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

The
Game of Work. 
He has created an entire system for mak-
ing a game out of work.
Chuck recalled that when he started in the grocery
business, in the icy frozen-food section of the warehouse,
he noticed that the owners would bend over backwards to
take care of their workers. They would give them breaks
every hour to warm up and they would give them prefer-
ential pay. But no matter what they did, the workers would
bitterly complain about the chilling cold.
“However, you could take these exact same workers
and put a deer rifle into their hands,” Chuck said, “and
you could send them out into weather that was much worse
than anything in the warehouse, and they would call it fun!
And you wouldn’t have to pay them a dime! In fact, they
would pay for it themselves!”
The key to making work fun, as Tom Sawyer taught us
many years ago, is to turn what most people would con-
sider drudgery into a game.
Randy was a leader-client of ours who had a problem
with absenteeism. For many months he tried to attack and
eliminate the problem. Finally, he realized that it might
be possible to lighten things up by introducing the game
element.
So Randy created a game. (Leaders create; managers
react.) He issued a playing card to every employee who
achieved perfect attendance for the month. A card was drawn
at random from a bucket of cards. The employee then put
the card up in his or her cubicle. At the end of six months,
the person with the best poker hand won a major prize; the
second and third best hands also won good cash prizes.

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“My absenteeism problem virtually disappeared,” Randy
later recalled. “In fact, we had some problems with actual
sick people trying to work when they shouldn’t have. They
would wake up with a fever, and their spouse would say,
‘You’re staying home today,’ and they would say, ‘Are you
crazy? I’m holding two aces and you want me to stay home?’”
After being in business for four years selling a pre-
packaged management development program, Chuck
Coonradt made what became the most important sales call
of his career.
He called on a plant manager in a pre-constructed
housing company. As part of their discussion, the manager
began to give Chuck the “Kids Today” lecture—kids don’t
care, kids won’t work, kids don’t have the same values you
and I had when we were growing up.
“As he was speaking, we were looking over the factory
floor from the management office 30 feet above the fac-
tory floor,” Chuck recalled. “He pointed down to the eight
young men siding a house and said, ‘What are you and
your program going to do about that?’”
Chuck said that he looked at their work pace and said
that it “would best be compared to arthritic snails in wet
cement. These guys appeared to be two degrees out of
reverse and leaning backwards! He had given me objec-
tions for which I didn’t have an answer. I really didn’t
know what to say.”
Then an amazing thing occurred—lunch. As soon as
the lunch bell rang, these eight workers dropped their ham-
mers as if they were electrified, took off on a dead run as
if being stuck with cattle prods, four of them taking off
their shirts, running 50 yards down the factory floor to a
basketball court.
Create a Game

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/ 100 Ways to Motivate Others
The motivational transformation was amazing! Chuck
watched the game, mesmerized, for exactly 22 minutes.
Everybody knew their job on the court, did their job on
the court, and supported the team with energy, engage-
ment, and enthusiasm—all without management. They
knew how to contribute to the teams they were on, and
they enjoyed it.
At 12:22 the game stopped, they picked up their sack
lunches and their sodas, and began to walk back to their
workstations, where, at 1 p.m., they were back on the
clock—arthritic snails back in the wet cement.
Chuck turned to the plant manager and said, “I don’t
believe there is a raw human material problem. I don’t
think there is anything wrong with these kids’ motivation.”
And on that day, Chuck began a quest to see if it would
be possible to transfer the energy, enthusiasm, and en-
gagement that he saw on the basketball court to the fac-
tory work floor. His success at doing so has become
legendary throughout the business world.
“Now we identify the