However, if circumstances demand a more forceful approach, you take comfort in the knowledge that the end will justify the means. After all, it is your parking space, and it’s not your fault that the bozos you’re dealing with respond only to fear. As long as you believe that the principal motivating force behind all behavior is fear, you have a built-in excuse for going to either silence or violence.
Contrary to popular myth, you don’t have to wield power or provoke fear to be an effective motivator. In fact, it’s better if we don’t think of ourselves as larger-than-life figures burdened with the challenge of bringing the nearly dead back to life through various inspiring techniques. That kind of flawed thinking is exactly what gets us into trouble.
Consider Melissa, a manager and positive deviant in the large midwestern manufacturing facility we referenced earlier. Weighing about 105 pounds, Melissa was far too small to intimidate anyone, and rarely, if ever, did she use her formal authority or position power. Yet she was extraordinarily influential, singled out by many as being the most effective manager in the facility. In fact, the amount of power you have has little to do with how well you motivate others. We have watched people with almost no authority motivate their bosses’ bosses.
Motivation, it turns out, is actually rather boring. It has little to do with clout or charisma. In fact, motivation is about expectations, information, and communication.
Expectations Change Everything
Let’s start our more accurate, if less flamboyant, description of motivation with a simple truism: people are always motivated. To say that someone isn’t motivated is patently wrong. As long as people are moving their muscles, they’re motivated to do something. Second, motivation is brain driven. People choose their behavior. Third, motivation is influenced by a nearly infinite number of sources from both within and without.
Here’s how the human brain and the surrounding world combine to propel individual behavior. Human beings anticipate. When deciding what to do, they look to the future and ask, “What will this particular behavior yield?” When they choose one action over another, it’s because they’re betting that that action will generate the best result. Since any action yields a combination of results, some good and some bad, it’s the expected sum total of the consequence bundle that drives behavior. If you want people to act in another way, you have to let them know how a different behavior would yield a better consequence bundle.
Here’s what motivation comes down to: change others’ view of the consequence bundle, and their behavior will follow.
How do you help people to change their view of the consequence bundle — to understand that their existing view is either inaccurate or incomplete?
One thing is for certain: three of the more popular methods — charisma, power, and perks — don’t work very well. They all have the potential to change people’s view, and so they all have the potential to change people’s behavior. Unfortunately, relying on these heavy-handed methods can be dangerous and rarely sustains behavior over the long run. Yet these methods remain enormously popular. In fact, they hold a nearly sacred place in the leadership lexicon. Let’s consider each method in turn.
Don’t Rely on Charisma
It’s time to kill a myth. To be an effective motivator, you don’t have to be awe inspiring. Everyday acts of motivation are almost always subtle, rarely elicit awe, and never make the papers. Nevertheless, the myth of charisma continues to thrive. Books, television programs, and movies positively ooze with scenes that are designed to make audiences gasp with admiration. For example, in the cold war drama Crimson Tide, we find a naval officer played by Denzel Washington giving a “big speech” to a young radioman on whose skill and attention hangs the fate of the world.
The poor fellow has to get the submarine’s radio up and running to learn if the vessel should launch its missiles. If he fails, the captain will be forced to launch the sub’s nuclear arms blindly, cause the enemy to retaliate, and eventually destroy the world — even though it may not be necessary. (“Sorry. My bad!”)
In the real world the poor fellow probably would collapse from the pressure. In fact, the stress would be so debilitating that a smart leader would be doing everything in his or her power to provide support. But screenwriters are human too. They make the fundamental attribution error by creating a radioman who doesn’t need support. He needs to be inspired. Apparently, he hasn’t repaired the radio yet because he has something he’d rather do than save the world from total destruction.
Denzel delivers a really hot speech. After the tear-jerking performance, the radioman turns to his coworker and tells him to stop messing around so that they can prevent a nuclear holocaust instead of playing video games or whatever it is they’re doing.
Denzel gives the speech, the radioman is appropriately inspired, and, yes, the audience breaks into applause. Charisma makes for good drama; however, it has precious little to do with real leadership. Rest assured that you don’t have to be charismatic to be influential.
Don’t Use Power
Let’s move on to the next big mistake. Raw power, painfully applied, may move bodies, it may even get people to act in new ways, but it rarely moves hearts and minds. Hearts and minds are changed through expanded understanding and new realizations. The flagrant and abusive use of authority, in contrast, guarantees little more than short-term bitter compliance.
This simple idea would never have made these pages if not for the fact that parents and leaders alike routinely turn to power as their first tool for motivating others. Without putting it in so many words, they believe that it’s easiest to change people’s thinking about the existing consequence bundle by administering new and painful consequences of their own. It’s a simple enough concept and is very easy to implement. Here’s what it sounds like:
• “If you don’t finish the project on time, you’re fired!”
• “If you talk back to me like that again, you’re grounded until the end of the summer!”
The Reason We Intuitively Rely on Force
Earlier we suggested that we often take a dispositional rather than a situational view of others. If others cause us a great deal of pain, we believe they must be bad to the core. The worse the impact others have on us, the worse our assumptions about their character. We think they’re inherently selfish. They may even take joy in our suffering. They’re at best indifferent. And here’s where it gets sticky: We believe that others are capable only of being selfish. It’s in their genes. It’s their disposition. It’s not a choice; it’s a calling.
When it comes to influence strategies, the implication of this dispositional view of people should be obvious. Individuals aren’t going to change their personalities through patience and long suffering on our part. They’re not going to change their proverbial spots after we give them an inspiring pep talk. In fact, they aren’t going to change their inherent and immutable personalities because of anything we say. They can’t.
And now for a leap in logic that would break any Evel Knievel record: since we’re dealing with deep-seated personality flaws, we have to use threats. Remember those teenagers who took your parking space? Oh yeah, they’ll pay.