Guide: “Energize Your People”

A complement to CEO Flow; you can have self-managing employees who aren’t motivated; or motivated employees who can’t self-manage.

About Motivation:

Motivation Is Complex: There’s no “7-step system” or magic solution to developing an energized company.  Every organization and individual within each is different.  Ultimately each organization and person must find out for themselves what works, and then evolve it, because continues to change.

Founders/CEOs Are Special: Founders and CEOs often say “why won’t others work as hard as me?  If I can do it, why not them?”  Because it’s your baby, not theirs.  Your people don’t have the same emotional or financial ownership that you do in the organization.  Asked another way, why would or should they work as hard as you?  How could you help them feel more ownership?  People support what they help create.

“No Surprises”: When was the last time you were happily surprised at work?  CEOs and VP Sales hate surprises from salespeople.  Salespeople hate surprises from prospects.  Prospects hate surprises from salespeople or companies. Employees hate surprises from CEOs and managers.  Nobody likes surprises at work!  They’re usually bad news, because for some reason, bad things seem to happen instantly, while good things incubate slowly over long periods of time.  Leaders fear their people can’t handle the truth, that telling them too much would cause more harm than good.  Not if you share the truth wisely, and regularly, just as in a marriage.  Could you create a company culture of “no surprises”?  Think about what it would mean – it’d be profound.  It would create a fantastic culture of communication and trust.

(By the way, yes, people LOVE happy surprises!  Perhaps because they are so, so, so rare?  If your people get into a habit of making them happen for each other, you will have a very special thing going!) 

Incentives…balance a mix of short and long-term motivations –

Short Term Solutions:

  • Fear (ex: Cracking The Whip, Threats, Exhortations) – adrenaline, like caffeine – can create a short-term burst of energy, but it leaves people off more drained than before (one step forward, two steps back).
  • Prizes (ex: Contests, Rewards, Motivational Talks) – like sugar – can be sweet, but aren’t a replacement for “food,” daily fulfilling activities. 

Long Term Solutions:

People Need Soil, Water & Sunlight:

  1. Trust: If I’m worried about my job or the company, it sucks a lot of energy out of my day.  I need to trust in my company, my executives, my manager.  If I don’t trust, or feel safe, I’m going to burn out half my mental energy on being stressed and wondering ‘what will happen next’ and I won’t be able to do my best. 
  2. Challenge: Am I learning, growing and contributing?  Have I made progress in the past month, year?
  3. Communication: If I don’t know what’s going on (from my manager & company), I’m going to be anxious. If I don’t know what’s expected of me, or how to improve, I won’t know what to do differently.

Survival Situations: Sometimes, a company or team ends up in a do-or-die situation, with a complex mix of fear, challenge, exhaustion, excitement and dread.  These situations can bring out the best in a person or team, or crush others.  The media loves to share survival stories, because they make for good reading – especially the happy ones, in which someone overcomes incredible odds to pull off a magical solution.  The more common failures just aren’t as interesting, so they aren’t shared as much.  I think because of this, executives have a ‘they can do it bias’ and believe the stupendous saves can be done regularly.  I think of them more like chemotherapy – yes, sometimes patients in life-or-death situations have miraculous recoveries, but even if they do (and most don’t), they are worn out from the treatment.  I don’t recommend putting your people in survival mode regularly in order to create huge breakthroughs.

People Support What They Help Create: The more people are allowed to make their own decisions, to help create goals and projects, the more dedicated they will be to them.

Trust Is Built In Baby Steps, But Lost In Leaps:  People will trust you if you show consistency and honesty.  If you’ve made and broken promises in the past, start with a commitment that is small and specific, to make it easy to succeed and rebuild trust.  If you have a history of missing goals, lower them or change them.  Stop ‘hoping’ and get real, honestly look at what’s gone wrong before.

Where To Begin?  Starting Points:

A doctor wouldn’t prescribe a medication without doing a checkup.  Start by finding out what’s going on already in the company.  If your people believe that you want to make a difference, that you mean well, they will want to help you. 

