Go Ahead, Motivate Me
 “Motivate me” must be one of the saddest requests a leader can receive. The request may not be so bluntly articulated, but the underlying assumption that the boss is there to motivate the staff seems to linger. “If only I had a better boss, I would be better”. “If only this company got its act together, I could get mine together”. “If only these other staff weren’t so hopeless, I would do better here – these people are holding me back”. The search for salvation located in the responsibility of others is a big fail. Many religions offer salvation, but they all seem to require something from us to deserve that salvation. The world of mammon is no different.
 
Motivation, loyalty, accountability, effort, responsibility, engagement – probably every boss is expecting these from their staff. They are all outcomes from inputs. Inputs from both the boss side and the staff side. We know what level of staff motivation we want as leaders, but how do we achieve it?
 
Some favoured leader methodologies are yelling, threatening, instilling fear of loss, shaming and humiliating. Steve Jobs ticked the box on quite a few of these in his early days as a leader. He has become a halo encrusted, saint like figure nowadays because he took Apple away from the brink of self immolation and gave it a second life through his leadership. He was however a flawed leader who, at various times, resorted to these methods. His later success does not validate these bully boy tactics and favourites. “It was okay for Jobs, so it is acceptable for me to cascade the tough love down to my team”. Maybe not!
 
You and I are not Steve Jobs, so let’s not get carried away with the parallel logic extension. He had many other fine attributes driving his success and remember he was successful in his field, not ours. We also need to look at the opportunity cost of what he could have achieved, had he been a better people leader. Getting massive compliance will not get you enough creative innovation. It is difficult to be fearless about coming up with new ideas and possibilities, if the boss scares you to death.
 
Jobs could have done more, much, much more, if he had played to his people’s strengths rather than abusing them about their weaknesses. He was able to get brilliance from the brilliant, which is probably not all that hard because they are brilliant already. The trick is getting brilliance out of the average person. That requires a lot more effort and skill. This is also where most of us live, because brilliant people are expensive and usually we can’t afford too many of them.
 
By contrast, Craig Bellamy is a Rugby League coach in Australia leading the Melbourne Storm team. He is famous for taking 2nd and 3rd level athletes and turning them into 1st class talent. He didn’t have the financial capacity to pay for a team full of stars, so he took people with potential and developed them into stars. This is a better model for us because very few of us can afford to employ a team of stars, but we can create stars.
 
Another challenge for strong leaders is they often work off the assumption that what made them successful is the model for everyone else to follow. Oh if it were only that easy! This is why you hear so much whining when bosses get together. They are dissatisfied with the staff because they can’t operate at the level they require. We forget sometimes that we too had to learn things when we were at their age and stage, that we now know and take for granted as common sense.
 
I hope this isn’t new information but, unfortunately, few people are ever going to be like you. You realise this as you go though life, when trying to deal with various others, but mysteriously, we tend to forget this fact when at work. There is a reason for those differences. Personality styles are often broken out into four boxes and by definition we tend to suit one box over the others. Hence three quarters of the population are automatically not on our wave-length.