A coach shares how a 2008 recession executive learned to inspire his struggling team by genuinely knowing each person, not just motivating them through incentives. The difference: motivation meets expectations, inspiration exceeds them.
How do you do that? How do you actually get somebody to understand what it means to lead with compassion and then to go back after your workshop and be able to implement it and have that benefit his or her company?
You know, it's so simple and people just overlook these things. I had an executive coaching client one time, an executive mentoring client, and he had— well, his original question was, how do I motivate my team? They were going through a particularly hard period of time. It was during the recession, 2008, and they were having a hard time. He was having a hard time motivating his team, so to speak. And the first question I asked, I would still ask this question, meeting a client for the first time, is how well do you know these people? Because I don't know what motivates them. Now, we make a distinction between motivation and inspiration as well, right? A manager, a typical manager will motivate or try to motivate anyway. You can do that very simply. You can do that with incentives, or you can do that with punishment. All motivation is, is calling someone to a specific action. I like to say moving people toward meeting a certain expectation. Inspiration is about exceeding those expectations. Now, in order to understand, in order to inspire somebody, in order to connect them with a deeper sense of purpose, you've got to get to know that person. So a very simple step you could take, and like I said, it's not just going to motivate people, it will inspire them if you sit down with them and really sincerely show that you care and you have an interest in their success.
But how can you do that if you have a really, really big company? I mean, there are people that have companies, they have employees of, you know, how many thousand people?
How many people report to you directly? How many people are in your circle? Start with them. That's all you need to do, right? And yes, you're absolutely right. Some people— in fact, we were doing a CEO Club event, I think it was, right? And most of the people in the room were executives in big companies, and we One guy had about 10,000 people. He said, "Jim, I can't get to 10,000 people individually." I said, "No, I understand. I can see that point, but can you embed that idea in your culture so strongly that every single person knows they can go to their supervisor, the person they report to most directly, right? And know that that person cares about them."
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