There are hundreds of assessments for leaders. The content and quality of these assessments vary greatly. You can spend a lot of time and money taking surveys to tell you the quality of your leadership.
There are a few leading indicators that can be used to give a pretty good picture of the overall quality of your leadership. These are not good for diagnosing problems or specifying corrective action, but they can tell you where you stand quickly. Here is one of my favorite measures.
Demonstrate Integrity
Lou Holtz, the famous football coach had a remarkably simple philosophy of doing business. It consisted of three simple little rules: 1) Do Right, 2) Do the best you can, and 3) Treat other people like you would like to be treated.
The basic Do Right Rule means acting with integrity. If doing what is right is such a basic and easy thing, why am I even bothering to write about it?
It’s simple; most leaders have a hard time figuring out what the right thing is. That is a stunning indictment to make, but I really believe it is true on occasion. Reason: in the melee of everyday challenges, it is so easy to make a judgment that seems right under the circumstances, but when extrapolated to its logical conclusion it is really not ethical, or moral, or it is just plain dumb.
Rationalization
For a leader, it is easy to rationalize the particular situation and convince yourself that something marginal is really OK to do “all things considered.” There must be a safeguard for this common problem. There is, and I will reveal it later in this article.
The Problem Escalation
I believe that most of the huge organizational scandals of the past started out as subtle value judgments by leaders in their organizations. There was a decision point where they could have taken path A or path B. While path B was “squeaky clean” in terms of the ethics involved, path A was also perfectly logical and acceptable based on the rules in place at the time and was also somewhat more profitable than Path B.
The problem is that if path A was acceptable today, then A+ would be fine the next day, and A++ the next. Other people would get involved, and the practice would get more embedded into the culture.
Eventually, after a few years, it was clear that rules were being bent all over the place in order for the organization to look good to investors. There was no convenient way to roll back the ethical clock, nor was there any impetus. They seemed to be “getting away with it.”
Ultimately the practice, whether it was Enron’s disappearing assets or Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi Scheme, became too big to hide and things blew up.
My contention is that these people were not intending to do bad things originally, they just got caught up in what Alan Greenspan called irrational exuberance and had no way to quit the abuse. Of course, by that time they really were evil people doing evil things, but I believe it did not start out with those intentions.
At the start I believe these leaders were truly blind to the origin of corruption that brought down their empires and bankrupt thousands of individuals in the process.
The Antidote
How can leaders protect themselves from getting caught up in a web of deception if they were originally blind to the problem? It’s simple; they needed to create a culture of transparency and trust whereby being whistle blower was considered good because it protected the organization from going down the wrong path.
Imagine if the culture in an organization was such that when someone (anyone) in the company was concerned about the ethics of current practice and he or she brought that concern to light, there would have been a reward rather than punishment.
To accomplish this, leaders need to reinforce candor, in every phase of operations. It has to be a recognized policy that seeing something amiss brings with it an obligation to speak up, but that is OK because speaking up will bring rewards.
When leaders at all levels reward the whistle blower, it sets up a culture of high trust because it drives out fear. One of my favorite quotes is, “The absence of fear is the incubator of trust.”
The concept or rewarding candor creates opportunities for leaders to see things that would otherwise be hidden and take corrective action before the tsunami gets started.
It also allows leaders to be fallible human beings and make mistakes without having them become a reason for them to spend the rest of their life in jail.
So here is a good test of your leadership ability. How transparent is your organization? Do you truly reward employees when they bring up things that do not seem right to them, or are they put down and punished?
Bob Whipple is CEO of Leadergrow Inc., a company dedicated to growing leaders. He speaks and conducts seminars on building trust in organizations.
Leadership Barometer 71 Demonstrate Integrity
November 11, 2020Body Language 97 Twelve Layers
October 20, 2020For the final few articles in this series on body language, I am highlighting some of the excellent content in a program entitled “Advanced Body Language” by Bill Acheson of the University of Pittsburgh.
In this article, I will summarize his Thinking on how we pick up twelve layers of information when we interface with another person. Most of the time the signals are processed by us unconsciously, but that does not mean they don’t matter to us.
The body language is most important when we are meeting someone for the first time. According to Bill, what we can observe in the other person is ten times more important than what we say.
