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

You can’t blow an uncertain trumpet.
—Theodore M. Hesburgh, Former President, Notre Dame

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Managers often, quite unconsciously, allow team meet-
ings and one-on-one conferences to focus excessively on
the past. But the constant refrain of how things used to be
and why things were “better back then” demoralizes the
team. The team also sits through unnecessarily long peri-
ods of time spent hashing out, venting, and reviewing break-
downs and mistakes.
This is done at the expense of the future. It is also
done at the expense of optimism, morale, and a sense of
good, orderly direction.
A good motivator will not make the mistake of obses-
sive focus on the past. A good motivator will use the past
as a springboard that immediately leads to a discussion of
the future: “What can we learn from that mistake that will
serve us in the future? And if this happens again, how might
we handle it better?”
To a good motivator, the past really has only one pur-
pose: to provide building material for creating the future.
The past is not used as something to get hung up on, or an
excuse for regret, placing blame, nostalgia, personal at-
tacks, and having a defeated attitude. A leader knows that
leadership
means
leading people into the future. Just as a
scout leader leads scouts into the woods, a true leader
leads team members into the future.
Your shift to better leadership might include learning
to make an ever-increasing percentage of your communi-
cation focus on the future: discussing your next week, plan-
ning your next month, designing your goals for next year,
and looking at the opportunities that will be there two years
from now. Be thorough and well-prepared when it comes
to discussing the future. If the details are not always known,
the commitments, vision, and strategies are.
Come From the Future

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/ 100 Ways to Motivate Others
Unmotivational managers will unconsciously disown
and spread fear about the future. They will say how un-
predictable and dangerous the future is. They will exag-
gerate potential problems and stress the unpredictability
of everything. They will attempt to come across as realists
when, in fact, it’s much more truthful to say that they sim-
ply haven’t done their homework.
You’ll be motivating others to the degree that you are
a constant source of information and interesting commu-
nication about the future of the team.
92. Teach Them to Teach
Themselves
If you want a man to be for you, never let him feel he is dependent
on you. Make him feel you are in some way dependent on him.
—General George C. Marshall
Scott remembers a story that Mr. Mercado told him
about the musical virtuoso Jascha Heifetz and the always
unplayable Tchaikovsky violin concerto.
Heifetz’s teacher was the great German violinist
Leopold Auer. Mercado said, “Auer himself could not play
the Tchaikovsky violin concerto up to speed. It’d never
been performed up to speed before Heifetz.”
Heifetz was the first one to perform this piece up to
speed! And if Auer, his teacher, could not perform it up
to speed, and he was teaching Heifetz, how then was
Heifetz able to do it?
Some people might say, “Well, he was just a talent.”

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But that wasn’t the explanation according to Mr. Mercado.
He said, “Scott, if Auer was only teaching Heifetz how to
play like Auer, then Heifetz would have never performed
that Tchaikovsky violin concerto up to speed. But that
isn’t what Auer was doing. He was