For motivation to be sustainable in the long run, it should spring from within each member of an organization or a team. Motivation is manageable. It is a quality of management and not a strategy. Gary Hamel, the well known author and first in the rankings of the Wall Street Journal for the thinker of 2010, says that the key to a company’s long-term success lies in its quality of management rather than its strategies or products. Undoubtedly, motivation constitutes a high priority area of management.

1. How and Why are people Motivated?
• In motivating employees for achieving company goals, they should be convinced that it is attainable and that it would benefit them personally.
• Mathew Kelly, through The Dream Manager portrays the realities of how and why employees are motivated. This masterpiece, though a work of fiction that nevertheless would count among all time greats in literature on leadership, brings to real life how a company plagued with a problem of high labor turnover and losing profits turned around within months of hiring a “dream manager” who worked devotedly to help workers achieve their personal life goals. It presents an altogether revolutionary concept of what management and leadership is, and emphasizes the ability to recognize the dreams of those that we lead as a critical role of leadership to inspire and motivate them to ultimately help us achieve our own goals.

2. Basic Requirements for Motivating and Sustaining It:
• Enlightened leadership has a big role to play in motivating and sustaining it. A leader should have a good track record for being genuine (one that never stays after normal hours cannot motivate others to work overtime.)
• An ethical leader would not seek cheap popularity from the team players by criticizing the top management.
• Since motivation has to ultimately spring from within the employees and not from you, have a company policy to screen and hire self-motivated people wherever possible.
• A new leader has to work harder to win the confidence of the team players. He or she should be sensitive to changing options and priorities, and responsive to new ideas, and capable of assessing situations and individuals quickly and realistically.
• Explain how a new project would benefit them; but guard against weaving fairy tales that show through.
• Devise an action plan and encourage employee feedbacks, constructive criticism and alternative suggestions.
• Show appreciation for suggestions however trivial; and reward ones that contribute to improvements.
• Show sincerity of purpose. Be responsive to their needs and eager to resolve them. Give them your ear first to get them to give their ears to you.
• Once a project gets underway, be on the constant alert for constraints, bottlenecks, signs of frustrations, and slackening or lack of interest among participants. Take immediate remedial action.
• When things go wrong, ascertain the reasons thereto calmly by talking to those concerned in a genuine troubleshooting and understanding attitude. Avoid subjecting anybody to humiliation. If this reveals any square pegs in round holes, switch tasks/positions and transfer them to activities more suited to their respective skills and temperaments. They will be grateful for having helped them to “discover themselves” and giving them a new confidence, a renewed sense of purpose and an opportunity to mend, to be useful and shine. (Nobody wants to be a drag on the team and attract the contempt and humiliation of others.)
• Control burnouts and fatigue – manage workload, work balance and keep focused on results and priorities.
• While making it plain to all very firmly that there is no room for whiners and wiggle room for the lazy, a tactical leader would try to show the carrot first before showing the stick.
• Instill a sense of purpose and pride in belonging to a winning team. Organizing unofficial get-togethers, trips, sporting events that would help further strengthen existing bonds and understandings. Make use of these unofficial occasions to conduct games whereby you could slyly arrange (to look as if by chance) to make some players to present items according to their varying talents. This would help some earlier unknown and lost characters to gain immediate recognition, admiration and acceptance among their teammates. It is good for building up self-confidence, enhancing morale and team spirit while keeping up and sustaining the motivational levels.

Sustaining Motivation under Stressful Conditions:

There are two types of stress that affect employees for attainment of goals.

(i) Stresses and constraints caused by external market conditions, especially during prolonged periods of economic downturn:
• At times of falling markets, employees are easily de-motivated through fears of possible pay cuts, redundancies and layoffs. Take them to your confidence and invite suggestions for improvisations, if not for mere survival. Many firms survive such bad periods through different strategies including diversification and replacement of unprofitable ventures with new ones with better market sustainability even at reduced profit margins.
• While excessive stress can retard motivation, some reasonable level of stress helps inspire extra hard work, and even some creativity and innovation to survive first, before achieving objectives. Too little stress also works against motivation by making employees take things easy, lose interest and move to comfort zones and stay put.
• A leader who is constantly in the fire-fighting mode cannot sustain motivation especially during stressful periods.

(ii) Stresses caused by limitations in individual skills and aptitudes for different types of work
• The nature of stress differs among individuals (for example one may have a phobia for doing presentations whereas another may thrive on it.) For better motivation, it is the level of perceived stress within individuals that need to be managed, and not the events or the situations.

