Prozac for angels

How many times have you phoned someone to be told, “They’re in a meeting!?”
At least 60 per cent of a manager’s time is spent in meetings. Research in one large organisation discovered that the figure could be as high as 90 per cent. And another survey found that many managers consider meetings they attend, to be a waste of time. In fact, some managers say that – “meetings take ‘minutes’ and last for hours.”
If you are a manager or team leader, then you will have to hold meetings; here are 4 steps to make them exceptionally Motivational:

1. Don’t hold a meeting unless you really have to. Be really, really sure that the meeting is needed and that it has a clear objective. By the end of the meeting, however long it takes, the shorter the better; you have to be sure that you’ve achieved that objective.

2. Start the meeting on time. Don’t wait for anyone and don’t go over what’s been discussed for latecomers. Of course, you really shouldn’t have latecomers and if you do, speak to them individually after the meeting and sort it out.

3. Have a structured agenda showing start time, breaks and finish time. Don’t schedule meetings to start on the hour; say 1.20 rather than 1 0’clock. And if it’s a half day meeting, start in the afternoon rather than the morning; people will keep moving if they think they will be late leaving work. Ruthlessly stick to that agenda; don’t allow people to ramble or talk about things not on the agenda. If you want to have chit-chat time – put it on the agenda! Keep people moving and even get them out the door before the finish time on the agenda.

4. Make meetings fun. Supply snacks, drinks, fruit and chocolate. Start the meeting with a fun energiser game or quiz. Let one of the team chair the meeting occasionally (as long as they control the agenda). Allow people to have a laugh; create energy and enthusiasm.

So there you have it; Motivational Managers run structured meetings with clear objectives where people have fun and resultantly contribute and get things done.

I have a confession to make; I, on occasion, have felt a little de-motivated. Yes, me, the ‘Motivation Doctor,’ feels a bit lacking in motivation from time to time, just like everybody else.

I’ve talked in the past about how to develop your Brain and Body Energy to build self-motivation; so here’s another suggestion – Spend time with positive people.

Last Saturday I had lunch (well beer and chips) with five of my really good friends. They’re always interested in what I’m doing, really supportive and they really make me laugh! When I leave them, I feel much better and more motivated than I did before we met.
I like to think that I do the same for them, and that’s the secret to receiving support and motivation from others; you need to hand out some ‘Warm Glows’

So let me ask you; do you remember how you felt after your last interaction with another person either on the phone or face to face? That person – it could have been one of your customers, a colleague, a salesperson, a friend or even a member of your family. Did they make you feel good, uplifted and more positive? Did they leave you feeling neutral or, even worse, did they make you feel down and more negative?

Unfortunately, most of us have grown up in a negative culture where it’s much easier to tell people what they did wrong rather than praise them when they succeed. Research in the United States found that 65% of employees received no recognition for good work in the past year.  Similar research in other countries of the world shows comparable results.
Other research has shown that the number one reason people leave their job, and customers take their business elsewhere, is that they don’t feel appreciated. (And if you think about it – many people leave their partners for the very same reason)

If customer’s leave an interaction with you or one of your team feeling better than they did before, then they’re much more likely to come back, recommend you to other people and spend more money with you.
If one of your team feels better after an interaction with you then they’re much more likely to pass that feeling onto a customer.

“The way you treat your staff is the way they’ll treat your customers” – Karl Albrecht

If a friend feels better and more motivated after spending time in your company, then they’re much more likely to return these feelings to you.

So, go ahead; give some positive and motivational comments to the other people in your life and you’ll have – a workplace that’s more productive and more fun – more happy customers – more friends – better relationships and a healthier, happier and longer life.

Remember – “Hand out warm glows, not dampeners.”

Let me ask you a simple question. Do you, as a manager, want a highly motivated team who don’t take time off work, who achieve their goals and objectives, and don’t stress you out in the process?
I’m sure the answer is – Yes! However, you’re no doubt asking how you’re supposed to achieve this ‘miracle.’

The one thing you need to know about team motivation is that – there’s no such thing! Okay, so the football manager ‘motivates’ the team by getting them together at half-time and ‘explaining’ how they’re about to lose the game unless they start to play a lot better. (This, of course, is the polite version)

However, the only way to build a highly motivated team is to concentrate on individual motivation and create an environment where the individual ‘motivates them self.’
Every member of your team is a complex and complicated human being and they all have different needs. Your job, as a Motivational Manager, is to find out what these needs are, and satisfy them.

