THE FIVE FACTORS OF SUCCESS

1. Mind Control

Successful people have the ability to run their own mind. They don’t let other people or circumstances run it for them. They reprogramme their negative conditioning. They raise their level of self-esteem and they develop a positive attitude through continual positive self-talk. They don’t react – they think!

2. Belief

Successful people have a passion for what they believe in. They set goals and achieve them by motivating themselves. They have vision.

3. Energy

They have lots of vroom! They manage stress and they know how to relax.

4. Rapport

They have the ability to communicate and get on with people, and to persuade people to accept their point of view.

5. Courage to act

People who make a success of what they do are willing to try. They’re prepared to make mistakes, to assert themselves and not get too concerned about what others might think.

We’re going to look at each of these Five Factors in turn.

FACTOR 1 – MIND CONTROL

Motivational Managers have a deep understanding of their own minds. They’re aware of their needs, their strengths and weaknesses, and their emotions. They’re honest with themselves and, with their team members.

You have to decide who runs your mind. Is it you or is it somebody else?

Let me give you an example. I’ve always had a thing about good timekeeping; it’s something that’s been programmed into my brain. If you agree to meet me at 8.30 in the morning, I’ll be there at 8.20; I will always do my utmost be on time.

So I used to get angry when a member of my team would show up late for a meeting or an appointment with me. When I got angry I’d get stressed and end up saying something to the team member that I regretted later. Therefore, I learned to start thinking about the situation and tried to see it from their point of view and not let my programming run my brain.

That doesn’t mean to say I ignored the lateness or did nothing about it; I thought very carefully about what I wanted to say and spoke to the team member about how we would resolve this situation. This is a very important area for us and we’re going to look at it much closer in Chapter 5.

The point about this is I’m not prepared to allow that team member’s behaviour to run my mind. Getting angry and stressed is not good for your health and it isn’t a productive way to motivate your team.

I mentioned earlier about Sir Alex Ferguson kicking a football boot across the dressing room and hitting his star player in the face. Of course we want to see passion in a team leader but that sort of behaviour isn’t healthy for Sir Alex and isn’t motivational for the team. They know when they’ve played badly and getting hit by a flying football boot doesn’t help the situation.

John Wooden, reckoned to be the best-ever sports coach in America, taught his players self-discipline and was his own best example. His demeanour was always contained. His philosophy was that if you needed emotion to make you perform then sooner or later you’d be an emotional wreck and then non-functional.

In running their own mind, Motivational Managers know what they’re good at and what they’re not so good at. Again it’s important to be honest with yourself. Some managers take on tasks they’re not good at, thinking that they should be able to do them. They then make a complete mess of it and ‘beat themselves up’ for being so useless.

On the other hand, don’t ever put yourself down; challenge and test yourself before deciding whether you can or cannot do something.

I was once in a position to apply for an internal promotion. However, I didn’t do it. I got it into my head that I wouldn’t be able to handle the financial aspects of this new management position. When one of my colleagues, an accountant, asked me why I hadn’t applied, I explained about the financial bit. She didn’t pull her punches – ‘You should have applied, you idiot. You would’ve been able to do the financial bit, it’s not that difficult, and I would have helped you anyway.’

You can imagine how I felt after that. I had allowed some program in my brain to influence me and missed an opportunity for promotion. It’s important to listen to that voice in your head which is driven by your programs, but also to challenge it.

When I now hear that voice in my head saying, ‘You couldn’t do that’, I reply with, ‘Well I’m going to give it a try before I decide.’

Motivational Managers have confidence in themselves. They accept their weaknesses but they don’t see them as failures. They speak out when they don’t know something and they ask for help when they need it.

Have you ever asked a question at a meeting possibly feeling a bit stupid and thinking everyone else knows the answer? At the coffee break someone then says, ‘I’m glad you asked that question because I didn’t know either but I didn’t like to ask.’

Motivational Managers have the courage to challenge what they hear in their own mind and also what they hear from other people.

Don’t think too much

It’s vital to run your own mind and think before you speak or take action. However, it’s also important not to think too much. Sometimes you need to trust your instincts and your gut feelings.

If you’re interviewing someone and your gut feeling is that this person isn’t right for the job, then don’t hire them. Too often, managers suppress their gut feeling. They think, ‘I must be stupid, I’m probably wrong, they’ll be okay once they’ve started working with me.’ Trust me – they won’t!

