The Kind Of Person That People Are Motivated By

By Wendy Lambourne, Director, Legitimate Leadership

The kind of person that people are motivated by is there for their people, not the other way around. They are in the relationship to 'give' to their people, not 'take' from them. More specifically, they have a sincere and genuine concern for the well-being of those in their charge (care for them) and enable them to become the best they can be (grow them).

To become the kind of person people are motivated by, managers must fundamentally rethink what they are here to do and for what purpose. They need to change their job description from 'getting the work done through the people' to 'getting the people done through the work'.

Managers need to stop seeking to change their people's performance, ownership and willingness, believing that doing so will deliver better results. Instead, they need to focus on changing themselves. Only when they do so will they gain the trust, willingness and loyalty of their people.

What accounts for this highly sought-after, but often not realised, trust in those in authority in organisations?

Our experience, consistently and without exception over the past 25 years, is that management (both individually and collectively) are trusted or not on the strength of their personal interest in the wellbeing of their people.

Employees gauge the genuineness or authenticity of that interest not on the basis of the sophistication of management communications or the company's human resources policies and practices.

Rather, trust is built or eroded according to the choices that employees witness managers making. Whenever managers choose to put their employees' interests before their own interests, they gain trust. Whenever they suspend their own needs (and, of course, they have needs of their own) or sacrifice their self-interest to do the right thing, people experience them as sincere. They see their managers as values-driven rather than needs-driven and therefore trust them.

Conversely, when managers act in pursuit of their own interests, when they ride roughshod over the needs or concerns of their people, they lose trust. Whenever they do the expedient or convenient thing, rather than the right thing, their employees conclude that they are self-serving and cannot be trusted.

Managers stand or fall at the end of the day on the basis of what we refer to as intent or motive, on the degree to which they are assessed as being in the relationship to 'give' or to 'take' from their people. The more they are deemed to be in the relationship to 'give' to their people rather than to 'get' from them, the more they are trusted.

This 'give', however, is not a giving of money; it is a giving of self. Across the world, people do not respond to the question, 'Who would you work for willingly?' with the answer, 'He/she who pays me the most.'

Rather, they say that they will go above and beyond for the person who does two things for them: cares for them sincerely and genuinely as a person and grows them or enables them to realise the best in themselves.

Trust, in other words, comes at a price. That price is not money, it is care and growth.