Steve Chandler, Scott Richardson
100 Ways to Motivate Others

To Rodney Mercado

Acknowledgments

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.

“While business is a game of numbers, real achievement is measured in infinite emotional wealths: friendship, usefulness, helping, learning, or, said another way, the one who dies with the most joys wins.”

– Dale Dauten

Introduction to the Third Edition

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.

– Steve Chandler

1. Know Where Motivation Comes From

Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.

– Dwight D. Eisenhower

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.

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.

Maybe you do this to win favor and create bonding at the victim level with the team, but it won’t work. In fact, what you have done will eventually damage the confidence of the team. It will send three messages that are very damaging to morale and motivation:

1. This organization can’t be trusted.

2. Our own management is against us.

3. Yours truly, your own team leader, is weak and powerless in the organization.

This leads to a definite but unpleasant kind of bonding, and it leads to deep trust problems and further disrespect for the integrity of the organization. Running down upper management can be done covertly (a rolling of the eyes at the mention of the CFO’s name) or overtly (“I don’t know why we’re doing this; no one ever consults with me on company policy, probably because they know I’d disagree”). This mistake is deepened by the repeated use of the word they. (“They want us to start…” “I don’t know why they are having us do it this way…” “They don’t understand what you guys are going through here…” “They, they, they…!”).

The word they used in excess soon becomes a near-obscenity and solidifies the impression that we are isolated, misunderstood victims.

A true leader has the courage to represent upper management, not run it down. A true leader says we.

6. Do the One Thing

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.

– Peter Drucker

I can’t motivate others if I am not doing the right thing. And to keep myself in a relaxed and centered state, it’s important for me to not be scattered, distracted, or spread thin. It’s important that I don’t race around thinking that I’ve got too much to do. I don’t have too much to do. The truth is, there is only one thing to do, and that is the one thing I have chosen to do right now.

If I do that one thing as if it’s all I have to think about, it will be extremely well done, and my relationship with any other person involved will be better and more relaxed and full of trust than before.

A careful study of my past week shows me that I did a lot of things, and they all got done one thing at a time. In fact, even in my busiest time ever, I was only able to do one thing at a time, even though I stressed myself and other people out by always thinking of seven things at once. When I talked to someone all I could think about was the seven other people I needed to talk to. Eventually, all seven people felt that stress and that lack of attentiveness, that absolute lack of warmth. Doing more than one thing at a time produces fear, adrenaline, and anxiety in the human system, and people pick up on that. People are not drawn to that. They keep away from that.

The mind entertains one thought at a time, and only one. The greatest cause of feeling “swamped” and “overwhelmed” in life is not knowing this.

The greatest source of stress in the workplace is the mind’s attempt to carry many thoughts, many tasks, many future scenarios, many cares, many worries, many concerns at once. The mind can’t do that. No mind can; not even Einstein’s could.

I need to choose from the list of things that need to be done, and then do the one thing as if that were the only thing. If it’s a phone call, then I need to slow down and relax and let myself be in a good mood so that the phone call will be a good experience, and the recipient and I can be complete afterward.

We talked to Jason, a national sales manager who had just finished a brutally long phone conference with his team. He spent the conference call nervously urging his team on to higher numbers and warning them that the team goals were not going to be met at the rate they were going. He had called the meeting because his own superiors had just called him to question him about his team’s poor performance.

Although Jason had been working 12-hour days, he felt he was falling behind in everything. On top of that, his superiors’ anxiety was then passed down to him. Because it was passed down into a hectic, disorganized mind, he freaked out and took it out on his team.

This is not motivation. Motivation requires a calm, centered leader who is focused on one thing, and only one thing.

7. Keep Giving Feedback

The failure to give appropriate and timely feedback is the most extreme cruelty that we can inflict on any human being.

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