Motivate Others

Stop Criticizing Upper Management

This is a huge temptation: distancing yourself from your own superiors. Maybe you do this to win favor and create bonding at the victim level with the team, but it won’t work. In fact, what you have done will eventually damage the confidence of the team. It will send three messages that are very damaging to morale and motivation:

1. This organization can’t be trusted.
2. Our own management is against us.
3. Yours truly, your own team leader, is weak and powerless in the organization. Read more…

Be the Cause, Not the Effect

A masterful motivator of others asks, “What do we want to cause to happen today? What do we want to produce?” Those are the best management questions of all. People who have a hard time managing people simply have a hard time asking themselves those two questions, because they’re always thinking about what’s happening to them instead of what they’re going to cause to happen.
When your people see you as a cause instead of an effect, it won’t be hard to teach them to think the same way.Soon, you will be causing them to play far beyond their own self-concepts.
You can cause that to happen. But it all comes from who you are being from moment to moment. A producer or a critic? Read more…

Tune In Before You Turn On

You can’t motivate someone who can’t hear you. If what you’re saying is bouncing off their psychological armor, it makes little difference how good you are at saying it. You are not being heard. Your people have to hear you to be moved by you.
In order for someone to hear you, she must first be heard. It doesn’t work the other way around. It doesn’t work when you always go first because your employee must first appreciate that you are on her wavelength and understand
her thinking completely.
We were working with a financial services CEO named Lance who had difficulties with his four-woman major account team. They didn’t care for him and didn’t trust him, and they dreaded every meeting with him because he would go over their shortcomings. Read more…

Teach Self-Discipline

The myth that nearly everyone believes is that we “have” self-discipline. It’s something in us, like a genetic gift, that we either have or we don’t.
The truth is that we can all “have” self-discipline. The question is really whether or not we learn to develop and use self-discipline.
Here’s another way to realize it: Self-discipline is like a language. Any child can learn a language. (All children do learn a language, actually.) Any 90-year-old can also learn a new language. If you are 9 or 90 and you’re lost in the rain in Juarez, it works when you use some Spanish to find your way to warmth and safety. It works.
In this case, Spanish is like self-discipline in that you are using it for something. You were not born with the language, but you can learn it and use it. In fact, you can use as much or as little as you wish. Read more…

Know Where Motivation Comes From

There was a manager who came early to a seminar we were presenting on leadership. He was attired in an olive green polo shirt and white pleated slacks, ready for a day of golf.
He walked to the front of the room and said, “Look, your session is not mandatory, so I’m not planning on attending.”
“That’s fine, but I wonder why you came early to this session to tell us that. There must be something that you’d like to know.”
“Well, yes, there is,” the manager confessed. “All I want to know is how to get my people on the sales team to improve. How do I manage them?”
“Is that all you want to know?”
“Yes, that’s it,” declared the manager.
“Well, we can save you a lot of time and make sure that you get to your golf game on time.”
The manager leaned forward, waiting for the words of wisdom that he could extract about how to manage his people. Read more…

Mengembalikan Jati Diri Bangsa

Mengembalikan Jati Diri Bangsa
oleh Yulie Apsari

MENGEMBALIKAN JATI DIRI BANGSA

“ Mengembalikan jati diri bangsa ” Hhmm, frase yang menarik nih, dan di kepala mulai berputaran pertanyaan demi pertanyaan. Kenapa ya… kok kata yang diambil jadi lokomotif kalimat itu justru kata “ mengembalikan ”… apakah jati diri bangsa ini ada yang pinjam? Apa iya pernah dipinjamkan..? atau justru kita yang pinjam dari pihak lain sampai harus dikembalikan…? Ada apa yah dengan jati diri bangsa kita…? Bicara jati diri, pastinya berhubungan dengan konsep pengenalan diri. Tentang “apa” dan “siapa” sebenarnya bangsa ini. Secara umum kita mengenali bangsa ini sebagai bangsa yang religious, ramah, santun, jujur, berakhlak mulia dan berkebudayaan tinggi, pokoknya… semua yang bagus-bagus adalah jati diri bangsa kita, setuju kan…? Potensi yang kita miliki sangat luar biasa dari mulai negara dengan bentuk kepulauan, sumber daya alamnya, juga sumber daya manusianya. Walaupun setiap potensi itu disisi lain juga menjadi tantangan (atau hambatan ?) tersendiri… (there’s always another sides for everything.. right…? ). Nah.. itu gambaran umum jati diri bangsa kita, indah banget ya, semua bagus-bagus plus segenap potensi yang (nyaris) unlimited… Trus… apa dong yang kira-kira bikin bangsa ini kok kehilangan sifat-sifat baiknya? Lihat berapa banyak kasus korupsi? eksploitasi alam? gaya pergaulan anak muda sekarang? Semua itu bikin kita harus menghela napas dalam-dalam… atau dengan ekspresif mengelus dada.  Hhhmm… moral-kah jawabannya???

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