What Drives People

Centuries ago, Niccolò Machiavelli wrote his political treatise, The Prince (2014, originally published 1513). Many would agree that his book is the foundation of modern political science. It is also about what drives and motivates people. The Prince is a deeply insightful piece of work, based on Machiavelli's direct observations of princes, principalities, and power. I remember first reading it as part of my MBA program. The core message was that the best way to motivate and drive people was through fear. My reaction was twofold. First, I could see the truth in what Machiavelli was saying. People are, in fact, motivated and controlled by fear. Second, I was disappointed by that fact and could not completely accept it as the whole truth. Thus began my search for the rest of the story. It is my hope that this book provides at least a glimpse into the next chapter of that story.

We have talked a lot about positive and negative energy. Fear is negative energy. There is nothing positive about it. The motivation that fear provides comes from our desire to avoid it. Fear is strongly attached to our desire to survive, a driving instinct that exists at the deepest and most primitive level of all human beings. Fear served us well over the millennia by helping us survive. But as we began to form what in Machiavelli's time were called principalities, leaders used our survival instincts to align, organize, and control us. Today, the principalities are governments and companies. And, unfortunately, many of our common business practices still rely on the use of fear to align, organize, and control people

For example, I saw fear clearly at play in our recent work with a federal government agency. In the agency, a strong culture of fear had the effect of keeping people in their places and, in some cases, virtually immobilized them. Risk taking was out of the question since employees generally felt that any significant failure put their jobs at risk. For the most part, employees were order takers. Their creative spirits and desire to take initiative had been broken. The risks were simply too high. When we encouraged leaders to go to their bosses and make some suggestions to solve significant issues, they were unwilling to do so. They never said no; they just didn't do it. In their culture, bold suggestions were too risky.

In this agency, being at fault was like playing musical chairs and being the one without a chair when the music stopped. No one ever wanted to be left standing. This orientation provided an automatic motivation for people in the agency to throw each other under the bus, which happened quite a lot. “Better him than me” was the rationale. That's what you do when you are focused on survival. And then there was the dreaded budgeting session that happened at least once a year. During these periods, people were afraid that their jobs would be cut. This fear motivated them to behave just the way the agency wanted them to behave: Do what you are told. Keep your head down. Don't stand out or rock the boat. Protect your leaders. Then you might be able to keep your job. With all of that fear, which constituted negative energy working against the forward progress of work, people were inherently inefficient.

No one person created this culture and management style. A collection of many leaders and business norms over the years created and sustained it. But this fear‐based culture and management style doesn't have to be this way, and in fact it shouldn't be. We don't have to rule the people in our companies, agencies, and schools by fear. We don't have to use negative energy to align and control people. There are ways to lead people that encourage creative and productive behaviors instead of forcing them into a nonproductive, fear‐based, order‐taking allegiance. To lead in this way, we must appeal to a different part of people and stop pushing their survival buttons. The promise of this type of leadership is that by removing the negative energy of what we might call Machiavellian leadership, we can harness much more positive energy in our people so that they perform the work of the business more effectively and efficiently. And we can have a much happier and healthier working environment.

Appealing to the Best Part of People

Given our circumstances in business, education, and government, with chronic conflict and a pressing need to work differently in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, we need an alternative to leading and managing people through fear. Fortunately, people are motivated by things other than fear. In his book, Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us, Daniel Pink (2009) asserts that the secret to high performance and satisfaction at work are the deeply human needs to direct our own lives, learn and create new things, and do better by ourselves and our world. Artists are a good example of people who live out of these more creative and altruistic motivators in a more visible way than perhaps most of us do. Although such motivators are not the exclusive drivers of human behavior, they seem to coexist with the survival‐based motivators discussed earlier. In fact, all people have what I call an intrinsic essence that spawns these deeply human needs. This essence is about positive energy. It is inherently the best part of us. In the expression of this essence, we are naturally motivated to create shared space in our work with other people.

You may be thinking that you know people who don't seem to have an ounce of intrinsic essence within them. I know such people as well. But I have also seen these people turn around and tap into their reservoirs, so to speak. The truth is that we never lose our intrinsic essence, but we can cover it up and choose not to operate from it. Two primary drivers can lead to this cover‐up. First, in many businesses, the environment encourages this path. For example, the culture and management practices in the government agency had the effect of moving people away from their intrinsic essences and encouraging them to operate out of their fear‐based instincts. Any individual could, of course, try to resist that pressure. However, such resistance is very difficult to sustain over time. Tribes (e.g., businesses) have a way of either bringing outliers into the fold or booting them out.

The second path that can lead to people covering up and ignoring their intrinsic essences starts with a personal orientation and intent toward survival at all cost. Doing work and the outcome of work are important only to the extent that they support this goal of survival, (i.e., keeping my job, status, and income). That orientation, in turn, drives fear‐based behavior (through the Directional dimension). In other words, this second path has to do with what we, as individuals, bring to the table and how what we bring affects our work. For example, if my intent at work is to survive and stay safe, I hold that agenda tightly, and I consistently give it a number‐one priority. I give little if any consideration to my intrinsic essence, or to any motivations that may stem from it. They simply are not a priority. Doing what I have to do to stay safe and prevent others from perceiving that I am at fault are much more important to me than doing good for my business or the world.