The 12 layers are the management of:
1. Time
2. Space
3. Appearance
4. Posture
5. Gesture
6. Voice
7. Eye Contact
8. Facial Expression
9. Breathing
10. Touch
11. Smell
12. Congruence
Actually, in his recording he left off the 12th item, so I added the concept of congruence, because when one part of body language is out of step with the others, it sends a warning signal that something is wrong here, even if we cannot put our finger on it consciously.
When we see conflicting signals, the caution flag goes up in our mind, and we have a much more difficult time establishing a relationship of trust. That caution flag, even if it is subconscious means it will take substantially longer to trust the other person than if all signals were consistent.
According to Malcolm Gladwell in the book “Blink,” human beings have a remarkable ability to size each other up in a heartbeat. He estimates that we form a first impression of another person within the first three seconds. He calls the phenomenon “thin slices” after the analogy that if you slice something, like a cucumber, thin enough, you can actually see through it.
Near the start of his program, Bill shares some data he took when working with a group of 600 business woman. His question was, “In a business setting, how do you know when a man cheats on his wife?” The top 7 responses were all body language.
In the video Bill shares the top two responses. The first was if a man wears too much cologne or aftershave. The second giveaway, mentioned by 70% of the women, is if the man is wearing a pinky ring. What male would have guessed those two responses?
Another fascinating statistic has to do with trust. The research shows that 97% of the women he polled said they do not trust a man who wears more jewelry than they do. I suppose that one seems pretty obvious.
In his program, he makes several general observations comparing men and women. Bill is always careful to point out that these observations do not hold in every case, but there is enough of a trend to make them a valuable tool.
For example, he has measured that of out of all the emotions, there is only one emotion that men project with far greater accuracy than women. That emotion is guilt. He suggests that if women experience guilt, they usually do it to themselves.
I hope you have enjoyed these few articles summarizing the entertaining and sometimes startling research of Bill Acheson. I hope that you are interested enough to pick up a copy of his program. You will find it fun, entertaining, and insightful.
This is a part in a series of articles on “Body Language” by Bob Whipple “The Trust Ambassador.”
Talent Development 12 Career and Leadership Development
October 4, 2020Section 2.6 in the CPTD Certification program for ATD is Career & Leadership Development. The first bullet reads,” Skill in sourcing, designing, building and evaluating leadership development experiences.”
In this article, I will describe the process I use to develop, refine, upgrade, and evaluate leadership development programs for my Leadergrow, Inc. Business.
All my life I have been fascinated by leadership. Even as a young boy I wanted to know what made some leaders amazing while others, seemingly equally qualified, struggled. During my early years I observed constantly, but I did not find the answers I was looking for.
Upon entering the corporate world, I started studying leadership in earnest. By reading and listening to programs, I was mentored by many of the great leadership gurus of all time, including Napoleon Hill, Earl Nightingale, Brian Tracy, John Maxwell and numerous other leadership authors. My knowledge base was growing, but I needed to get more specific with the training.
For over 30 years, I ran a “leadership laboratory” at my place of work. I surrounded myself with the best leaders I could find, and we learned from each other how to apply the theories we were reading about at the time. I also completed my MBA studies in Behavioral Science at The Simon School at University of Rochester.
Eventually, I learned that there are a million behaviors that constitute great leadership, but all of them are enabled by one single concept. That concept is trust. I learned that the leaders who can build, maintain, and repair trust enable all of the other behaviors (such as respecting people, being consistent, delegating well, etc.) to work like magic.
Leaders who fail to create a culture of high trust work like crazy on all of the other behaviors without much success.
Trust becomes the golden key to great leadership. If you have it, your success as a leader is assured. If you fail to develop high trust with your group, then you will be locked out from the halls of great leadership.
Immediately after retiring from my full-time job as a Division Manager for a large company, I went to work designing leadership development programs. Developing leaders was always my passion at work, and I figured that doing the same thing after leaving the corporate world would be rewarding and also lead to a stable income for decades to come.
I started teaching at several of the Business Schools within driving distance. I also made a proposal to the local Chamber of Commerce to run a series of “Leadership for Managers” courses at the chamber, which I have taught three times a year for the past 17 years. These teaching opportunities made sense, as they both fed my consulting and coaching business.
I also joined the National Speakers Association and prepared to spread the word about the benefits of a high trust culture widely.
