Motivate Leadership to Turn Difficult Situations into Advantage

I remember a story my mother use to tell us about how to turn a difficult situation into advantage. She taught French at a Christian school in Aleppo Syria in the 1950's. In that school, a rumbustious teenage girl was notorious for being every teacher’s nightmare.

During one of her classes, my mother was unexpectedly summoned to leave the classroom for a quick chat with the principal. She looks at the students, knowing very well what was potentially about to happen with the young troublemaker, who was in her class that year.

She beckons her over to the teacher’s desk, leans over and tells her privately, “listen, I have to leave the classroom for 5 minutes, and I don’t want the class to lose order. I want you to sit here in my chair, and watch over them until I come back. Will you do that?”

Our little hero nods firmly with a stern grimace of determination, and for the rest of the school term, she was her teacher’s watchful lieutenant.

I was 11 years old when I first heard her telling us this story, but its lesson only registered for me much later in my professional years. I started my career as a corporate technology consultant, and later became a coach helping others with leadership and interpersonal challenges in the workplace. I gave this skill a name: “motivating leadership”, the skill to invite and inspire acts of leadership in others for productive ends.

And the more I noticed it, exercised it and taught it to others, the more I began to understand “motivation” in a new light. My new understanding unconcealed an industrial mentality that underlied the common understanding of “motivation”: to produce short term excitement for employees to increase their performance and efficiency completing their tasks; an industrial revolutions practice.

"Motivating leadership" is fundamentally a different practice than common motivation. It is rather simple: Find the other person’s strength and make the space for them to exercise it, regardless of the circumstances, biases, likeness, and roles. If the situation is difficult, then this will ease it and turn it into an advantage – “making the space” means you make a specific request that invites trust and a mood of responsibility, and then, you get out of the way.

Will this practice work for everyone? Of course not. This practice is for superior leaders who are willing and able to notice the strengths of others, and not give up on producing an opportunity just because the situation (or person) presents a challenge. Unless a leader is grounded in moods of self-confidence and generosity, it is not likely he or she will be able to motivate leadership into others.

Its true value? To transform the workplace of the 21st century from a reality where people seldom stop to help others grow, to one where leaders motivate leadership for the sake of helping others personify their true potential.

How? Paying attention to others, noticing their strength, making specific requests, and trusting that they will act from responsibility and enthusiasm, and not contrived excitement.

Publisher: Ernest Stambouly's Blog - Sunday, September 25, 2016

The Hidden History of Motivation

Did you know that something sinister lurks behind "motivation" in the workplace? What is motivation about really? What is it a sign of? And why there is an entire self-help industry catering to motivating employees?

First, consider that the concept of "motivation" practically did not exist prior to year 1900. Take a close look at the notion of motivation, where it came from, and what brought it into existence. You'll be surprised! My inquiry started with a simple question: why do employees need motivation to work? Aren't we supposed to work a job that we love?

Motivation became suddenly important precisely at the turn of the 20th century. The Google Book Ngram Viewer has a puzzling story to tell us about the usage of the word "motivation". Take a look:

Although earliest occurrences of the word "motivation" date back to the 1870's, its usage sharply surged exponentially at around year 1900, all the way to 1980, at which time it flattened. Google's book scans stop at 2009, and regardless of how accurate or inaccurate they are, this is too remarkable of a surge to ignore.

This turn of the century surge correlates with the beginnings of the "second industrial revolution", a period that saw the emergence then rapid increase of books on motivation.

So, if "motivation" is a product of the industrial revolutions, why does today's professional development industry still enact its methods and speak its language? We are well into the digital age with digital natives running the workplace, not industrialists or boomers. Perhaps, just perhaps, new standards of workplace values are in order so that we produce the qualities congruent with the age.

See, well into the offices of the 1970s, efficiency and performance were the necessary qualities to instill into people and the organizational culture for the sake of increasing productivity. The reason? Because human labor was still an impactful factor on production; workers needed to be motivated to increase their performance and complete their tasks efficiently; a machine-like value inherited from the first industrial revolution. As we headed into the eighties, a substantial economic phenomenon occurred: productivity kept improving at formidable rates because we were well into the age of computers and industrial automation; US wages flattened because companies began to outsource their labor in addition to replacing human performance with machines; and as we can deduce form the graph above, the motivation industry flattened with the wages.

Today we are in the digital age, an age marked not by the need for high labor performance and efficiency, but an age marked by a succession of radical (disruptive) innovations and a stagnant employment market marked by a general dissatisfaction with the job. Therefore, resilience, not efficiency, and enthusiasm for work, not spinning faster completing tasks, are the valued currencies of the digital age. These are the two values that stand to bring freedom and prosperity to people in the digital economy because now we must adapt to the new magnitude of performance and efficiency brought forth by digital technologies.

But the digital economy is not headed in the direction of wellness and prosperity for the majority of the inhabitants of planet Earth. Bosses and managers today still behave as those of the early 1900's, they still use the industrial-age key to motivation, that people are motivated by their fears, wants, hopes, preferences, beliefs, and want for immediate gratification. So they externally evoke employees into excitement based on such motivators. This has been known in management circles, and psychologists have a name for it: “extrinsic motivation.”

Today, the challenge is to transform the work environment from workplace to workspace to include all the magnificent freedoms and capabilities that digital technologies hand us. We must exploit them for our benefit, wellness, and a life of prosperity free of toil, drudgery and struggle.

So how will we cause this transformation?

First, we must re-think the "workspace" and respect its new nature: a networked environment that must be highly adaptable to rapid change. A distributed environment that no longer requires the management and bureaucracy that were needed during the pre-Computer and pre-Internet industrial age.

