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

listening
as your next growth skill. Listening, compro-
mise, positive reinforcement, compassionate relationship-
building, and all the other skills that build trust and
understanding. There are books such as 
The Relationship
Handbook
(Pransky and Associates, 2001) by George
Pransky and our own
50 Ways to Create Great Relationships
(Career Press, 2000) that give a dramatic crash course in
eliminating the sick ego in human communications. The
University of Santa Monica’s Spiritual Psychology program
Let Them See You Change and Grow

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teaches leaders the deepest and most thoroughly gener-
ous listening skills on the planet. Many leaders we have
worked with have enrolled in that program with dramatic
turnarounds in team morale as a result. When you, as a
true leader, learn to listen, everything opens up.
You may choose customer relations as your next skill
to improve. You can read Darby Checketts’s 
Customer
Astonishment
(Robert D. Reed Publishers, 2006) and
Posi-
tive Conflict
(Career Pres, 2006) and take those books to
heart. Your people will be astonished at how differently
you treat customers and how much new business comes in
as a result. They will remember you being rather brief and
“professional” in demeanor with customers before, but
now see you opening up to becoming a completely new
you with whom customers love to brainstorm.
When your people watch this, they get motivated like
no other system or “trick” for motivating others will do.
Why does it work so well? It’s the hardest thing to do, and
your people know it.
A lot of older managers think it’s cute or curmudg-
eonly to not want to learn any of the newer communica-
tion technologies. While the younger employees thrive on
all kinds of “cool” new ways to communicate by phone,
text, and videoconferencing, the stuck-in-the-past leader
refuses to learn the new ways.
A wonderful opportunity for personal growth is in the
technical field. Every leader should subscribe to 
WIRED
magazine and read it voraciously! You’ll surprise every-
one (in the most pleasant way) if you challenge yourself
to stay current and continuously add new technical and
Internet skills to your repertoire. When a new IT system
comes in, you can be the first to learn it and embrace it.

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No one is really motivated by a same-ol’, same-ol’,
stuck-in-the-past manager. If you think it’s always a good
thing to be falsely “consistent” as the same person you
always were (stuck in an outdated rut), you are simply
wrong.
Most managers believe they don’t have time to im-
prove themselves by adding a new skill. They think they’d
never have time to take a Dale Carnegie speaking class at
night or fly into a weekend session at the University of
Santa Monica because that’s the time they reserve for
stressing out over e-mails, or studying the sales reports,
or being upset with their families.
But it isn’t a matter of time, it’s a matter of commit-
ment. It’s a bold move to grow yourself in a new direction.
That’s why it’s so motivating for others to watch you do it.
When you pick your next category in which you im-
prove yourself, make sure you really dive into it. Take it
on with a passion. If you have a leadership coach (and we
can recommend some good ones if you contact us at
www.stevechandler.com
), use that coach! Let him or her
hold you accountable for dramatic change so that your
people can see it and think “wow.” Don’t go through your
life in leadership never tapping into that “wow” factor.
It’s always available to you. Not to mention the effect it
will have on you yourself. As the great poet-philosopher
William Butler Yeats said, “Happiness is neither this thing
nor that…it is simply growth. We are happy when we are
growing.”