Tag Archives: Productivity

It’s an Inspiration. Why You Can’t Motivate Anyone.

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Present day culture often confuses motivation and inspiration, and this confusion spills over into the business environment. However, it is not an issue of motivation or inspiration. Rather, great business leaders know that exceptional business results require both motivation and inspiration and, equally important, they understand the different origins of motivation and inspiration.

How often have you heard some variation of the following phrase, “We need to figure out how to motivate this [insert the name of a team member, customer, supplier, etc].” In reality, it is impossible to motivate someone else to do anything. Why? Motivation is an internal driver. A wide range of factors motivate us. Some of those factors involve basic physical needs—food, clothing and shelter. Other drivers arise from our spirit. Some desires of the heart appear almost universally—gaining the respect of others, feeling loved, and aspiring for significance. Yet, other desires of the heart come from inherent character traits and vary from person to person. For example, crowds energize some of us and drain others. Lastly, spiritual drivers flowing from an intentional commitment to certain values inform and guide our behaviors—caring for the defenseless among us, beliefs about an afterlife, or the importance of learning.

Inspiration, on the other hand, involves an external animating force that draws out behaviors Inspiration is the province of leaders who seek to influence the behavior of others. Inspiration seeks voluntary cooperation not compulsory compliance.

What inferences and behavioral implications might we draw from these differences between motivation and inspiration:

  • Effective inspiration requires caring and curiosity. Is not about me. Skillful inspiration is very others-centered and requires cultivating a curiosity about what drives others.
  • Effective inspiration requires the expenditure of energy. If we hope to inspire others, we must often provide an input to produce the action we seek. We find in chemistry a complementary analogy where two substances require the presence of a separate catalyst to create the desired chemical reaction.
  • Inspiration cannot impose or inject from the outside an idea foreign or repulsive to an individual. We call that coercion. Rather, inspiration is about discovering and drawing out motivations already resident within the other person.
  • We can inspire through leadership, but if motivations arise internally, we must seek and hire people motivated by factors suitable for our team or business. Hiring for motivation requires that the organization explicitly understands its own drivers since you cannot hope to find what you cannot describe.

Part 2 (next week’s post) will convert these implications into 15 actionable methods that can inspire ordinary people to accomplish extraordinary things.

What Characterizes a Person of Integrity?

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Integrity is one of those common words we may use without ever stopping to ponder what it means. We instinctively have a strong sense that integrity is a good thing; so it’s an attribute of human character worthy of effort, but how do I attain it.

I never found a definition that satisfied all the elements central to a full understanding of integrity; so a number of years ago I wrote my own:

“Integrity is the reliably consistent alignment of what I believe, think and do and the highest objective standards of morality”

Let’s unpack that definition starting with the back “…what I believe, think, and act and the highest objective standards of morality.” There are four elements to integrity:

  1. External. What I do. My public life. Observable words and actions both in terms of commission and omission in various situations; after all, sometimes the right thing to do is nothing.
  2. Internal. Who I am. My private life. My mind, will and emotions. Some call this the human spirit. This includes all the doubts and fears with which I may wrestle but not expose to the outside world.
  3. Metaphysical. What I believe. This may be an explicit and conscious set of beliefs, or it may be your subconscious internal compass of right and wrong (your conscience). Some call this the human soul.
  4. Supernatural. What is Right and True. This standard exists apart from me as an individual and serves as an arbiter of right versus wrong. [As an aside, this fourth element may make some of you uncomfortable. You may believe it inappropriate to pass moral judgments across peoples and cultures and struggle with the notion of an objective right and wrong. Consider this…Absent this fourth element, one could claim that the individuals who planned and executed the 9/11 attacks on the USA were individuals of integrity. The incredibly tight alignment among their beliefs, thoughts and actions led them to sacrifice their very lives. They made this fateful decision based on a powerful belief in the rightness of their position. Attempts to argue that their actions were wrong starts one down a logical path of right versus wrong.]

Random or occasion alignment of these four elements do not produce integrity. We must combine all four elements in a “…reliably consistent alignment… ”

Without a reliably consistent alignment among these four elements I will experience the draining and damaging effects of internal turmoil. I am weakened emotionally. The pressure erodes my passion and siphons off my stamina. Sustained internal misalignment will eventually damage my physical and emotional health.

Externally, an unreliable or inconsistent alignment among these four elements produces collateral damage to my relationships. Not only does my inconsistency hurt others, but the rebound effect makes my life a bigger struggle. The blowback also shapes my reputation as someone unpredictable and inconsiderate. The multiplying effect of my reputation makes every subsequent interaction more difficult than necessary.

On the positive side, a reliability consistent alignment unleashes and leverages the power of alignment.

When we nurture and exercise our own inherent talents we act in concert with who we are as a person. We naturally and more easily perform at a high level. We feel joy in our labors, because we are doing work we were designed to do. We receive invigorating affirmation from others that inspires us to greatness and sustains us through difficult times. We experience a wholeness that breeds contentment.

If we take integrity to the ultimate level and align ourselves with “the highest objective standards of morality”, we place ourselves in alignment with God-ordained Natural Laws. We suffer less heartache and harm. Our behaviors yield fruitful outcomes. We enjoy mutually fulfilling relationships. We are producers (givers) and not solely consumers (takers); yet we can humbly receive without guilt.

At a practical level building integrity involves regularly expose your mind to Truth (for me that’s the Bible) to erase errors that creep into your life from the imperfect world and renew your mind around right thinking. Consider writing a personal mission statement that reflects Truth and your uniqueness as a human being. Regularly assess and realign your beliefs, thoughts and actions to your mission statement.