In his book The Luck Factor, Dr Richard Wiseman states, ‘Lucky people make successful decisions by using their intuition and gut feelings.’

FACTOR 2 – BELIEF

The second of the Five Factors is Belief. It’s dependent on how we control our mind and the conversations we have with ourselves. Belief in yourself is what drives your motivation and that in turn generates the energy to succeed. A manager who doesn’t have belief in themselves or in what they are doing is going to find life very difficult. Of course, it can be challenging to retain a belief in yourself when you’re under pressure from your manager and your team.

Fifteen years ago I was working for a brewery in the UK (yes, I did get lots of samples to take home). One day my manager, the Director of Sales, handed me a new challenge. The customer service telesales team were doing a mediocre job but had the potential to bring in for more sales. He told me to sort it out. I inherited a totally demotivated team of fourteen telesales agents and a supervisor whose job it was to phone customers in hotels, bars and restaurants and process their orders for beer, wine and other drinks.

John, the distribution manager I was taking over from, briefed me on my new team. ‘They’re a truculent bunch and they’re always whingeing. There are always two or three of them off sick at any one time and you’ll never get them to sell promotions.’

As you’ll gather, it took a great deal of self-belief on my part to turn this team around. I was continually hearing from them and sometimes my manager, ‘You can’t do that Alan,’ or ‘That’ll never work,’ or ‘We’ve never done it that way before.’ I had many discussions with my manager and other senior managers regarding things I wanted to do to improve this team. I won some battles and I lost a few. However, I held on to my belief that I could make this team successful. It took me about six months to start turning things around – but I did it using the skills and techniques that I’ll share with you in this book.

I said earlier that it’s tough to hold onto belief in yourself when your manager and your team are telling you all the things you can’t do. In Chapter 5 we’ll look at how you communicate with your manager and your team, but first you must get that positive self-talk going and believe in yourself.

FACTOR 3 – ENERGY

The third of the Five Factors and something the Motivational Manager needs lots of. You need brain energy and you need body energy. However, as with any other kind of energy, it’s constantly being drained away and needs replacing.

Managing people can drain both your brain and your body – and you probably don’t need me to tell you that. How often have you gone home tired and stressed out and your partner says, ‘I can’t understand why you’re so tired darling.’ You then go on to try to explain about your hard day and try not to strangle them!

Remember what I said earlier: ‘The Motivational Manager doesn’t react; he thinks.’

Reacting drains the brain – thinking, less so.

I gave an example earlier of your boss saying, ‘I need to speak to you in my office.’ If you react to that with, ‘Oh no, what does she want, what have I done now? Maybe she wants to get rid of me’, that sort of reaction drains your brain of energy and gives you stress.

So, get the thinking bit working and say to yourself, ‘I’ll speak to her now and see what she wants. If it’s about the poor results, what information do I need to make my case? Perhaps she wants to talk about new plans for the team.’

Whatever you’re thinking, stop the negative stuff – it’ll kill you!

If one of your team comes to you with a problem or a customer complaint, start thinking, ‘Let’s see what I can do about this.’ Do not, and I repeat, do not say ‘Oh no, what am I going to do now?’ Every time you say ‘Oh no’ your brain has a huge drain of energy and a whole cocktail of chemicals pumps into your system.

I just want to say a few more words about stress. People will tell you that there’s good stress and bad stress. I’m talking about bad stress and it occurs when your brain is drained of energy. Some managers seem to believe that it ‘goes with the territory’ and some even wear it as a ‘badge of honour’. They also believe that it can’t be avoided; it’s the fault of the company and the world we live in. Organisations do have a responsibility to minimise levels of stress in their workforce but you also have a responsibility for yourself.

It’s very important to minimise your levels of stress and you can do that by thinking rather than reacting. Challenge your inbuilt programs. Stop saying, ‘That makes me really mad’ or ‘That really gets on my nerves.’ Start saying, ‘This is something I have to deal with and I’ll deal with it.’ Remember – you have the choice.

I know you’re probably thinking (or is it reacting), ‘That’s all very well Alan but it’s hard sometimes not to get stressed.’ You’re absolutely right. However; let me give you some more reasons why you need to work at minimising it.

