Three factors of motivation Leadership

Leaders do nothing more important than get results. But you can not achieve alone. You need others to help him. And the best way to get other people to achieve results 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 every day, try to understand its three critical factors. Knowing these factors and put them into action to greatly improve your ability to lead for results.

1. Motivation is physical action. "Motivation" has common roots with "motor", "momentum", "movement", "mobile", etc. - all words that indicate the movement, physical action. An essential feature of motivation is physical action. The motivation is not what people think or feel but what they do physically. When motivating people to get results, challenge them to take those actions that are carried out those results.

The leading defenders who must motivate individuals and teams to achieve results, not to deliver presentations but "leadership talks." Presentations communicate information .. But when you want to motivate people, you need to do more than simply communicate information. You need to believe in you and act to follow. A key outcome of every leadership talk must be physical action, physical action that leads to results.

For example, I worked with the newly appointed director of a large marketing department who wanted the department to achieve sizable increases in results. However, the employees were a demoralized team that was clocked tons of overtime under her predecessor, and anger they felt that their efforts were not recognized by management.

He could have tried to order them to get more results. Many leaders do. But to-founders of leadership in today's highly competitive, fast-moving markets. Organizations are much more competitive when their employees instead of being ordered to get from point A to point B want to get from point A to point B. So I suggested we take a first step in getting employees to increase results by motivating employees to want to increase your results. They "want" when they started to believe in his leadership. And the first step in enlisting that belief was for her to write a series of talks leading to the employees.

One of his first interviews she had scheduled for warehouse employees in the company auditorium.

He said: "I want you to know that I appreciate the work they are doing and I think they can get the results I'm asking of them. I want to feel good about themselves."

"Believing is not enough," I said. "Feeling good is not enough. This justification must be. Action must be physical. Not give the conversation until you know what actions are to occur are that precise."

He had the idea of ​​having the CEO come into the room after the interview, shake hands with each employee, and say how often he appreciated their hard work - physical action. She did not stop there. After the CEO left, she challenged each employee to write on a piece of paper three specific things that they needed from her to help them get increases in results and then hand those pieces of paper to her personally - physical action.

Mind you, discussing leadership was not magic dust sprinkled on the employees to motivate them instantly. (To turn the department around so that he began to get sizable increases in results, he had to give many leadership talks in the weeks and months to come.) But it was a start. The most important thing, is just beginning.

2. MOTIVATION is driven by emotions. Emotion and motion come from the same Latin root means "move". When you want to move people to act, engage their emotions. An act of motivation is an act of emotion. In all the activities of strategic management, you must make sure that people have a strong emotional commitment to realizing it.

When I explained the director of marketing services companies worldwide, said: "Now I understand why we're not growing! We senior leaders developed our marketing strategy in a bunker! He showed me his" "strategy document. It was about 40 pages, single-spaced. points that were made logical, coherent and complete. It made perfect sense. That was the trouble. He made perfect, intellectual sense for senior leaders. But no experiential sense. to middle management should realize that they had about as much input into the strategy as the washer at the corporate office, so it sabotaged in many innovative ways only when the paintings were motivated - were emotionally committed .. to realize the strategy - that the strategy has to have a realistic chance of success.

3. REASONS NOT what we do for others. And 'what OTHERS do to themselves. The English language does not accurately depict the psychological truth of motivation. The truth is that we can not motivate someone to do something. People who want to motivate can only motivate themselves. The motivator and motivatee are always the same person. We as leaders communicate, motivate. So our "motivating" others to get results really entails our creating an environment in which to motivate yourself to get those results.

For example: a commercial division leader almost faced a mutiny on his staff, when in a planning session, he put next year's goals, numbers much higher than the previous year, on the head. All staff, but had to be discarded from the ceiling after they went ballistic. "We eliminated the queues to get these numbers last year. Now we want to get the numbers much higher? No way!"

I said. "We can hit those numbers. I just have to get people motivated!"

I gave him my "motivator-and-motivatee-are-the-same-person!" step. I suggested that he create an environment in which to motivate. So he had them assess what activities got results and what is not. They found that they spent more than 60 percent of their time on work that had nothing to do with getting results. Then they had to develop a plan to eliminate unnecessary work. Put in charge of your destiny, you are motivated! They developed a great plan and started to get great results.

In the long term, your professional success does not depend on what school you went to and what degrees you have. That success depends instead on your ability to motivate individuals and teams to achieve results. Motivation is like a high voltage cable lying at your feet. Use 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, so to speak, and will serve you well in many powerful ways throughout your career.

2004 The Filson Leadership Group, Inc..

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