But you cannot 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 they misconstrue the concept and applications of motivation. To understand motivation and apply it daily, you need to understand its three critical factors. Knowing these factors and putting them into action, greatly enhances 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 and physical action, which is an essential feature of motivation. Motivation is not about what people think or feel but what they physically do. To motivate people to get results, challenge them to take the actions that will achieve those results.
Many leaders rely on presentations to motivate their people. Presentations communicate information, usually in a passive way – you talk, they listen! To motivate people, you must talk to them. Your talks must do more than simply communicate information, you must have them believe in you, want to support you and, most importantly, take physical action that leads to results. You need to also convince your people that you appreciate the work they are doing and believe that they can produce the results that you want.
Never give the talk until you know what actions you want your people to take and be prepared to walk the talk. That will almost always mean ensuring that your people have the time and resources to take action but might require additional action from you. One of our clients challenged each of her staff 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.
2. Motivation is driven by emotion.
Emotion and motion come from the same Latin root meaning “to move”. When you want to move people to take action, engage their emotions. An act of motivation is an act of emotion. In any strategic management endeavor, you must make sure that the people have a strong emotional commitment to achieving it.
One of our clients developed a marketing strategy. It was some 40 pages long and single-spaced. The points it made were logical, consistent, and comprehensive. It made perfect sense. That was the trouble. It made perfect, intellectual sense to the senior leaders but it did not make experiential sense to middle management who had to carry it out. They had not been involved in developing the strategy and started to sabotage it in some impressively innovative ways. Only when the middle managers were motivated — were emotionally committed to carrying out the strategy — did that strategy begin to succeed.
3. Motivation is not what we do to others.
It is what others do to themselves. The English language does not accurately depict the psychological truth of motivation. The truth is that we cannot motivate anybody to do anything. The people we want to motivate can only motivate themselves. The motivator and the motivated are always the same person. We as leaders communicate, they motivate. So our “motivating” others to get results really entails our creating an environment in which they motivate themselves to get those results.
Another of our clients almost faced a mutiny on his staff when he set targets much higher than those of the previous year. We suggested that he create an environment in which they could motivate themselves. This started by getting staff to assess what activities got results and what did not. They discovered that they spent more than 60% of their time on work that had nothing to do with getting results. The next step was to get them to develop a plan to eliminate the unnecessary work. Put in charge of their own destiny, they got motivated, developed an effective plan and started to get great results.
Over the long run, your career success does not depend on what schools you went to and what degrees you have. That success depends instead on your ability to motivate individuals and teams to get results. Motivation is like a high voltage cable lying at your feet. Use it the wrong way, and you’ll get a serious shock. But apply motivation the right way by understanding and using the three factors, plug the cable in, as it were, and it will serve you well in many powerful ways throughout your career.
