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

teaching him how to
teach himself
how to play the instrument. And that’s how
he learned to become better than his teacher.”
This is a very powerful distinction. And that really is
why Auer was such an extraordinary teacher.
Your goal is to teach like Leopold Auer taught, abso-
lutely unafraid of the people you lead being better than
you are. Because that’s what a great coach and leader does.
They don’t teach us how to have a great career. They teach
us
how to teach ourselves
how to have a great career.
93. Stop Apologizing
for Change
If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of
change on the inside, the end is near.
—Jack Welch
Managers who apologize for any and all changes the
team must accommodate are sowing the seeds of low mo-
rale and discouragement.
Every time they introduce a new policy, product, sys-
tem, rule, or project, they apologize for it. They imply
that change is harmful to the well-being of the team and
that change is something we would hope someday to not
have to suffer so much of. This is done with the unconscious
Stop Apologizing for Change

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motive of seeming compassionate, and being liked, but it
results in creating a team of victims, and it dramatically
lengthens the time it takes for the team to assimilate and
become comfortable with a change.
A true leader does not apologize for change. A true
leader does not feed into the fear that so easily accompa-
nies change. Instead, the leader is an advocate for the
change. A leader continuously communicates the benefits
of having an ever-changing organization. A leader endorses
an organization that is continuously reinventing itself to
higher and higher levels of productivity and innovation.
Every change is made for a reason. Every change was
decided upon because the positives of the change outweigh
the negatives. So, if you wish to be a highly motivational
leader, you simply learn the positives, through and through.
You find out everything there is to know about the upside
of the change, because that’s what leadership is. Leader-
ship is communication of the upside.
Unconscious managers are often as uncomfortable with
changes as their own people are, so they constantly apolo-
gize for them, which furthers the impression that this little
team is not in alignment with the mission of the company.
But not you. You are a leader, and so you will always
reconnect the team to the mission of the company.
Change will not be apologized for. Why apologize for
something that will improve the strength of the orga-
nization? Every change is made (every last one of them)
for the sole purpose of strengthening the ultimate viabil-
ity of the organization.
That’s why you advocate the change. That’s how you
sell it to your team.

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94. Let People Find It
People ask the difference between a leader and a boss.
The leader works in the open, and the boss in covert.
The leader leads and the boss drives.
—Theodore Roosevelt
Scott again recalls coach and teacher Rodney Mercado
and his master key to getting remarkable performances
out of the people he taught and motivated:
If you heard any two students of Mercado play side by
side, you would absolutely swear that they did not have
the same teacher. You would say it was physically impos-
sible because their playing styles were so radically differ-
ent. Most people who take music lessons are aware that
listeners can identify who a student’s teacher is by how
the student plays.
But with Mercado, not only could you not do that, you
would absolutely swear that they