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

—Woodrow Wilson
Good leaders continue to seek creative input from their
direct reports. This practice is not only good for the busi-
ness, it’s also highly motivational for both parties to the
conversation.
A good leader will ask people on her team, “How can
we send a signal over the phone, when the customer calls
with a question, that we are different than the other com-
panies, and they are going to feel more welcome and at
home with us? How do we create a relationship right there
at the point of that call? What are your thoughts on this?”
The quality of our motivational skill is directly related
to the quality of our questions.
Get Input From Your People

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/ 100 Ways to Motivate Others
A frustrated manager whose numbers are mediocre
asks the following kind of questions instead of the ques-
tions just asked by our true leader above: “How ya doin’?
Wasssup? How was your weekend? How is your depart-
ment today? Up to your neck in it? Swamped as usual?
Are you maintaining? Hang in there, bro. Customers givin’
you a hard time about that new ad? Jerks. I’m dropping
by to check some stuff out. Don’t worry too much, you
guys are cool. I won’t be too hard on you. You know the
drill. Hang in.”
That’s a leader who can’t figure out why his team’s
numbers are low. The quality of that leader’s life is di-
rectly affected by the low quality of his questions. Directly.
A great leader will ask questions that lead to sales
ideas. A great leader will build a big success on the imple-
mentation of those ideas. Questions such as: “How could
we make the buying experience at our company funda-
mentally different, on a personal level, than at the com-
petition? How could we get our people to be like friends
to the customer and get them to hang out with us more
and buy more? How might we reward our own people
for remembering a customer’s name? What are some
of the ways we can inspire our team to get excited about
increasing the size of each sale? Do our people dis-
cuss the concept of creating a customer for life? Have
you gone to a whiteboard and shown them the finan-
cial windfall involved? How do we get everybody brain-
storming this all day long? How do we get the team
more involved in the success of the store? What are
your thoughts?”

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9. Accelerate Change
Every organization must be prepared to abandon everything it
does to survive in the future.
—Peter F. Drucker
My role as a leader is always—
always
—to keep my
people cheered up, optimistic, and ready to play full-out
in the face of change. That’s my job. Most managers do
not see this as their job. They see their job as being
babysitters, problem-solvers, and firefighters. And so they
produce babies, problems, and fires all around them.
In the face of change, this dysfunction is most pain-
fully revealed. Therefore, it’s important to anticipate the
psychological reaction to change in your employees and
to see how it follows a predictable cycle.
Your employees pass through these four stages in the
cycle, and you can learn how to manage this passage:
The Change Cycle
1. Objection: “This can’t be good.”
2. Reduced Consciousness: “I really don’t
want to deal with this.”
3. Exploration: “How can I make this change
work for me?”
4. Buy-in: “I have figured out how I can make
this work for me and for others.”
Sometimes the first three stages in the cycle take a
long, long time for your people to pass through. Produc-
tivity and morale can take a dizzying dip as employees
resist change. It is human nature to resist change. We all