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

Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity.
They seem to be more afraid of life than death.
—James F. Bymes, former Secretary of State
Change will scare my people to the degree that it
scares me.

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So another way to consciously build my inner strength
as a leader is to increase my awareness of what life is like,
what the world is like, and what the business community is
like. As I become more aware of that, I become a better
leader.
I don’t want to just put my head into the sand, and say,
“But we’ve been doing it this way for 20 years.”
I don’t want to always be heard saying, “I don’t want
to think about it, I don’t want to be aware that anything’s
changed. I just want everything to be like it used to be; I
want people to be the way they used to be.”
But if I don’t want to have a real understanding of
what people are like today, especially younger people, and
how they’re perceiving life, my leadership skills will de-
cline over the years, and pretty soon I’ll become almost
irrelevant.
As Nathaniel Branden writes in 
Self-Esteem at Work
:
We now live in a global economy characterized
by rapid change, accelerating scientific and tech-
nological breakthroughs, and an unprecedented
level of competitiveness. These developments
create demands for higher levels of education
and training than were required from previous
generations. ... What is not understood is that
these developments also create new demands on
our psychological resources. Specifically, these
developments ask for greater capacity for inno-
vation, number one, self-management, number
two, personal responsibility, number three, and
self-direction.
It used to be that leaders were led by other leaders,
managers were managed by other managers, and there
Wake Yourself Up

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wasn’t that much wiggle room in between. We were told
what to do, then we told other people what to do, and it
was basically a hierarchical, military-type system. A top-
down silo.
But now, things are so complex and ever-changing—
it’s like calling audible plays at the line of scrimmage ev-
ery single time, instead of running regular plays. That’s
what global business life is like right now. Life has changed
profoundly. And it will continue to change even faster as
time goes on. That’s good news for a leader committed to
being more and more awake to it.
58. Always Show Them
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.
—Confucius
A lot of great sports players go into coaching, but it
just doesn’t quite work. Sometimes, it turns out, they’re
just not very good at it.
And there’s a reason. It’s not mysterious. They are
simply not totally 
conscious
of what it was that made them
great players. A lot of what they did as players was intui-
tive and subconscious. It was the feel of the thing. And so
they have a very hard time teaching it to others and com-
municating it 
because they didn’t even know what it was.
The best batting coach of all time was Charlie Lau. He
taught a baseball player by the name of George Brett how
to hit. And, as you may know, George Brett was one of the
greatest hitters of all time, hitting in the high .300s all the

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time. But Charlie Lau—his coach, his instructor, his
teacher—had a lifetime batting average of .255! Charlie
Lau was a mediocre hitter at best.
But because Lau had to struggle so hard just to stay in
the majors, just to keep his job, he learned hitting inside
and out. He became extremely conscious of how it was
done. Therefore, he was great at teaching it.
So when you figure something out, anything, that your
people are not doing up to the level that you’d like them to
be doing,
 show
them what to do. Take the bat in your own
hands and show them how to hit.
Christina wanted our opinion of a problem she was
having with her team.
“My people aren’t great with customers,” Christina
said. “I believe they leave a lot of business on the table.”
“Tell us how you’d like your people to be different.”
“Well, here’s what I think,” said Christina. “I bet if
my people talked to customers a little differently, asked
them more questions, got more interested in their lives,
that they’d find out a few other areas in which they could
help them out. They’d find out areas where we might have
a product or a service that would help the customer. In-
stead, my people just sell people things, they’re just order-
takers, and our sales aren’t as high as they could be if my
team took a greater interest in the customer.”
“What have you done about that?”
“First, I sent that opinion around in an e-mail, and
that didn’t go over very well,” said Christina.
“Of course it wouldn’t.”
“Right,” she said. “Then I called some of my managers
and said, ‘I want you to get your people to do more of this!’”
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“Did that go well?”
“No.”
“What else did you do?”
“I called HR,” said Christina. “I told HR we really
needed training in this. Relationships. The upsell.”
“How did the training go?”
“Still waiting,” said Christina. “I’m still waiting for an
answer to my request for it.”
“Christina, do this yourself! A true leader, a really
powerful leader, who’s consciously motivating others to
great performance, will 
show them how to do it.
A true
leader will figure out what it is that she wants her people
to do and then will go in and demonstrate it.”
We watched Christina later as she talked to her team.
“Here, let me work with you today,” she told them. “I
want to talk to customers who come in. All I’d like you to
do is be with me and watch me do it, be there, help out,
ask questions if you can think of them. But let me do the
work.”
Christina learned to 
show
people the way she wished
they would do it. She realized that the best way to commu-
nicate that was to do it herself. That was her new leverage
point, and by doing it that way her people got excited and
understood quickly.
If you just tell your people, “I want you to do more of
that, you’ve got to get better at that,” it falls on deaf ears,
and sometimes even worse. Sometimes it causes people to
defend
how they’re doing it. Or it causes people to tell
you, “I don’t have time to do that.”
To really motivate, talk less and demonstrate more.

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59. Focus Like a Camera
Most of the successful people I’ve known are the ones who do
more listening than talking.
—Bernard Baruch
We want to introduce a kind of leadership that we find
in only one out of every 10 leaders we work with.
We call it 
focused leadership
. It’s the ability on the