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Do you want to know how to be a great motivator? It all starts with you! What reasons do you have to behave in a certain way? Could it be sales incentives, bonuses or becoming a member of the President’s Club? As a manager, you need to find your reasons for excelling in your career. And as a manager, you need to provide your team their reason. Provide a compelling reason for each of them to get out of bed each morning and you’ll be building a successful team. Learn how in this episode of the Manager Mojo Podcast.
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How to be a Great Motivator
Hello everyone and thank you for joining me today. I’m really looking forward to today’s topic. Today’s topic is called, “Motivate Yourself: I’m Too Busy.” You know, sadly this is the reason that most managers give for not really making an effort to motivate others. I mean I get it, I was like that myself. You know when I started out back in the workplace quite some time ago, I really believed that just having a job and getting up and going to make money was all the motivation that I needed. I mean I didn’t have much and so I thought, “Well you know I’ve got to get up and I go earn it.” And so for me, motivation was something that I felt came totally from within. I didn’t realize that I even needed anybody else and I certainly didn’t look to anybody else for my own motivation. And so I constantly was pushing myself to get things done and maybe you were a little bit like me and you did the same thing.
Well the problem with that is that I took that same type of attitude with me whenever I became a manager. I just believed that. You know what, I was hard headed and I wanted everyone to think like I did. I just thought, “Well look, you’re here. You have a job. You’re here to make money. You’re here to do the work. Why don’t you get busy? Let’s get this done. Let’s meet our objectives. Let’s go! You know we’re wasting time.”
And so I was thinking that everybody really thought the same way I did. Well, guess what? It didn’t take me long to realize that, but yet I never really accepted that motivation was a part of my job as a manager. I just didn’t get it. And so the more I studied, the more I looked at how to improve—good things began to come my way. And I still remember one of the best things I ever had.
I had an opportunity to hear Zig Ziglar talk. And Zig Ziglar’s gone today but I’ll tell you what—what a great, great speaker and what a great motivator he was. And Zig made me begin to rethink my own personal attitude about motivation and motivating others. Now here’s what he said—Zig said that, “People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing. That’s why we recommend it daily.”
Now isn’t that great? Isn’t that awesome? I love that! People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing. That’s why we recommend it daily. Now, I hope it brought a chuckle to you just as it did to me and it still makes me smile and makes me happy every time that I hear it. But I have to be honest, the first time I heard it I thought, “That’s funny and that’s good but you know what, I don’t need that! I don’t need that because I am so highly motivated I get up and go after it,” and it still didn’t click in my mind.
But it was always sitting there and it was working on me. What happened was I began to dig into why I thought every other priority as a manager took the place in my mind of me motivating my team. I put everything else ahead. I mean I put getting projects completed. I put getting training done, I mean I did all of these things but you know motivation that was like if there’s a top of the list it was way down on the bottom.
Well the solution began to come to me over a period of time. But where it came to me was when I discovered what motivation really and truly is, and so what I’m going to do is share that with you today.
Now let’s start with the definition of motivation. Here’s the definition: it’s the reason or reasons one has for behaving in a particular way. Let me repeat that: it’s the reason or reasons one has for behaving in a particular way.
Now the problem for me, and maybe it is for you as well, is that you’re not understanding what this means. Well the reason it’s hard for us to understand what this means is that there are synonyms that are used for motivation and I happen to believe that they get in the way. Some of those synonyms are things like incentive and stimulus and inspiration. So what we do is we pick up words like incentive and stimulus and we have confused motivation with a completely different concept. That concept would be bribery or bribe. But that’s not what we should do. I mean, look at so many programs that companies have.
If you’re in sales you’ve seen this. They give you a sales contest and it’s supposed to motivate you to go out and achieve your goals and overachieve so you can get the money and the rewards and there’s president’s clubs, there’s chairman’s clubs—we have it in all levels of management. Everybody has these contests. And these contests are supposed to be motivation, and they can be motivating. I mean, you will push to get the money and you’ll push to get the recognition. But what they really are is a form of bribery. They’re bribing the individual by saying, “Hey go achieve more than what you normally would have done.” There’s nothing wrong with those things. They’re good. They have their place. But the problem that I had was that as a leader, as a manager, I believed that was the kind of stuff that you had to pay attention to—that nothing else mattered. My job as a manager was to make sure I kept you focused on those goals and focused on those contests and if I just put my thumb on you and made you do it, then that was good enough. That was motivation. My job was to kick you in the butt and make sure that you did it. I didn’t understand. Motivation to me was just “Tell, tell, tell.”
Well, let’s look at that definition of motivation again so you get what I’m talking about. Motivation defined is the reason for acting or behaving in a particular way. Now the secret here is that word reason. It’s the word reason—R-E-A-S-O-N—reason. You see, we have to give our team members the reason to get going, the reason to get energized to achieve the goal, the reason to do what needs to be done. Each one of us needs to know reasons every day. We have to know the reason that we get up out of bed, the reason that we go take a shower, the reason we leave our homes and we don’t come back for 10 or 12 or sometimes 14 hours. We need to know the reason that we’re doing that. If we don’t know the reason then what we’re doing is we’re just going through the motion of habits.
