Source: Self-Leadership and the One-Minute Manager
Self-Leadership and the One-Minute Manager is the
sequel to One-Minute Manager and was therefore suggested to me by one of
my blog readers. (=)) The book poses a lot of challenging steps for a person
that seeks to be a self-leader. I’ll discuss some of the memorable points made,
but a full summary will be lengthy and therefore defeats the point of a
summary.
Steve has been promoted to a new position in which he is now
managing a team. While Steve’s boss is
out, Steve fails miserably in making a presentation to a major client of his
company. He is discouraged and upset at his boss for being out of town, his
team for being incapable and the client for being demanding. Steve assumes he will be fired and that his
team will hate him. Subsequently, he begins
to draft a resignation letter. Surprise! Steve meets a woman at a coffee shop that
empowers him to be a leader and accept responsibility for the situation. He
waits on submitting his resignation and decides to go back to work. Steve
informs his team, and later his boss, about the result. His fears of being
fired and being hated by his team prove to be untrue. He is surprised at their
reactions and realizes that he should accept that he cannot read minds.
Here, the book presents an exercise where you have to
evaluate your motivating factors ranking from 1 to 10. 1 meaning that it is the
most important motivating factor to 10 being the least. Steve then asks his team to do this survey
only to realize something very important: all of their answers are different. This
exercise shows Steve that his team members aren’t all motivated by higher pay.
Their motivating factors were as varied as their personalities but Steve didn’t
take the time to learn this about them.
I wanted to prove this theory for myself so I proceeded to
ask a few of my friends to take the same exercise. (Thank you to those that
did!) The answers in my survey were varied as well. It surprised me how many
people didn’t choose money as their first or second or even third motivating
factor at work. Another surprising result was how many people chose interesting
work as the number one motivator at work. As a leader of a non-profit, I knew
interesting social activities were important to keep people’s interest but I
didn’t expect this for the workplace. It reminded me to spend more time on this
particular motivating factor going forward. It is important to recognize that
motivating factors even in the best teams are different. While success is the
end goal, the journey mattered more.
The other day, a friend was talking to me about how she
offered her sister money for each ‘A’ she made. I asked her if money motivated
her sister, her response was, “Who doesn’t want money? If someone gave me money
during high school for studying I’d be a straight ‘A’ student.” I reminded her
that her sister isn’t her and that she should ask her sister what motivates her
and solve the problem in that manner. We all make this mistake. In the
workplace or the non-profit world, we give recognition to people that excelled
at their job for their talent or time. We assume the few minutes of fame are
all that is needed to motivate another person. What if that person wanted
‘Sympathetic help with personal problems?’ It is our responsibility as a leader
to learn each member’s motivation and apply that to our interactions. Just like we can't read their minds, our mentors/bosses can't read ours either. Therefore, we must
also proactively talk about our motivating factors with our mentors/bosses so
they are better aware on how to support us and challenge us.