Stress can cause heart disease, sleeplessness, sexual problems, overeating, drinking too much, loss of concentration and stomach upsets. Research is now telling us that many, if not most, of our illnesses can be related to stress.

When we get stressed, one of the chemicals that are released into our bloodstream is called cortisol, sometimes known as the ‘stress hormone’. High levels of cortisol can lead to diabetes and skin problems. There is also a suggestion that cortisol attacks our immune system and leaves us vulnerable to many of the bugs and viruses that come along.

So if you’ve ever suffered from skin complaints or perhaps too many colds, they could very well be the result of stress. I don’t want to scare you to death or give you any more stress. I just want you to think.

I read a lot about stress some years ago and made a personal decision to decrease my levels of the bad stuff. When situations occur that are potentially stressful, I go into thinking mode to resolve them. I don’t say, ‘Oh no!’ I say, ‘Deal with it!’

I want to live a long and healthy life and I’m not prepared to let stress affect that; I recommend you do the same.

You don’t get ulcers from what you eat. You get them from what’s eating you.

Vicki Baum (1888–1960, American writer)

So what about the body stress? The body and the brain are linked together, so that when the brain drains of energy so does the body. However, the body does a lot of running about, up and down off the seat and often take a bit of a battering. For it to work well, it needs to be in good condition in the first place.

We should all know by now that if we eat too much or eat the wrong things, smoke too much or drink too much alcohol, then our body is in danger of breaking down.

Again it comes back to programming. I often tell people that I eat a lot of salad. The response – ‘Salad is boring.’ Not the way I make it, it isn’t; I put all sorts of things into a salad other than the green ingredients – chillies, sun-blush tomatoes, anchovies, tuna, sardines, chicken, olives, cheese, sausage, etc. Not all at once, of course – I like a bit of variation on the theme. So open up your mind and open up the fridge, but be careful what you take out (of the fridge, that is).

If you want to be a Motivational Manager then you’re going to have to do some exercise. Now I know you think you don’t have the time. You may also be the type that doesn’t want to go to the gym and lift heavy things or leap about in an aerobics class; however, you need to take some exercise that makes you sweat a little. I’m sorry, but a round of golf doesn’t count – it isn’t the kind of exercise you need. Golf is great and it’s good for the stress but it doesn’t make you sweat. If you’re going to walk then walk fast for a distance, enough to push up the heart rate and increase the breathing. (And don’t run round the golf course with your clubs on your back – that’s going too far.)

Again, get your internal program right and start to think how you can make your exercise enjoyable. I see some people at the health club making the whole business a real chore. They get on a bike or a rowing machine and try to kill themselves for twenty minutes. If that’s your thing then fine, but please don’t make it a chore – plug into the sound system and catch up with what’s on TV. I like to do circuit classes with a whole group of people, many of whom have become friends. I enjoy the chat beforehand, the music and the exercise (and I also like the fact that there are more girls than guys).

If you’re really not into exercise then please make sure that you have other activities outside of your workplace and make them fun. Too many managers are going home and slumping in front of the TV; Motivational Managers don’t do that.

So look after the body and the brain and you’ll have lots of vroom!

FACTOR 4 – RAPPORT

Motivational Managers are good at building rapport and communicating with their team, as well as all the other people they come into contact with. Of course, communicating isn’t just about speaking to your team. It’s about listening and understanding how the team member sees the situation; it’s also about being able to empathise and understand how they feel.

There were two ways I could have looked at my telesales team:

• 1.As John, the outgoing manager, had described them – a bunch of troublesome underachievers.
• 2.As reasonable human beings who wanted to do a good job.

I chose the latter.

Again it comes back to the same question: Who runs your mind? Is it you or is it somebody else? It would have been so easy to accept John’s description of this team; after all, he was a nice guy and he’d worked with them for a while. The only thing is, he wasn’t a very good manager. I could understand how the telesales agents felt in their jobs. If I’d been managed the way they’d been, I’d probably have taken days off work and complained a lot more.

See it how they see it

When you have to deal with a team member who’s complaining to you, rather than allowing your negative programs to take over, get your thinking part in gear and try to see the situation the way your team member sees it. You don’t necessarily have to agree with them but perhaps you can empathise with their point of view.

