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.

Share

Tweet