As I teach each course, I take feedback at the end, so the material can be continually upgraded. The course has now expanded beyond the original 20 hour format because there are so many wonderful videos available to illustrate key points. Also, during COVID-19 I recast the entire program to be virtual. This change is a real blessing, because I can now reach people all over the world without having to travel.
Bob Whipple, MBA, CPTD, is a consultant, trainer, speaker, and author in the areas of leadership and trust. He is the author of: The Trust Factor: Advanced Leadership for Professionals, Understanding E-Body Language: Building Trust Online, Leading with Trust is Like Sailing Downwind, and Trust in Transition: Navigating Organizational Change. Bob has many years as a senior executive with a Fortune 500 Company and with non-profit organizations.
Talent Development 11 Instructional Design
September 26, 2020Section 2.2 in the CPTD Certification program for ATD is Instructional Design. The first bullet reads, ”Skill in selecting and aligning delivery options and media for training and/or learning events to the desired learning or behavioral outcomes.”
In this article, I will describe the process I have developed that has worked well for me over the past 20 years.
Step 1 Meet with the team and the leaders
I set up a few meetings to understand what they want to accomplish by an intervention. In these meetings I am like a sponge just soaking up the various bits of input. Usually the issue of trust is one factor in why they want some training, so I often recommend a trust survey to add to the data base.
Step 2 Administer a Trust Survey
I have developed my own version, but there are also commercial trust surveys that can be employed. My version identifies the general trust level and measures it in the specific organizational layers. For example: it is common for the higher levels in an organization to believe trust is at a pretty high level. When you get to the lower levels, the data spreads out and many people feel trust is pretty low.
My survey also has 30 areas where there could be an issue causing lower trust. For example, accountability and/or transparency often surface as an issue within an organization.
I feed back the information to the team and watch their reactions to it. It is generally a positive reaction, like I am on the right track.
Step 3 Look at extant data
The organization will likely have internal surveys for quality of work life or turnover data. They might have investigations of employee complaints. I gather all of the information they are willing to share with me.
Step 4 Identify most urgent training needs
This is done with another quick survey in which I identify over 80 different potential training topics and ask each participant to identify, for each one, what is his or her opinion of the urgency for training on the following scale:
0= no need at this time
1= routine – may be a little helpful
2= Important now – this topic would be very helpful
3= Urgent – we really need this right now
The 80 different topics cover a wide range of potential topics, such as, Communication skills, Emotional Intelligence, Understanding Body Language, Leading Successful Change Programs, Customer Service, etc.
Step 5 Winnow down the field
I now go into an analysis phase where I take all the data I have gathered (usually in just a few days) and compare it to a set of modules that I have built that cover about 100 different training topics.
Based on the data, I run a “comb” through the 100 potential topic areas and out pops a subset (normally 10-20 topics). This is the core elements of a custom program for that organization.
I put the topics in a logical order, so there will be a logical flow and schedule a meeting with the leaders. This meeting is usually less than a week from the first moment I walked into the organization.
Step 6 Gain Commitment
At the meeting I summarize the data that has been collected and then show an outline of the development program that was custom designed to meet their needs.
At this point, I almost always get a positive reaction to the proposal, because the data came from them. I recall one CEO looking at the proposal and writing BINGO next to the 7 action items I listed.
By this point I have not charged the client anything for my effort. I can give a pretty accurate estimate of the number of sessions that will be required and also the fee I would charge. My batting average for approvals is close to 90%.
Step 7 Customize the training for their particular industry
This is where I design the program to fit the specific company and industry. A program for a manufacturing plant will be quite different from a hospital or a financial planning office. I also customize the role-playing exercises, body sculptures, photographs on my slides to be for that specific industry.
I will use the company logo and any pictures of the actual people I can get in the program.
Step 8 Spice it up
In every training event, I include several stories to illustrate my points in an entertaining way. I also use magic illusions that relate directly to the concepts I am training. The illusions keep people on their toes but also each one is related to the topic I am teaching at the moment. I have hundreds of illusions to draw from.
By breaking up the training with experiential things that involve the participants in physical activities, I can keep the groups fresh and having fun while they learn the vital skills.
I have found this eight-step process allows me to efficiently handle a variety of clients in totally different industries but remain effective with my instructional design.
