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

part of a leader to be absolutely focused. And what we
mean by focused is not hard-core, intense concentration,
as if you’re forcing something. It’s really the opposite. It’s
a much more relaxed sense of focus.
So what we’d like you to do is picture a camera focus-
ing: you’re looking through the camera and it looks fuzzy,
and as you turn the focus dial or knob, you don’t have to
jam it or whack it or slam it. All you have to do is move it
very gently one way or the other, and, all of a sudden, the
whole picture comes into focus. That same thing can hap-
pen with your 
outlook
as a leader.
Someone will walk into your office and sit down. No-
tice that you are beginning to focus on him like a camera,
because there’s that internal dial in you that is very slowly
moving until the person across the way comes into a gentle,
relaxed, absolute focus.
And now, you may breathe a sigh (go ahead), and take
a deep breath, and say, “Tell me what’s on your mind.
How’re you doing? Let’s talk about this issue here.”
Your employee will pick up on this gentle, relaxed sense
of focus, and be honored by it. They will be thinking this
about you: 
It’s as if we’re the only two people in the world
Focus Like a Camera

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right now. It feels like we’re on a desert island and we’ve got
all the time in the world.
You will be thinking, 
And I’m listening to you, and
you and I are going to get to the bottom of this. But not in
a rushed way, and not because we have to. But because
that’s where the conversation will take us in an open way.
In a way that honors you and acknowledges you, and hears
you, and we just talk. We’re going to exchange some ideas,
I’m going to ask you some questions, and we’re going to find
out what the two of us think about this. I’m not going to tell
you what to do. And I’m not someone who’s got an agenda
that’s hidden that I’m going to reveal to you bit by bit as I
talk to you. I’m wide open. I’m like a camera.
And you are a great leader.
You already know the other kind of leader, the not so
great one; the leader who comes into meetings carrying
his electronic organizer, and while he’s sitting in the meet-
ing, he’ll be returning e-mails, picking up his vibrating cell
phone every two or three minutes to see who it is, and also
trying to be in the meeting.
He’s thinking he’s multitasking, but really, he’s just
not focused. And everyone who runs into that leader feels
diminished by the exchange.
We talked to Richie about a leader of his who behaves
that way.
“I always feel about him that he’s someone who has no
time for me,” Richie said. “That’s someone who’d really
rather not be talking to me right now. The minute I sit
down he rattles off a list of ideas he has. He doesn’t care
what I think.”

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That “leader” doesn’t know that of the hundred people
he communicated with that week in some form—some by
e-mail, some by PDA, some by fax, some by phone, some
in person, some in the hallway—all 100 people have been
distanced by this behavior.
And maybe, deep down, this dysfunctional manager
senses the distancing that’s happening. And so he has an
uneasy feeling. He must fix this sense of things not going
right. But rather than slowing down, he speeds up even
more!
Once we told a manager who behaved this way that he
ought to wear a sign around his neck.
“What do you mean a sign around my neck?”
“You ought to wear a sign, like people do in treatment
centers when they’re trying to solve a personal issue, and
the sign should say, ‘I HAVE NO TIME FOR YOU.’”
He said nothing.
“You also might want to have your e-mail send an au-
tomatic reply to people saying, ‘I HAVE NO TIME FOR
YOU.’”
“Why would I do that? I could never do that,” he said.
“You’re doing it now. You’re sending that message
now. This way, you’d just be more up front about it.”
When we coach managers to open up and focus on
their people, like a camera, it actually saves them time in
the long run. Because it takes a lot less time to manage a
motivated, trusting team than it does to work with a de-
moralized, upset team.