There are 3 actions you can take

1. Spend some quality time with each team member – One or two minutes of quality time on a regular basis is far more productive than an appraisal once a year. You need to get to know the individual better and they need to get to know you. You’ll gain a much better understanding of them and how they’re handling the job. It will also send the message that you care about them and show that you’re there to help with problems, both personal and business.

2. Give feedback and coach them – You need to regularly tell each of your team members when they’re doing well and when not so well.
This is where so many employers and managers fall down in dealing with their people; they’re hopeless at giving feedback! Many managers are uncomfortable telling staff how they feel about their work performance. Some managers still believe – “Why should I praise people when they’re only doing what they’re paid to do!”
However, most employees want to know how they are performing in their job; they want to know if they are doing it right or how they could do it better.
If you really want to motivate your team members then you need to ‘catch them doing something right’ and tell them about it. If, on the other hand, you hear or observe them doing something you’re not happy about, then you need to tell them what needs improved and coach them.
It’s important to tell the team member when they’re not performing. There are too many managers who either ignore poor behaviour or come down on the person like a ton of bricks. There are particular ways to give feedback and coach and they’re described in detail in my book – How to be a Motivational Manager.

3. Be a believer – You need to constantly demonstrate to the team member that you trust and believe in them, by what you say, your tone of voice and your body language.
They will very quickly sense if you don’t trust them to carry out their job and they’ll act accordingly.
If you believe that your people are not to be trusted to do their job; that they’ll turn up late and go home early, then that is exactly what they’ll do.
On the other hand, if you believe that your people will do their job well, that they can be trusted to make decisions that are good for the business and that they’ll give you a fair day’s work, then it is more likely this is what you’ll get.
As with all theories, there is no guarantee that this will work every time. However the majority of people in this world are reasonable people; if you treat them as such they’re more likely to behave in a positive manner.

So there you have it; Motivational Managers know that to get the best out of their people they need to concentrate on the human interactions and make that emotional connection with each individual team member.

I often get many people emailing me with questions such as ‘How do I write about personal topics?’, ‘How can I motivate people with my articles?’ and ‘How do I give advice without sounding preachy?’.

I usually try and answer the best I can, but the truth is that there are many different writing styles, and quite a few are appropriate for personal development articles.

After replying to a few of these emails, I decided that it would be useful if I tried to condense a few of my own techniques into an article so that many others can pick up a tip or two for their own writing. I also encourage you to add your own comments so that we can help build this into an even greater resource for budding bloggers and freelancers!

1. Use lists. I practise what I preach, and so this article will be in list format also. Lists are a brilliant format for relaying advice on the internet because they are appealing to the eye, they’re easy to skim and pick up chunks of knowledge, and they help give the article a good structure. By habit, you’ll try to keep the list items to a similar length, which will help make the experience more enjoyable for the reader.

A visit to the Digg.com homepage will show you how powerful lists are in capturing attention. At any one time I would expect 1/3 of the websites featured there to be lists. For the very reasons I gave above.

2. Speak about your own experiences. Try and capture a balance between making the article a biography, or including so few self references that the advice sounds arbitrary and distant. With experience (and possibly reputation) comes authority, which is incredibly important for readers of leadership articles. Anyone can dispense advice, but internet surfers will only sit up straight and listen to leadership authors whose words carry weight.

Think of it like personal branding. By reffering to experiences and events in your life, you’re helping to establish a credibility and loyalty that will suck your reader in. It helps to create a unique experience that they won’t find on an advice website like about.com.

3. My final piece of advice in this brief article is to keep your writing light and informal. Professional leadership bloggers have a skill at writing in a friendly and chatty style without looking like an amateur. They manage this in two ways. One reason is that what they have to say is well thought out and smart. Professional writers spend plenty of time planning and writing their article – often far longer than you’d imagine. The second reason is that they use tasteful humour to good effect.

You may want to look like the absolute authority on a subject, but let me assure you, the best way of going about doing that is not to sound like a lecturer. The best way is to relax, and appreciate that you have the confidence and security to not need to use long words to ‘convince’ your readers that you know what you’re talking about. Once you loosen up, your readers will respond, and you’ll start sounding more like a proffessional leadership writer.