In the end, it is up to the people to choose their path in work. However, managers and leaders can influence which path people choose by the way they design their enterprise elements and the way they manage people. These things can push people either toward their intrinsic essences or toward their fear‐based instincts. Again, the need to tap into the intrinsic essences of our people and help them work from that orientation is becoming more essential. Collaboration and interpersonal services are easily tainted by fear and personal agendas. People need a clean playing field to operate at the level we need them to, less unencumbered by negative energy. The people themselves are part of the solution, and managers and leaders are the other part.

In managing people, we need to appeal to their intrinsic essences. We need to engage and ignite the deeply human needs that Daniel Pink identified as key motivators. To effectively engage the intrinsic essence of our people, management itself must be viewed as an interpersonal service. In other words, every interaction a manager has with one of their people is a collaboration with a goal of optimizing the person's performance, the performance of the business overall, and the intrinsic satisfaction the person receives by performing the work. As with all collaborations, these management interactions involve the four dimensions of energy.

To appeal to the best part of people, we must be thoughtful, aware, and attentive to our contributions to each of these dimensions and the affects they have on the other person. We cannot approach management as a one‐directional activity where we give the orders, they do the work, and all of the motivation comes from us. Instead, people are largely responsible for their motivation, and we are responsible for facilitating an ongoing process that helps them engage their internal motivations and apply them toward meeting or exceeding the goals of the business.

In my career I have had many different bosses. They ran the gamut from awesome to horrible. As I reflected on the best versus the worst bosses, I recognized some common differences, including these:

• The worst bosses tended to view me as one would, let's say, an ox pulling a cart. Their only interest was to get the ox to work harder and pull the cart faster. This felt like domination, distrust, and devaluation. In contrast, the best bosses recognized my intrinsic essence and related to me primarily through that essence. Those interactions felt much different. They were not dominating, they were partnering and guiding. These bosses trusted me and opened the door for me to build on our trusting relationship. And they valued me for who I was, what I could do, and my partnership with them.
• The worst bosses wanted too much intellectual involvement in, and control over, my work. If I wanted to brief them on my progress on a project, they would grill me for details and get way down into the weeds, which made me feel as if they were usurping my project in an attempt to prove that they were smarter than I. If I pushed back with alternative ideas, they were easily insulted and often reacted by giving me direction (orders) to show that they were still the boss. Conversely, the best bosses had a sense of shared space and understood the importance of building that with me. They did nothing to take away from the responsibility they had given me but sought to help me with it. They listened to and respected my ideas and invited healthy debate. And they gave direction reluctantly, urging me instead to tell them what I was going to do next.
• The worst bosses were either completely closed off about sharing their own situations, experiences, and motivations at work or they wouldn't stop talking about them in a negative way. When they didn't share at all, there was no room for partnership, no way for me to put myself in their shoes and find solutions that would work for them. It was a constant guessing game in which I felt a sense of failure whenever I guessed wrong. My experience with bosses who incessantly complained about the company and their work was that they were useless to the cause and cared only about themselves. The best bosses knew what to share and what not to share; most important, they knew when to share and how to share it. Their sharing was motivated not by what made them feel good but by what I needed to know to build shared space with them. If they had information that needed to stay at their level, they would tell me as much as they could without getting into details. If they had a personal experience that was relevant to what I was experiencing, they shared it, even if it didn't paint the perfect picture of a boss. I respected them even more for that and felt a strong professional camaraderie.

You can see from these examples that the worst bosses crushed my internal motivation while the best bosses engaged, fed, and guided my intrinsic essence. But we must allow for the fact that not everyone is like me. While I am all about working from my intrinsic essence, other people are not. They are not automatically bad people for that, but they are somewhere else on the continuum between intrinsic essence and fear‐based instincts. As much as I would like to say we should abandon all management techniques that involve fear in favor of the intrinsic essence methods, I cannot. I cannot say that because people who operate more toward the fear‐based end of the continuum, either in a particular situation or chronically, cannot be reached without a dose of fear. That's why Machiavelli was both right and wrong. He was right because some people will only respond to fear. And he was wrong in that his answer was incomplete. There is another way to lead people that many will respond to.

I once had a program manager on my staff who managed a large program on a very important account. I'll call her Alice. I “inherited” Alice when I took my position. Soon I began to hear complaints from the client staff that Alice had said things and done things that they felt were disrespectful. When I asked Alice about the incidents, she always had a rationalization for doing what she did, such as “That client always wants something for nothing.” In fact, her stories were more often true than not, but that didn't excuse her unkind and unprofessional interactions. Furthermore, Alice painted herself as a victim of both the client and the company we both worked for. This was her way of not taking responsibility. I coached Alice and tried to appeal to her intrinsic essence, the part of herself that got her into this company and industry in the first place. I talked with her about all the people her large program served and the opportunity she had to make a difference in their lives. I talked about it being an honor to serve and even told a story about King Arthur and the Round Table. Nothing worked. She kept up her disrespectful behavior. The complaints got worse, and the account was in jeopardy. I had no choice but to operate from the fear‐based side of the continuum where Alice was entrenched. Along with HR I gave her a verbal warning, hoping that her fear of losing her job would be enough to turn her around. But she didn't budge. I went to a written warning, which also didn't motivate her. Ultimately I terminated her.

