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

Wise leaders and high achievers come to understand that they
can’t hope to eliminate problems...and wouldn’t want to.
—Dale Dauten
Why are so many managers ineffective leaders?
Because they are firefighters. When you become a
firefighter, you don’t lead anymore. You don’t decide
where your team is going. The fire decides for you. (The
fire
is whatever current problem has flared up and cap-
tured your time and imagination.)
The fire controls your life. You think you are control-
ling the fire, but the fire is controlling you.
You become unconscious of opportunity. You become
blind to possibilities, because you are engulfed in, and de-
fined by, the fire.
If you’re an unmotivational manager, even when you
put the fire out, you hop back on the truck and take off
across the company looking for another fire. Soon, 
all you
know is fires,
and all you know how to do is fight them.
Put Your Hose Away

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/ 100 Ways to Motivate Others
Even when there is no real fire, you’ll find something you’ll
redefine
as a fire because you are a firefighter and always
want to be working.
A great motivator doesn’t fight fires 24/7. A true moti-
vator leads people from the present into the future. The
only time a fire becomes relevant is when it’s in the way of
that future goal. Sometimes a leader doesn’t even have to
put the fire out. She sometimes just takes a path around
(or above) the fire to get to the desired future.
A firefighter, on the other hand, will stop everything
and fight every fire. That’s the basic difference between an
unconscious manager (letting the fires dictate activity) and
a conscious leader (letting desired goals dictate activity).
17. Get the Picture
People cannot be managed.... Inventories can be managed,
but people must be led.
—H. Ross Perot
Here’s a question often asked: Isn’t leadership some-
thing people are born with? Aren’t some people referred
to as 
born leaders
?
Yes, but it’s a myth. Leadership is a skill, like gardening
or chess or playing a computer game. It can be taught and it
can be learned at any age if the commitment to learn is
present. Companies 
can
turn their managers into leaders.
But if companies could transform all their managers
into leaders, why wouldn’t every company just do that?

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They don’t know what a leader is. So how can they
train for it? They don’t read books on leadership, they
don’t have leadership training seminars, and they don’t
hold meetings in which leadership is discussed and
brainstormed. Therefore, they can’t define it. So they say
people are born leaders.
The remedy for this is to always revise your picture of
what a good leader is. People are not motivated by people
who can’t 
even picture
good leadership.
In his powerful, innovative book on business manage-
ment,
The Laughing Warriors
(Lumina Media, 2003), Dale
Dauten offers a picture of a leader with a code to work by:
“THINK LIKE A HERO (Who can I help today?), WORK
LIKE AN ARTIST (What else can we try?), REFUSE
TO BE ORDINARY (Pursue excellence, then kill it.), and
CELEBRATE (But take no credit.).”
Continuously picturing that code in and of itself would
create leadership.
18. Manage Agreements,
Not People
Those that are most slow in making a promise are the most faithful
in the performance of it.