Bob Whipple, MBA, CPTD, is a consultant, trainer, speaker, and author in the areas of leadership and trust. He is the author of: The Trust Factor: Advanced Leadership for Professionals, Understanding E-Body Language: Building Trust Online, Leading with Trust is Like Sailing Downwind, and Trust in Transition: Navigating Organizational Change. Bob has many years as a senior executive with a Fortune 500 Company and with non-profit organizations.
Leadership Barometer 62 Level of Trust
August 20, 2020There are hundreds of assessments for leaders. The content and quality of these assessments vary greatly. You can spend a lot of time and money taking surveys to tell you the quality of your leadership.
There are a few leading indicators that can be used to give a pretty good picture of the overall quality of your leadership. These are not good for diagnosing problems or specifying corrective action, but they can tell you where you stand quickly. Here is one of my favorite measures.
Level of Trust
Good leaders create a legacy of trust within their organization. I have written elsewhere on the numerous hallmarks of an organization with trust as opposed to one that has no trust.
Is there a quick and dirty kind of litmus test for trust? Think about how you would know if an organization has high trust.
You can do extensive surveys on the climate or call in an expensive consultant to study every nook and cranny of the organization, but that is not necessary.
All you need to do is walk into a meeting that is going on and observe what you see for about 5 minutes. You can get a very accurate view of the level of trust in what Malcolm Gladwell calls a “thin slice” of a few minutes watching a group.
Look at how the people sit. Are they leaning back with arms crossed and rigid necks, or are they basically leaning either in or toward the other people next to them?
Observe the look on the faces of people in the meeting. Can you see pain and agony, like they do not want to be there but are forced to endure the agony till the boss adjourns?
Listen to how people address each other. Is there a biting sarcasm that seeks to gain personal advantage by making other people in the room look small, or do the people show genuine respect and even affection for each other?
See how individuals interact with the leader. Is it obvious that everyone is trying to help the leader or are they trying to trip him up or catch him in a mistake? Do the participants show a genuine respect for the leader?
Is there a willingness to speak up if there is something not sitting right – for anyone, or is there a cold atmosphere of fear where people know they will get clobbered if they contradict the leader? In other words, is there psychological safety in this group?
If there is work to be done are there eager volunteers or does everyone sit quiet like non bidders at an auction?
Is the spirit of the meeting one of doom and gloom or is the group feeling like masters of their own fate, even when times are rough?
Do the people focus on the vision of what they are trying to accomplish, or do they focus on each other in a negative way. The former is an indication of a high trust group while the latter is how low trust groups interact.
These are just a few signs you can observe in only a few minutes that will tell you the level of trust within the group. That trust level is an accurate reflection of the caliber of the leader.
I used to tell people that I could tell the climate of an organization within 30 seconds of watching a meeting. You can actually see it in the way people interact with each other.
Bob Whipple is CEO of Leadergrow Inc., a company dedicated to growing leaders. He speaks and conducts seminars on building trust in organizations.
Leadership Barometer 59 Reinforcement Done Well
July 21, 2020The most effective way to get people to perform in a certain way is to reward performance that is in the direction you wish to go.
Two other important concepts are to establish an environment of trust up front, and gently shape impending wrong behavior toward some activity that can be positively reinforced. These concepts are documented Ken Blanchard’s book, Whale Done, published in 2002.
When people are properly reinforced, they develop habits of doing the right things because it makes them feel good. The reinforcement becomes intrinsic. People are doing their best at all times, not just when the boss has a chance to witness it.
Of all the tools at a leader’s command, positive reinforcement is by far the most powerful. Yet reinforcement can be a minefield of potential problems, and many leaders, after getting burnt, become reluctant to use it.
By avoiding reinforcement, they ignore the most powerful correcting force available to them.
A good analogy is when a military pilot flies a fighter jet. The way to get a fighter jet to do what you want is to carefully control the stick at all times.
Reinforcement at work is like the stick of a fighter jet. If we are not skillful at using it, the results can be destabilizing or even disastrous, but that’s no reason to let go of the stick.
We simply need to train everyone to use reinforcement often, learn from any mistakes along the way, and use reinforcement to enhance intrinsic motivation.
It is sad that many attempts at positive reinforcement actually lower motivation. You have probably experienced this yourself, either on the sending or receiving end, and it can be very frustrating.