  1. “No Surprises”
  2. CEO Reflection: The CEO’s vision and mood affects the entire company.  Whether the CEO locks themself in a room for an hour a weekend, hires a life or business coach, or starts a new contemplative activity, the CEO needs to reflect about where they want their life to go, what they define as “success” (money, fame, happy families, giving back..?), what they want the lives of their people to be like – or if they aren’t supposed to have any –  and what the business should feel like.  The amount of success or failure of the company depends on the culture, and culture is made up of emotion, not logic.  Excitement, energy and sadness are feelings.  It doesn’t matter how rational an argument you make that people should be energized, it won’t happen until they feel it.
  3. Company Survey: Put together a survey to gauge the mood of the company.  What drains people, what inspires them?  What would they do differently if they were CEO?  What do they want from their manager and leaders?  You only want the raw truth here – avoid trying to paint a rosy or bleak picture to fit some kind of agenda.  Make the survey anonymous, but allow people to enter their names if they wish.
  4. Individual 1-On-1s: Talk with each individual.  Do they feel safe, challenged, and in-the-know?  If not, why not?   What do they want to do & learn at the company, in work, in life?  How can they learn what they want to in their job?  What does the company need to do differently?  The CEO should talk with people across all levels of the hierarchy, to get a real feel for what it’s like for the regular people in the company, not just the executives. 
  5. More Company Transparency: As the leaders of the company learn more and draw conclusions about what’s going well or not, share them with the company.  Your people can’t help if they don’t know what’s going on.  Hold town hall meetings – more communication & transparency.  What’s not working?  What do you want to do about it?  Share more information than you think is necessary, then let people opt-in or opt-out as they wish, since each person’s appetite for information about what’s going on will vary.

Toxic Management: If the management is toxic, none of this will help or happen.  It’s a waste of time to try to convince them otherwise.  If you’re a manager who cares, create your own bubble of encouragement. If you’re an employee, do your best to make the most of what you have, and if that isn’t working, start looking for greener pastures.

“How can I get my people to worker harder?” a common question for both sales executives and just about every manager/entrepreneur in business. 

But this is the wrong question to ask.

When anyone starts something new, whether a company, a job, a project, a romantic relationship, there’s a natural burst of starting energy and enthusiasm.   Human brains love the drug “New.”  

This extra burst of enthusiasm may last a few minutes, a few months or perhaps up to a couple of years.

Unfortunately, if you don’t see that this isn’t sustainable, it creates unrealistic expectations that the initial energy could last forever (like in relationships, when problems are created when people believe their ‘new love’ chemistry should last forever).  

As the extra energy wears off, the blinders come off and what’s left is the natural, unbiased state of reality.  The initial “high” recedes and you become habituated to your new situation.  It’s a function of brain biochemistry.  

(It’s also a reason you’re never perfectly satisfied with ‘getting more stuff,’ and always want more.  Think back – 10 years ago, what did you want?  Wouldn’t you have been astounded at what you have today?  Yet why aren’t you satisfied with it now?  Contentment and satisfaction come with changing your attitude slowly over time, not from achieving more success.)

In a romantic relationship, this is the time people often realize that they may or may not actually enjoy each others’ company.

It’s the same at work.  After several months, the newness of a job & its benefits wears off, and the employee now has a chance to determine if they actually enjoy the job and work – or not.  This is when you’ll see some adapt and thrive, and others go through the motions, doing the minimum to get by.

If a job is mostly a grind, enthusiasm for it will go down.  If it’s mostly interesting and enjoyable, engagement stays higher.  (No matter what – even in the greatest relationship or job in the world – enthusiasm will always go up and down day-to-day, never being constantly high).  

When you force or “push” people into something, there will be a form of resentment left.  Ideally, you are helping people choose their job (how, why, how much) in a way they believe will work for them.

In the long-term, you can’t “get them to work harder” by motivating or inspiring people – you can only help create an environment in which they can best motivate or inspire themselves.

At their core, every human wants to make their own decisions in life rather than be told what to do.  In some, this desire is buried quite deep under a lifetime of emotional issues.  In other people, such as entrepreneurs, it’s obvious to see.  When people are told what to do, how to do it and when it must be done by, this creates resentment (either obvious or hidden) and resistance.  The more they are allowed to make their own choices and come to decisions by their own power, the more sustained energy and dedication created.