Don’t Spin Your Tires

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My project is stuck. My team is under performing. We are falling behind the competition. We are missing our earnings projection. Why? What is the problem? Where do I start?

There are five discovery factors an effective leader must assess before launching any countermeasures to get a project/team/business back on track.

Before I proceed, please understand that I strongly support using one of the powerful problem-solving methodologies developed and rigorously field-tested over the past several decades; including the Lean Plan-Do-Check-Act or the Six Sigma Design-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control. Those methods define a series of effective process steps for continuous improvement. However, they do not tell you where to start. While the discovery nature of those methodologies and related tool sets would eventually discover the root cause of your team’s poor performance, the urgency of the business situation typically allows for few, if any, false starts.

Even the best processes perform more efficiently (i.e., quickly uncover the root cause) when we seed or start the process by first assessing the most likely problem areas. If you discover oil in your car’s radiator (as we did recently in our household), it is a waste of time investigating the car’s electrical system. Instead, you will focus attention on the automobile fluids and look for sources of cross-contamination.

Where do I start when my project/team/business is under performing? Two fundamental principles undergird the elements and sequence of the five discovery factors I have developed and used over the years; one, people want to do a good job; and two, the selection of your team heavily influences the fate of your team/organization/business.

So, what are those five elements? Where should we begin an evaluation to identify the root cause of under performance?

  1. Talent. Do we have the right players on the team? Even the most well-intentioned person will fail in certain circumstances. I watched the movie “Lone Survivor” with my son last night and was again struck by the realization that there is no way I could become a Navy Seal. Their combination of mental and physical determination makes them a breed apart.
  2. Target. This is a combination of strategy and priorities. In short, are we working on the right stuff? If a particular baseball game requires the team to play “small ball,” but my batters are all trying to hit a home run, that’s a problem. If I am spending my team’s resources on improving the distribution system when we have a problem of product quality, we are focusing on the wrong target. The more typical problem is that everything is a priority, which means nothing is a priority.
  3. Tactics. Evaluate our processes. Do individuals or teams use their own work methods? Are performance standards widely deployed and rigorously tracked? Do we have documented processes for performing repetitive functions, including how to solve problems? Do we have documented processes that we frequently ignore?
  4. Training. Do we explicitly know the skills (as distinct from talents) necessary for high-performance in a particular project or organization? Do we know how team members’ skills align with those success factors? Have we provided appropriate training to fill in the gaps or cross-training to build sufficient depth and enhance flexibility.
  5. Time. Is the team investing enough time? More bluntly, are they working hard enough? This factor is intentionally last, because the answer to a business problem is rarely work harder. However, there are circumstances where solution requires working faster and longer. So, don’t ignore it.

The next time you find your team stuck, pull out this list and use it to start your own assessment of why the team is spinning its tires.

 

 

The Unequal Nature of Egalitarian Time

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The world isn’t fair. Personal, corporate, community and national assets are not distributed equally. Intelligence, wealth, and power may vary greatly from individual to individual. Yet, the life distance we measure as a day travels equally for every person on earth. This same window of time is available to all; regardless of individual intelligence, wealth, health or power. However, in retrospect we can see that some periods during our life or business were dramatically more impactful than others. While the seconds, minutes, hours and days marched on at a rigid pace, not all days presented the same opportunity window.

A former business leader of mine once said that for a stable business with modest growth a year is a year. However, a business experiencing fast growth must treat every quarter as a year and every week as a month; and a business experiencing hypergrowth must respect every month as a year and every week as a quarter. In other words, time is egalitarian (i.e. there are 24 hours in every day for everyone), but time is not equal for all people in all situations.

If it takes a calendar month to develop an “annual” business plan and you are a hypergrowth business, you spent a whole “year” planning and no time executing. If it takes three weeks to close the books and issue financial reports, the “year” in a hypergrowth business is 75% complete before the business know how well it’s doing.

It does not take much thought to identify rate of change as the distinguishing factor between stability and hypergrowth. Time speeds up when my life/business experiences a high rate of change. If I do not recognize times of rapid change and correspondingly adjust the pace at which I plan, decide and act, then I risk falling behind or missing a window of opportunity.

But be careful! In order to appropriately adapt we must recognize that our minds can warp our perspective of time. Consider how often you have heard someone remark how quickly the year has flown. Contrast that with your memories of the interminable wait for Christmas Day as a child. And, if you stop and think for a few moments, you can also recall periods of time as an adult when time seemed to stand still. Don’t ask me how that happens. The best analogy that comes to mind is the difference between high-speed and time-lapsed photography. A high-speed camera takes many frames per second, but when replayed at normal speed gives the appearance of slow-motion. On the other hand, time-lapsed photography compresses time and allows us to actually observe slow rates of change that are undetectable at normal speed.

I can only speculate that our minds possess remarkable potential to adapt to high rates of change. However, extended periods of stability can also slow our minds. This is why bright people with long experience in large corporations may struggle or even fail in a fast-paced entrepreneurial environment.

Bottom line…you must learn to recognize the signs of the time and adjust your behaviors accordingly or risk getting either left behind or overrun. As the iconic American humorist, Will Rogers once said, “You may be on the right track, but if you are just sitting there, you will get run over.”

Putting it into practice. How can I leverage the relativity of time?

  • Take time to reflect and train my mind to recognize the present pace of time in my life and business
  • Adapt my rhythms of planning, decisions and actions to suit the times
  • Take advantage of slower times to crystallize and capture lessons from past failures and successes; so that I am prepared to readily apply them to future problems and opportunities
  • Commit to a lifetime of learning. Leverage times of stability to learn new skills and explore new arenas.