There are four reasons why positive reinforcement can have a negative impact.
1. Overdone Tangible Reinforcement
The over use of trinkets, buttons, T-shirts, or stickers to reinforce every positive action gets old quickly. When using tangible rewards, keep the volume and variety to a reasonable level to maintain their impact.
Check to see if people are rolling their eyes when given a trinket.
2. Insincere Reinforcing
Insincerity is transparent. When a manager says nice things about you that do not come from the heart, you know it instantly. It reduces his or her credibility.
When reinforcing others, don’t say something because it sounds good, say it because it feels true.
3. Not Perceived as Reinforcing
What people find reinforcing is a matter of individual taste. When leaders reinforce using their own frame of reference rather than that of the recipient, it often ends in frustration.
Find out what would really reinforce the other person by asking. Don’t give a doughnut to a person on a strict diet.
That sounds obvious, but that kind of mistake happens all the time.
4. Reinforcement Perceived as Unfair – Of all the reasons for not reinforcing well, the issue of fairness spreads out like a nuclear cloud after a bomb blast.
Leaders get burnt on this issue once, and it colors reinforcing patterns from then on.
If they reinforce Sally publicly, it makes her feel good, but tends to turn off Joe and Mark, who believe they did more than she did.
Fairness is why the “employee of the month” concept often backfires. It sets up a kind of implied competition where one person is singled out for attention. That person is perceived to “win” at the expense of others who think they “lose.”
How do you fight the issue of perceived unfair reinforcement?
Create a win-win atmosphere rather than win-lose. Focus more on group performance, where the whole group is reinforced with special mention to some key players.
Have the employees themselves nominate people singled out for attention. Group nomination feels better than having the boss “play God,” trying to figure out who made the biggest contribution. It is a tricky area.
You can never overdo sincere reinforcement in an organization. The best reinforcement approach is to make it ubiquitous and continuous.
The word ubiquitous comes from the Latin root, ubiqe, which means everywhere. It was originally a theological expression used to describe the omnipresence of Christ. In this context, it means that reinforcement should exist everywhere in an organization and be encountered constantly.
Developing a Reinforcing Culture
Thus far, we have discussed personal reinforcements for a job well done. This is important, but it pales compared with the power of developing a reinforcing culture at all levels.
That culture is a social norm that encourages everyone to honestly appreciate each other and say so as often as possible.
Many groups struggle in a kind of hell where people hate and try to undermine one another at every turn. They snipe at each other and “blow people in,” just to see them suffer or to get even for some perceived sin done to them.
What an awful environment to live and work in, yet it is far too common.
Contrast this with a group where individuals build each other up and delight in each other’s successes. These groups have much more fun. They enjoy interfacing with their comrades at work.
They are also about twice as productive! You see them together outside work for social events, and there are close family-type relationships in evidence.
As a leader, you want to develop this second kind of atmosphere, but how? A good place to start is with yourself. Make sure you are practicing positive reinforcement in a way that others see and recognize.
Create an atmosphere where everyone understands and places high value on effective reinforcement. Become a model of reinforcement, and praise those in your organization who excel at it.
One helpful technique is to have the leader encourage reinforcing notes within the organization and ask to receive a copy of each note. By reviewing the notes and publicly giving praise to both the sender and receivers, the method will quickly spread and perpetuate itself.
The speed and ease of e-mail facilitates these notes of praise.
At the same time, leaders need to encourage verbal reinforcement that is not documented. Any time someone sees another person doing something right, she should be encouraged to offer praise.
Especially important are the “thank yous” any time a person goes out of his or her way to help someone. The key is to create the culture at all levels. It isn’t enough for just the boss or a few supervisors to reinforce people. Teach everyone to do it. That multiplies the impact by however many people you have.
As the culture develops, you’ll see it spreading to other parts of the organization. People will begin to notice your area is much more positive and productive than before. It will sparkle, and upper management will start asking how you did it.
A reinforcing culture transforms an organization from a “what’s wrong” mindset to one of “what’s right.” The positive energy benefits everyone as the quality of work life is significantly enhanced.
In addition, the quality and quantity of work increases dramatically because you have harnessed energy previously lost in bickering and put it into positive work toward the vision. What an uplifting way to increase productivity!