The Motivational Manager thinks about the people in her team, she’s sensitive to how they see things and knows that they might think differently from her.

I mentioned earlier about timekeeping and I know many people don’t see it as importantly as I do. We all see the world in a different way based on our culture and how we were brought up. So it’s very important to understand this, particularly when you give your people feedback, be it good or bad.

A few years back I spent several weeks in a particular hotel running seminars and I started to get to know some of the staff. One day I noticed that Carol the conference manager had been named employee of the month and her photograph was displayed in the reception area. When I congratulated her on this honour I was a bit surprised at her reaction. ‘I hate it, I’m so embarrassed,’ she complained. Carol didn’t like the attention she was getting, and as a result this recognition by her manager didn’t motivate her. Another member of the team could possibly see this completely differently and regard it as a great honour. It would have been far better if Carol’s manager had spoken with her in private and thanked her for all her good work.

If you have good rapport with your team members then you become sensitive to how they see things. The Motivational Manager understands each team member and doesn’t reward everyone in the same way.

I’ve often heard managers say, ‘I treat people the way I expect to be treated.’ The Motivational Manager says, ‘I treat people the way they expect to be treated.’

I was smiling to myself as I read the sign on the wall in the men’s room at the offices of one of my clients recently. It said, ‘PLEASE LEAVE THESE FACILITIES THE WAY YOU WOULD EXPECT TO FIND THEM.’ I was smiling because I’ve been in bathrooms in people’s houses over the years. Soap everywhere, towels lying on the floor and not as clean as I would like. So how would these people react to the notice on the men’s room wall?

It is what you say and how you say it

As well as listening and understanding, it’s obviously important to speak to your people. I say obviously. However, I’ve known managers who say very little to their people other than to issue instructions, and they’re often not clear with these.

Some years ago a large and successful football club appointed a new coach. He replaced a coach who had gone on to bigger and better things. This successful team started to go downhill from day one; they were losing games to much lesser teams on a regular basis.

The new coach had been successful as a player and had worked as an assistant coach at another team. Did he know the business he was in? Did he know about football? Of course he did. Did he know how to speak to the media and more importantly his team? I’ll leave you to answer that one.

The newspaper, radio and TV people didn’t like this new coach because of his offhand manner towards them; the players felt the same and it showed in their results.

If you want to motivate your team and achieve the team’s goals, then you’ve got to talk to them on a human as well as a business level. It’s not enough just to issue instructions; you’ve got to get to know your individual team members.

Get off your ‘butt’

I’ve often heard managers say, ‘My door is always open, come and talk to me anytime.’

You have to accept the fact that your team won’t always do that. They might not want to bother you or they may feel that they should know the answers to their questions and they’ll look stupid if they ask. And how many times have they approached you and you’ve been on the phone or ‘too busy’? It’s your job to get out and talk to them.

I’ve also heard managers say, ‘I sit with my team in an open-plan office so I’m always available to them and I hear what’s going on.’ Oh no you don’t!

It’s important to get out of your office or up off your seat and mix with the team on a regular basis. Don’t wait for them to come to you. Pull up a chair and have a chat and don’t just talk about business – find out how they’re doing on a human level. That doesn’t mean prying into their personal life, but your team members want to feel that you’re interested and care about them as individuals.

It’s also important that they feel free to chat among themselves, so don’t stifle that. A team who have good relationships with each other are a productive team.

Many managers aren’t comfortable about speaking to their team members unless it’s about business. I’ve worked for many managers who knew nothing or very little about me on a personal basis.

One of my colleagues once told me that our manager had asked him if I was gay. He’d come to this conclusion because there didn’t seem to be a woman in my life. At the time he was coming to this conclusion, I was going through the break-up of my fifteen-year marriage to my wife. However, my manager didn’t know that nor would he have been able to handle it if he did. That doesn’t suggest he was a bad person, he just didn’t know how to make that human connection and sadly he didn’t try.

Perhaps you’re not comfortable speaking to your team on a human level, so that’s why we’re going to take a closer look at what to say in Chapter 5. However, for the moment I would ask that you consider the importance of your communication and rapport-building skills. Your success as a manager is highly dependent on your ability to listen to and speak with your people. Human beings crave attention and acceptance and they want to know you care. If your team members feel that you’re interested and care about them as individuals, then it becomes so much easier for you to achieve your goals.

