100 Ways to Motivate Others: How Great Leaders Can Produce Insane Results Without Driving People Crazy

“So what is it you do teach?”

“We teach you how to get people to motivate themselves. That is the key. And you do that by managing agreements, not people. And that is what we are going to discuss this morning.”

The manager put his car keys in his pocket and sat down in the first seat closest to the front of the room for the rest of the seminar.

2. Teach Self-Discipline

Discipline is remembering what you want.

    – David Campbell, founder, Saks Fifth Avenue

The myth, which almost everyone believes, is that we have self-discipline. It’s something in us, like a genetic gift, that we either have or we don’t.

The truth is that we don’t have self-discipline; we use self-discipline.

Here’s another way to put it: self-discipline is like a language. Any child can learn a language. (All children do learn a language, actually.) Any 90-year-old can also learn a language. If you are 9 or 90 and you’re lost in the rain in Mexico City, it works when you use some Spanish to find your way to warmth and safety. It works.

In this case, Spanish is like self-discipline. You were not born with it. But you can use it. In fact, you can use as much or as little as you wish. And the more you use, the more you can make happen.

If you were an American transferred to Mexico City to live for a year and needed to make your living there, the more Spanish you used the better it would be for you. If you had never used Spanish before, you could still use it. You could open your little English/Spanish phrases dictionary and start using it. You could ask for directions or help right out of that little dictionary! You wouldn’t need to be born with anything special.

The same goes for self-discipline. Yet, most people don’t believe that. Most people think they either have it or they don’t. Most people think it’s a character trait or a permanent aspect of their personality. That’s a profound mistake. That’s a mistake that can ruin a life.

Listen to how people get this so wrong: “He would be my top salesperson if he had any self-discipline at all,” a company leader recently said. “But he has none.”

Not true. He has as much self-discipline as anyone else does; he just hasn’t chosen to use it yet. If the person you lead truly understood that self-discipline is something one uses, not something one has, then that person could use it to accomplish virtually any goal he ever set. He could use it whenever he wanted, or leave it behind whenever he wanted.

Instead, he worries. He worries about whether he’s got what it takes, whether it’s in him, whether his parents and guardians put it there. (Some think it’s put there experientially; some think it’s put there genetically. It’s neither. It’s never “put there” at all. It’s a tool that anyone can use. Like a hammer. Like a dictionary.)

The good news is that it is never too late to correct that mistake in yourself and your people. It’s never too late to learn the real truth. Enlightened leaders get more out of their people because they know that each person already has everything it takes to be successful. They don’t buy the excuses, the apologies, the sad fatalism that most non-performers skillfully sell to their managers. They just don’t buy it.

3. Tune in Before You Turn on

Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.

    – George S. Patton

You can’t motivate someone who can’t hear you.

If what you’re saying is bouncing off their psychological armor, it makes little difference how good you are at saying it. You are not being heard. Your people have to hear you to be moved by you.

In order for someone to hear you, she must first be heard. It doesn’t work the other way around. It doesn’t work when you always go first. Because your employee must first appreciate that you are on her wavelength and understand her thinking completely.

As leadership guru Warren Bennis has said:

The first rule in any kind of coaching is that the coach has to engage in deep listening. Which means that the coach must relate to the context in which the “other” is reasoning – they must “tune in” to where the other is coming from. In short, perhaps the basis of leadership is the capacity of the leader to change the mind-set, the framework of the other. That’s not easy, as I needn’t tell you for most of us, thinking that we have tuned into the other person, usually we are listening most intently to ourselves.

We were working with a financial services CEO named Lance who had difficulties with his four-woman major account team. They didn’t care for him and didn’t trust him and dreaded every meeting with him as he would go over their shortcomings.

Lance was at his wit’s end and asked for coaching.

“Meet with each of them one at a time,” we advised.

“What do I say?”

“Say nothing. Just listen.”

“Listen to what?”

“The person across from you.”

“What’s my agenda?”

“No agenda.”

“What do I ask them?”

“How is life? How is life for you in this company? What would you change?”

“Then what?”

“Then just listen.”

“I don’t know if I could do that.”

The source of his major account team’s low morale had just been identified. The rest was up to Lance.

4. Be the Cause, Not the Effect

Shallow people believe in luck. Wise and strong people believe in cause and effect.

    – Ralph Waldo Emerson

A masterful motivator of others asks, “What do we want to cause to happen today? What do we want to produce?”

Those are the best management questions of all. People who have a hard time managing people simply have a hard time asking themselves those two questions, because they’re always thinking about what’s happening to them instead of what they’re going to cause to happen.

When your people see you as a cause instead of an effect, it won’t be hard to teach them to think the same way. Soon, you will be causing them to play far beyond their own self-concepts.

You can cause that to happen.

5. Stop Criticizing Upper Management

Two things are bad for the heart – running uphill and running down people.

    – Bernard Gimbel

It is a huge temptation to distance yourself from your own superiors.