Be The Change That You Want To See In The World

Imagine, if you would, that your company put Eeyore, stuffed donkey from the Winnie-the-Pooh books who is wont to lose his tail, in charge of employee motivation in your office.

You can just imagine the meetings. You can imagine him in his deep, monotonous voice, talking very slowly as he says something like, "Hello, everyone. I'm here to motivate you. There are a lot of great reasons to work here. The company is doing a lot of great things." Here he would pause to heavily sigh. "We've really got to get morale up around here or else we all might not jobs in a few months."

(Feel free to substitute Debbie Downer here, or whatever other habitually depressed character is appropriate to your cultural experience.)

It's clearly a silly example, but it illustrates a serious matter--in order to create change in our organizations, our behavior has to be consistent with the change that we want to create.

It's silly to imagine we can get people to become more motivated by chewing them out or by threatening them. Fear can improve performance, certainly, but fear is limited in that it fear can only motivate to an expectation.

What do I mean by that?

I mean that if we use fear to motivate employees, we're basically saying something like, you have to do X or you get fired. We might sugar coat it, we might hide that in "managerspeak," but when it comes right down to it, we're saying "You have to do X, or you're going to be fired."

That fear has, at most, the power to get them to do X. And it only has the power to barely get them to do X. It does not inspire them to do X to the best of their ability. It does not motivate them to do X and Y. At best, it simply gets them to go along with your orders.

It certainly doesn't inspire them to do X better than anyone has ever done it, and wouldn't even occur to them you ever appreciate them figuring out a new idea that would make X easier or even make it become completely unnecessary.

All you're going to get, if anything, is X.

But in some cases, like motivation or customer service, motivating through fear--by any means--is generally counter productive.

Can you imagine that one? Imagine Bobby Knight trying to inspire a team of salespeople to give better customer service.

Or Skeletor. Or Grumpy from the seven dwarfs. Or the Grinch. Or Cruella DeVille. Or the Grumpy Old Troll. Or Captain Hook.

Imagine any of those folks trying to tell people to keep the customers interests in the forefront of their minds or to be sensitive.

It wouldn't inspire a single soul to listen sincerely to people or to keep customer interests in mind. If their own leader doesn't see the need to listen to them or keep their interests in mind, they're not really going to believe you think any of that stuff matters, since you're not doing it for them.

Between my examples and the title of this post, my point is probably obvious.

It was Ghandi who said it:

Be the change you want to see in the world.

In this case, we can paraphrase that as, "Be the change you want to see in your organization."

The way to improve the customer service in your organization is by improving the employee service you, as management, provide your employees.

The way to help the organization to become more motivated is by becoming absolutely motivated yourself.

Now that's not to say either of these are foolproof. Becoming more motivated isn't going to guarantee motivation improves. However, it is the only alternative that at least makes motivation possible.

The question to ask yourself is an easy one:

Is my behavior consistent with the change I am trying to create?

By being brutally honest about the answer to this question, you can better put yourself in a position to get the results you're looking for.