If You Don't Lead With Meaning, You're Just Working. Become a Leader Who Inspires

You are a team leader who wants fast growth, rapid productivity, excellent quality, and a highly motivated digital workforce. How do you motivate them? You reason that employees work for money, so the more money the more motivation.

You give bonuses, offer paid vacations, and set tight deadlines with public accountability to stimulate results. Some time passes. Things are moving along smoothly. You get what you want. Then all of it comes to screeching halt. Your employees start to trickle out, tensions erupt in house, and you see control slip away no matter how many strategy meetings, pow-wows, and experts you call in.

Even today this scenario plays out often enough that business strategy gurus are still selling high-grossing self-help books on how best to motivate a workforce. The theories abound. But all those tips and tricks boil down to one very simple, very human principle through which every organizational decision can be filtered.

Is this meaningful?

In this article, I explain practical ways to use this question to inspire teams to action. It’s one of my longer pieces but one that deserves this level of discourse. The article is a summary of one of the many topics from my new book “The Empirical Leader”.

The Four Core Characteristics of a Motivational Leader

Leaders come in many shapes and sizes. For those seasoned professionals who’ve had multiple bosses, there are clear behaviors and attitudes that motivate and others that demotivate. A command-and-control approach to leadership driven by financial incentives and negative accountability is stressful and vacuous. In the short-term, it works; but in the long-term it’s unsustainable. The best leaders move us with emotion, imagination, and collaboration.

There are four core characteristics of a motivational leader with long-term effects: confidence, humility, results, and relationships.

1.   Confidence. You believe that you can achieve the results you’ve set for yourself. More than that, you believe that enduring results are achieved collectively.

2.   Humility. As an internal leadership value, humility means that you have an accurate self-image. You don’t let power go to your head. You own your strengths and your flaws. You recognize the internal, inherent worth of each person without hierarchy. In short, have an accurate self-image (pros and cons), admit mistakes (flexible) and invite challenges (growth).

3.   Results. Result attainment is formulaic. You must clarify, plan and act. You and your team must be clear on why the team exists, what the end-goal looks like, and why and how you will achieve it. With clear expectations and a clear vision, you can design an actionable plan. And concurrently cultivate earnest accountability.

4.   Relationships. A long-term productive team relationship requires connection, investment, and collaboration. The connection is about trust and respect. People aren’t objects or pawns, they are thinking and feeling humans with potential, hopes, and insights. When you invest in the team’s potential, listen to their hopes, and consider their insights, you establish a connection wherein fruitful collaboration is possible. Collaboration is an attitude that extols unity and bridges separation.

Igniting Passion and Motivation to Keep Yourself and Your Employees Moving

Motivate by Culture Not Force

A motivational leader doesn’t move people through brute force or economic incentives. A motivational leader moves people through culture and through the heart. A motivational leader taps into our fears and our strengths by making it acceptable to be flawed and admirable to take risks, explore, and be creative.

A culture is not nurtured overnight. It takes hours and days to build the foundation of motivational leadership. And each team will face its own unique challenges along the way. The team members bring different experiences, and the context and goals bring their own endemic drawbacks and hardships. Despite the inescapability of this, a motivational leader realizes that people are people.

1.   Make it safe to try. When someone brings you an idea that you’ve tried before, don’t send him away with a brusque, “We tried that. It didn’t work.” Try an invitation instead: “Thanks for thinking about this with us. We tried a similar idea last year and found an issue with X. Would you be willing to think about that issue and see if you come up with any ways to make this idea work? I’d love to hear them.”

2.   Start small. The technology sector is iconic in its minimum viable product practice. What is the smallest way you can test an idea and learn how to improve it? Get moving, get feedback and get better.

3.   Reward behavior. This is important. When you ask people to solve problems, you are actually asking them to take a risk. Their solution might not work. How do you respond? Are you grateful they tried, or do you get upset at the failed attempt? To build a culture that nurtures innovation and problem solving, reward effort over results.

Stay Attuned to the Big Picture

Communicating the big picture is a skill that only the executives should worry about developing. Wrong. Everyone should, at all times, have a sense of the big picture and of how to bring it into focus when things get myopic. Everyone needs to know how the pieces fit together, why their work makes a difference, what needs to be done, and where they are going.

By tapping into the big picture, a team finds meaning, purpose, and perennial motivation when times get tough. Try these three steps to connect people to the bigger picture:

1.   Magnify the meaning. Talk explicitly about the impact of each team member’s work on the overarching goal. Encourage dialogue, feedback, and share your own accomplishments and failures.