Successful entrepreneurs are excellent at building rapport. When you meet them they don’t necessarily talk about themselves, they ask you questions. I’ve met several successful business people and I’m always impressed and flattered by their interest in me.

You can practise your rapport-building skills any time, particularly in your personal life. In the locker room at my local health club, I notice that many of the guys don’t speak to each other. I always make a point of saying hello or passing the time of day. If they don’t want to talk then that’s fine. However, I find they usually do and I’ve had some interesting conversations.

Speak to everyone you meet and practise your rapport-building skills: taxi drivers, people in trains, on aeroplanes and anywhere else you come into contact. I sometimes have to push myself to do it but I’m always glad when I do.

FACTOR 5 – COURAGE

Factor 5 in my list of success characteristics is the courage to act. You’re going to need a lot of courage to be a really successful manager. You need courage to run your own mind, and to question and possibly change your programming.

Christine, the supervisor of the telesales team I described earlier, phoned me one day: ‘I want to have a bit of a celebration on Friday afternoons’, she said. ‘I want to celebrate the team’s success for the week and have some chocolates, cake and wine.’

Now I have a program (call me old-fashioned) that tells me, ‘No alcohol in the workplace,’ it’s a big no-no. However, I thought about it for a second, cancelled the ‘no alcohol’ program in my brain and told Christine to go ahead. However, there was still a bit of me (these programs can be very powerful) that thought I was maybe doing the wrong thing. Perhaps they would get drunk and insult the customers or other colleagues, and what would my manager say?

Needless to say, the Friday afternoon session was a big success and the ironic thing is that everyone on the team was so busy working that they hardly had any time to eat the cake or drink the wine. I was glad I’d had the courage to challenge my programming.

As well as challenging your own programming, you’re going to need courage to deal with difficult situations in your team. You need the courage sometimes to say ‘no’ and still keep the team motivated. In your communications with your manager you’ll often need the courage to stand up for what you believe to be right.

I once had a manager say to me, ‘Alan, I’m going to promote this guy from another department into your sales team.’ Coolly and calmly, I informed my manager that I’d interviewed this individual and I didn’t think he was suitable for my sales team. I reminded my manager that in order to produce the results he required I needed to be sure that I had the best people for the job in my team. After a bit of wrangling I won this particular ‘discussion’, but as I said earlier, you don’t win them all. However, you must have the courage to try.

I read somewhere ‘Winners make mistakes but losers never do.’ That’s because winners have the courage to try and they know they’ll make mistakes. However, that’s how they learn and move forward.

So these are the Five Factors of Success; I’ll refer back to them as we go through the book. Your success as a Motivational Manager is highly dependent on your ability to implement these factors.

Here are some other points I’d like you to consider before we move on.

YOU CAN’T MAKE PEOPLE WHAT THEY’RE NOT

Too many managers are spending too much time trying to change people. They seem to believe that if they train people, tell them what to do or threaten them with the sack, then they can get them to change.

The Motivational Manager concentrates on developing the strengths of his team members – not trying to correct their weaknesses. Sometimes you have to manage around a weakness (we’ll look at that later) but you can’t make people what they’re not.

I described earlier how I had taken some golf lessons. A friend and I spent some hours with a professional golfer and coach at a local country club. This was really useful to me and I did get better. However, my friend Robin hadn’t a clue. No matter what the pro told him to do, how to change his stance and his grip, he could hardly hit the ball. If you’d given Robin a hundred lessons and threatened him with a gun, I doubt if he’d ever have completed a round of golf in less than two days. Robin is a successful lawyer and makes a lot of money. However, a golfer he is not!

So if you have a sales person on your team who isn’t bringing in the sales or a production engineer who isn’t making his quota then you have to make a decision (back to the thinking part). Is this person not producing because they don’t have the ability, because they need more training, or because there’s another reason?

We’re going to look at coaching and other reasons for non-performance in Chapter 5 but for the moment it’s important to understand that the individual may not be able to do the job. They may tell you they can do the job because they’re unwilling to accept defeat. However, I’ve known people in sales jobs who shouldn’t be in sales and doctors, plumbers, lawyers and engineers who were also in the wrong job.