This is why people support what they help create.  They will be much more motivated by a goals or projects they help design and choose to buy into, than ones pushed on them.  

“You WILL want to work more!”

The default reaction that managers have when they feel employees are doing the minimum to get by is come up with more ways to control them, perhaps demanding they work harder by instituting stricture hours, goal requirements and expectations around amount of work.  Hence the common question, “How can I get my team to work harder?”  

This approach may work at first, but it’s not sustainable, and becomes an ongoing problem that’s never solved.  

Now, an employee needs internal motivation in order to sustain a high level of productivity at a job, once the bloom’s worn off.  

The conflict is: the more “control” needed to coerce employees to work harder, the more it drains their inner motivation.   Sort of like with kids, the more you force them to do homework, the less they want to do it.  Now, after years of forcing kids to do homework, at some point their minds are trained and it seems like they want to do it themselves.  But it’s your voice in their ear that’s driving them, not their inner voice. 

They may go through the motion for some time (even years), but ultimately they’ll either self-sabotage or leave.  At least the best people (“A”s and “B”s) will leave…leaving the less-confident (“B’s, “C”s or “D”s) to stay.  

Perhaps this is an important reason why big companies tend to become less innovative as the grow, as they implement more controls, policies and bureaucracy that are one-sided, intended solely to enforce compliance or make lives easier on executives, with little regard to the impact on employees. 

It seems that there’s less tolerance than ever for people putting up with controlling workplaces.  So the length of time these techniques work is shortening.  Even by the late 20th century, people often stayed at companies, including toxic ones, for decades.  

I did have a client with an emotionally erratic CEO. It was unpleasant for their employees. They managed to make some great sales hires, but within a year the entire team was either let go or choose to leave.  Good people – exactly the people you want on your team – have too many options out there.

In Summary So Far: 

  • Human behavior, including sustainable motivation, is complex and not understood well 
  • There is a natural high when people start something new, creating artificially high expectations in employees and managers about future performance
  • That initial high fades quickly, leaving people with ‘reality’
  • If a job and/or workplace are more interesting & trusted, motivation stays higher
  • If it’s boring or distrustful, energy decreases
  • Willpower – like caffeine – can seem to make up decreases for awhile, but it’s not an infinite resource
  • Managers’ job is to know what kinds of seeds to choose (don’t choose a pine tree if you want apples), and help create the best environment for people to flourish (soil, sunlight, water…) 
  • Employees’ roles are to figure out what works for themselves, and how they can flourish at work (they decide what kind of plant they want to grow to be, and how to make it happen). Even if someone is a “grape”, there are infinite possibilities for them to grow when you consider not just all varieties of grapes, but also all the products that can be made like wine, jelly and raisens.  
  • Every company is different & every person is different, so ultimately you will have to customize an approach that works best for you.
  • Managers must encourage the growth of each employee into what is the best fit for them, even if it’s not what the manager ‘wants’!
  • In a team, people can’t do whatever they want, when they want to.  Some things must be earned. 

Human Behavior Is Complex

Human behavior may be one of the most-studied yet least-understood areas of science.  We could probably come up with dozens or hundreds ideas and facts around things that affect motivation.  

However, that is way too complicated.  I’m going to share with you, from my personal experience the few, most important things that help people want to achieve more within your company.

STEP 1

Three Starting Fundamentals (Soil, Water, Sunlight)

Let’s use a plant metaphor.  

There are important basics – soil, water and sunlight – that most plants can’t live without.  Then there are some nice-to-haves, such as fertilizer, music, ladybugs, etc.

To your employees, the first three essentials are:

1) Safety (Soil)

2) Challenge (Sunlight)

3) Communication (Water)

PEEL (Basics): Honesty, Common Ground, Expectations, Fair Benefits  (Not just at the beginning)  => Safety

FLESH (Growth, Internal): Oppty, (Unique) Contribution (+recognition?), Care (for the person), Acceptance, Competence => Confidence , ‘individual growth’ / for the person

SUGAR (Rewards, External): Pay, Promotion (Title/Status), Prizes, (Praise?) => Power  ‘team growth’ / for the team