This kind of situation is an unfortunate reality in our workforce. Some people are beyond influence when it comes to moving them in the direction of their intrinsic essences. A colleague of mine calls these people the “uncoachables.” Managers and leaders generally have little or no effect on entrenched Personal characteristics that people bring with them to work—and to life in general. Impacts are possible but much less likely, and are far from a sure thing in any individual. For this reason, appealing to the best part of people who have rendered their intrinsic essences inaccessible, to themselves and others, is either impossible or not worth the major energy required for what will likely generate a low return. Only the person can impact these personal characteristics, and some people are unwilling to do so.

For managers and leaders, the message here is simple. If you are interested in tapping the intrinsic essence of your workforce, you need to understand who you can help and who you can't help. Then you need to understand that if you keep people around who are entrenched in the fear‐based side of the continuum, they will continue to operate out of their personal agendas because it is their orientation. They may have tremendous Intellectual gifts, but the value of those gifts to the business will always be compromised by their personal agendas. Furthermore, keeping these people around sends a message to everyone else that you condone personal agendas at the expense of the business. At best, doing so will make you look hypocritical. At worst, your efforts to move people in the direction of their intrinsic essences will fall apart.

Most people will fall somewhere in the middle of the motivational continuum, and most businesses have Environmental characteristics, poorly designed enterprise elements, that breed conflict and competition and push people toward the “dark side.”  This negative environmental influence complicates things because someone who exhibits negative behaviors in one company may behave quite positively in a company with a healthier environment. Therefore, it is important to evaluate people in the context of their environment, and it is important to take action on negative Environmental factors while you are asking your staff and managers to undergo their own transformations.

In the next section we discuss how leaders can ignite and harness the intrinsic motivations of people to achieve the important goals of the business.

Align Your Personal Dimension

As a leader, your intent (i.e., your goals, agendas, personal beliefs, and attitudes) will be under a microscope and watched by all whom you lead. Your intent will play out in how you lead and in ways that may even surprise you. Your power will be significant, and you will want to find the best blend between your Personal dimension and the interests of the business and its people. Therefore, it is a good idea to check your intent to find the sweet spot and make sure you are committing to the job for the right reasons.

You may ask, Why should I need to check my personal intent? I'll just keep that stuff to myself. Nobody has to know my secret beliefs or agenda. Technically that would be correct. However, as a practical matter, you need to understand your personal intent.

If you enter a leadership position with a significant disconnect between your intent and the interests of the company, it is unlikely that you will be able to keep that a secret. Under the pressure of daily leadership, you will probably find yourself saying and doing things that expose your true goals, agendas, personal beliefs, and attitudes. As we sometimes say, it comes out sideways. As you become more exposed, the disconnect can lead to major problems.

For example, let's say you come in saying that you are going to improve the working environment and are later heard to say that revenue growth trumps people and the environment is good enough. Word will spread like wildfire, and you could become instantly unpopular. You may find a way to set the record straight, but you may well end up exposing yourself again in some other way. The point is, leading with a significant disconnect between your goals and those of the business will waste a lot of energy, your risk of exposure is high, and the consequences are even higher. Perhaps the larger point is that leadership is about service. If you lose sight of that service orientation, or never engage it in the first place because you are more focused on your own agenda, you will likely fail as a leader because your people will follow you right into their own personal agendas. For these reasons, it is worth your while to resolve as much personal misalignment as possible before you start down the leadership path. Doing so will help you set the stage for your sustained attention, effective engagement, and maximum effort in performing the functions of a leader.

Know the Environmental Dimension

As a leader, it is important to know and understand the business environment, the playing field upon which you will lead. It is also important to know the people with whom you will be working. This knowledge comes over time as you gain experience with the business, but it is good to have at least a high‐level view when you start a new leadership position. One way to approach this is to use the Enterprise Elements Model as a checklist of areas to investigate. For senior executives and business leaders, your investigation will focus across the business. For mid‐level leaders, your focus will be on your part of the business, but you should also have a general idea of the business as a whole.

Another view of how the business works can be had by mapping the flow of money, as we discussed in chapter 3. It follows, of course, that you will want to know, in general, where the business is “broken.” Look for chronic conflict and misalignments of control and responsibility. Keep in mind that this is the environment your people work in every day. Your job as a leader will almost certainly include making the environment better in support of the people and your overall business direction. As a leader, you are responsible for the use and conservation of the collective energy. If dysfunctional elements in your environment are draining energy, you are going to have to plug some holes.

Understanding the business culture is also key. Cultures are about “the way we are in this business.” They are composed of many things, including norms, expectations, protocols, and stories. For example, every business has what I like to call the unwritten book of rules that are tacitly agreed upon within the collective over time. These rules are usually about how to keep each other safe, when and how to promote self‐interest over company interests, and underground channels of information flow. In my experience, people usually are more loyal to the unwritten rules than written policies and procedures. These rules are not written down because, if they were, people would have to admit to them, and they are not the kind of rules people want to acknowledge. In addition, if the business has defined values, they are worth a careful review, but look at them as more of an aspiration than a fact. Often the declared values of a company and the values of the people are in stark contrast.