Now maybe you’re like me. You know I had thought of that and I thought that simply being paid a salary should be motivation enough for somebody to get off their butt and go do their job. After all, that’s all I needed. But not everybody is like me. Not everybody is like you. Most people don’t want to be a manager. You know what? They hate the idea of having that responsibility. So when they get up in the morning, they view themselves as a worker, they view themselves as having to go get stuff done today, and they’re not particularly thrilled about it. They know they have got to go do it, but they’re not happy about it, they’re not thrilled about it. The only reason they’re going in their mind is that, “Okay I’ve got to get paid and so I’ve got to do this. It’s just what I do. This is my job. I’ve got to make the money. I’ve got to bring home the bacon,” whatever the reason is. That’s all they needed to get up and go. Frankly, that’s all the motivation I needed, because I knew I was going to achieve and I was going to make money and I was going to get promoted and I was going to do those things because I was going to get things done.
But you are not like those people. And let me tell you what separates you from the type of people that just by habit go to work. You have the title. You took the responsibility of being a manager and a leader willingly. Nobody twisted your arm. You took it. Now you own it and it’s up to you to know what to do with it. That’s what separates you. You’ve now taken on the responsibility of other human beings besides yourself. That’s a huge responsibility.
It’s different when I’m only responsible for me. It’s easier. It’s so much easier for most of us. But the reality is when we become a manager, we now have accepted responsibility for other human beings. It’s elevated you. You now have to deliver. And here’s what you have to deliver. You have to deliver the goals that your team has been given. And believe me, you’re going to need all the motivation you can muster just in yourself everyday to achieve those objectives. Companies don’t give you easy objectives, they give you tough objectives. They’re going to take a lot of long hours, a lot of hard work, a lot of cooperation—you’re going to need that.
So let me ask you a question. If you need motivation, what makes you think that members of your team don’t? We all need motivation. We all need to be motivated. You see motivation does not mean that you have to be a cheerleader. That’s why, in my mind, so many managers don’t motivate. They think that motivation is, “Rah, rah, rah! Let’s go get it done!” And it’s not, “Rah, rah, rah.” Motivation is reason, reason, reason. Huge difference.
Now don’t misunderstand me here. I’m not saying that “Rah, rah, rah,” is not good on occasion. It is! But the reason that it is, is because that type of motivation is a way that what you’re attempting to do is to make the task fun. And after all, who said that work can’t be fun? Work can be fun! We can motivate through “Rah, rah, rah.” But that’s not what makes people really motivated.
Haven’t you all been to those meetings where everybody gets all pumped up and they’re thrilled and they’re excited and they go back to work and you think, “Man we’re going to tear it up today! We’re going to do a great job!” But the first time a problem comes up everybody’s like, “Oh okay. Let’s go back through the motions again.” Well of course you have. See “Rah, rah, rah,” doesn’t last. That’s why Zig said that motivation needs to be done daily. It’s like bathing, it doesn’t last either.
You see we need to be motivated all the time. What we need is to know the reason that we are being motivated, the reason that we have to take on this task, we have to understand it and we have to own it. You know it’s really all in how you think about it.
I’m going to give you an example. I’m going to tell you a story that I think will demonstrate my point. You see, growing up my brother and I had the responsibility—aka ‘job’ in other words, it was our job—that we had to clean the house every week. And we each had different things that we were responsible for. I did the bathrooms and the floors, and he did the dusting and the mirrors and the windows in the house. I mean, it took quite a bit of time, we had a lot of real fine-tuned details that we had to do because our mom worked outside the home and she needed help and we couldn’t afford to hire somebody to do it so guess what, it was the job of my brother and me.
Well here’s what we did. You know, it was tough. We didn’t have anybody there to motivate us. We didn’t have anybody to say, “Hey go get your chores done!” And so we really didn’t want to do it, but I have to tell you we began to understand the importance of it, and once we understood the importance—the reason if you will—then we began to understand what we had to do and so we did it. And so here’s what we did. We began to race each other to see who would finish their jobs first. It was so much fun, and it helped us get our chores done so much faster because we were competing against each other. Our motivation—our reason—for doing this was that each one of us wanted to win. We wanted to be first.
Now that didn’t mean we couldn’t do quality work. We had to because our mom was going to inspect and examine what we’d done. But I have to tell you we were highly motivated and it was a lot of fun. And you see, I’ll bet you have examples similar to that in your life where you had motivations—you had reasons that you wanted to do stuff. It wasn’t just doing the work it was, “Okay I needed a reason to finish first or to get that next promotion,” if you’re a manager or leader. We have reasons.
When I began to think back about all of these examples in my own life, that’s when it finally clicked for me. I realized that motivation was essential for two reasons: the enjoyment and fun of everyday life. We need to be motivated to enjoy stuff. We need to be motivated to have fun. And today since we work so darn much and so many long hours, don’t you think that we should have fun and enjoy our work instead of dreading it? Well frankly so do I. We ought to enjoy our work. So I want to encourage you today. I want to motivate you today.
Here’s what I want you to do. Today I want you to figure out ways that you can have fun and encourage your team. The reason that you’re going to be doing this is because you will be more satisfied, you will be more productive, and you will have happier employees. And that’s the reason that it’s so important for your team. Your team objectives will be met with absolute certainty when this happens. When that happens, guess what? You, as the manager or leader, are going to look good. You’re going to look great!
And you’re going to be presented with more opportunities for growth. You’ll make more money. You’ll have more success. You’ll be a greater leader. Not bad huh? A little bit of motivation can go a long way.
I want you to remember Zig’s words: People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well neither does bathing. That’s why we recommend it daily. Love it, love it, love it Zig! Thank you so much for saying those great words.
I want to encourage you—start motivating today. Commit yourself to this. Commit yourself to sharing the reason for people to do the things that they need to do. Not only will it grow your own manager mojo, it will help you to become the leader that others want to follow.