Motivational Exercises & Team Building Ideas:
The Helium Stick Team Building Activity is a fun way a team can learn how to get motivated as a team rather than as individuals. Find this fun activity aptly described in http://www.sustainable-employee-motivation.com/the-helium-stick-team-building-activity1.html
Team building and employee motivation should happen as a regular or periodical feature just like a sports team having regular training and practices.
Continuous motivation is maximized by a leader conducting debriefing and feedback sessions to link and relate what is learned through games and metaphors to the actual activities at the real workplace. These exercises help enhance camaraderie, team spirit, better understanding, and communications amongst the team members with the emphasis on keeping focused on goals, objectives, members’ skills and available resources. Dr. Gardener, a great thinker with a high rating from the Wall Street Journal, in his Frames of Mind – The Theory of Multiple Intelligences advocates such motivation building training programs to be incorporated with data, visual images and stories to reach out to people with different approaches.
Interventions for team building exercises may be followed by about 30 minute interviews with each player to find out how they feel about one another, how they react to mistakes by others as against their own, how they cooperate with one another in others’ difficulties etc. You may frame your own questions to suit the situation and obtain such vital feedback information from all players to have the motivational levels under constant check.

One good question to ask is whether they would leave the organization if offered a similar or higher pay elsewhere. The answer we get, perhaps with a little more probing, would sum up to what extent the firm has or has not succeeded in motivating and sustaining motivation as regards its employees.

Being a real dynamic leader rather than a play-safe leader means moving out of your comfort zone and exposing yourself to all types of pressures from within your own community as much as from the external sources. Even during normal times, the relentless pressures of it are enough to make you feel friendless, isolated, and highly vulnerable; but at times of economic downturns and market crashes, you could be stretched to the limits of your endurance and resourcefulness.

At such times you may be blinded by the pressures in seeing beyond your self-imprisonment within your own accountabilities and responsibilities. These are times when even the most ambitious real leaders have to restrain themselves and lie low to tide over hazardous situations to come back strongly to fight another day instead of sinking under the pressures of impossible circumstances.

For a leader setting his/her goals on steering an organization from sustained growth and mediocre greatness to spectacular growth to be at least “one of the greats in the industry” (if not the greatest), such feats cannot be achieved by playing safe all the time. Such success only favor the brave and the ones who are willing to take calculated risks and make quick decisions and stick by them however critical and unpopular they may be. Such leaders are essentially the big dreamers with an insatiable yearning for challenge, unlimited potential for imagination and innovativeness, and a knack for spotting opportunities and grabbing them at the correct time. They will be leaders who are not afraid to make mistakes and profit from them as part of their learning and development. They will of course be inspirational leaders of men and not mere managers of functions.

Playing safe should be an exception rather than the rule for any dynamic leader.

Now, let us look at a real life example of a CEO who called a halt to the play safe policies his firm had been pursuing for some years and started adopting an aggressive approach to pull it back to the top from the depths it had fallen into, as a result.

Safeway stopped playing it safe to revert back to the top:

In the early 1980s, Safeway, the world’s largest food retailer was on a downslide with regional chain giants like Randall’s, Rayley’s, Giant Foods and Tom Thumb already eating into its market shares in Houston, Washington, Sacramento and Dallas respectively. Safeway’s 6.6% market share in Los Angeles in 1980 was less than half of what it was in 1970. Analysts view this situation as the outcome of a timid leadership oriented strategies Safeway had been following since the 1970s, especially with regard to blind adherence to government regulations, reluctance to advertise and match competitors’ prices with aggressive discounts.

Taking over the reins as CEO in 1980, Peter A. Magowan immediately set about making drastic changes. The following figures bear testimony to the impact his dynamic leadership made on the turnaround of Safeway to be a market leader once again: The three-year period 1978 to 1981 saw Safeway’s net income plummeting by 32%; but by 1982, it was already recovering by recording a massive 47% improvement over 1981. The company stock had more than doubled in value over the last three years. While acknowledging the change in the company’s strategies and performance, Magowan shied away from taking the full credit himself by saying that it was the management team as a whole and not the CEO who took all the decisions.

The changes he brought about through creative retailing did not come direct from textbooks, but through his experience in the marketplace. He had left John Hopkins in 1968 to join Safeway as an Assistant Store Manager, where he worked his way up to be its CEO within 12 years. Commenting on Safeway’s success since becoming its CEO, Magowan says that Safeway had a tendency not to experiment; and that they would watch what someone else would do and copy it cautiously if it appeared to be a good idea. He further states that they had to become more aggressive merchants and get price-competitive, drop their over-reliance on private labels and engage in experimentation.

In Organizing Genius, Bennis and Beiderman say, “The best thing a leader can do for a Great Group is to allow its members to discover their greatness,” referring to a leadership with ego and servant hood in equilibrium. It is the right environment for great groups (teams) to come up with groundbreaking innovations. Patrick Lencioni, best-selling author, in his book, “The Five Temptations of a CEO,” highlights ego as one.