If you have an adequate understanding of culture, you will be more immediately trusted and respected by the collective, and you will also be in a better position to change the culture as needed.

Finally, there is the matter of knowing the people and how they work. People you lead want to be seen, known, heard, and involved. Forming and nurturing business relationships is essential for successful leadership. And don't just give this lip service. People know when you are insincere and when you are genuine. As you get to know people, they will get to know you. Show them who you are, let them touch you with their words and experiences and learn from them. In the words of Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, “To lead people, walk behind them.”

Establish the Energetic Direction

The overall goal of leaders is to lead the movement of the business in a direction where it will better serve customers, achieve its business goals, and provide returns to its investors. In doing this, leaders are growing and maximizing the collective energy of the business. The growth in collective energy is essentially the return from the efforts invested to move the business. An obvious early step in this process is to establish the desired direction. That clarity then provides a set of targets for applying the collective energy. Establishing too many targets will diffuse the energy and risk them all. Too few targets will result in wasted time and a lesser performance in the marketplace. Thus, leaders must choose their targets wisely, and they should do so with a sense of how much energy their business has available to invest in achieving new targets. If, for example, the current state of the business is quite dysfunctional, with work less efficient and draining energy, the leader should be aware that the energy available to do new things is quite limited.

There are essentially two types of targets: business and environmental. Business targets are what you would expect, and have to do with the business as it relates to the outside world. Leaders at the highest levels of business target things such as increased market share, product line expansion, and increased revenue. Mid‐level leaders target such things as production increases, improved capability, and functional talent development. Environmental targets, of course, have to do with improving the environment (i.e., the collection of enterprise elements). Environmental improvements are often necessary to support specific business targets and the business as a whole.

For example, the Alchemy Instruments case earlier in the book showed us a company that had to create a new sales paradigm to support its desired increase in revenue, a major business target. Because external business initiatives often require complementary internal initiatives, it is suggested that business and environmental targets be established simultaneously.

Align the Environment

The stage has been set in your leadership collaboration. You have aligned yourself with the business, you know your environment, you know the people with whom you will be working, and you have clear targets for the business. Now it is time to aim the energy gun, so to speak. Doing so begins with the environmental changes needed to hit your established environmental targets.

We discussed an approach for making environmental changes and creating shared space in chapter 3. All of that applies here. As a leader, you are redesigning those aspects of the environment that create energetic obstacles to people doing what you want them to do and/or removing energy drains that rob energy from the desired activities. You are thereby facilitating the work you want people to do by making things easier. People appreciate that support, and it will begin to move the needle on their intellectual and personal alignment.

Align People Intellectually and Personally

With the environmental alignment under way, it's time to align the collective with you and the business targets. Initially, doing so means aligning the people within their Intellectual and Personal dimensions (i.e., engaging the concurrence and support of their hearts and minds). Leaders do and say a multitude of things that move people toward alignment; there are just as many that erode alignment. Therefore, leadership is as much about what not to do and say as it is about what to do and say. The message here is to be careful about everything you do. It is much easier to erode alignment through a careless statement or inattentive behavior than it is to build it.

Intellectual alignment is getting people to know and understand where the business is going, why that direction is important, what they can expect from the business, what is expected of them, and what's in it for them in their jobs. Intellectual alignment is accomplished by the flow of explanatory information along with interactive dialogue for questions, clarifications, and feedback to ensure an adequate level of understanding. There are many ways to communicate with people and no one “right” way to do it. You should consider every method of communication and the communication preferences of individuals. For example, I started texting so I could communicate more with my daughters. It helps to meet people where they are, and it helps to have information available in ways they prefer.

The indicators of energy that signal the degree of alignment in the Intellectual dimension tend to focus on evidence of understanding and of confusion. At the individual level, a simple conversation will usually tell you how clearly a person understands something. At the collective level, it is more useful and pragmatic to look at behaviors and listen to what people say. Internal survey results can also serve as good indicators of where people are in their understanding of key points and messages. There will undoubtedly be adjustments and refinements to the targets along the way, so plan on Intellectual alignment being an ongoing endeavor. The most important thing is that you establish and maintain an adequate degree of Intellectual alignment. If you are watching the indicators, you should have a strong sense of whether you are in the adequate range.

Personal alignment is about connecting with the people on a more emotional level, one that inspires them and engages their motivational forces. Personal alignment is accomplished primarily through the relationship that people have with the leader, the business overall, and themselves. That, of course, doesn't mean that a CEO has to know everybody in the company by name. The relationship does not require that kind of contact. However, it does require a personal connection.

The energy of a personal connection fires off when people feel elements of their Personal dimensions (i.e., their goals, agendas, personal beliefs and attitudes, and personal positions regarding their work), being acknowledged and supported. This is an emotional energy born of our human need to survive. The elements of our Personal dimensions are simply products of this survival energy playing out in the workplace. It is perhaps an unfortunate truth that the way to get many people to follow you is to do things and say things that make them feel you will help them survive. Every time you say or do something that encourages people's goals and agendas, agrees with their personal beliefs and attitudes, and supports their personal positions at work, you are speaking to them at an emotional level and telling them that you will help them survive.

