The Secret to Releasing Your People’s Energy
“Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.”
–RALPH WALDO EMERSON
You can’t motivate your employees. By definition, motivation comes from inside a person. It’s not something you can provide externally. If you could, the Gallup Polls wouldn’t consistently be showing that 68 to 70 percent of American workers are disengaged (with similar statistics around the world).1 That’s why most employee-engagement programs don’t work. You can, however, cultivate motivation by uncovering it, tapping into it, and inspiring lasting change. But you can’t just dive into a discussion like that. It begins when you create the space to know your employees for who they truly are.
• • •
Shelly was completely frustrated with her team’s results. She’d brought in extra training, introduced a clever incentive program, stack ranked and managed the outliers, implemented every best practice she could find, and even invited her boss in for a quick motivational talk.
Nothing worked. The team’s results were still abysmal, and staff showed visible signs of exhaustion.
“What can you tell me about the people you supervise?” her manager, Laura, asked. Shelly’s response was filled with “attitude problems,” “absence issues,” and a smattering of statistics.
Laura tried again. “What can you tell me about the human beings on your team? Are they married? Do they have kids? What do they do for fun? What do they enjoy most on the weekends? What did they do last weekend?”
After a bit of a blank stare, Shelly admitted, “With results like these, I don’t have time to ask about all that. Plus, this is business; it’s not personal.”
“Which team leader is knocking it out of the park?” Laura asked.
“Jose,” she said, without hesitation.
“Please go talk to Jose again. But this time, don’t ask him about best practices; ask him how he connects with his staff.”
Shelly came back with a laundry list of connection builders Jose did on a regular basis and tried them. She met each employee at the door as he came in; spent the first two hours of each day doing nothing but sitting side by side with call-center reps; started each one-on-one talking about something personal; gave birthday cards; and followed up on “no big deal” stuff such as how her kid did in the soccer game last week.
Results soared. Business is always personal.
WALK WITH THEM AND THEY’LL WALK WITH YOU
To a manager, values and vision are important, but they’re only half the equation. David learned this in a poignant exchange with a boy named Eric.
When he was 23 years old, David taught a course in community leadership at an urban high school. A major part of the course involved public speaking. On the ninth day of class, Eric, a solidly built 17-year-old junior, stood in the front of the class to deliver his first impromptu speech. Between the scar on his cheek, the tattoos covering his thick arms, and his relaxed confidence, he exuded tough. The other students treated him accordingly.
He reached into a hat, pulled out a slip of paper, and announced his topic. “I got cars, y’all.”
Eric shifted his weight from side to side, looked out the window, and avoided eye contact with anyone in the class. Finally, he took a deep breath, shook his head, and began.
“Cars is tight ….”
But that was all he could get out. Nerves got the better of Eric, and he slid back into his desk, defeated. After class, David asked Eric to stay behind for a few minutes.
When the other students had left the room, Eric walked up to David and said, “’Sup?”
“Eric, I—”
But the words caught in David’s throat.
What’s up?
It was a good question.
He’d asked Eric to stay after class so he could offer encouragement, but David was barely six years older than Eric, had led a different life from his, and had been a teacher for less than two weeks.
What was “up” was that David had no clue.
With the empty encouragement lodged in his throat, David scrambled for something to say. Eric had a piece missing from the top of his ear. It may have been shallow, but it was the best David could do.
“Eric, do you mind if I ask you what happened to your ear?”
“Yeah mister. Was a bullet. It ricocheted off a dumpster and got my ear.” No bravado. Nonchalant. Like it happened every day.
He pulled up his left pant leg. “Got one in my leg too.” He pointed to a scar on his shin. “Doc says they can’t take it out.”
Then he grinned. “It makes the metal detector go off at the courthouse.”
As his story unfolded, Eric explained that he’d been involved in gangs since he was 11. He’d been in several gunfights at age 12. As David and Eric got to know one another, it became clear that Eric was trying to leave behind the gang life. He’d started his own landscaping business, had been beaten out of his gang (which is exactly what it sounds like, only worse), and had chosen classes like the one where he met David.
