For the
past few months, I was writing about quantum physics and business research to
explore the correlation between the science of consciousness and patterns in
the business world, to suggest innovative ways of using this wisdom to lead and
succeed in a business environment that is constantly evolving at a rapid
pace. Once we reach a greater
understanding of how the thought energy in an organization, in addition to
actions, is influencing our results, many of our focuses will change. Today, we
place a huge emphasis on monitoring how employees perform, as far as the
actions they take, but we place very little emphasis on understanding the
thoughts behind their actions. Today we only care that an employee is motivated
to perform, but in the future we will care about why an employee is motivated
to perform, because this will determine the target of their intentions.
When employees are motivated to perform because they intend
that the company is successful, rather than because they desire
self-preservation or self-promotion, our businesses will be more successful.
This is because the energy of their intentions has an impact on business
outcomes (see earlier article on
Intentions.)
It has been proven scientifically thru experimentation, when
groups of people intend that a particular outcome is achieved, the intentions
themselves have an impact on events, so that the outcome is more likely to
occur in the direction of the intentions. An intention is a conscious desire
for a particular outcome. See my earlier
article
for a premise on how thought energy leads to business success.
It is not a foregone conclusion that employees of a business
have a conscious desire, or intention for the business to succeed. I remember
one time I was talking to a prospective client who has never worked for a
company. I was talking enthusiastically about the importance of employees’
intentions for the success of a business, and he looked at me with a quizzical
expression and said “Why do you think this is such a revelation? All employees
intend for their company to be successful.” Those were definitely words of a
person who was never employed in the corporate world. Based on my experience,
it’s not a stretch to say that most employees in corporations don’t have high
levels of intentionality for the success of the company, but rather their
intentionality is focused on their own success.
So the question for leaders and managers to ask is “Are
employees striving to do a good job because of self-preservation/promotion, or
do they care about the success of the overall organization?” The answer to this
reveals the object of their intentions.
Here are some reasons why the object of most employees’
intentions is their personal success. Typically, we have caused this by the way
we run our multinational businesses.
First, most employees see that winning requires they look
better than their fellow employees. That’s how they get promotions and raises
that are larger than their co-workers, and that’s how they protect their job
security. It follows that their personal success is more important than the
success of the overall company and is therefore the object of their intentions.
Secondly, employees will focus their intentions on the realm
that is top of mind. They naturally have an active awareness of the success of
their particular job function or the project they are working on, but most
don’t have an active awareness of the overall success of the company. I like
what I have read about how Herb Kelleher kept the employees of Southwest
Airlines connected to the affairs of the overall business, by emotionally
engaging them in the issues and the company’s strategy for tackling them. This
helped focus their intentions on overall business success, but most companies
are not nearly as adept at this.
Finally, employees will focus their intentions on the realm
where they believe they can influence success. This means they’ll focus their
intentions on the realm that they control, which is their personal success or
the success of teams of which they are a part of. Most companies aren’t
proficient at showing employees how they personally contribute to the bottom
line.
The traditional method that leaders use to get employees to
be invested in the success of the overall business is to tie the wealth of
employees to the wealth of the business through profit sharing bonuses or stock
ownership plans. I won’t say that these methods are ineffective, but I will say
they are of limited value as long as employees are more motivated to achieve
personal success.
Most employees have a high level of intentionality for their
own success but not for the success of the entire company. Even employees who
are highly engaged and excellent performers will likely intend for their
personal success to a far greater degree than the success of their overall company.
Causing employees to have strong intentions for overall business success is
multi-faceted and the subject of other articles, but we can start with simply
paying attention to the current source of motivation.
Law of Unfulfilled
Potential
One can see aspects of this law working in such areas like,
for instance, in neurophysiology, humans use only a fraction of their brains'
capabilities; in technology, superconductivity is not yet widely available; and
in medicine, the harnessing of the body's abilities to fight cancers is only
just beginning to be understood and realized.
But the Law of Unfulfilled Potential is particularly
dominant in the business world - and especially in operations. Operations is
the blocking and tackling of any organization, the fundamentals that create the
foundation for consistent success.
It's such an important function that in many companies the
Chief Operating Officer is usually the next in line for the job of CEO. If a
company is not doing operations well, all of its other functions are
diminished.
Having worked with operations leaders in a variety of top
companies for over two decades, I have seen that many are unfortunately strict
adherents to the Law of Unfulfilled Potential - for one main reason: They have
neglected an all-important results-driver, motivation.
Clearly, many factors further operational excellence:
capital, cycle time, technological advancements, quality, efficiencies, etc.
But motivation is the most fundamental, operational determinant of all, for it
drives all the others.