Now, about the darker, more Machiavellian side of leadership. If you want to crank up the emotional gain and exploit survival emotions to control people, first tell them their survival is in jeopardy and then tell them you will help them survive if they follow you. I mention this not because I condone this leadership behavior, but because I want to be thorough. As we discussed in the last section, this kind of leadership comes with a price. Fear among people will get in the way of them doing their best and most productive work. Conflict among people will take its toll on them and the workplace and will ultimately erode the customer experience. The bottom line is that every leader has to decide how to engage the emotional side of the people. Calming their fears and helping them survive is one thing; stoking their fears to generate self‐serving power is another.

The other way to fire off the energy of a personal connection is by engaging the intrinsic essence of people. This is a more altruistic energy than the survival‐based emotional energy just discussed. It is much more about the larger goals of the business and how those will help people than it is about personal agendas. It is about the greater good, not about the individual good.

Earlier we discussed engaging the intrinsic essence of people as a motivational approach. Using that approach can go a long way toward motivating people to follow you. The other way to engage is to share how your vision for the business is connected to your own intrinsic essence. For example, “Our business is to help homeless people. I believe that every person deserves a hot meal and a safe and comfortable place to sleep.” Or “We make the fastest cars in the world. People don't really need them, but they touch a spirit of adventure and excitement in me and others. That feels like magic.” These statements are inspirational. Even if someone is not as passionate about taking care of homeless people or generating feelings of magic, they can relate to the statements; these messages touch their own intrinsic essences. If people believe in and appreciate your intrinsic essence, they are likely to believe in and follow you. At the very least you will have added to the Personal alignment among those in the workforce.

For several reasons, it is more difficult to gauge the degree of Personal alignment among your people at any point than to appraise Intellectual alignment. First, feelings and emotions are less tangible than knowledge and are more difficult to detect. Second, people tend to keep their Personal dimensions private and share only with those whom they trust. Third, even if you ask people about their Personal dimensions, they can talk only about the parts they are conscious of, and a large part of the Personal dimension is unconscious in all of us. While it is good to talk with people about their feelings directly, it is often more informative to watch their behaviors.

For example, I took on a leadership position in a company division where the previous leader tended to blame and punish. I explained to the people my general position on making mistakes—avoid them but, if you make one, learn from it, don't make that mistake again, and move on. I made it clear that if people didn't make a mistake once in a while, they weren't trying new things, and I was not about punishing those who took measured risks for the sake of the business. After that little speech, I hoped my people would begin to engage more in the kind of innovative behavior I was looking for. But I kept seeing the same risk‐averse behavior. I realized that even though I told the people that we wouldn't punish them for intelligent failures, they hadn't had enough time with me to see proof of that in my behavior, nor had I built an adequate level of trust. In other words, they did not yet trust that I would help them survive after they made a mistake. With more time together and some purposeful actions on my part to display the desired behaviors, the trust was built and my people became much more innovative and willing to take risks.

This is one small example of how the behaviors of people serve as indicators of Personal alignment. There are many more, so many that you won't see them all yourself. To help provide a more comprehensive view, you probably will want to engage your trusted network in helping you watch for the indicators. One final point is that the Personal dimension also includes the attention, engagement, and effort of the people. These things are somewhat more tangible and should definitely be included in the list of indicators to watch for.

Align People Directionally

All of your efforts to this point ultimately culminate in Directional alignment, where people are actually doing what you want them to do in concert with each other and you. The achievement of Directional alignment is not typically a single event. It usually happens in layers over time, ideally with each successive layer representing a deeper level of alignment. However it happens, it can be quite exciting. Energetically, it can be like reaching points of critical mass that result in the release of (or, more accurately, the receipt of) massive energy. This energy comes from the achievement of your targets and often comes in the form of revenue and profit. But it comes in many other forms as well, and certainly stokes the fires of your intrinsic essence as well as the intrinsic essences of your people.

Your daily work is guided by your Directional dimension, which ideally is focused on building and maintaining alignment across all of the dimensions. This is the work of a leader. You must plant seeds and tend to the garden before achieving a bountiful harvest. Over time, various aspects of the business start to become misaligned. That is the nature of things. A strong leader watches for those misalignments and corrects them as quickly as possible, knowing that one misalignment can beget another and another. You stop the leaks when they occur, and you work to avoid energy drains.

By pointing, marshaling, focusing, and applying energy in specific directions, amazing things happen. As I mentioned earlier, this is not a cookbook on how to be a good leader. Rather, it is a leadership approach for accomplishing great things by collaborating with your people through the management of energy. When your focus is on energy, your focus is on the things that will, collectively, achieve the large returns you are looking for. And furthermore, by conserving and focusing the energy you invest in achieving your targets, you will minimize your required investment. That makes the returns all the sweeter and gives you extra energy to accomplish other things.

