Leaders' most important job is to get things done. But you can't make things happen on your own. You need help from other people. And the best way to get other people to do what you want is not to tell them what to do, but to inspire them to do it. Still, many leaders fail to get people to do things because they misunderstand what motivation is and how it can be used.
Let's look at the three most important parts of motivation so we can understand it and use it every day. If you know and use these pillars, you will be much better able to lead for results.
- MOTIVATION IS PHYSICAL ACTION. "Motivation" comes from the same place as words like "motor," "momentum," "motion," "mobile," etc., which all mean movement or physical action. Action is a key part of what motivates people. Motivation has nothing to do with what people think or feel. It has to do with what they do. When trying to get people to do things, challenge them to do the things that will get those things done.
I tell leaders who need to get people and teams to do things to give "leadership talks" instead of presentations. Presentations are a way to get information across. But if you want to get people to do something, you have to do more than just give them information. You have to get them to trust you and act in order for them to follow you. Every talk about leadership must lead to action, and it must be action that gets results.
For example, I worked with the new head of a large marketing department, and he wanted the department's results to go up by a lot. But the employees were down on themselves because their boss before her had made them work a lot of overtime, and they were angry that their hard work wasn't being noticed by higher-ups.
She could have tried to tell them what to do in order to get the better results. Quite a few leaders do this. But order-leadership doesn't work in today's markets, which are very competitive and change quickly. Organizations are much more competitive when their workers want to go from point A to point B on their own instead of being told to do so. So I told her that if she wanted the employees to do a better job, she should start by getting them to want to do a better job. When they began to trust her as a leader, they would "want to." And the first thing she did to get people to believe in her was give a few leadership talks to the staff.
One of the first talks she planned was for the department workers in the auditorium of the company.
She told me, "I want them to know that I appreciate the work they are doing and that I believe they can get the results I want from them. I want them to be happy with who they are."
"Believing is not enough," I said. "Feeling good is not enough. It's important to get people going. There must be action on the ground. Don't give the speech until you know exactly what you want to happen."
She thought it would be a good idea for the CEO to come into the room after the speech, shake the hands of each employee, and tell them how much he appreciated their hard work. She kept going after that. After the CEO left, she challenged each employee to write down on a piece of paper three specific things they needed from her to help them get the increases in results and then hand those pieces of paper to her in person.
Mind you, that leadership talk wasn't like sprinkling magic dust on the workers to get them to work right away. (In the weeks and months ahead, she had to give a lot of leadership talks to turn the department around and get it to start getting big results.) But it was the start. The most important thing is that it was a good start.
- MOTIVATION IS DRIVEN BY EMOTION. Both "motion" and "emotion" come from a Latin word that means "to move." If you want people to do something, you need to get them to feel something. Emotions are what drive people to do things. In any strategic management project, you need to make sure that the people involved care a lot about seeing it through.
When I told the chief marketing officer of a worldwide services company about this, he said, "Now I know why we're not growing! We top leaders came up with our marketing plan in a bunker. He gave me a copy of his "strategy." It was about 40 single-spaced pages long. The points it made made sense, were consistent, and covered a lot of ground. Everything made sense. The problem was that. The top leaders thought it made perfect sense from a logical point of view. But it didn't make sense to the middle management people who had to do it. They didn't have much of a say in the strategy, about as much as the people who clean the windows at the corporate headquarters. So they found many creative ways to break it. Only when the middle managers were emotionally invested in carrying out the strategy did it have a real chance of working.
- What we do to other people is not what motivates them. It's something other people do to themselves. The English language doesn't show the psychological truth about what motivates people. We can't get anyone to do anything, that's the truth. People we want to get going can only get going on their own. The person doing the motivating is always the same person being motivated. We, as leaders, talk, and they get people to do things. So, if we want to "motivate" others to get results, we have to make it so that they can motivate themselves to get those results.
For example, the head of a commercial division almost had a mutiny on his hands when he put next year's goals on the overhead, which were much higher than the ones from the year before. After they went crazy, the staff almost had to be pulled off the ceiling. "Last year, we worked very hard to get these numbers. Now you want us to make a lot more money? No way!"
I was told. "We can reach those goals. "All I have to do is get people going!"
I told him that the motivator and the person being motivated are the same person. I suggested that he make a place where they could find their own motivation. So he had them figure out which activities worked and which ones didn't. They found out that they spent more than 60% of their time doing work that didn't help them get anywhere. He then told them to come up with a plan to get rid of the extra work. When they were in charge of their own lives, they got going! They came up with a great plan, and things started going well.
Your career success doesn't depend on where you went to school or what degrees you have. That success depends instead on how well you can get people and groups to work together to get things done. Motivation is like a high-voltage wire lying at your feet. If you use it wrong, you'll get a very bad shock. But if you use motivation the right way by understanding and using the three pillars, you can plug it in, so to speak, and it will help you in many powerful ways throughout your career.