What you need to do is get people who can’t do the job into a job that they can do or get them out of your team.

I joined three companies as a manager and in each case I inherited team members who didn’t have what it takes to do the job. I’d usually find three categories of people in the teams. The first group were the ‘good guys’, the ones I knew could do the job and wouldn’t give me any hassle. The second group consisted of people who needed a bit of looking after, watching closely and definitely some coaching. The third group were the ones who didn’t have either the skills or the characteristics to do the job and no amount of training, or anything I could do, would change that. I would often find that these people, due to their lack of success, weren’t exactly happy in the job anyway and were sometimes only too pleased to be transferred to another position.

I hear you saying, ‘Easier said than done Alan’ and you’re right. But the Motivational Manager needs to address these issues for the good of the team and the business. It often takes co-operation from your manager so we’ll look at that in Chapter 5.

Strengths not weaknesses

I keep talking about Chapter 5 and that’s where we’ll look at how to give feedback. We’ll be looking at how to give your team members (and your manager) feedback on their strengths and also on their weaknesses. However, these will only be weaknesses that we know the individual can do something about. It’s a waste of your time and effort trying to sort weaknesses that can’t be sorted. Some people just can’t build relationships with customers, others can’t work as fast as you need them to and others can’t write a report to save their life.

Your most productive time as a manager will be spent giving feedback on strengths and how to develop these even further.

Many managers spend the majority of their time with team members trying to resolve weaknesses. They then don’t have the time or sometimes the capability to give feedback on strengths. The Motivational Manager concentrates on strengths not weaknesses.

One company where I worked as a regional sales manager had very strict procedures on how a field sales person should conduct themselves. They had to present the sale to a customer in a particular structured way. They had to dress in a certain way and do their paperwork in a certain way. Their car had to be clean and their product samples had to be laid out in the boot of their car in the ‘company’ way.

My boss, the General Sales Manager, was a stickler for these rules and regulations. However, needless to say, certain sales people in my team didn’t always do their paperwork on time or have their car laid out in the required way. They did, however, bring in the sales and as their manager that was the outcome I needed from them. Therefore, I was extremely careful how I gave them feedback on their performance. I knew that I’d ultimately be judged by my manager on the sales performance of my team, so I concentrated on reinforcing their skills in that area. I didn’t ignore untidy paperwork or samples that weren’t laid out properly but I definitely kept any comments to the absolute minimum. I’ve witnessed a salesman, in another team, handing a big order to his manager and then being reprimanded for having an untidy car boot. If that’s the approach you take, then what you end up with is tidy car boots and fewer sales.

Focus on the outcomes

As a manager you need to be very clear about what your outcomes are. Whether you call them goals, objectives or targets, these are the factors that you’re ultimately judged on. You’ll find them in your job description or contract and I’m sure your manager will concentrate on them at your next performance review. It’s what you’re paid to do.

Many managers allow themselves to be distracted and diverted from their outcomes. They get involved in all sorts of situations that take their ‘eye off the ball’.

I regularly run a workshop for managers called Managing Your Priorities. At the start of the workshop I ask the managers to draw a map on a large sheet of flip-chart paper of all the things they do in their job. They almost inevitably fill that page with all sorts of tasks and activities. More often than not they surprise themselves with what’s on the page. I then ask them to identify and mark with a large cross their real priorities, and the outcomes that they’re ultimately judged on. Out of all the tasks and activities on the page they usually cross only five or six priorities and sometimes fewer. (You might want to try this exercise yourself sometime.)

What we do find, however, is that the priorities they identify are not allocated the time they deserve on a day-to-day basis. The managers will often blame their senior manager for many of the tasks that divert them from their priorities, which is perfectly fair. However, there are many tasks managers take on because:

• 1.They don’t like to say ‘no’.
• 2.They don’t trust anyone else to do them.
• 3.They just ‘like’ to do the tasks themselves.

I then spend time in the workshop showing managers how to communicate with their senior manager and their other colleagues in order to minimise the number of tasks that don’t contribute to their outcomes. It’s back again to who runs your mind; is it you or is it somebody else?

Many managers fall into the trap of believing that their manager will understand why they haven’t hit their target or quota. They seem to think that because the senior manager has handed out all sorts of other tasks, then they’ll accept your failure to achieve your target. Well let me tell you now – they won’t!

