Learning the Language of Inspiration

Run a quick search on the following question: “Are you Leader or a Manager?”

You will see that it is a very popular topic, and for good reason: people want leaders not managers. If you want your business to outperform, or the team you ‘manage’ to flourish, you have to ditch the ‘manager’ mind set and learn the language of inspiration*.

Why?

The old levers to motivate people aren’t working.

Let’s take a look at some of these levers and their challenges:

Performance-based Differentiation

Promotions, salary increases, bonuses, options or trips to Cancun are all means that rely on identifying and rewarding those team members are performing ‘better’ than others.

Problem: This means some –if not most– of your people have to be identified as ‘not as good’. You’ll notice it’s usually the same people every review that are labeled the top performers. This will become a de-motivator to many, and those that are constantly rewarded will start to wonder if they could actually do even better elsewhere. Finally, money is a very short-term motivator for most people.

Fear

Whether it’s overt-threats of rants, humiliation or job loss, or the –much more common– less-overt threats of people’s jobs moving to China or expectations of 60-hour weeks, fear is still leveraged in the work place either intentionally or unintentionally.

Problem: Your people will turn on you at the earliest opportunity and/or leave. Also, since businesses rely more and more on creativity to generate profits and value, it should be a big concern that creativity doesn’t flourish in an environment of fear. Finally, because there is a coming shift in the supply-demand relationship (less-more) in our workforce, as well as a shift in attitudes of the new generation of employees entering the workforce, fear will decrease from its already low effectiveness.

Recognition

Aside from the financial awards mentioned above, there are methods to reward individuals and teams for great performances or meeting key milestones. These might include the celebratory lunch for hitting a product release, certificates of achievement or public recognition of individuals or teams.

Problem: Often people see it as silly for recognizing people just for ‘doing their job’. Also, this often mis-fires as people who don’t like to be singled out in public are put on the spot, or people that added a significant contribution to the project are accidentally left out. Since some managers promote their teams & projects better than others, there is often a lot of resentment build up when less-promoted projects are ignored.

So what does this all have to do with the topic of leaders vs. managers?

In the plethora of quotes from great leaders of the past, the one that captures the new perspective required is “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” - John Quincy Adams (6th PotUS)

*At this point, there will be a few readers that are saying to themselves “This makes me uncomfortable, I don’t think I am an inspirational person and I am certainly not a dreamer. I am a practical person that solves the problems that are given to me with the resources I have.” I think you are selling yourself short, here is a great opportunity for you to become more by using practical and concrete methods to inspire and engage your employees.

If you’ve read this far, and are still keen for more, I am tempted to say “drop me a line and we will show you how” (because that is what we do), instead, I will give you some free pointers on how to get started, and you can contact Psyche if you get stuck.

Back to JQA: Note that he didn’t say ‘your top performers’, he said ‘others’; unlike the ‘old levers of motivation’ mentioned above, if you learn the language of inspiration this will speak to all your employees. The most successful businesses engage all their employees to a higher level of performance, not just those regularly identified as ‘top talent’.

The biggest challenge to inspiring your employees is to create a common language to capture what intrinsically motivates and inspires each unique individual. But since each person is different, and will not necessarily share the same motivators as their leader, it is often hard for that leader to translate the business objectives into the individual or group tasks that will inspire their people to higher performance. The discussion about this can’t even begin because the leader –and their employees– don’t have a common language to discuss what gets their motors running.

In our post “Beyond MBTI” we introduced the psychometric assessment called Strengthsfinder® from Gallup®. This assessment uses 34 themes that provide a perspective on skills AND preferences of people. By creating a systematic way of identifying the basic elements of what motivates us (striving themes), how we motivate others (impacting themes), how we build relationships (relating themes) and how we perceive and analyze the world (thinking themes), Gallup® ended up creating a comprehensive talent lexicon. To date, this is the best new ‘language’ we have found to enable the discussion between leaders and their employees on what motivates employees, and how their roles can leverage their greatest strengths. If you would like to learn more about the 40 years of research behind StrengthsFinder®, and the ‘themes’ themselves, you can see a technical report, HERE.

Armed with the knowledge of your own key themes (e.g ‘strategic’, ‘maximizer’, ‘arranger’, etc.), and the themes of your employees, a very analytical approach can be taken to align employees, and combinations of employees, to tasks that will become the source of their inspiration (yes, the work becomes the inspiration!). This approach leverages each employees intrinsic motivators, the way they are pre-wired to achieve results. The language of inspiration lies in people’s strengths.

A simple example on how this can work: You have two employees, Fatima and Jack, who are good performers but they always seem to get stuck at different points in their assigned projects. A profile is created on each employee, and you find that one of Fatima’s top 5 (of 34) themes is ‘Maximizer’ and one of Jack’s top 5 is ‘Developer’. This tells you that Fatima likes to take things that are ‘good’ and make them ‘great’, while Jack enjoys fixing things that are broken. You realized that this makes total sense in the context of their project challenges; Jack’s motivation seems to ebb once a project is ‘back on the rails’ where Fatima always seems to get frustrated when assigned troubled projects. With this new knowledge of their respective interests, you can A) make it clear that you have observed and appreciate this characteristic and B) keep this in mind when assigning projects. Now, when you identify a project that has run into problems, you can leverage Jack who will be naturally motivated to work on it. On the other hand, if you have a particularly picky customer who is only satisfied with the ‘best’, Fatima will be eager to rise to the challenge. In time the will come to respect you for your ‘uncanny’ ability to identify how their unique attributes bring value to your organization (and keeping them in their ‘zone’: dreaming, learning, doing).

Like any new skill, it takes consistent practice and effort to master it. But with practice, managers can learn this language of inspiration, and become inspirational leaders.