Second, we must recognize the workspace not as a shoe-box looking building with cubicles and equipment, but as a social organization that invites ambition, enthusiasm, and leadership.

And finally, we need to turn attention to the person, the individual, the Self, and start to awaken innate powers that we all share, powers such as the desire to accomplish, autonomy, and a mood of iconoclasm required to purge values that are no longer needed in the workplace, values at odds with our innate powers because they were shaped according to machine-like behavior.

Now, this is all easier said than done because each of these three transformative actions represent radical shifts in how we think about our work environment. They require true knowledge of how to transform a workplace at odds with our innate powers, to one that is congruent with modern times.

Publisher: Ernest Stambouly's Blog -

How to Transform a Workplace at Odds with Our Innate Powers

If workplace "motivation" is a product of the industrial revolutions, then what is the digital age workplace anthem? There is a hidden history of motivation, which is not so hidden any more thanks to big data, that will inform us something unexpected about the very notion of motivation. When I discovered it, I decided to write about it because motivation might not be as desired and dignified in the 21st century workplace as we might lead ourselves to believe.

Pause for a moment and think about, "what aspects of your work and workplace are congruent with your innate needs for fulfillment as a human being?" By "congruent" I mean orchestrated to include the facts of our humanness, what makes us tick, what makes us satisfied with our lives. I also mean coherence with the demands and standards of the digital age.

I can think of one aspect of my life that no amount of motivation could have enhanced. In fact, the effect was to the contrary. I'll explain.

We all share a magical innate power: the desire to accomplish. I’ve seen it when people “motivate leadership” in others, instead of motivating tasks. Motivating leadership is the skill of inviting acts of leadership for productive ends, especially in difficult and contentious situations. Motivating leadership does not play on the want for immediate gratification, or people's fears, as common motivation does. Rather, it trusts and relies on one’s internally generated enthusiasm for the desire to accomplish. Making the difference between the two is an act of transformation.

I’ll explain why.

I recently decided to create a seminar on “motivating leadership” because I wanted to help others acquire this empowering ability that I had learned from my Mom. But I knew it was not going to be another basic motivational leadership seminar, the kind where you’d typically hear things like, “The best leaders don't motivate their people. The best leaders excel at learning how to keep their people from becoming demotivated.” But this industrial motivation is not at all what I have in mind because this is precisely what will no longer work in the modern economy of the 21st century.

What best serves the workplace of the 21st century is a work culture that questions what is demotivating “their people” in the first place. A culture that promotes a way of working that is not at odds with our innate powers. The younger generations are readily attuned to their innate powers, and there is plenty of evidence that they eschew the old ways of the workplace.

When we move from externally evoked excitement, positive or negative, to internally generated enthusiasm, an act of transformation is brought into existence. Psychologists distinguish the two as “extrinsic motivation” and “intrinsic motivation”, respectively.

Let me make the contrast felt for a moment. When we say “excitement”, think teenagers. When we say “enthusiasm”, think man or woman on a mission. Excitement is, “Oh ma gad! Look at that thing.” Enthusiasm, “Goooood morning sunshine, let’s go! I can’t wait to get started.”

But there is great difficulty in intrinsic motivation because it requires we awaken our innate power and shift attention to our desire to accomplish in the midst of our workdays overloaded with task-oriented busy schedules. And this awakening is precisely what I focused on when designing the Motivating Leadership Seminar.

So “If this shift is about awakening," you might ask, "then what made this innate power go dormant?”

To begin looking at this question, all you have to do is listen closely and attentively to the sound of the workplace today, with focus on the language utilized in meeting rooms, throughout the industries that serve the workplace, and that of the trade press, which perpetuates the language.

The predominant language is loaded with disembodied metaphors and recycled narratives that don't really mean anything. It sounds something like this: “Think outside the ‘box’ to design a ‘process’ and a ‘framework’ to ‘streamline activities’ and ‘drive efficiency’ so that we ‘disrupt’ our market. And so on. And so on.

It is a language that invites a mechanistic existence because it is disembodied and devoid of real actionable content. One that favors high efficiency and performance, and fueled by a motivation industry that wants to help employers “keep their people from becoming demotivated” — by resorting to extrinsic motivation. Why is no one talking about what is demotivating “their people” in the first place? There must be something in their environment demotivating them, yes?

People get demotivated because the ethos and language of the workplace today is at odds with our innate needs and powers. If we look at ourselves, our bodies, and our social organizations, little that we do to be free and lead a good life has anything to do with driving efficiency or streamlined processes. Our well-being rests on fulfilling our needs to exercise, play, socialize, interact with dignity, act creatively, create aesthetic surroundings, and work together to take care of concerns of family, community, business, and the world.

So how do we replace today’s workplace with what will work best, spreading into the workspaces of the 21st century? People must stop giving importance to sustaining a mechanistic workplace for the sake of high efficiency, and instead, start giving more importance to what feels right for them: a sense of purpose, autonomy, and personal accomplishment, all of which are intrinsic motivators. These are the true human motivators, so powerful, that when exercised by enough people in an organization will transform the workplace into one that is in harmony with their inner powers.

Look for these motivators within yourself, and pay attention to other's strengths when motivating leadership. In my life and line of work, this recipe always produced a much more productive, healthy, and desired context for everyone to be fulfilled in their work.

To my understanding, this is the way transformation happens because, after all, social and business organizations are people interacting, helping, and carrying conversations with one another. The rest is scaffolding: the desk, walls, windows, computers and processes, all are things that do not transform on their own. Transformation only happens within us.

Publisher: Ernest Stambouly's Blog - Friday, September 16, 2016