  1. Do People Trust The Company, Or Are They Fearful?
    1. Surprises, Dishonesty, Broken Promises, Threats, Passive-Aggressive Executives, Abuse of Power,  
    2. People treated as replaceable ‘resources’
  2. Do Employees Feel The Company Cares About Them As People, Including Their Success? (With Actions, Not Words)
    1. Actions, Not Words
    2. Do They Believe Their Manager Is Helpful & Cares About Them?
    3. Both Professional And Personal
  3. How Valued Are Respect, Honesty & Open Communication?
  4. Do They Enjoy Their Work And Workplace?
    1. What’s In It For Them?
    2. Do They See The Connection To Their Futures?
    3. Do Employees Know How To Succeed?
      1. Are they set up to fail?
      2. Do they have a chance?
      3. Is it too easy, too hard, or just right?
      4. Are They A Good Fit?

Where To Begin

  • 1-1 Communication: Speak with each teammate, find out what is important to them
  • Transparency

The “Control” Model 

It’s hard for Type-A executives and entrepreneurs, who want to believe that everything is “controllable”, that ultimately, they can’t control their people.  Especially since setting goals and holding them accountable to what you want seems to .  You see, people can be “controlled” for awhile – a few weeks, months or years – but at some point, it doesn’t work anymore, resulting in higher turnover, problems with the culture, or other issues that fester under the surface for a long time before becoming urgent problems.  

  • Fear “I’ll lose my job if I don’t do this”  (Includes: “my boss will yell at me”, “I will look bad”, “everyone else is doing this”…)
  • Acceptance
  • Enjoyment “I like coming to work, I like doing this”  (Includes: excitement, challenge, )
  • Challenge: “I’m excited to ____”
  • Rewards “I’m going to get a bonus for this”  (Includes 
  • Social Acceptance
  • Growth
  • Power/Prestige
  • Achievement 

At Salesforce.com, I always tended to make contests very short (hours or a day long) and focused it around training them on a new skill, rather than on generating sales results such as a leads/opptys goal.

For example, we would hold a two-hour calling session to see who could get the most “call connects” in that time, which was defined as talking with someone at a company and getting at least one piece of useful information. Or perhaps we’d design a contest around who could learn a new salesforce.com skill, or email skill, or…you get the idea. It was always done with some fun in mind, with “co-opetition”, never i-win-you-lose-competitively.

If you study human behavior, it turns out that the more you reward and compensate people for anything (kids for grades, adults for work), the less they enjoy the activities involved. They become subconsciously trained that the work involved isn’t worth doing on its own. You become dependent on the rewards, or contests. So – if you use contests to motivate your people, at some point you will NEED contests to motivate people, because their inherent / intrinsic / internal interest in working will be lowered.

Contests are nice “icing on the cake”, but – like sugar – to be used sparely in addition to, not to replace, the important things like recognition (excellent point above), respect, coaching, enjoyment, training, honesty, etc.

Another idea instead of a contest would be to ask each individual on the team about what’s most frustrating to them each day, and what would make their job more enjoyable. Perhaps you could run a contest as to who can come up with the best ideas on making the team and job more interesting 🙂

MISC IDEAS

When you grow up, you are trained by your parents and school to conform to what they think you should do and be in life.  If you don’t perform the way they expect – such as not studying, learning or understanding math in the way they think you should – you are punished.  If you don’t do chores or homework or speak as they want you to, you are punished.  When you act they way they want, you are rewarded.  It’s not their fault – they believe they are helping you, that it’s in your best interests.  And sometimes they are right, because it’s important, for example, to learn to be polite.  And if they didn’t teach you how to behave, we’d have a bunch of wild, feral kids and adults running around.  Yet just as often, or more, they are wrong.  Just because they want you to be a lawyer, doctor, banker or entrepreneur doesn’t mean you should do it.  You see, you were trained from the earliest ages, even as a newborn, to conform to other people’s expectations.  Rarely, so rarely, were you encouraged and supported to follow your own path.   