2.   Clarify priorities. Cluster the work your team does into meaningful chunks that link back to the bigger picture.

3.   Simplify the message. If you can’t explain your team’s mission in one sentence, you don’t fully understand it. If you’re really struggling, ask a few strong team members to give it a shot. Everyone on your team should be able to describe your team’s mission and in that way present a multidimensional picture of the team and the goal.

Savor the Details and Minutiae

The bigger picture should be concrete. Platitudes and sweeping statements are intangible and indistinct. The place where concreteness can be found is in the details, in lived experience, in the seen and the deeply felt.

The difficulty is that details are abundant, and the more we analyze, the more details and subdivision and crevices hiding further detail we will find. The way to avoid getting caught in the weeds is by priority:

1.   Know what matters. One question leads you to a potent answer: What does your customer or client care about? That is what matters.

2.   Know the key behaviors that produce real results. Whatever your business, certain behaviors and functions drive meaningful results that matter to your customer. Know yours.

3.   Emphasize key behaviors. Consistently emphasize the key behaviors. When we do this, we get that; when we make money here, it allows us to invest there; when we bring these people together, they innovate best in these areas; our customers do this when we do that.

Pull People Out of the Weeds

The culture you help generate will never be perfect. People get distracted. They lose steam. They overlook the bigger picture. They get caught up in unimportant details. They clash. None of this is unnatural. And it’s not necessarily undesirable. Flash points and contention often reveal entrenched issues that are already causing damage, and had they not reached a critical mass, you never would’ve had the chance to address them.

To reorient your team when disaster strikes, you must harken to the transcendence in each person. You must refocus people with results and relationships.

1.   Set clear expectations. Deficiencies in expectations account for a large portion of institutional failure. You may be clear on expectations for your team, but it’s likely they’re not as clear to your team. Make it a practice to check on comprehension before closing a discussion. A few questions you can use are: “Before we go, would you please recap your understanding of our conversation?” “Can you restate what you heard in your own words?” or “Let’s review before going forward.”

2.   Train and equip people to meet expectations. Second to unclear expectations, the next perpetrator of institutional failure is the assumption that everyone has the knowledge or skills to meet expectations. Be sure that your team members are equipped for success. If not, then train them.

3.   Reinforce expectations. Your mind receives 11 million bits of information every second you are awake. With that much information coming at your people, it can’t hurt to say things twice. Your major strategic themes, objectives and key priorities warrant repetition at least once a month.

4.   Close the loop with celebration and accountability. You can easily demotivate your team when you fail to celebrate success or practice accountability. Think of celebration and accountability as the final part of the expectation circle: the feedback that closes the loop and makes it likely your team will stay focused on what matters most. Celebration can be as simple as gathering your people and privately acknowledging that they did it.

Engage Your Team in Decision-Making with Inclusion

Clarity on how decisions are made and who is involved obviates a number of structural and sociological pitfalls. The truth is that people are less skeptical of decisions when they are clear about what is required, why the decision was made and if they had input. That doesn’t guarantee they’ll agree, but it’s more likely they’ll engage rather than shut down or outrightly reject.

Any decision-making process should start with to central questions:

1.   What kind of decision is this?

2.   Who owns the decision?

After you’ve answered these questions, follow up with a categorization:

1.   Where are we going?

2.   How will we get there?

The first question is about outcome, the second about process or method. These should be two separate conversations, as oftentimes people can cross wires unintentionally, talking about process when they mean to talk about outcome and vice versa. This creates discord and disparity of purpose.

The point on decision ownership is important. Although inclusion is preferable, not everyone involved has equal say. In general, there are four types of decision ownership:

1.   A single person makes the decision.

2.   A group makes the decision through a vote.

3.   A team makes the decision through consensus.

4.   Fate decides.

Make sure to clear all this up before jumping into a decision-making process. Many meetings devolve into standstills or shouting matches because of a lack of clarity on what the decision is about, why it matters, and how it will be settled. When we talk about the bigger picture, this fits squarely in that field.

Lead Meetings That People Want to Attend

Meetings are a proverbial thorn in the side of just about every employee. Most meetings accomplish distraction and stress rather than progress. The problem arises from a misperception of what meetings are supposed to accomplish. A meeting is a commitment creator not a broadcast station. You bring people together to discuss a few topics, determine intended outcomes and commitment to solutions. Some meetings are just informational, which is frivolous because nowadays means of communication are aplenty. Why do you need a meeting to give an update unless it’s dismal?

Commitment should be baked into the meeting and into the decision-making..

1.   Commitment 1. Who will do what? Until someone actually does something, nothing has changed from before you made the decision. Until then, it is just a nice idea. There are actually two questions here: What is to be done? Who will do it?

2.   Commitment 2. By when? When deadlines are public, everyone is more likely to meet them.

3.   Commitment 3. How will we know? “How will we know?” is the magic question that moves your meeting from good intentions to real-world impact. It closes the loop from intention to action and creates momentum without you having to spend hours every day tracking down action steps.

