Communication For Leaders: How To Inspire And Motivate Your Team To Achieve Success
Maybe you’re tired of theories of leadership and the various styles. Its well-covered turf—and rightly so given how important leadership is in terms of affecting the conditions of people’s lives. It's perhaps a bit presumptuous for me to weigh in on the topic where far greater leaders than me have contributed so much. But, just like you, nobody has seen things exactly the way I have. My view on this topic comes from a lifetime of studying the human condition and a passion for helping people move in a direction of their choosing. From that perspective, I share my thoughts on how any person can build their ability to effectively inspire and motivate others, and I share a mission statement that any organization may use to elevate their culture. See what you think!
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Communication For Leaders: How To Inspire And Motivate Your Team To Achieve Success
Leadership is a well-worn topic. If you do a keyword search for leadership styles, you'll see lists that break them down into anywhere from 3 to 13 types. Leadership advice often stresses finding a style that suits our personality. That makes sense. To inspire and motivate others, people need to feel they know us and respect us. This means that whatever style we happen to adopt, it will need to be consistent, congruent, and authentic.
These qualities are non-negotiable and foundational but they aren't enough. Leadership is talked about and studied so much because it's complicated. It's also vital. Any organization from families to nations rises and falls by the equality of their leadership yet the difference between the best-run organizations and the worst remains massive.
Worst by most measures we can apply, leadership effectiveness is subject to the vagaries of a normal population distribution, the Pareto or the 80/20 ratio. This means what we might call good is a rather small percentage of leaders, perhaps around 1% and 5%, and great leaders are far fewer. All of this is despite how well-known leadership principles are and how well-established leadership practices have become.
If there are so many examples of effective leadership strategies and such a wide spectrum of possible ways for us to improve as leaders, why the low bar, especially considering the high stakes? We've already hinted at some of the difficulty. It comes down to how we were made. Human nature makes it hard to be consistent, congruent, and authentic. Our experience in the world proves to us that we have a lot to worry about like dangers, risks, and potential calamity at every turn.
This reality pulls us inward. Our impulse is to protect ourselves and those close to us. Our strategies to do this can lead us away from the quality that is needed to effectively lead, inspire, and motivate others. To become consistent, congruent, and authentic, in other words, to manifest a sophisticated and elevated character, one that others can truly depend upon requires a self-possession, emotional maturity, and a field of vision that is rather a rare achievement.
Truly, it's aspirational no matter who we are. We are all works in progress but there are some helpful hints to speed that progress. That's the thing we talk about here in the show. One of our methods is to break the complicated picture of the world into bite-sized pieces. Let's do that. What are the fundamental functions that effective leaders must attend? We've already identified some potential answers.
In this episode, we’ll focus on the need to inspire and motivate teams. Leaders must recognize and communicate universal motivating factors. Those elements address common human needs. They must also appreciate the unique combinations of these elements that characterize each member of the team. It's quite a task. It’s one of the many reasons why great leaders don't come in bunches.
Leaders must recognize and communicate universal motivating factors in order to inspire and motivate teams.
One of the tools I use with my clients is a psychometric instrument called Driving Forces. It's based upon the work of famed Austrian psychologist Eduard Spranger who identified six basic universal motivating factors in humans. Over that span, the model has been honed and validated in the workplace. The Driving Forces Model uses Spranger's original six but recognizes polarities within each factor, which results in a more detailed instrument comprised of twelve motivators.
Breaking those down would be an episode of its own and perhaps we'll get to that at some point. For now, I'll share the 6 basic factors, the 6 things we all want but in different degrees in our unique combination. Great leaders speak to all six. Knowledge. It means ever-increasing learning and understanding.
Surroundings. It means pleasurable experiences whether sensory or relational. Utility. It means practical benefit. Others. It means serving people. Power. It means the kind of personal agency we talk about in the Eye of Power community. Methodology. It means the system by which we conduct ourselves to live according to what we consider to be best or proper.
Understanding and addressing these is a good way to connect with others because they will respond positively to at least one of them. I'm tempted to elaborate now on these. While important, they are not the most foundational so we'll leave that discussion for another time. Instead, let's turn to a more basic level of the psychology that obtains whenever we want to influence others.
