There’s a big difference between inspiration and motivation. As a leader, your job is inspiration. You are the one who has to dig deep, find the goodness, and communicate it even when the circumstances around you suggest otherwise. Your message is always about what’s possible and where the company is going. It’s your job to generate an experience of certainty when things feel chaotic and uncertain.
Is it easy? Not always, but that’s part of the admission price to the leadership table. Our job is to find the opportunity in the problem and to create the conversation that breeds inspiration, hope, and creativity for our teams. There’s always a more hopeful possibility and being an entrepreneurial leader means you are uniquely gifted to seize opportunity where others see problems.
When you’ve done a great job passionately communicating the possibility in any situation, your team will be clear on what the future looks like. The motivation to do so, however, is all in their court. What can you do to ensure they are clear?
- Communicate often and reinforce the SAME message every time in many engaging ways – it takes seven times for people to hear it the first time
- Share the benefits of the future turning out and make it specific to them
- Ensure you are passionately committed to that future and delivering the message EVERY time
- Find your advocates and champions on the team and engage them early and often for reinforcement
- Offer visuals (if it makes sense) to show progress, encourage, and reinforce the message
- Reward and recognize those exceeding expectations, not those meeting expectations
- Make it FUN!!!
- Plan a celebration for key milestones or once the result is achieved
- If your team is competitive, make it a competition to the same goal
- Make it all about them, see it from their position, and frame your message from that perspective
- Be transparent and truthful – if it requires more of them, acknowledge that and give them a big enough WHY
- Measure your progress and communicate, communicate, communicate.
As a leader, the inspiration is all on you. If they’re not motivated, look in the mirror. If the majority of your team are motivated and a few aren’t, look at them and ask “are they the right people?“