Disney envisioned hitherto undreamt of possibilities to build a financial empire; but it was too complex for him to execute single-handed and hired hundreds of others with varying skills to assemble his dream and make it work. If Disney were too egoistic as to be the solo shining star, and lacking in humility to share the glory with others, his dream would never have found fulfillment. Humility at times could be a Hobson’s choice; an outlook forced on a leader due to his/her inability to realize a vision except through collaboration or teamwork.

Jim Collins, author of “Good to Great,” who is credited with having developed the concept of “Level 5” leadership, identifies the Level 5 group as leaders who can “channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company. Their ambition is first and foremost for the institutions, not themselves.”

We often see some high-profile CEOs dominating news headlines bragging about their own strategies and importance; but really great leaders remain faceless and in the shadows focused on the successes of their organizations rather than their own.

Steve Job’s (Co-founder and present CEO of Apple Inc.) career provides a good example of a leader/innovator gone through the metamorphosis from a highly egoist approach to a present more down-to-earth approach bordering humility. Steve had always been an exceptionally brilliant designer/innovator. However, his highly egoist approach alienated even his close work allies from him. Finally, he was let go from the company he founded by the very person he hired to jointly manage it! After being thrown into the wilderness, he again worked his way up founding 2 great new companies in Pixar and NeXT while continuing with his innovative and designing brilliance.

Several years later (in June 2005), addressing graduates at the Stanford University, Steve said, “I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.” Continuing, he went on to say, “Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance,” in an obvious reference to Apple’s iPod, iTunes etc.

Being fired from Apple taught Steve many important lessons; and he re-emerged with a healthier ego – that keeps one from thinking too highly or too humbly about oneself. The finale to this episode comes through a picture of Steve Jobs appearing on the front cover of a recent Fortune magazine; but by contrast, he is portrayed with a small group of people on a two-spread inside. This conveys that Steve has transformed from an egoistic state to a more moderate state of humility. We also have a lesson to learn: humility serves as a powerful antidote to an unhealthy ego. We have two options for greater achievements: do we humble ourselves, or wait till life humbles us?

President Anwar Sadat of Egypt had a unique way of winning over bargaining international opponents by employing an approach akin to humility that is called “labeling” in professional circles. His modus operandi was to flatter the opposing negotiators by telling them that their country and the people were held in high esteem worldwide for their cooperativeness and fair mindedness; giving them a label of reputation that they would feel obliged to uphold. Thus, President Sadat succeeded in indirectly transforming the opponents’ decisions and courses of action to be compatible with what he really wanted. Even Henry Kissinger, the master negotiator said in 1982 that he was highly impressed and sometimes amazed at the way President Sadat managed to get his own way at international negotiating tables.

There is no doubt that humility triumphs far more often than the ego. Ego is an obstacle for a leader to achieve to his/her best potential. Humility opens minds and creates opportunities for change. It can act as a bridge for turning silence or bitter argument into vigorous rewarding debate.

For motivation to be sustainable in the long run, it should spring from within each member of an organization or a team. Motivation is manageable. It is a quality of management and not a strategy. Gary Hamel, the well known author and first in the rankings of the Wall Street Journal for the thinker of 2010, says that the key to a company’s long-term success lies in its quality of management rather than its strategies or products. Undoubtedly, motivation constitutes a high priority area of management.

How and Why are people Motivated?
• In motivating employees for achieving company goals, they should be convinced that it is attainable and that it would benefit them personally.
• Mathew Kelly, through The Dream Manager portrays the realities of how and why employees are motivated. This masterpiece, though a work of fiction that nevertheless would count among all time greats in literature on leadership, brings to real life how a company plagued with a problem of high labor turnover and losing profits turned around within months of hiring a “dream manager” who worked devotedly to help workers achieve their personal life goals. It presents an altogether revolutionary concept of what management and leadership is, and emphasizes the ability to recognize the dreams of those that we lead as a critical role of leadership to inspire and motivate them to ultimately help us achieve our own goals.

