Unlocking the potential of your employees: the not-so-secret secrets of motivational leadership.

• Author: Moline, Lynn A.

The working conditions couldn't have been more deplorable. Toil from dawn until dusk in unbearably hot, steamy weather with no electricity, no fresh water, no place to take a break. Do punishing physical labor with inadequate tools and even less information. Eat peanut butter, cheese from a tube, apples, and candy bars for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for three days. Sleep--if that was possible--in the back of a cramped RV with no air conditioning, then get up and do it all again. Perhaps worst of all, the assignment came without warning late on a Friday afternoon when most people were looking forward to the weekend. Despite these conditions, the team worked with a level of focused and committed energy, cooperation, and enthusiasm that produced a small miracle.

Many civil servants will recognize this scenario as a disaster recovery effort, which it was (the episode transpired in the wake of Hurricane Ivan last fall in northern Florida). But this wasn't a team of civil servants. It was a group of six high-level managers accustomed to working in nice offices in a large organization. They had mobilized overnight from several cities nationwide to help a colleague whose home had been severely damaged.

Admittedly, it is relatively easy to be motivated to work hard in such extraordinary circumstances. Generating that same kind of enthusiasm is more challenging in typical workday situations that lack life or death urgency. However, the good news is that skillful leadership can replicate in the workplace many of the elements that produce the powerful motivation that emerges in extraordinary situations. Managers who understand these elements are those whose work groups are productive and engaged in all situations. Managers who don't understand them tend to attribute lack of desired results to "bad attitude" or "lack of motivation" or to other conditions they believe are out of their ability to influence. So just what is it that successful managers understand about motivating others?

Leadership is about executing strategy through others. Arguably, the most demanding aspect of the job of leadership is to get people to do what they are expected to do, and to do it well and with sufficient motivation to surmount the obstacles encountered along the way. Successful execution begins with understanding why people do what they do. Managers whose staffs work with commitment tend to understand that most people have a level of intrinsic motivation that must be sustained. According to Lionel Tiger, a professor at Rutgers University, "Leaders often forget that people arrive on the scene predisposed to doing a good job. People, like young baseball players, are hard-wired to want to be sent into the game." When managers are unaware of this reality, they often unwittingly engage in practices that actually drain employees of the motivation they brought with them to the job. This article offers some insights into how to obtain and sustain employee commitment.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MOTIVATION

Just exactly why motivation occurs and how leaders and organizations influence it has been the subject of decades of evolving analysis. Perhaps the earliest modern theorist on human motivation was Freud, who argued that people are basically lazy and must be coerced to work. Indeed, it is reported that an early 20th century training manual for U.S. Army officers warned that "enlisted men are cunning and stupid and not to be trusted." But Freud's theory has long been discounted, and common sense alone says that if it were true, managers would...