One day David asked him what had prompted him to change.
“Last year,” he said, “here in Denver and out in Cali, I went to 11 different funerals. Some were friends, some were family.”
He paused and stared at his shoes.
“After that last one, man I looked up and I was like, ‘This ain’t normal!’ I gotta do something.”
Teachers often claim they learn as much or more from their students as they’re able to teach. David knows that to be true. From Eric, he learned an invaluable principle: You do not motivate people.
Eric had his own motivations. He was in the course for his own reasons. He had challenges, values, and concerns David knew nothing about. Until David learned what was important to Eric, how to help him achieve what he valued, and how to help him get where he wanted to go, David could not lead him.
As his teacher, David also had his own vision, his own values, his own picture of a future that Eric could not yet see for himself. As a manager, your values and your vision are also important. You shouldn’t set them aside. However, if you want people to walk with you, you must first walk with them. Discover what’s important to them.
• Why are they a part of the organization?
• What do they value?
• What do they dream of for their future?
When you walk beside them and support them in that purpose, those values, and their dreams, while also sharing your own, then, and only then, you will see true motivation. Walk with them and they’ll walk with you.
David had the privilege of being Eric’s teacher for two years. He became a leader within the class, succeeded in giving presentations much longer than just 60 seconds, and became a mentor for younger students in the community.
MORE STRATEGIES TO UNLEASH ENERGY
In order to release your people’s energy, you must first recognize that you cannot motivate anyone. Motivation always comes from inside your employees. Your job is not to motivate them but to cultivate an environment that releases their internal motivations. Here are three more strategies you can use to unleash your people’s motivation.
1. Hold deeper developmental discussions.
When you want to go deeper but you don’t want to cross any inappropriate boundaries, there are a number of engaging topics you can use. These topics will open the door and help you learn more about your employees.
You might start with their big dreams. Most development conversations focus on potential next steps, or a five-year plan. What other big dreams do your employees hold in their hearts? What do they want to become? What’s on their bucket lists? Is there any way to build some related work or skills into their current jobs? It’s motivating to work on your big dream, even in baby steps.
Don’t motivate. Cultivate.
From there, you can ask, “What motivates you?” Asking is a good start; however, you can also learn a lot through observation. Pay attention to get insights that will serve as excellent fodder for a deeper dialogue. You can use this as a starter: “You seem really excited about this project. What aspects make it most meaningful for you?” Ask these sorts of questions with sincere curiosity and willingness to hear the answers. You want to build openness and trust, not interrogate your employees or punish them for answers you don’t like.
As you deepen your connection with employees, you may be able to ask about what scares them. This one is trickier, and it’s not one to start with in new relationships. However, as your relationship develops, getting underneath fear and uncertainty can go a long way in helping someone grow. When you help an employee face her fears and overcome them, it leads to confidence and competence.
One question to incorporate at the beginning of your work relationship and to revisit throughout your time together is, “What do you really need from me?” The power in this question is to keep asking as the relationship matures. You will likely get more real answers as trust increases and the employee grows.
Here’s a question that may feel risky, but isn’t: “What matters more to you than this job?”
Would we really ask employees this question? Yes—depending on the relationship, maybe not in exactly those words, but the premise is important. What do they care deeply about? Their children? Their place of worship? Their hobbies? Their aging parents? Their health? You want to know what really matters. A little knowledge can go a long way to make you a more supportive manager and bring out much more energy and productivity from your people.
These conversations evolve over time. Don’t fire all these questions at your employees in one sitting. Bring them in gently as the relationship grows and you will build trust and know how to support and invest in your people, and you will inspire their best work.
2. Let your employees outgrow their past.
Antoine was an accomplished millennial sales rep in a retail store of a large company who was considered “a bit rough around the edges.” He had a “no BS” approach that created a natural bond with entrepreneurs and mom-and-pop companies but left some managers scratching their heads.