After all, operations is the sum of people doing many jobs;
and when skilled people are motivated to accomplish those jobs, great results
happen.
But many operations perceive motivation as "soft"
- as opposed to the "hard" factors of cycle time, quality control,
etc. - and so either ignore it or struggle with actualizing it on a daily
basis.
I see motivation, however, as a "hard" determinant
of operations that can be a concrete, a practical results-producer.
I am going to provide four imperatives that you can use
right away to achieve consistent increases in operational results. But before I
do, I'll offer a working description of motivation. Leaders often fail to
motivate others because these leaders misunderstand the concept of motivation.
The best way for me to describe it is to describe what it is
not.
Motivation is not what people think or feel. It's what
people do. Look at the first two letters of the word, "mo." When you
see those letters in a word, such as "motor", "motion",
"momentum", "mobile", etc., it usually means action of some
kind. Look at motivation as action too. If people are not taking action, they
are in point of fact not motivated.
Motivation is not something we can do to somebody else. It
is always something that that someone else does to themselves. Look back over
your career, and you will see that the motivator and the "motivatee"
were always the same person. As a leader, you communicate, and provide an
environment for your members to thrive but the people whom you want to motivate
must motivate themselves.
Motivation is not a dispassionate dynamic. It is an
"emotional" dynamic. The words "motivation" and
"emotion" come from the same Latin root word, which means "to
move." When we want to move (motivate) people to take action, or in truth
have them motivate themselves, we engage their emotions. Put another way:
People will not take action for more results faster continually unless their
emotions are engaged.
Finally, the best way to enter into a motivational
relationship with people is not by distant communication but the kind of
face-to-face talk that has people make the choice to be committed to your
cause. It is called the ‘leadership talk’.
Those are descriptions of what motivation truly is. But descriptions
alone won't help you meet the challenges of Unfulfilled Potential. You must
follow clear imperatives to help you transform descriptions into results.
Here are four that will help you cultivate motivational
operations.
1. Give leadership talks
not presentations. The difference between a presentation and a leadership
talk is what Mark Twain said the difference between the almost right word and
the right word is. "That is the difference," he said, "between
the lightning bug and lightning."
Let's understand the basic difference between the
presentation and the leadership talk.
Presentations communicate information; but leadership talks
have people believe in you, follow you, and, most important of all, want to
take leadership for your cause. (The best example of such a talk is the one
given by George Washington in 1783 to his field commanders who were on the
verge of a revolt in the history of American Revolution.)
My experience has taught me that 95% of all communication in
business is accomplished through the presentations. However, if 95% of
communication were accomplished through the leadership talk instead, leaders
would be far more effective in getting results.
So, before you speak to people from now on, and by the way,
leaders speak 15 to 20 and more times a day, ask yourself if you are simply
providing information or are you motivating those people to motivate themselves
to take action for results.
2. Create
motivational systems. Most operational leaders are good at systemizing
quality initiatives, cycle time, efficiencies, etc. But few understand that
some of the most important systems they can put into place are systems that
help people make the choice for motivation.
A particularly effective motivational system is one that
saturates operations with "cause leaders."
Unquestionably, people accomplish a task better if they are
not simply doing it but taking leadership of it. When we are challenged to take
leadership, we raise our performance to much higher levels. With that in mind,
create systems that identify cause leaders, challenge them to take specific
leadership action, and support those actions through systematized training and
resource allocations.
3. See results not as
an end but as a motivational process. Clearly, you have to get results. But
many operations leaders misunderstand what results are about. I teach leaders
the concept of achieving "more results faster continually" - not by
speeding up but by slowing down and working less, by putting the motivational imperatives
into practice. Leaders understand the "more results faster" aspect -
but they often stumble when it comes to the "continual achievement"
aspect.
We can usually order people to get more results faster. But
we can't order people to do it on a continual basis. That's where motivation
comes in. Instead of ordering people to go from point A to point B, say, we
must have them want to go from A to B. That ‘want to’ is the heart of
‘continually.’
When we understand results this way, understand that we must
achieve "more, faster" on a continual basis, then we begin to make
motivational operations a way of life.
4. Challenge people
to be motivational leaders. The imperatives are powerful when you use them
consistently. But they are even more powerful when you have your leaders use
them and teach others to use them. After all, you alone can't create
motivational operations. You need others to help you do it, especially those
mid-level and small-unit leaders. If they are not putting the imperatives into
practice every day, your attempts to raise the standards of operations to a
consistently high motivational level will falter.
Define the success of your leadership by how well your
leaders are leading, and you are well on your way to making motivational
operations a reality.
Once you begin to institute motivational operations by
applying the four imperatives, the Law of Unfulfilled Potential becomes your
competitor's worry, not yours.