Motivation sometimes seems a lot like magic. Some people can do it. Other people can’t. Your boss tells you that you need to “motivate your people,” but doesn’t tell you how.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “motivate” as “to give someone a motive.” It goes on to define “motive” as something that causes a person to act. In business you’re told to “motivate” the people who work for you. In police work, we’re told, you solve a crime by figuring out the motive.

I’ve got the motive, which is money, and the body, which is dead!

In the movie, In the Heat of the Night, Police Chief Bill Gillespie is sure he knows who committed the murder that Detective Tibbs was originally arrested for. After all, Chief Gillespie has figured out the motive, or so he thinks.

But he was wrong. You’ll be wrong, too, if you think you can figure out people’s motivations. You can only guess at motivation.

You can observe behavior, what people say and do. You can observe performance. Since that’s all you can observe, that’s all you can manage.

Don’t worry about the horse being blind. Just load the wagon

When John Madden was the coach of the Oakland Raiders his players sometimes challenged him when he asked them to do something. Rather than explain in detail, Madden would just reply: “Don’t worry about the horse being blind, just load the wagon.”

In other words, don’t worry about the things you can’t control. Spend your time on the things you can control.

You can’t get inside someone else’s head and make him or her want to do something. You can’t control another person’s behavior.

But you can control your own behavior. And you can use your behavior to influence the choices that other people make and the actions other people take.

Tell your people what you want. Then make sure they understand.

Do things that support what you say. We call this “walking your talk.”

It’s simple. If you pay attention to productivity numbers, so will the people who work for you. If you comment on people’s appearance, they will pay attention to appearance.

It can work the other way, too. If you pay attention to how neatly reports are formatted instead of paying attention to the content, your people will catch on. If they have to make a choice they’ll spend their time and effort on making reports look good, rather than beefing up content.

In the end, managing is all about behavior. But it’s not about misbehavior.

Ain’t misbehavin’.

I was a bright, active, talkative child in a world where children were expected to sit still and be quiet. Consequently, I was in trouble a lot when I was in school

Time after time my teachers would call my mother and ask her to come down to school because I was “misbehaving.” When they used that word, it was a certainty like night following day that they would get one of mom’s favorite lectures.

Mom would turn her mom look on Miss Smith or Mrs. Sally or Mr. Schnabel. “There is no such thing as ‘misbehavior,’” she would say. “There is only behavior.”

“You are calling what my son does ‘misbehavior’ because he’s not doing what you want him to do. But he’s got a reason. Now let’s see if we can figure out what we can do so he’ll want to do what you think he should do.”

If more bosses had listened to my mom, more workers would be productive and happy. That’s because people do things for their reasons, not yours. Your job is to figure out how to make their reasons work for you.

You can’t control their reasons or choices, but you can control the consequences of their behavior. As one of my trainees once put it: “The just should be rewarded and the unjust punished in accordance with their deeds.” There are two kinds of consequences, positive and negative.

If at first they don’t succeed, praise, praise again.

Praise is the most common and easiest to deliver positive consequence. Recognition, awards, promotions and special privileges are also positive consequences.

Use praise to encourage. Encourage them to try new or uncomfortable things by praising their efforts. Encourage them to continue doing good things by praising their work. There are simple rules for praise.

Praise specific actions or performance that you want to encourage. Don’t praise people just to praise them.

Deliver praise inconsistently. Don’t praise every good thing or your praise loses its power. But most US managers are nowhere close to praising too much. They don’t praise enough.

That’s why there’s one more rule. You should look for opportunities to praise that meet the criteria above.

Stop in the name of love.

A reprimand or correction is a negative consequence. So are formal punishment and discipline.

You use negative consequences like reprimand to get people to stop behavior or performance that you don’t want. Be specific about the behavior or performance you want to change. Many times you will get best results with a mix of negative consequence for unacceptable behavior and praise for efforts to change.

Negative consequences of all kinds should be delivered consistently. If you promise that it will happen, make sure you keep your promise.

Be wary, though. Remember Mark Twain’s Hot Stove Rule. Twain noted that a cat who sits on a hot stove will not sit on a hot stove again. But he won’t sit on a cold stove either.

If you use negative consequences too much or exclusively, your people will stop the behavior you want to stop. But they’ll also stop trying.

Wouldn’t it be magic?

The science fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke said that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” In other words, if you can’t figure out how it’s done, it will look like magic to you.

If you use your behavior to influence the behavior of the people who work for you, it will look like magic to others. “Wow,” they’ll say, “That manager sure is a motivator.”