Episode #117: My Motivation Isn't The Boss's Job

Motivation is simple. It comes from within. If you don’t believe me, try yelling to your staff member “be motivated, be motivated, be motivated” over and over and you will soon see how ridiculous the idea is. The boss’s job is to create the environment where the self-motivated can excel.

“Motivate me” must be one of the saddest requests a leader can receive. The request may not be so bluntly articulated, but the underlying assumption that the boss is there to motivate the staff seems to linger. The search for salvation located in the responsibility of others is a big fail.

Motivation, loyalty, accountability, effort, responsibility, engagement – probably every boss is expecting these from their staff. They are all outcomes of inputs. Inputs from both the boss side and the staff side. We know what level of staff motivation we want as leaders, but how do we achieve it?

Some favourite leader methodologies are yelling, threatening, instilling fear of loss, shaming and humiliating. Steve Jobs ticked the box on quite a few of these in his early days as a leader. He has become a halo encrusted, saint like figure nowadays because he took Apple away from the brink of self immolation and gave it a second life through his leadership. He was however a flawed leader who, at various times, resorted to these methods.

His later success does not validate these bully boy favourites. We need to look at the opportunity cost of what he could have achieved, had he been a better people leader. Getting massive compliance will not get you enough creative innovation. He could have done more, much much more, if he had played to his people’s strengths rather than abusing their weaknesses.

Strong leaders often work off the assumption that what made them successful is the model for everyone else to follow. Oh, if it were only that easy! Unfortunately, few people are ever going to be like you. You realise this as you go through life, when trying to deal with various others, but mysteriously, we tend to forget this fact when at work. Personality styles are often broken out into four boxes and by definition we tend to suit one box over the others. Hence three quarters of the population are automatically not on our wave-length.

So how can we motivate the people who are not like us – probably the majority of staff. By the way, if your staff are all the same personality style as you, because that is how you have tweaked the recruiting system, settle back for disaster ahead. Your flagrant cult of your personality type and lack of diversity will bubble up so much group think, you will assure yourselves you are correct all the way along, as you speed lemming-like, straight off the cliff.

Let’s assume that is not the case and you have a typically diverse work group with people with various preferred personality styles. Do yourself a big favour and start communicating with the team, as they prefer. This is beyond the Golden Rule, on toward the Platinum Rule of “treating everyone, as they wish to be treated”. That means knowing what is self-motivating for each person and counter-intuitively, aligning that with the organisation’s goals, rather than the other way around.

Communication skills, one of the most important soft skills, are key to success here. What we say is important, but how we say it is more important. Let’s be clear - we can’t motivate anyone but ourselves. However, as the leader, we can create an ecosystem where the team are encouraged to motivate themselves. Mirroring their preferred communication style when speaking means better understanding. Talking in terms of the other person’s interests, rather than are own, is more likely to be motivating for them.

The trick is you have to spend time with your team to know what their individual interests are. We loop back to the soft skills of good communication. The boss’s barked order generates docile compliance. The alignment of staff self-motivation with the direction of the organisations’s strategy, coupled with the right communications skills, get’s our people going the extra mile. That is a good goal - Platinum Rule turbo charged self-motivation.