Q&A: How Do You Motivate Your Team?

Hi there. Throughout the year, I've received a lot of questions from my friends on Facebook. So we've decided to sit down and answer these questions and let me give you my thoughts and insights and experiences, and they may be helpful to you. And questions from one person may be a question that you might have asked yourself. So let's get started.

Anna from Facebook asks, how do you motivate a team? I've had great success, but most of the team is lagging and aren't able to duplicate my success.

Well, how do you motivate a team? Well, I, as it happens, I teach this all over the world. How do you build a team? How do you motivate a team? How do you manage a team? And so on. Number one rule in everything I teach is pick the right people in the first place. Jim Collins, in his book Good to Great, says the starting point of building a successful company, a great company, is get the right people on the bus, get the wrong people off the bus, and then get the right people in the right seats on the bus. So the starting point is to pick good people. 95% of team building is selecting the team members in the first place, whether it's sports or business. If you have poor team members, then there's nothing you can do. You can talk to them and work with them and teach them and train them and preach and everything else all day long, and they'll never be good team members. So that's number one. Number two is you have to have absolutely clear goals and objectives. There's 22 years of research, 16,000 companies all over the world. They found that the most productive teams and companies are ones that have very clear goals and objectives, and everybody knows what they are. I sometimes play this little game with my managers, and I say, how many people here would like to play a game? And they all say, I'd like to play a game. I say, good. Well, here's the game. I'll tell you the rules, and then you tell me if you want to play. The name of the game is called Keep youp Job. And here's how it works. You list the people who report to you back at work and. And list below them the three most important tasks that they are responsible for accomplishing each day, each week, each month. And then you sit here, and I'm going to go back and I'm going to interview these people back at your office, and I'm going to ask them, what do you think are your three most important tasks in order of priority, that you're responsible for accomplishing. And I say, and if their answers are the same as your answers, then you get to keep your job. How many people want to play? I've given this exercise in 50 countries. I've never found one manager anywhere in the world in any company who wants to play keep your job because not one of them is confident that the people that report to them really have any idea what they're supposed to be doing. So number one is clear goals and objectives that a person can write down and read back to you and that everybody else in the company knows what the goals and objectives of each other person are. Again, this is based on multimillion $120 country study of the top performing teams in the world is everybody knows the goals and objectives of the team and what everyone else is supposed to do to contribute to it. The second is clear measures and standards is how is the person going to measure exactly that the job has been done on time, on schedule, on budget, and so on. And again, we could play keep your job with that and nobody would want to play. The third is clear deadlines, deadlines and sub deadlines. So everybody knows what it is, how it's measured and when it's supposed to be done. And everybody knows what everybody else's answers are to those same questions. If you do those few little things, you'll be using the best techniques practiced by the most successful companies and teams in the world today. It all starts off with getting the right people on the bus, getting the wrong people off the bus, and then getting the right people in the right seats on the bus. Now, I've given you a couple of ideas, so the most important thing that you can do is to take action. So what one action are you going to take as a result of these key ideas that I've just given you? Whatever it is, jot it down and let me know. Remember, one action that you take that you would not have taken in the absence of this discussion can change your life forever.