When we wish to inspire, motivate, and/or influence people, what are we talking about? We're talking about change. Hopefully, one that moves in a productive direction. People have a quirky relationship with change. We all want change. We imagine a future that holds desired experiences we lack at the present. However, we all miss trust and even fear change at some level. This is because change requires the sacrifice of something we have in the present. It is this oppositional dynamic that leaders must skillfully navigate to effectively inspire and motivate their teams.
When we work together, we're trying to accomplish something. Thank you, Captain Obvious, but I say that because it means we're doing that change thing. We are moving from a current condition to a more desirable future condition. In other words, we're guiding people through some change process. Each member of a team weighs the things they must sacrifice. Some of which they may hold dear against the theoretical future rewards. Some of which they may value but have not yet experienced.
They may be skeptical about the feasibility of these promised rewards. This is a primary reason why the character of leaders is so important. They are in the position of asking for leaps of faith. People are far more likely ready to do that when they trust the person they're following. This is where consistency, congruency, and authenticity matter but they're not enough. There's another element foundational in all relationships. It's respect.
Communication For Leaders: The character of leaders is so important because they are in a position to ask for leaps of faith.
How do leaders most effectively demonstrate to their teams that they value and respect them? It's the same way we show respect for every person we meet. We develop the success habit of seeing people. Respect is what happens when we put down the agenda in our heads for long enough to allow others to share theirs. We went into great detail about this in the active listening episode. If you haven't heard that one, I urge you to check it out.
More foundational than the motivating factors that Spranger identified in the early part of the 20th century, a universal need people share is to be recognized as the unique individual they are. When leaders give people this gift, the needle moves significantly in a positive trusting direction. When the team feels heard, understood, and respected, they're more willing to trust that leaders have their interests at heart.
However, there is more. Trust and integrity move us in the desired direction but leaders must contend with the very human responses to change and that requires additional knowledge. Whenever we wish to make a productive change, what's in our way? Why don't we make a decision, make a plan, and execute the plan until we get what we want? It's because we're incongruent. We want incompatible things.
We want to lose weight but we also want donuts for breakfast. We want to get a promotion and earn more money but we want to attend every one of our kids’ events. Often, there isn't a clear right or wrong path. It's a choice between competing priorities and values. We established that there are universal motivating factors and that each person holds them in a unique proportion. This means in any group of cooperating people we can get close in the alignment of our priorities but we don't get them to match it precisely.
That complicates the job for leaders. How do we navigate this rocky terrain? We can't be all things to all people. We can't pursue incompatible goals. At least, not at the same time. What's the best strategy leaders may employ to inspire and motivate a diverse team to move as one? We need a mutual goal that all can invest in. This means it's big enough to encompass all the motivating factors.
It allows people to pursue learning and development. It creates tangible experiential value for people. It produces harmony among the stakeholders. It empowers individuals to exercise their personal power. It employs systems that are simple enough to understand and follow but sophisticated enough to work to deliver what's necessary. It's big enough to matter to many people. The leader who optimally inspires and motivates their team easily and often speaks to how the shared goal shows up in these ways.
We'll wrap up with an example of such a goal. It works for any commercial enterprise and many that aren't. It works on the team level and an individual level. It allows for a wide range of styles, skills, and roles. Have I gotten your attention? Here it is. Our goal is to increase the esteem and value of our organization in the eyes of our stakeholders, employees, vendors, customers, stockholders, or owners in everything we say and do.
We, as individuals and as leaders, have the power to make such stark differences in the lives of other people if we have the courage and honesty to do so.
A goal like that is the starting point for effective leadership. The journey forward requires expanding skills recognizing how everyone fulfills that goal and giving them the resources required to do so. That means they need a leadership team who deeply shares the same vision. It means the spirit of their actions must match the spirit of their words.
It's a high bar but it's a bar worth shooting for because the experiential difference between cultures built upon trust, respect, and delivering value and cultures that are provincial, petty, and self-serving is like the difference between heaven and hell. We as individuals and as leaders have the power to make differences that stark in the lives of other people if we have the courage and honesty to do so. Let's go.
Important Links
Active Listening Episode – Past Episode