Imagine that a person completes a task. She then passes on the results to one person or the group, or sends out an update. The primary feature here is the accountability. Everyone knows what they are accountable for and the team knows if it was completed. In other words: Who does what? By when? How do we know? Done!

Accountability from Person-to-Person

I might be beating a dead horse but there is a dramatic difference between negative accountability and positive accountability. Accountability isn’t about assigning lone tasks to complete spurred by the fear of punishment for failure. It’s about mutual commitment to an identifiable outcome with predetermined, realistic expectations.

Accountability is nice to talk about but hard to put into practice. It’s an abstract moral standard. When you get to the bare bones, you realize it can rub people the wrong way. That is why having an approach in mind is key.

INSPIRE is an excellent pneumonic I’ve used to broach performance and accountability issues.

Initiate. Initiate the conversation in a respectful manner and as close to the moment of concern as possible. Don’t wait three days.

Notice. Share your concern or observation in a non-accusatory way. “I’ve noticed there are paint drips on the floor when you leave a job.” “In listening to your calls, I’ve noticed you don’t connect with the customer.” “I noticed that you arrived late this morning.”

Specific Support. Provide specific supporting evidence you can see. “When the customer told you he was calling to disconnect his line because his spouse had died, you didn’t express any empathy. You said you would be happy to disconnect the line.” “The meeting was scheduled for 9:00, and you arrived at 9:30.”

Probe. After you present the situation, open a dialogue. Ask a question in a neutral, inquisitive tone to encourage open exchange. Generally, “What happened?” is sufficient and allows the person to share information. “What happened on that call?” “What happened that you were late?”

Invite. Once thoughts and feelings are shared, extend an invitation to problem solve. Review the situation and ask how the problem can be resolved. Usually, this will be straightforward. You might realize that the person needs more training in a particular area.

Review. Ask one or two open-ended questions to check for understanding and one closed question to secure commitment. “What concerns do you have about this approach?” “Is this your commitment going forward?” Ask the employee to review her specific commitment: “Would you please recap what you will do next time?”

Enforce. Enforce the behavior and why it’s important while reinforcing your confidence in the person’s success.

Sustain Your Team’s Energy and Momentum

Decision-making. Commitment. Culture. Accountability. Details. The big picture. It’s a lot to process. It’s exhausting, albeit indispensable. Even when everything is perfectly laid out, human beings can still become unmotivated. Tired. Depleted. We disengage and grow apathetic. That’s why we need encouragement. It is a fact of life.

To provide long-lasting encouragement that fuels performance, make sure it’s comprised of three traits: relevance, specificity and meaningfulness.

1.   Relevance. Make sure the encouragement you give your team is relevant. What are the specific things people do that contribute to healthy relationships and meaningful results? Encourage those things that are relevant to the relationships and results you want to achieve.

2.   Specific. You’ve taken the time to identify your team’s relevant behaviors. Now, when you acknowledge them, be specific about what you encourage. Describe what actually happened and why it was important. When you take the time to get specific, people know you understand their work, and you reinforce positive contributions.

3.   Meaningful. People are different. Motivational leaders know this and tap into it. They want encouragement in different areas, and they receive encouragement in different ways. Meaningful encouragement is relevant to the work and to the person.

Here are six ways to make recognition more meaningful:

1.   Customize. Seek out what is meaningful to each person in the team.

2.   Personalize it. Some people like time off. Some people like a chocolate bar.

3.   Timely. Don’t waste time in recognizing someone’s efforts or accomplishments. Do it as soon as it happens.

4.   Encourage strengths. Stay on top of the team’s personal goals and strengths. Acknowledge work in the areas that are most meaningful to your team members.

5.   Align. Make sure words and actions align with organizational behaviors and norms.

6.   Meaningful for the team. When you acknowledge individuals in front of the team, talk about how their actions contributed to the team and helped everyone to win. 

In Sum

A motivational leader is attuned to her strengths and weaknesses, she is flexible and goal-oriented, she learns her team, their ticks, their hopes, their fears, and develops accountability models and opens lines of dialogue that permit each person’s creativity to fly in a safe space where being human is okay. She makes purposeful decisions that include just enough people with precise goals, methods, and skills to ensure results. She sets clear expectations and holds people to commitments aligned to their wants and expertise. And she does all of this while asking the fundamental question: Is this meaningful?

The meaning flows from the people on the team, from the customers, from the exact vision of success the team has envisioned. The meaning is the reason for all the hard work, the sweat, the long hours. Without meaning, you’re just working. 

Igniting Passion and Motivation to Keep Yourself and Your Employees Moving