Dan Schneider

The Keys to the Kingdom: Motivation
October 20, 2008

“So how do you suggest I get these people to focus on results rather than on just being busy?” If that’s a question you’re facing right now, and many of us are, then you make it worth their time and effort.

“Wait a minute,” you might be thinking. “Aren’t they motivated by the fact that they have a job?”

Possibly, but more than likely, no. Here’s something hard for many successful business owners, corporate executives, boards, front line managers, and even parents to understand. You don’t and can’t motivate anybody but yourself.

To get people to give us what we want – more sales, higher profits, better grades – we generally go through a two-step process that we believe will, in some magical way, have the desired impact. Some of these efforts actually do produce short-term results, but they rarely have a permanent, culture-changing impact. As Ricci Victorio might have said in her blogs last week, these efforts don’t shift the paradigm.

The Most Common Approaches

Let’s begin with a relatively simple definition of motivation. It’s what I would rather do than not do at any given point in time. To get people to do what we want them to do, we consistently fall back on two frequently used motivational tools: fear and incentives.

Both of these are reactive – they come from the outside. And that’s one of the main reasons why they have short life cycles. They are effective only until people get used to them or until people get away from them.

Let’s start with fear. Most of us don’t want to go through life scaring people, but there are some who are pretty good at it and truly enjoy it. All of their relationships – business, family, social, etc., are built around fear. It’s only natural for them to bring that mentality to work with them; after all, that type of behavior has paid off in the past.

Fear can be a powerful motivator. It can also be a powerful reason to leave. And remember, there are several ways to leave a company. The most common is not employee turnover. It’s employee turnoff. When I hear owners and managers grousing about the “morons, misfits, and moochers” they have working for them, I can almost always be correct in assuming that the employee turnoff ratio is going through the roof and that the major problem is with management, not with the employees.

Here are a few tips to tell where you and your company are with regard to fear-based motivation:

1. What words do you use to describe your employees (partners, family, siblings)? The more demeaning the description, the more likely fear is the prevailing motivator.
2. Are you attracting high-caliber recruits and retaining your top talent?
3. Is your work environment full of adult hostility? Sarcasm, malicious compliance, and directives followed to the letter are symptoms of a culture based on fear.

Fear may get an owner or an organization what it wants on a short-term basis. The real question is how much does it cost?

Posted by Dan Schneider on October 20, 2008 | Comments (0)