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Get Your First Sales (pre-revenue early stage)

Get To A Million   / Get Your First Million  (entrepreneurs with some sales)

Sell Ideas, Not Stuff (Messaging)

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5 keys: 

Honesty (honor / authenticity)

Provide help

Need nothing

Sell Ideas, not stuff

Career: Make learning your priority over money

NEED NOTHING / Eliminate Neediness

Need nothing

Provide value no matter what is going on

Be willing to walk away, no matter how much you need it

Sell Ideas, Not Stuff

Do you feel like you keep struggling to find a marketing and sales messaging isn’t resonating with buyers?  

You’re not alone – more companies than ever are being created, sending out more sales and marketing messages than ever, creating an overwhelming ambount of information and options for customers.

Simple Truths  (simple different ways of looking at things)

Show Don’t Tell  (concrete details)

Specific & Stories

Speak To The Hindbrain

Speak to the hindbrain: 

Surprise

Stories 

Speed 

Specifics (“real”)

Simplicity

Comparisons

Uniqueness (New, Different)

Visual

  1. Problem
  2. Needed Solution
  3. Feature
  4. Benefit
  5. Proof
  6. Idea – independent of your stuff

Your idea should speak to your Ideal Client Profile – what do they have, what do they need?

Startups: “Why salespeople are valuable”

Mature: “Why you must specialize”

FAQ
Q: So many companies that are very successful don’t seem to care about their employees; in fact, the founder is known for yelling at them and being emotionally abusive.  

A: Who says that same company wouldn’t be five times as successful if they had cared about their employees?  Perhaps they were successful despite the culture, not because of it.

Are we working harder, under more pressure, but running in place?

The internet has changed business – in helpful and challenging ways:

* We have more information and metrics – and more confusion from all the clutter.
* We can develop and deploy products faster – far beyond our clients’ ability to absorb them.
* We can find prospects more easily – but they’re less interested in talking with us.
* We have more forecasting tools – but less predictability.
* We try to work harder – but we can’t work as hard as the scrappy firms in India and China.

* We want our people to work harder – but they don’t want to, now they want things like enjoyment and fulfillment as much (or more) as money.

I’ve worked with, mentored and observed dozens of companies over the past couple of years. It’s not uncommon for the double whammy of clutter and pressure to make companies and people so busy that they can’t get anything done!

The brute force methods that used to work so well, such as “work harder,” “hire more,” “spend more” aren’t true strategic or competitive advantages. Anyone can work hard, hire people and raise more money.

It’s time to start taking regular breaths to reflect on what we’re missing – there is a better way to increase growth more productively. From my point of view, the most impactful thing a CEO can do to increase sustainable growth than to move towards a pull management system and away from a push management system.

How can a CEO create an environment that helps the company to grow itself faster by unlocking the motivation of its people in an environment of trust, transparency and alignment? Can a CEO spend 95%+ of their time enjoyably surfing the flow of growing a company, rather than feeling sometimes like they’re paddling against the waves?

Push v Pull Management

Note that companies are not pull OR push…there would be a sliding scale (such as 70/30 push/pull)

Push System
* The CEO actively works to motivate (push) people.
* Work is usually exhausting.
* The company does not trust employees, who must be monitored and pushed to do more.
* The company culture is pressured, competitive, political.
* The executive team and board come up with the vision and goals and push these out to the company.
* Goal setting and tracking metrics take up 80% of the attention; prioritization of projects and goals is 20%.
* The executive team then pushes the employees to hit those goals on a quarterly or monthly drumbeat.
* Mistakes are punished.
* Burnout is common.
* Does not require much time from management. High rates of internal confusion or mis-alignment are acceptable.

Pull System
* The CEO actively works to create an environment that unlocks people’s inherent motivation (their own motivation “pulls” them to sustainably achieve).
* Work is usually energizing.
* The company culture is enjoyable, nurturing, collaborative.
* The company trusts employees to pull what they need from management (advice, information, help) as necessary.
* All employees have an opportunity to include their voice/feedback in company goals and priorities.
*  The executive team and managers work to maintain constant clarity alignment across the company, even on a weekly drumbeat.
* Every employee has transparent access to (or feeds to) updates on the company’s priorities and goals, so they remain in a constant state of alignment.
* EVERY mistake is a learning opportunity to improve something.
* No burnout – employees, through conversations with their peers, have total discretion in how and when they can take time off.
* Requires more investment of time by management, but much more productive (like the Toyota Production System).

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