I have been thinking a lot about motivation and how leaders can motivate employees.  It is inherent that if you are a good leader, then you will be a good motivator.  Maybe I should be writing about leadership and the lack there of it in the workplace where we have managers leading teams.  This is perhaps about as good as an idea as hiring a blind bus driver to take your kids to school.

I guess what is most important to note is that in putting managers in charge we are doing damage – making leaders from managers who believe they are engaged but in fact are the only ones excluded from the conversation questioning their methods.

Don’t worry, the team will not revolt because they feel like they are herded in the wrong direction, but instead look for ways, albeit quietly, to leave the team either mentally or physically.  The news flash here is that the team with not revolt because they are not really your team.  I see it everywhere, and perhaps by writing about it, it gives me a chance to understand it better and help others identify solutions.

It is actually quite sad to believe that a person working so hard is actually causing damage to the team.  These managers do work very hard.  It is what has gotten them to the position they are in and oftentimes that is irrefutable.  An issue arises when it comes to that little extra that makes a manager a leader, that something, that feeling of how to engage with people they fail – like baking bread with dead yeast.  You can try and try, but it fails because of something you cannot fully control.

What makes a leader?

Leaders are a special breed of people – more an honest friend than anything else.  An honest friend is one who I can trust the opinion of; someone who is going to tell me how they feel, give me equal ownership of the friendship, and someone that by choice I want to befriend.

This issue of trust is paramount.  How can we be friends with someone we are unable not trust?  If we do not know the person, their functional logic, the drivers, then there is no way we are able to believe them and follow their leadership.  To be a leader means to generate true friendships from those we lead, to bridge the gap between out-of-work life and work-life.

A leader must be overt and should not lurk in the shadows; a smile once and while is not a personality, and is no way a replacement for one.  A slap on the back at the wrong time is a slap in the face.  Individual outgoing actions without an outgoing attitude breed distrust.

I hear feedback all the time from friends that work all over the world – people complaining about their bosses.  Once a while you will hear about a boss that is loved and they are only loved because they are seen as a person who cares.  This is the take home point everyone.  You have to be seen as someone who cares.

How do we fix this?

If you are an employee, I would not even try.  You would only end up hurting yourself.

If you are a manager, you need to think more about how you are perceived.  As you worked your way up the organization you were perceived as the hard-working and that is what put you where you are today.  Now that you are the leader of a team, you need to change the way the people you lead see you.  You need to become an honest friend and start genuinely investing yourself in your employees.  You have to become overt, share who you really are so that employees can start to see you and understand what drives you.  If you show your motivators, it will encourage the team to show theirs and drive them.  Motivation is an internal driving force and not an external one, just as trust is something that is internal and can never be imposed on someone.

Update: N.B.  This post is not about any one individual or organization and should not be interpreted as an assessment on an individual’s management style.  It is all a combination of theory an personal feeling.