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

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Does anybody here work with a person who seems
unmanageable?” Steve asked as he opened one of his lead-
ership seminars.
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The managers who filled the room nodded and smiled.
Some rolled their eyes skyward in agreement. They obviously
had a lot of experience trying to manage people like that.
“How do you do it?” one manager called out. “How
do you manage unmanageable people?”
“I don’t know,” Steve said.
“What do you mean you don’t know? We’re here to
find out how to do it,” someone else called out.
“I’ve never seen it done,” Steve said. “Because I be-
lieve, in the end, all people are pretty unmanageable. I’ve
never known anyone who was good at managing people.”
“Then why have a seminar on managing people if it
can’t be done?”
“Well, you tell me, can it be done? Do you actually
manage your people? Do you manage your spouse? Can
you do it? I don’t think so.”
“Well, then, is class dismissed?”
“No, certainly not. Because we can all stay and learn
how great leaders get great results from their people. But
maybe they do it without managing people, because basi-
cally you can’t manage people.”
“If they don’t manage people, what do they do?”
“They manage agreements.”
Managers make a mistake when they try to manage
their people. They end up trying to shovel mercury with a
pitchfork, managing people’s emotions and personalities.
Then they try to “take care” of their most upset people,
not in the name of better communication and understand-
ing, but in the name of containing dissent and being liked.
This leads to poor time management and a lot of
ineffective amateur psychotherapy. It also encourages

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employees to take a more immature position in their
communication with management, almost an attempt to
be re-parented by a supervisor rather than having an adult-
to-adult relationship.
A leader’s first responsibility is to make sure the rela-
tionship is a mature one.
A skillful leader does not run around playing amateur
psychotherapist, trying to manage people’s emotions and
personalities all day. A skillful leader is compassionate,
and always seeks to understand the feelings of others. But
a skillful leader does not try to 
manage
those feelings.
A leader, instead, manages agreements. A leader cre-
ates agreements with team members and enters into those
agreements on an adult-to-adult basis. All communication
is done with respect. There is no giving in to the tempta-
tion to be intimidating, bossy, or all-knowing.
Once agreements are made on an adult-to-adult basis,
people don’t have to be managed anymore. What gets
managed is the agreement. It is more mature and respect-
ful to do it that way, and both sides enjoy more open and
trusting communication. There is also more accountabil-
ity running both ways. It is now easier to discuss uncom-
fortable subjects.
Harry was an employee who always showed up late for
team meetings. Many managers would deal with this prob-
lem by talking behind Harry’s back, or trying to intimi-
date Harry with sarcasm, or freezing Harry out by not
returning his calls, or meeting with Harry to play thera-
pist. But our client Jill would do none of that.
Jill co-authored an agreement with Harry that said
Harry (and Jill) would both be on time for meetings.
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They agreed to agree, and they agreed to keep their
commitment to the agreement. It is an adult process that
leads to open communication and relaxed accountability.
Jill has come to realize that when adults agree to keep
their agreements with each other, it leads to a more openly
accountable company culture. It leads to higher levels of
self-responsibility and self-respect.
The biggest beneficial impact of managing agreements
is on communication. It frees communication up to be
more honest, open, and complete.
A commitment to managing agreements is basically a
commitment to being two professional adults working to-
gether, as opposed to “I’m your dad, I’m your father, I’m
your mother, I’m your parent, and I will re-parent you.
You’re a child, and you’re bad and you’ve done wrong,
and I’m upset with you, and I’m disappointed in you, and
I know that you’ve got your reasons and you’ve got your
alibis and your stories, but still, I’m disappointed in you.”
That kind of approach is not management, it’s not leader-
ship, it’s not even professional. That kind of approach,
which we would say eight out of 10 managers do, is just a
knee-jerk, intuitively parent-child approach to managing
human beings.
The problem with parent-child management is that the
person being managed does not feel respected in that ex-
change. And the most important, the most powerful, pre-
condition to good performance is trust and respect.
Let’s say my project leader has been assigned to get
the team to do something. The team all agreed to watch a
video and then take a certain test about it given on the
Internet. But then they don’t do it! What does it mean

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that they won’t do things like that? What does it mean
about them? What does it mean about me?
All it means is that the person in charge of getting that
project done is someone with whom I need to strengthen
my agreement. It’s not someone who’s done something
“wrong.” I don’t need to call them on the carpet. It’s some-
one with whom I don’t have a very strong agreement.
And so I need to sit down with him or get into a good
phone conversation with him, and say, “You and I need an
agreement on this because this is something that must be
done, and I want to have it done in the way that you can do
it the most effectively, that won’t get in the way of your
day-to-day work. So let’s talk about this. Let me help you
with this so that it does get done. It’s not an option, so you
and I must come up with a way together, that we can both
co-author, together, an agreement on how this is going to
get done.”
Then I should ask these questions of that person: “Are
you willing to do this? Is this something you can make
sure your people follow up on? Do you have a way of do-
ing it? Do you need my support?”
And finally, at the end of the conversation, I’ve got
that person agreeing with me about the project.
Now, notice that this agreement is two-sided. So I also,
as the co-professional in this agreement, am agreeing to
certain things, too.
That person might have said, “You know, one of the
hard things about this is we don’t have anything to watch
this video on, we don’t have a TV monitor in the store.”
And so I would say, “If I can get you a TV for your
store, will that be all you need?”