Leading People to Be Highly Motivated and Committed

Executive Summary

Every executive and manager wants employees who are highly motivated and committed, fully engaged with very high morale. This makes creating employees with these characteristics the ultimate goal of managing people. Why? Because such employees produce the highest quality products and services for customers and they also happen to be 300% to 500% more productive than if poorly motivated, are a joy to manage, and create the lowest levels of stress for management and the company.

However, the reality for most managers is that a majority of their employees are not fully engaged, performing in the middle and perhaps disengaged with low morale. These managers want to have more top performers, but have not been able to find the tools to affect that change.

This book is written for those who want to achieve the goal and break out to far above average performance, to realize a tremendous gain in productivity and to create a legacy of peak performance. This book outlines what to do, why to do it and precisely how to do it at every level of management.

Understanding People

We all have a set of values that we use to guide our lives and we all have the power of choice. A large majority of us, however, are followers and in the workplace this means we use the values of what we experience as how to perform our work. These human characteristics - values, choice, following - dictate how people respond to managerial actions and inactions. Understanding each of these is the key to managing and leading employees to the highest levels of performance.

Each characteristic is reviewed in detail to reveal how to tap into what truly causes individuals to apply their full potential on the job. These are triggers that bosses often spend little time understanding or addressing, but that ignite the greatest performance, including trust, commitment, motivation, creativity, innovation and productivity.

What we find is that everyone agrees on what constitutes a good value, but we have different standards for each derived from our own personal experiences. Knowing this helps to get us past the “us versus them” mentality that rises up in the most well meaning of bosses.

The idea that 90% of people are followers has been widely propagated. How to capitalize on this fact, however, has not. Society is generally authoritarian. It creates followers when what we need in the workplace is non-followers, people who waste no brainpower on following, but instead apply 100% of their brainpower on their work. This ultimate goal is what makes great companies, ones that can weather any economic downturn and blast past their competition. Because every individual has the power of choice, every person is in fact capable of becoming a non-follower, a superstar employee or manager.

Leadership: The Only Way to Manage People

Because of these common human characteristics, leadership in the workplace can only be defined as the transmission of value standards to employees, standards they then use to perform their work. Followers will conform to the value standards reflected in the boss’ support functions; good, bad or otherwise. This is a Natural Law. As such, it is a powerful force for bosses to utilize. The boss need only transmit exceptional value standards to raise performance and to build a culture of excellence.

Since most of what employees experience consists of the support management provides to them, every support function — training, discipline, tools, direction, information, technical advice, parts, material, planning and the like — simply must be delivered to a very high standard. The low standard would be if the tools are hard to find, broken, missing, late, or often obsolete. Followers will use this low standard of quality in performing their work; they will conclude that the boss does not really care about them and will use this same standard of caring in their actions toward their work, customers, each other, and their bosses too.

The book explains each of the values most relevant to the workplace and how the boss can demonstrate the highest standards of each. The same is done for each of the elements of support with particular emphasis placed on direction because it is not only the most destructive action any boss can take, it is also the main tactic of the traditional top-down command and control approach to managing people. In order to create break out performance, managers must create a workforce that is self-directed.

Listening, the Most Important Leadership Skill

With an understanding of people and the role of the boss/manager in supporting the workforce, we move on to the skills and tools to master, starting first with listening to employees. How to listen properly and how to respectfully take action are fully explained.

The only way any boss can find and correct to the satisfaction of employees all support deficiencies is to ask employees and to listen carefully to collect accurate input. Apologies for substandard support, admission of error, perseverance in correction, humility and high standards of other values are easily transmitted during interactions with employees, thus it is the most important leadership skill to develop. There is no other way for bosses to express that they actually care about what is going on and the effects on their people and it is the only way to show respect for employees and thusly meet their most important needs of being heard and being treated as a valuable team member.

It will be through listening and responding respectfully that the boss will lead the majority of employees to become highly motivated, committed, fully engaged, and transformed into strong and independent self-directed individuals.

One-On-One and Group Meetings

There are two mechanisms to learn and master: one-on-one interactions and group meetings. These are the venues for the boss’ listening skills and the book provides precisely how to conduct oneself in each from start to finish with guidelines to follow and the reasons why those are correct.

It is during these interactions when employee complaints, suggestions, and questions are collected and resolved and where employees are led to address issues on their own. This enables managers and executives to increase performance considerably, access untapped talent and increase their own value to the company.

We learn that both venues are necessary and clearly complementary. One-on-one meetings are great practice for group meetings and issues raised one-on-one prepare the boss for group meetings. Conversely, because group meetings stamp the boss with high credibility, they are the only place to create a values-based culture of self-motivated, self-directed, committed and fully engaged employees. Group meetings are where followers are transformed into non-followers. They are the only setting where the boss ensures that everyone sees and hears how committed the boss is to high standards for all of the values critical to success in their company.