Antoine was maxing out his compensation and winning big vacations as rewards for stellar sales year after year, but he wanted more. He went back to college at night and got his degree. He waited until he was selling more to businesses from his store than his counterparts who worked full time in business sales. Then he applied for a job with the business sales manager.
He was rejected. He applied again. Rejected.
His mentor, Jill, encouraged him to shave his scraggly goatee and begin wearing suits to work. He applied again. This time he didn’t even get an interview—just a call from HR saying he “wasn’t quite ready.”
Frustrated, Jill got sneaky. She called up Jack, the hiring manager, and described an ideal candidate she’d like to refer to him. Jill described everything about Antoine without using his name. Jack salivated and asked for the resume as soon as possible. After all, Jack didn’t want to risk losing a candidate like that.
Jill sent over Antoine’s resume.
Embarrassed, Jack gave Antoine a chance in a junior role, a level down from the position for which Antoine had applied. Within six months he was running circles around his peers, was promoted, and began teaching others his secrets to success.
Most employees mature over time. Even so, when someone has been with a company a long time, it’s his old image that sticks. Be sure you’re helping your employees outgrow their past.
We’ve seen too many companies go in search of the ideal candidate, hire her, and then find they had the right person all along. In fact, we’ve both been that person.
Be brave enough to see who’s really showing up.
Anticipate maturity and watch it flourish.
Be an advocate. It’s easy to see Antoine as the little Tony he once was: young, overly direct, and a little too cool for the corporate scene.
If you have a company of Jacks you can’t win well because you’ll squander potential. In this case, Jack didn’t see the need to invest in new talent because he was already winning—his numbers were solid. What he couldn’t see was the need to think long term and groom raw talent to build a winning future and a reputation of being someone people want to work for.
Are you a Jack or a Jill?
3. Give your employees new challenges.
Meet Larry. Larry’s Ph.D. dissertation was on the migratory behavior of striped bass in the Chesapeake Bay, probably not the obvious choice to become chief financial officer of a world-renowned research institution.
But Larry’s career was bit like Forest Gump’s: He was at the right place at the right time, and then just figured it out. He held many diverse leadership positions between his first assignment in radar-signal processing and his chief financial officer role, including helping to lead a team of engineers building a space telescope.
If you ask Larry about his career path, he cites a series of mentors who took a chance on him and assured him that he would “figure it out.”
When you have an employee who’s great in his current role, it’s sometimes difficult to see him doing anything else, especially something radically different. After all, he’s winning, so why rock the boat?
If you want to win well and unlock deep potential for lasting impact for your high performer and your organization, take that quick study and move her into a role that may feel a bit crazy to you and to her. If it doesn’t work out, you can recover.
Larry—who, by the way, is Karin’s father—ended up helping more than fish, partly because he learned the Winning Well art of taking a chance on talent, as others had done for him. Nothing energizes an employee quite like the feeling that he’s just jumped out of an airplane and discovered he has a parachute he didn’t even know existed.
Do you have a Larry on your team?
YOUR WINNING WELL ACTION PLAN
1. Write down all your employees’ names and what you know about each of them. Here are some options:
If you can’t answer these, get to know them more deeply, up to their level of comfort.
2. Meet with all your employees to discuss each one’s career. Work to identify three possible stretch projects or assignments that would challenge them to stretch their skills. Agree on next steps and a timeline to pursue at least one of the stretch activities.
NOTE
1. For example, see Nikki Blacksmith and Jim Harter, “Majority of American Workers Not Engaged in Their Jobs,” Gallup Poll, October 28, 2011, accessed October 15, 2014, http://www.gallup.com/poll/150383/Majority-American-Workers-Not-Engaged-Jobs.aspx; Daniela Yu and Rajesh Srinivasan, “Employee Engagement Increases in China, but Still Very Low,” Gallup Poll, February 20, 2013, accessed November 2014, http://www.gallup.com/poll/160190/employee-engagement-increases-china-low.aspx.