Motivational Managers keep focused on outcomes and don’t allow anyone or anything to divert them without good reason.

Keep the team focused on outcomes

It’s also important to focus on outcomes as far as your team is concerned. Whatever tasks your manager is putting on you, don’t allow yourself to do the same to your team. Sometimes your team members will be only too happy to do other little jobs and tasks that you ask them to do. I’ve had sales people say, ‘Oh, I’ll deliver that to the customer, it’s on my way.’ Customer service people will say, ‘I’ll go and talk to distribution or finance department about that.’ You have to keep asking yourself the question ‘Is what they’re doing helping me to achieve my outcomes?’ If the answer is ‘no’, don’t let them do it.

Make it clear to your team what the outcomes are and don’t concern yourself too much about how they get there. Now that doesn’t mean that you encourage a salesman to get a sale at any cost, or a chef to use inferior ingredients. And you obviously don’t want a maintenance engineer cutting corners that could jeopardise safety. However, it does mean using your thinking part again and listening to your inbuilt programs. Your people may not do a job the way you would do it but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s wrong.

I’ve often listened to a sales person speaking to a customer and found myself thinking, ‘That’s not the way I’d do it.’ The temptation is to jump into the conversation or speak to the sales person afterwards. However, I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut, because many times the sales person closed the business, the customer was happy and it probably was better than I would do it.

I checked into a hotel recently and as I signed the paperwork the bubbly receptionist complimented me on my cologne. She asked what kind it was so that she might buy some for her boyfriend. Now I know this hotel chain and this isn’t part of the welcoming speech. I also know that some managers would discourage this level of familiarity between staff and customers. But I’ll tell you something as a customer – I loved it, and she certainly brightened my day! Her response was far better than some of the stuffy robotic greetings you get from receptionists at the major hotel chains.

This receptionist had made me a happy customer and if I owned this hotel that’s an outcome I would want.

Southwest Airlines in the USA has consistently won awards for the fewest complaints, best baggage handling and best on-time performance. However, everything at Southwest is focused on fun. Obviously safety is important and all employees follow FAA regulations. But the whole purpose of the company is to have fun.

I’ve flown with airlines who continually tell me that their focus is my safety. I don’t really want to know that; I take it as a given. Stop telling me how safe I am, you’re scaring me – I want fun!

Southwest issue guidelines to flight attendants in their training courses. They hand out joke books and give them ideas and tools for having fun. They then leave it up to the individual flight attendant to create ‘fun’ for the customer. As they say, ‘We don’t want clones.’

The successful manager defines the outcomes to the team members and then lets each person find their way of getting there. That doesn’t mean you walk away nor have no idea what’s going on. As I said earlier, you should be constantly getting out there with the team, watching and listening and supporting what they’re doing.

In Chapter 1 I said that the two characteristics of Motivational Managers were:

• 1.They get the job done.
• 2.They do it in the easiest and least stressful way.

I’m just reminding you of that, because to try to control your team’s activities and get them to do things the way you want them done is extremely stressful. It can also mean that you demotivate the team and then it will be much harder to achieve your outcomes.

Trust your team

I just want to say a bit more about trusting and having faith in your people; it’s so important that I’ve devoted Chapter 6 to it. However, this chapter is devoted to you and your characteristics and it’s very important to get the ‘trust’ program into your brain. The old-style managers that I described in Chapter 1, were programmed to believe that they couldn’t trust their people. That doesn’t mean they thought they were dishonest, just that they needed to constantly supervise their people to ensure they did the job properly. Sadly, many managers still see it that way today.

The Motivational Manager thinks the opposite: he or she believes and trusts their people to do the job and let’s them get on with it. If you’ve got the old program, as I once did, then be prepared to change it. Because if your team members believe that you trust them to do the job, then it will have a huge positive effect on morale and on you achieving your outcomes.

This book is all about how to become a Motivational Manager. However, as you’ve probably realised, you don’t motivate your team – you create the environment in which they motivate themselves. Trusting your people to do their job goes a long way towards creating that environment.

However, you’ve firstly got to get the right people in your team and that’s what we’re going to look at next.

Trust is the lubrication that makes it possible for organizations to work.

Warren G. Bennis (1925–, American psychologist, management educator and consultant)