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

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. But it all comes from
who you are being from moment to moment. A producer
or a critic?

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We had the opportunity to watch and hear Neale
Donald Walsch speak a couple years ago, and his message
inspired us, as always. It’s amazing who we can be if we
are willing to drop the story of who we think we should be.
In our coaching practice we have always marveled at the
fact that people grow, evolve, and move forward the minute
they are willing to live without their stories about them-
selves (weaknesses) and others (threats). Steve’s book 
The
Story of You
came out of those breakthroughs in coaching
sessions.
Or, as Walsch has said, “Every decision you make—
every decision—is not a decision about what to do. It’s a
decision about Who You Are. When you see this, when
you understand it, everything changes. You begin to see
life in a new way. All events, occurrences, and situations
turn into opportunities to do what you came here to do.”
Choosing to be a producer who causes things to hap-
pen will set you apart from most other people. And that’s
not always easy. Most managers just try to manage like
other people manage, and lose all the potential of who
they could really be by doing that. Or, in the words of the
fiery and brilliant philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, “We
forfeit three-fourths of ourselves to be like other people.”
5. Stop Criticizing Upper
Management
Two things are bad for the heart—running uphill
and running down people.
—Bernard Gimbel
Stop Criticizing Upper Management

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/ 100 Ways to Motivate Others
This is a huge temptation: distancing 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 dam-
aging 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 an unpleasant but definite kind of bond-
ing, but it also 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....” “