Why Leadership is Better Than Motivation
The following is adapted from The Motivation Trap: Leadership Strategies to Achieve Sustained Success by John Hittler
Many business leaders rely on motivation to produce results. What does this involve? Essentially, it comes down to one of two things. The first is geeing up the team with pep talks and promises of rewards. The second is making it clear that poor performance will not be tolerated.
Both of these approaches come from you — the team leader — and show up as an effort to convince your team members to buy into your agenda. In the short term, motivation occasionally has its uses, but in the longer term it’s exhausting and ineffective.
Attempting to lead your team through motivation will drain your energy, requiring you to institute larger and larger rewards or punishments to attain the same effect. For your team, the impact of motivation will soon fall, leaving them disgruntled and performing poorly.
How does leadership differ from motivation? Let’s consider the background and etymology of the word lead. The word comes from a German root and means “to guide.” Other distinctions include “to march at the head of,” “go before as a guide,” “accompany and show the way,” and “carry on.”
Can you see what these meanings all have in common? They place the leader at the head of his or her team, lighting the way for others to follow. Do you show the way physically, demonstratively, and ethically? Do you march at the head of the troops? Do you carry on, especially when challenges present themselves? In its earliest usage, the leader held the flag at the front of a battle or procession. Do you carry the flag for your team, organization, or family? Leaders do so — willingly.
In its purest form, leadership is always transformational. That is, we are changed for having followed the leader. We have simply become different — better or worse — than when we started. Leadership takes us to places that we would not otherwise go.
This isn’t always a positive shift. Notice what happens when we are forced or required to follow a leader we did not choose, such as a corrupt politician or CEO or a team leader who has attained their position via nepotism or favoritism. We may tolerate a leader of this kind, but we do not give them our heart or follow them with real enthusiasm. Their ability to transform us is compromised by a lack of ethics, direction, validity, or ability.
Authentic leaders rarely concern themselves with the credit they will receive. They gladly share it with their team. Sharing credit and staying out front in a manner that others want to follow works much more powerfully than imposing an external stimulant upon individuals and teams.
No Book Can Teach You How to Lead
If you’re looking to develop your leadership skills, you may be tempted to read some of the many books available on the subject.
These cover every possible aspect of leadership. Some are autobiographical stories of how a business or political leader accomplished some feat or achievement. Others are Harvard Business Review–type case studies detailing the latest research on the most effective way to lead. Often a magic number is part of the process, such as “the seven steps to better leadership” or “the five required attributes to become a more effective leader.” Most include a recipe of sorts that will supposedly show the reader how to become a leader according to the author’s model.
If you’ve read one, did you find that it contradicted the last one you read? Funny how that works. One year the most popular or best-selling leadership model becomes the one that companies want to teach and implement into their organization and teams. The next year, we all attend training or create a study group around the new best approach to leadership, or the three steps, versus the five or seven steps, to effective leadership.
The game never ends, and the theme of leadership continues to draw lots of attention, as we lack great leaders in our society and our businesses. The new models will not cease to show up on bestseller lists. Read all of them, if you like.
Unfortunately, there’s a catch with all of these models: None of us are wired like the author who created or espoused the latest and greatest leadership model. If you led like the author, you would need to be exactly like that author in many other aspects — same personality, same core values, perhaps even the same type of business. Just combining those three factors, the chances of you looking, talking, or acting like the creator of that leadership model are more far-fetched than winning the lottery!
Are you introverted (or extroverted) like the author of the last best-selling leadership book you read? Do you marinate on decisions, as one author might, or shoot from the hip, like another author promotes as his leadership “secret”? Do you tell stories? Use charts, graphs, and statistics? If you are a charts- and-graphs person who “learns to lead better” by telling great stories, chances are you will end up telling lots of pretty mediocre stories, because that is not your strong suit.
The key here is that you can listen to and learn from all kinds of leadership tactics and success stories, and for you to lead in any capacity, you will most likely have to develop the authentic style that represents most fully who you are at your core.
Why try to learn to become someone you are not? Learning someone else’s model — custom-made for them but not you — sounds incredibly exhausting, like trying to motivate instead of inspiring people.
Imagine you are a “thinker” and decide that going with your gut is one of the keys to effective leadership. What will happen? My guess is that your stress level will rise significantly and your decision-making ability will deteriorate dramatically Why? You will be going against the grain of how you are hardwired.
If an advantage you hold is your ability to consider decisions fully before making them, and suddenly you are making decisions in rapid-fire fashion, watch out! In short, you are not being your authentically best or most powerful self, and when that occurs, trouble often follows.
Developing Your Leadership Abilities
If you want to step off the motivation treadmill and rely on leadership, you will need to discover your own personal leadership style, guided by your highest values.
So how can you lead?
In the end, there is only one manner of authentic leadership: being yourself! Connect with your highest values and talents and simply live those values and talents every day. When you lead by being yourself, you lead authentically. You can be vocal or quiet. You can be action oriented or a deep thinker. The attributes matter little as long as they are authentic to who you are. You will have people follow your lead out of respect and admiration for who their leader is becoming as a full expression of his highest values.
Regardless of what those highest values are, people follow those who live their values every day, even when they do not necessarily share the exact values with their leader. Live your values and exercise talents, and you lead authentically, in a manner that others will want to follow.
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For more advice on leadership, you can find The Motivation Trap on Amazon.
John Hittler is the cofounder of Evoking Genius, a transformational business-coaching firm based in San Jose, California. Father of seven, happily married, competitive athlete, and dedicated volunteer in the field of domestic violence, John spends his free time dancing Tango with his wife, cooking for his friends and family, and traveling to places he has not yet visited. John can be reached at evokinggenius.com.
