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

The first duty of a leader is optimism. How does your
subordinate feel after meeting with you? Does he feel uplifted?
If not, you are not a leader.
—Field Marshall Montgomery
Nobody remembers it. Everybody seems to forget it.
But positive reinforcement trumps negative criticism ev-
ery time.
It doesn’t matter if you are training dolphins or moti-
vating your team members, positive reinforcement is the
way to go. You don’t see trainers at Sea World beating the
dolphins with baseball bats when they don’t jump through
the right hoops. You see them, instead, giving them little
fish when they do jump through.
Use Positive Reinforcement

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Why can’t we remember that?
We’re too busy chasing down problems and then criti-
cizing the problematic people who created the problems.
That’s how most managers “lead.”
But that’s a habit trap. And like any other habit trap,
there are certain small behaviors that will remove you from
that trap. For example, you will want to pause a moment
before e-mailing or calling any one of your team players.
You will want to take a moment. You want to decide what
small appreciation you can communicate to them.
You will want to always realize that positive reinforce-
ment is powerful when it comes to guiding and shaping
human performance. This revelation continues to surprise
us, because we have been trained by our society to iden-
tify what’s wrong and fix it.
There’s a better way: Find out what’s right and reward it.
A very surprised Napoleon once said, “The most amaz-
ing thing I have learned about war is that men will die for
ribbons.”
42. Teach Your People
“No” Power
As we look ahead into the next century,
leaders will be those who empower others.
—Bill Gates
The tragedy of a disempowered, weak-willed life ex-
tends to all aspects of work.

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Unless you change it.
Tina reports to you. And one of the things she reports
to you is that she is stressed out and incapable of doing all
of her work.
After a long talk about her life on the job, it becomes
clear that Tina has no goals, plans, or commitments. It is
no wonder, therefore, that Tina allows people to waste
her time. People that Tina doesn’t even care about keep
taking up her time. She can’t say no to them only because
she hasn’t said yes to anything else.
You talk to her.
“The greatest value of planning and goal-setting is that
it gives you your own life to live. It puts you back in charge.
It allows you to focus on what’s most important to you. So
you won’t walk around all week singing the Broadway song,
‘I’m Just A Girl Who Can’t Say No.’”
You begin to sing that song to her. She begs you to
stop.
“Okay, how do I turn it around?” Tina asks you. “How
do I learn to say no?”
“Ask yourself these questions: ‘What goals are most
important to me? And how much time do I give them?
What people are most important to me? And how much
time do I give them?’”
We hear many complaints from people in business who
are going through the same kind of scattered lives. It’s as
if they’re dying from a thousand tiny distractions. They
report a life of being constantly drained by other people’s
requests. People poking their heads in all day saying, “Gotta
minute? Gotta minute?”
Teach Your People “No” Power

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Slam the door on those poking heads. Those incessant
talking heads give you a life in which you have not learned
to say no.
Once you learn it, teach it to your people, too. Make it
an honorable thing.
Your people’s access to focused work will depend on
their willingness to develop a little-used muscle that we
call the No Muscle. If they never use this muscle, it won’t
perform for them when the chips are down. It will be too
weak to work. Any request by any coworker or relative
will pull them from the mission.
The key to teaching your people to develop the No
Muscle is to first develop their Yes Muscle. If they will
say yes to the things that are important to them, then say-
ing no to what’s not important will get easier and easier.
Help them verbalize what they want. Make them say it out
loud.
“Tina, you need to know what you want, know it in
advance, and chances are you’ll get it. It’s easy to say no to
something if you’ve already said yes to something better.”
43. Keep Your People
Thinking Friendly
Customer Thoughts