Instead of beating on people and constantly dwelling on the negative, you’ll be generating good feelings and loyalty while you drive productivity to new heights. That is worth doing and easy to accomplish!
Don’t get discouraged if you make a mistake in reinforcing. Sometimes you will. It is an area of significant peril, but its power is immense.
Continually monitor your success level with reinforcement. Talk about it openly, and work to improve the culture. Consider every mistake a learning event for everyone, especially yourself. Often these are comical in nature – like throwing another pizza party when everyone is sick of pizza.
Let your reinforcement be joyous and spontaneous. Let people help you make it special. Reinforcement is the most powerful elixir available to a leader. Don’t shy away from it because it’s difficult or you’ve made mistakes in the past.
The preceding information was adapted from the book The TRUST Factor: Advanced Leadership for Professionals, by Robert Whipple. It is available on http://www.leadergrow.com.
Bob is also the author of Leading with Trust is like Sailing Downwind, Understanding E-Body Language: Building Trust Online, and Trust in Transition: Navigating Organizational Change. Bob consults and speaks on these and other leadership topics. He is CEO of Leadergrow Inc. a company dedicated to growing leaders.
Leadership Barometer 58 12 Rules for Success
July 13, 2020Several years ago I generated a list of rules for success. It is important to write down a set of rules for yourself, just as it is to document your values.
Having a list of rules gives you something to hang on to when there is too much confusion. Another benefit of a list like this is that it helps other people know how you operate much quicker.
I would review this list and my passion for each item whenever inheriting a new group. People appreciated that I made a special effort for them get to know me in this way.
1. The most important word that determines your success is “attitude” – how you react to what happens in your life. The magic learning here is that you control your attitude, therefore, you can control your success.
2. Engagement of people is the only way to business success.
3. Credibility allows freedom to manage in an “appropriate” way (which means if you are not credible, you will be micro-managed).
4. Build a “real” environment – maximize trust – This requires honesty and transparency.
5. Create winners – help people realize their dreams of success (which means, grow other leaders).
6. Recognize and reward results at all levels (reinforcement governs performance).
7. Operate ahead of the power curve (which means, be organized and get things done well ahead of the deadline).
8. Don’t get mired down in bureaucratic mumbo jumbo, negotiate the best position possible, out flank the Sahara. However, feed the animal when necessary (which means pick your political battles carefully).
9. Enjoy the ride – when it is no longer fun – leave.
10. Admit when you are wrong and do it with great delight. Beg people to let you know when you sap them and thank them for it (which means Reinforce Candor).
11. Provide “real” reinforcement that is perceived as reinforcing by the receiver. Build an environment of reinforcement.
12. Keep trying and never give up. You will succeed.
There are many other things that could be mentioned, but if you can master the things above, most other things become subcategories of them.
For example, another bullet might be “Treat people as adults and always demonstrate respect.” That is really a sub item of the second bullet.
Or another bullet might be “Always walk your talk.” That is one thing (among many) you need to do for bullet four to happen.
I believe every leader should have a documented set of beliefs such as the one above. I am not advocating that you adopt my list. Think about it and develop your own list.
Don’t worry about being complete, just start an electronic file and add to it over the years as you grow and encounter new ideas. You will be amazed how this simple task enables you to operate with congruence and grow in your leadership skill.
The preceding information was adapted from the book Leading with Trust is like Sailing Downwind, by Robert Whipple. It is available on http://www.leadergrow.com.
Robert Whipple is also the author of The TRUST Factor: Advanced Leadership for Professionals and, Understanding E-Body Language: Building Trust Online. Bob consults and speaks on these and other leadership topics. He is CEO of Leadergrow Inc. a company dedicated to growing leaders.
Talent Development 2 Leaders: Stop Trying to Motivate Your Employees
July 1, 2020As a training and development professional, how many times a week do you hear leaders say, “We’ve got to motivate our people?” Believe it or not, that phrase often leads to lower rather than higher motivation.
Seeking to motivate people is the most common thought pattern leaders use every day, so what’s wrong with it?
Trying to motivate people shows a lack of understanding about what motivation is and how it is achieved.
Leaders who think this way put the cart before the horse and do not make the necessary mind shift to do the things that actually do improve motivation.
