How To Inspire Others

Being an inspirational person is contagious. When you inspire someone, they want to become an inspiration too.

When a highly effective leader motivates their team, it is highly likely that they will also be inspired. A highly effective leader can influence their team both when they are present within the team, and also when they’re not present with the team.

Hence, they are both motivational and inspirational.

I was working as a consultant project manager for London Tube Company in early 2019. My role was to manage the overhaul of the fleet of trains that ran on the District Line.

The team I had consisted of 9 consultant engineers who had never worked together before, or even met each other before. The role of the engineers was to validate all of the overhaul instructions, vehicle maintenance instructions, and bill of materials, tooling, and facilities.

It was a huge project that was planned to last a year. The validations that our team were required to complete was massive, so I had to bring the team together and motivate them.

Otherwise the project wouldn’t last a year, and our consultancy wouldn’t be offered further projects. There was a lot at stake for us to pull off.

It took about a month to bring all of the 9 engineers onto the project, and then a couple of weeks to delegate the first phase tasks to each team member. 4 of the engineers were contractors, and the other 5 worked for the same consultancy I did.

So, at first there was a little bit of us and them between the contractors and the consultants. This made my position even harder, because not only did we not know each other, there were also people who didn’t like each other right from the start.

The goal I set for the team was to complete our tasks on time to the best of our ability. But, the real goal I set was for us to get a long and enjoy working together.

Not everyone bought into that goal right from the beginning, so I arranged a social get together to try and get to know each other first before we really got stuck into the work.

We went paint balling together, and then we went for dinner and drinks later in the evening. It was a really good day and we all got a long great.

We talked about our previous jobs, our families, friends, told stories, but most of all we were happy to work with each other from then on. It was a huge success.

We went back to work on the Monday morning with a new attitude following our successful social encounter. We were ready to work as a team, and help each other.

The first week of starting the project for real, I did a lot of observing. I wanted to see if the team were relying on me, or relying on each other. I advised the team that I would not be a micro-manager, and be on their back each day looking for updates.

They had the autonomy to make their own decisions and work with the client as they saw fit. I tried to ask a lot of open questions that would enable them to think for themselves and come to their own answers.

By asking questions, I was not telling them what to do, they were telling themselves what to do. I found it interesting because they didn’t realise that’s what they were actually doing.

All the best,

Tom Lawrence (Highly Effective Leader)