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

To the greatest motivator there ever was, Mr. Rodney Mercado, child prodigy, genius in 10 fields, and professor of music and violin at the University of Arizona.

To Chuck Coonradt, who, unlike other consultants, not only talks about how to motivate others, but has a proven system, the Game of Work, that delivers stunning results and fun to the workplace in the same breath. Chuck used the Game of Work on his own business first, and blew the lid off the results for his Positive Mental Attitude Audiotape company. Chuck realized that what he had created, the Game of Work system, was worth a fortune to companies of all sizes: It brought more financial success than even Positive Mental Attitude! Chuck has helped our own businesses succeed.

To motivator extraordinaire Steve Hardison, about whose talents we have written much, but never too much.

To Ron Fry, Gina Talucci, and Michael Pye at Career Press, for many years of wonderful service to our writing efforts.

And to the memory of Lyndon Duke (1941-2004), a magnificent teacher, motivator, and friend.

The world of leadership has changed dramatically since the first edition of this book was written, and Scott Richardson and I have now revised and refreshed this organizational leadership guidebook to meet the times.

We have added 10 new ways to motivate others, bringing us into the modern world.

The book now includes fresh respect for the communication and rapid decision-making that the global community demands.

The importance of personal self-leadership and physical energy have been added to the solid leadership principles that made the first editions of this book so popular with leaders and managers of every kind of organization, from corporate, educational, and non-profit, to community groups and even families.

Motivating others requires a connection to people’s deep desires. It’s not just about loading them up with a lot of how-to information. Transformation is more important than information. Action is everything. A great motivator of others will value testing over trusting. She won’t waste time getting her people to trust change or trust the system – she will work on ways to test them.

Change in the workplace and the world is exponential now. It is no longer linear, predictable change. It is more like the absolutely unexpected, shocking change described so dramatically in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan. Because of this, great motivators are now welcoming change and helping their people see all change as a creative opportunity.

Organizations are more vulnerable than ever to suddenly disappearing. They can become obsolete in a heartbeat. But rather than finding that frightening, one who masters motivating himself and others finds it exciting.

The new edition we have created for you addresses all these quantum shifts in organizational reality. It updates and upgrades your skills as a leader to motivate others to feel the same excitement you do about the global market and its opportunities. The 10 new ways to motivate others that we have added to this book are what work for us and our clients. They are not theory. And because they are not mere theory, we invite you to use them immediately, and see them as tools, not rules.

There was a manager named Tom who came early to a seminar we were presenting on leadership. He was attired in an olive green polo shirt and white pleated slacks, ready for a day of golf. Tom walked to the front of the room and said, “Look, your session is not mandatory, so I’m not planning on attending.”

“That’s fine, but I wonder why you came early to this session to tell us that. There must be something that you’d like to know.”

“Well, yes, there is,” the manager confessed. “All I want to know is how to get my sales team to improve. How do I manage them?”

“Is that all you want to know?”

“Yes, that’s it,” declared the manager.

“Well, we can save you a lot of time and make sure that you get to your golf game on time.”

The manager Tom leaned forward, waiting for the words of wisdom that he could extract about how to manage his people.

We told him: “You can’t.”

“What?”

“You can’t manage anyone. So there, you can go and have a great game.”

“What are you saying?” asked the manager. “I thought you give whole seminars on motivating others. What do you mean, I can’t?”

“We do give whole seminars on this topic. But one of the first things we teach managers is that they can’t really directly control their people. Motivation always comes from within your employee, not from you.”

“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.

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.