So, what is the cart and what is the horse? The cart is the culture of the organization that either enables or extinguishes motivation. The horse is how satisfied people feel at any particular moment.
. Why do leaders reverse the conventional order; try to motivate people by making them feel good?
1. Poor understanding of motivation –
The notion that by adding perks or benefits we somehow make people more motivated is flawed. Over 50 years ago, Frederick Herzberg taught us that increasing the so-called “hygiene factors” is a good way to sweeten things (reduce dissatisfaction), but a poor way to increase motivation.
Why? – because goodies like parties, bonuses, hat days, games, , etc. often help people become happier at work, but they do little to impact the reasons they are motivated to do their best work.
2. Taking the easy way out –
Many leaders believe that by heaping nice things on top of people it will feel like a better culture. The only way to improve the culture is to build trust.
By focusing on a better culture, managers enable people to motivate themselves.
3. Using the wrong approach –
It is difficult to motivate another person. You can scare a person into compliance, but that’s not motivation, it is fear.
You can bribe a person into feeling happy, but that’s not motivation it is temporary euphoria that is quickly replaced by a “what have you done for me lately” mentality.
4. Focusing on perks –
Individuals will gladly accept any kind of perk the boss is willing to hand out, but the reason they go the extra mile is a personal choice based on the level of motivational factors, not the size of the reward.
Putting the horse in front of the cart means working on the culture to build trust first.
Improving the motivating factors, such as authority, reinforcement, growth, and responsibility creates the right environment. Motivation within people will happen, and it will endure.
Why do I make this distinction? I believe motivation comes from within each of us. As a manager or leader, I do not believe you or anyone else can motivate other people.
What you can do is create a process or culture whereby employees will decide to become motivated to perform at peak levels. An example is when you set a vision and goals then allow people to use their initiative to get the job done as they see fit.
How can we tell when a leader has the wrong understanding about motivation? A clear signal is when the word “motivate” is used as a verb – for example, “Let’s see if we can motivate the team by having a picnic.”
If leaders seek to change other people’s attitude about work with perks, they are going to be disappointed frequently. To motivate is not something you “do to other people,” rather it is something that is always within people that only they choose to let come out.
Using the word “motivation” as a noun usually shows a better understanding – “Let’s increase the motivation in our workforce by giving the team more autonomy.
An organization where all people are pursuing a common vision in a healthy environment of trust has a sustainable competitive advantage due to high employee motivation. The way to create this is to build a culture of TRUST and affection within the organization.
You accomplish this through consistency and by letting people know it is safe to voice their opinion without fear of reprisal. You work to inspire people with a vision of a better existence for them and by really hearing their input. Doing this helps employees become motivated because:
• They feel a part of a winning team and do not want to let the team down. Being a winner is fun.
• They feel both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards when they are doing their best work, and that is what drives their behaviors.
• They appreciate their co-workers and seek ways to help them physically and emotionally.
• They understand the goals of the organization and are personally committed to help as much as they can in the pursuit of the goals.
• They truly enjoy the social interactions with peers. They feel that going to work is a little like going bowling, except they are distributing computers instead of rolling a ball at wooden pins.
• They deeply respect their leaders and want them to be successful.
• They feel like they are part owners of the company and want it to succeed. By doing so, they bring success to themselves and their friends at work.
• They feel recognized for their many contributions and feel wonderful about that. If there is a picnic or a cash bonus, that is just the icing on the cake: not the full meal.
For an organization, “culture” means how people interact, what they believe, and how they create. If you could peel off the roof of an organization, you would see the manifestations of the culture in the physical world.
The actual culture is more esoteric because it resides in the hearts and minds of the society. It is the impetus for observable behaviors.
Achieving a state where all people are fully engaged is a large undertaking. It requires tremendous focus and leadership to achieve. It cannot be something you do on Tuesday afternoons or when you have special meetings.
Describe it as a new way of life rather than a program. You should see evidence of this in every nook and cranny of the organization.
Do not put the cart in front of the horse by attempting to motivate people with special events or gifts. Instead, increase the motivating factors and build a culture of trust. The end result is that many people will choose to be highly motivated, and the organization will prosper.
Bob Whipple is known internationally as “The Trust Ambassador.” He is CEO of Leadergrow Inc. a leadership Development organization.