How is life? How is life for you in this company? What would you change?”
“Then what?”
“Then just listen.”
“I don’t know if I could do that.”
The source of his major account team’s low morale had just been identified. The rest was up to Lance.
4. Be the Cause, Not the Effect
Shallow people believe in luck. Wise and strong people believe in cause and effect.
A masterful motivator of others asks, “What do we want to cause to happen today? What do we want to produce?”
Those are the best management questions of all. People who have a hard time managing people simply have a hard time asking themselves those two questions, because they’re always thinking about what’s happening to them instead of what they’re going to cause to happen.
When your people see you as a cause instead of an effect, it won’t be hard to teach them to think the same way. Soon, you will be causing them to play far beyond their own self-concepts.
You can cause that to happen.
5. Stop Criticizing Upper Management
Two things are bad for the heart – running uphill and running down people.
It is a huge temptation to distance yourself from your own superiors.
Maybe you do this to win favor and create bonding at the victim level with the team, but it won’t work. In fact, what you have done will eventually damage the confidence of the team. It will send three messages that are very damaging to morale and motivation:
1. This organization can’t be trusted.
2. Our own management is against us.
3. Yours truly, your own team leader, is weak and powerless in the organization.
This leads to a definite but unpleasant kind of bonding, and it leads to deep trust problems and further disrespect for the integrity of the organization. Running down upper management can be done covertly (a rolling of the eyes at the mention of the CFO’s name) or overtly (“I don’t know why we’re doing this; no one ever consults with me on company policy, probably because they know I’d disagree”). This mistake is deepened by the repeated use of the word they. (“They want us to start…” “I don’t know why they are having us do it this way…” “They don’t understand what you guys are going through here…” “They, they, they…!”).
The word they used in excess soon becomes a near-obscenity and solidifies the impression that we are isolated, misunderstood victims.
A true leader has the courage to represent upper management, not run it down. A true leader says we.
6. Do the One Thing
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
I can’t motivate others if I am not doing the right thing. And to keep myself in a relaxed and centered state, it’s important for me to not be scattered, distracted, or spread thin. It’s important that I don’t race around thinking that I’ve got too much to do. I don’t have too much to do. The truth is, there is only one thing to do, and that is the one thing I have chosen to do right now.
If I do that one thing as if it’s all I have to think about, it will be extremely well done, and my relationship with any other person involved will be better and more relaxed and full of trust than before.
A careful study of my past week shows me that I did a lot of things, and they all got done one thing at a time. In fact, even in my busiest time ever, I was only able to do one thing at a time, even though I stressed myself and other people out by always thinking of seven things at once. When I talked to someone all I could think about was the seven other people I needed to talk to. Eventually, all seven people felt that stress and that lack of attentiveness, that absolute lack of warmth. Doing more than one thing at a time produces fear, adrenaline, and anxiety in the human system, and people pick up on that. People are not drawn to that. They keep away from that.
The mind entertains one thought at a time, and only one. The greatest cause of feeling “swamped” and “overwhelmed” in life is not knowing this.
The greatest source of stress in the workplace is the mind’s attempt to carry many thoughts, many tasks, many future scenarios, many cares, many worries, many concerns at once. The mind can’t do that. No mind can; not even Einstein’s could.
I need to choose from the list of things that need to be done, and then do the one thing as if that were the only thing. If it’s a phone call, then I need to slow down and relax and let myself be in a good mood so that the phone call will be a good experience, and the recipient and I can be complete afterward.
We talked to Jason, a national sales manager who had just finished a brutally long phone conference with his team. He spent the conference call nervously urging his team on to higher numbers and warning them that the team goals were not going to be met at the rate they were going. He had called the meeting because his own superiors had just called him to question him about his team’s poor performance.
Although Jason had been working 12-hour days, he felt he was falling behind in everything. On top of that, his superiors’ anxiety was then passed down to him. Because it was passed down into a hectic, disorganized mind, he freaked out and took it out on his team.
This is not motivation. Motivation requires a calm, centered leader who is focused on one thing, and only one thing.
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