Reward and Celebrate

As your business achieves success, don't forget to celebrate and reward it. Rewards are both intrinsic and tangible. Use them all! Celebrations are rituals that touch the deepest parts of people and reinforce their motivations and behaviors. Reward and celebration position you and your people for the next round of achievement. Give some energy back to the people. If it weren't for them, you wouldn't be successful. Your gifts back to them will go a long way toward positioning you for your next success.

Putting Me First

As we have discussed, we all bring to our work a Personal dimension of energy. Within that energy we have personal goals and agendas, beliefs and attitudes, and positions regarding our work. The nature of that energy tends to affect the attention we give a particular task, how we engage others in doing the work, and the amount of effort we put into that work.

Putting me first happens when people give their own personal agenda a higher priority than the larger business goal and the interests of the business. In practice, putting me first is not an absolute. It comes in degrees based on the relative priority people place on their own agendas versus the needs of the business. At the extreme, there are people who seem to live by their personal agendas, which essentially means they often work at cross purposes with others and the business. Let's look at two examples.

I once worked with a marketing manager who seemed to believe that she was entitled to be taken care of but wasn't receiving the appropriate care. Therefore, she would rationalize the prioritization of her own agenda as a way of getting what she “deserved.” In meetings her comments were seldom constructive. Instead, she tended to criticize other people, their ideas, and the company. She had a holier‐than‐thou attitude that was designed to make others feel inferior so she could get what she wanted. She didn't produce much original work, and most people (except her closest allies) didn't really like working with her. Her managers knew there was a problem, but she seemed untouchable. She knew how to do just enough to protect herself from negative personnel actions. She knew how to cloak her negativity with supposedly positive remarks and hide that negativity altogether when her managers were present. She got away with her destructive behavior for a long time, until I coached her managers on how to appropriately deal with it. Part of my coaching was to help the managers recognize how they were enabling her behavior by feeling responsible for taking care of her. In other words, they had, to some extent, bought into her premise.

Earlier in my career I encountered another example of putting me first. I worked with a man, a fellow manager, whose put‐me‐first behavior had a more competitive premise. His premise boiled down to this: “I work hard for this company and I need to be recognized and rewarded over my peers. No one else will look out for me but me. I'm just playing the game.” The deep issue here is that this attitude can be used to justify all sorts of actions that hurt others and the business. And this man did just that to look out for himself. Such a person may work hard, but we must question how much of that work is for the business and how much is for himself.

Whatever the source of their personal agendas, me‐first people spread considerable negative energy as they operate out of their own self‐interests. They generally do a lot of damage and know how to survive so they can continue spreading negative energy. In my experience, it is amazing how often, and how well, me‐first behavior works for chronic users. But it only works if managers aren't looking for it, don't see it, and don't take appropriate action to stop it.

Engaging in Conflict

Conflict, as it is defined in this book, is never good. People engage in conflict for different reasons. As we discussed, dysfunctions and misalignments in the business environment can provide an ongoing source of triggers that invite people to engage in conflict. But people still have a choice to engage in conflict or handle the situation in a different way. People also engage in conflict to further their agendas. These agenda items can include everything from being right, to protecting a faction, to making someone look bad, to getting something from someone. Throwing someone under the bus is a form of conflict that often occurs as an escalation of an ongoing conflict.

It is probably impossible to be in a business without engaging in conflict from time to time. Life is not perfect, and neither is business. However, in business, there are some people who are involved in conflict frequently. They look for it, start it, and sometimes seem to enjoy it. They appear to have little motivation to walk away from a potential fight and may view doing so as weakness. In general, men are more prone to overt conflict than women. It is the nature of men, in general, to just have it out. It is male DNA to fight, and men have been going to war for millennia. But that doesn't make it OK for a man or a woman to chronically engage in conflict within a business. Conflict, as we have discussed, constitutes a huge energy drain on a business. When unintentional conflict escalates and when conflict becomes intentional and premeditated, it needs to be addressed.

Men also engage in covert conflict, yet women have a greater tendency to engage covertly, more often with other women than with men. Women compete with each other for attention and recognition, among other things. Much of the time men don't see these battles. They become aware only when the conflict becomes a factor in conducting business. For obvious reasons, it is difficult to see how much time and energy is being expended on covert conflicts. Nevertheless, they take a toll.

Whatever the cause of conflict, people who chronically engage in conflict drain the energy of business. If they are not dealt with, they continue to drain energy, and their behavior is being tacitly condoned. Managers must consider the environment and any role it may be playing in triggering conflict, but they also must deal with chronic offenders appropriately, once they are recognized, or the business will pay the energy price.

Resisting Change

People who resist change most often do so because they are afraid of the unknown, don't trust the company or its leaders, aren't sure if the change will be good for them, perceive a possible loss of power or status, and/or are more comfortable with the status quo. Everyone experiences some of these feelings. Change can be difficult and uncomfortable. But there are those who resist change as if they are on a crusade, most often an underground crusade. The activities happen in private conversations behind closed doors. They happen at parties where only certain supporters are invited. In short, the leaders of these unofficial groups organize the resistance and use tactics from negative PR and misinformation, to smear campaigns, to active recruiting. Many resisters are less involved and dramatic than that, yet they resist in a variety of ways including nonresponsiveness, negative comments, and continuing to do things the way they have always done them.

