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The Factors of Leadership Motivation
By Brent Filson
Leaders do nothing
more important than get results. But you
can’t get results by yourself. You need
others to help you do it. And the best way to have other people get results is
not by ordering them but motivating them. Yet many leaders fail to motivate
people to achieve results because those leaders misconstrue the concept and
applications of motivation.
To understand motivation and apply it
daily, let’s understand its three critical pillars. Know these pillars and put them into action
to greatly enhance your abilities to lead for results.
1. Motivation is physical action. “Motivation” has common roots with “motor,”
“momentum,” “motion,” “mobile,” etc. — all words that denote movement, physical
action. An essential feature of
motivation is physical action.
Motivation isn’t about what people think or feel but what they
physically do. When
motivating people to get results, challenge them to take those actions that
will realize those results.
I counsel leaders who must motivate
individuals and teams to get results, not to deliver presentations but give
“leadership talks.” Presentations
communicate information.. But when you want to motivate people, you
must do more than simply communicate information. You must have them believe in you and take
action to follow you. A key outcome of
every leadership talk must be physical action, physical action that leads to
results.
For instance, I worked with the
newly-appointed director of a large marketing department who wanted the
department to achieve sizable increases in the results. However, the employees were a demoralized
bunch who had been clocking tons of overtime under her predecessor and were
feeling angry that their efforts were not being recognized by senior
management.
She could have tried to "order"
them to get the increased results. Many
leaders do that. But this leadership
approach causes organizations to flounder in today’s highly competitive,
rapidly changing markets. Organizations
are far more competitive when their employees, instead of being ordered to go
from point A to point B, want to go from point A to point B. So I suggested that she take a first step in
getting the employees to increase results by motivating those employees to want
to increase results. They would
“want to” when they began to believe in her leadership. And the first step in enlisting that belief
was for her to give a number of leadership talks to the employees.
One of the first talks that she planned was
to the department employees in the company’s auditorium.
She told me, “I want them to know that I
appreciate the work they are doing and that I believe that they can get the
results I’m asking of them. I want them
to feel good about themselves.”
“Believing is not enough,” I said. “Feeling good is not enough. Motivation must take place. Physical action must take place. Don’t give the talk until you know what
precise action you are going to have happen.”
She got the idea of
having the CEO come into the room after the talk, shake each employee’s hand,
and tell each how much he appreciated their hard work — physical action. She didn’t stop there. After the CEO left,
she challenged each employee to write down on a piece of paper three specific
things that they needed from her to help them get the increases in results and
then hand those pieces of paper to her personally — physical action.
Mind you, that leadership talk wasn’t magic
dust sprinkled on the employees to instantly motivate them. (To turn the department around so that it
began achieving sizable increases in results, she had to give many leadership
talks in the weeks and months ahead.)
But it was a beginning. Most
importantly, it was the right beginning.