We acknowledge here that not all changes, as designed, will be good for a business. We spend considerable time discussing that problem and ways to solve it in chapters 2 and 3. However, assuming the desired change is good for the business and something it needs to do, resistance to change is born out of personal agendas, beliefs, and attitudes. Most people resist change at some point in their careers, and companies and change leaders have learned to anticipate this common reaction and deal with it through effective dialogue and other change management techniques. However, when people chronically resist for their own personal benefit at the expense of the company, that is a different matter. Chronic resisters can waste a tremendous amount of energy and can cause a change initiative to fail. As a change leader, I have often commented that it takes about one‐tenth the amount of energy to move an initiative backward with resistance than it took to move it forward in the first place. Therefore, those who resist change substantially or chronically are in a position to do great damage to the business.

Resistance to change is largely a covert affair. The challenge for leaders and change agents is that it is difficult to track covert activity, and if you can't identify resistant behaviors, you can't deal with the involved people. However, I have found two ways to be effective in revealing the covert operators. First, people talk to people, and tapping your trusted network can give you a lot of information about the resistance. Second, covert activity tends to result periodically in some kind of overt challenge. The beast tends to surface when it feels powerful. In doing so it reveals at least some of the people involved in the resistance and gives management a chance to deal directly with the problem. Look for the indicators of resistance, such as people not behaving in the new ways wanted by the company, rumors designed to discredit the change and the people involved, and political maneuvering. Above all, identify the ringleaders and chronic resisters and deal with them directly.

Bullying

Bullying isn't restricted to the schoolyard. It happens all the time in business. The energy of bullying is an overpowering force designed to intimidate and make others afraid so the bullies get their way. Bullies are often managers with a level of positional power, but they can derive their power from other sources as well. For example, a company I worked with had a CEO who was known to play favorites. Several of his favorites used that status to bully others and get what they wanted. People were afraid of any kind of bad press with the CEO so the bullying usually worked. Some bullies get their power from personal characteristics, such as their physical size or ability to verbally intimidate. Whatever the source of their power, bullies know how to use it to move people toward submission.

The problem with bullying is that is serves a personal agenda at the expense of other people and the business. Furthermore, it takes an emotional toll on those who get bullied. It is one thing to get forceful once in a while. It is quite another when people consistently take on the mantle of the bully to get what they want, be more powerful than others, and create a fear‐based mechanism for controlling others. Sometimes bullies seem to be born that way; other times they are latent bullies who get activated by certain situations. For example, I have seen a fairly consistent phenomenon in companies with multiple functional departments. Almost always, one department and department manager is the bully. This department usually has the most people and the biggest budget. It is as if the people's positions in the biggest departments impel them to become bullies. This use of power may be hard to resist.

Generally speaking, men most often bully men, and women most often bully women. Conquest is in the primitive nature of men. Left unmanaged, bullying can become an expression of that nature, where behavior essentially is a game of King of the Hill. Women seem to bully for similar reasons, but I have seen several examples in groups with a preponderance of female employees and a male boss where women bully each other to gain favored status from the boss. Quite often the male boss hasn't a clue about the bullying and the competition among the women. Worse, if the female bully is the boss's favorite, he may be unknowingly and tacitly giving her at least some of her power to bully. Her message to the other women is something like “I am the boss's favorite and I have his ear. Don't cross me or I'll smear you with him.” The boss unconsciously invites her to bully, and she goes ahead and does it. Both are problems to be solved.

The actual behavior of a bully can take many forms. One form is to rob others of the credit for their accomplishments. Another common form of bullying is when a bully breaches the boundaries of another person's position or turf. The bully tells the person what they should or shouldn't do, usurps their resources, and steps into their business as if they own it. Perhaps the most common form of bullying is when the bully simply makes it clear, in a meeting, for example, that they expect to get their way, with the full force of their intimidation behind it.

Bullying is also done in gangs. In a business, such bullying may not be on the same scale and intensity as Al Capone's gang, but it can be quite effective and destructive nonetheless. In business, gangs are factions with a common agenda and a will to achieve it through the use of bullying tactics. There is almost always a ringleader and a set of loyal followers. The dynamics are basically the same as any gang. People join the gang and promise to be loyal to it in exchange for being taken care of by the gang.

I saw an example of this behavior in a fast‐growing small company that was going from start‐up to grow‐up. Its informal practices were no longer sufficient or appropriate for a complex company of its size. A new CEO was brought in who launched a major initiative to formalize operations while preserving the character of the company and the “things that made it great in the first place.” Unfortunately, not everyone agreed with that goal, including a senior manager who rallied the troops and formed an informal gang to resist the change. People who favored the informal practices they had enjoyed for years quickly and, at first quietly, jumped on board. They soon made the CEO the bad guy who “didn't understand the company.” They spread misinformation and false rumors about the CEO and his new initiative. Before long the CEO was spending a lot of time trying to set the record straight and was losing support even among those who were initially on board with the changes. By the time the CEO figured out who was leading the resistance, the senior manager, a longtime employee, had opened a covert dialogue with some board members, who had heard that there were problems. Public opinion of the CEO at the board level deteriorated as the senior manager spun the information in a negative light. Ultimately, the board removed the CEO for failing to accomplish his goals and sold the business to a rival company. That is the power of a gang. I often wonder where that company would be today if the gang had not blocked its efforts to grow up.

There are plenty of other forms and tactics of bullying, and they are all ugly. Regardless of who does it, bullying robs energy from the business and other people involved and can take a business off track as it serves the bully's agenda instead of its own. Whether the bullies are men or women, people need to stand up to them. Managers, in particular, need to show them that bully behavior is unacceptable and will not be tolerated.

Playing the Victim

Playing the victim is a common act in business. In general, women make more credible victims than men because they are often viewed as more vulnerable. Nevertheless, men play the victim too. Playing the victims can be extremely powerful, as the victims' energy is almost entirely negative. They pour buckets of negative energy into the business and often go undetected or undiagnosed.

People learn to play the victim by watching others do it. As far as I know, there is no victim cookbook or training class. People observe and practice the various victimization strategies and behaviors and learn how these ingredients work together to create what can be a very damaging role. This development process is probably more unconscious than conscious. In any event, people have a choice about playing the victim or not. Unfortunately, playing the victim is often effective and creates considerable power for the individual at the expense of others and the business. The reason it works so well is that unless you understand the victimization formula, it is difficult to identify and discuss concretely. Here is a summary of the victim's recipe.

• The people adopt a premise and an orientation that they have been, and continue to be, a victim to the business and those who work there. Perhaps they are victims of other life circumstances as well. Therefore, the business owes them a large and undefined consideration.
• These victims tacitly communicate their victim status and the large unpaid consideration due them to others in the company with whom they interact, eliciting feelings of sympathy and guilt. After a period of consistent victim communication, other people begin to think of the people as true victims (i.e., victimhood becomes part of their identity).
• The victims use their victim status in meetings and other interactions with coworkers as leverage to get things and avoid work assignments and responsibilities. They use spoken or unspoken messages, such as “I'm already being dumped on by this company and don't see how I could take on any more. You all know I am overworked and underpaid, right?”
• These victims often complain and criticize others in order to reinforce their victimhood, to shift attention away from their responsibilities and performance, and to blame others—often for things they have done or not done. Doing this helps keep the victims unaccountable and safe.
• Should anyone challenge these victim tactics, the victims will lobby support from others in the business (often other victims) to mount propaganda campaigns designed to protect them and discredit the “attacker.”

What all of this boils down to is that people who play the victim are unaccountable, produce little value for the business, live by a different set of self‐serving rules, damage the reputations of others, and threaten attack and retaliation upon anyone who threatens to expose them and their tactics. Victims feign innocence as a cover for their destruction. The irony is that the energy of victims is very much like the energy of bullies, only it is less honest and more covert. The threat to, and intimidation of, others is formidable. Victims paint themselves as the victims of bullies, yet they are bullies themselves. This is the secret that victims never want you to know. When you recognize this fact, victims' cover is blown. It's time for managers to wise up, expose victims for what they are, and recognize the immense damage they cause.

Gossiping

In his 1998 book, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, Robin Dunbar discusses the evolution of human language. He argues that between 30,000 and 70,000 years ago during the so‐called Cognitive Revolution, our unique human language evolved as a means of sharing information about the world. Because the most important information that needed to be conveyed was about each other, our language evolved as a way of gossiping. Reliable information about who could be trusted, and who couldn't, allowed small tribes to expand into larger tribes, and people to develop more sophisticated types of cooperation. Today, these larger tribes include businesses. This tribal element in organizations suggests that gossip plays an important role in business as a tool promoting the cooperation of those involved.

Based on the fact that gossip actually plays a useful role in companies, you may be asking why we included gossiping in our list of damaging behaviors at work. Clearly it serves a purpose. The answer is that there are two ways to cross the line in gossiping that make it damaging. Gossiping for the purpose of information exchange as a way to promote the interests of the business is fine. However, when the agenda behind the gossip is personal and self‐serving at the expense of the company, it crosses the line into damaging behavior. Second, when the amount of time a person spends gossiping becomes unreasonably high, significantly detracting from their work, it crosses the line.

As a practical matter, monitoring gossip and identifying when it crosses one of the lines is difficult, since gossip typically happens behind the scenes. Nevertheless, gossip usually goes public within the business, and when it does, we can sometimes trace the information leak, untrue rumor, attack, or misinformation back to its source. In addition, chronic gossipers tend to reveal themselves through indicators such as poor productivity. In either case, damaging gossipers waste the energy of the business. And when their personal agendas are involved at the expense of the business, they hurt others and the company. When you add it all up, damaging gossip can rob a business of a whole lot of energy.

Addressing Negative Behaviors

Of course there are many more types of negative behaviors than those addressed in this chapter. However, the six behaviors covered here are some of the big ones in terms of their frequency and degree of damage. Putting a dent in these behaviors has the potential to make a big difference in the energy and performance of most businesses. But how do we go about addressing negative behaviors to help prevent them and to deal with them when they do occur? We suggest an approach that includes action at three levels: organizational, managerial, and individual.