Basic Requirements for Motivating and Sustaining It:
• Enlightened leadership has a big role to play in motivating and sustaining it. A leader should have a good track record for being genuine (one that never stays after normal hours cannot motivate others to work overtime.)
• An ethical leader would not seek cheap popularity from the team players by criticizing the top management.
• Since motivation has to ultimately spring from within the employees and not from you, have a company policy to screen and hire self-motivated people wherever possible.
• A new leader has to work harder to win the confidence of the team players. He or she should be sensitive to changing options and priorities, and responsive to new ideas, and capable of assessing situations and individuals quickly and realistically.
• Explain how a new project would benefit them; but guard against weaving fairy tales that show through.
• Devise an action plan and encourage employee feedbacks, constructive criticism and alternative suggestions.
• Show appreciation for suggestions however trivial; and reward ones that contribute to improvements.
• Show sincerity of purpose. Be responsive to their needs and eager to resolve them. Give them your ear first to get them to give their ears to you.
• Once a project gets underway, be on the constant alert for constraints, bottlenecks, signs of frustrations, and slackening or lack of interest among participants. Take immediate remedial action.
• When things go wrong, ascertain the reasons thereto calmly by talking to those concerned in a genuine troubleshooting and understanding attitude. Avoid subjecting anybody to humiliation. If this reveals any square pegs in round holes, switch tasks/positions and transfer them to activities more suited to their respective skills and temperaments. They will be grateful for having helped them to “discover themselves” and giving them a new confidence, a renewed sense of purpose and an opportunity to mend, to be useful and shine. (Nobody wants to be a drag on the team and attract the contempt and humiliation of others.)
• Control burnouts and fatigue – manage workload, work balance and keep focused on results and priorities.
• While making it plain to all very firmly that there is no room for whiners and wiggle room for the lazy, a tactical leader would try to show the carrot first before showing the stick.
• Instill a sense of purpose and pride in belonging to a winning team. Organizing unofficial get-togethers, trips, sporting events that would help further strengthen existing bonds and understandings. Make use of these unofficial occasions to conduct games whereby you could slyly arrange (to look as if by chance) to make some players to present items according to their varying talents. This would help some earlier unknown and lost characters to gain immediate recognition, admiration and acceptance among their teammates. It is good for building up self-confidence, enhancing morale and team spirit while keeping up and sustaining the motivational levels.

The leaders need to sustain motivation under Stressful Conditions. In diverse teams, stress may be caused by limitations in individual skills and aptitudes for different types of work. The nature of stress differs among individuals (for example one may have a phobia for doing presentations whereas another may thrive on it.) For better motivation, it is the level of perceived stress within individuals that need to be managed, along with the events or the situations. The events or the situations causing stress can be well managed by risk management techniques and/or collaboration techniques with clear expectations.

All of them carry high credentials and are well acclaimed great thinkers of the world. They co-create today, the “best practices for tomorrow”. All of them are recipients of high accolades from such prestigious and influential business magazines/websites as Wall Street Journal, Fortune Magazine, Thinkers50.com, Amazon.com and many more. The receipts of their accolades have mainly coincided with respective times of publication of some of their groundbreaking works; and sometimes over several years consecutively.

• Strategic intent according to Hamel & Prahalad is a passion or an obsession built into the vision of a firm as to encourage leveraging resources to achieve seemingly impossible goals. E.g., the post war period saw a dramatic rise in Japanese companies that carried and sustained obsessive ambitions over long periods that would have been considered highly unrealistic in the Western countries, given their limited resources and undeveloped capabilities.
• Core Competency is the initial brainchild of Michael Porter put forward as part of “Porter’s Five Forces”. It deals with crucial factors that give added value to a firm enabling it to gain and sustain a competitive advantage over its rivals. In 1980, Porter looked at it from an “outside-in” angle (where the starting point comprise of the combination of the factors of the market, competition and the customer) whereas in 1990, Hamel and Prahalad looked at it from an “inside-out” perspective (starting from the core competencies in the possession of a firm). Hamel and Prahalad argue that since a firm’s ability to keep producing at a lower cost ahead of its rivals is the key factor in fighting and beating market competitiveness in the long run, it should be the point from which to start building forward. An organization scores a competitive advantage over its rivals by the way it coordinates and integrates multiple core competencies in providing consumer benefits. The extent to which it can be widely leveraged to different products and markets, and in ways that is difficult for rivals to imitate, count a lot.
• The “Value Chain” is another significant concept created by Porter, and is a way of looking at how a competitive advantage may be developed by a firm. The “chain” comprise of “primary” and “support” activities that culminate in contributing to the creation and building of total value. It is an integral part of Core Competencies.

Renee Mauborgne co-authored “Blue Ocean Strategy – How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant” with Chan Kim (2005). It sold over 2 million copies and has been translated into 41 languages (most foreign languages ever achieved). She is the highest placed woman on Thinkers 50, which ranked her among the top ten most influential business thinkers in the world in years 2007 and 2009.

Whereas almost all business gurus hitherto concentrated on how to fight the competition posed by rivals, she pioneered research on how to eliminate competition!

Blue Ocean Strategy
Firms fight one another for a competitive advantage and a better market share over a pool of shrinking profits. These “red ocean strategies” offer less favorable possibilities of growth for future years.

Conversely, “blue ocean strategies” work on the concept of avoiding competition by creating new demand by innovating entirely new products/services with ample uncontested free market space for growth over the next many years. This is also called “value innovation”.

(i) By introducing the assembly line, Ford replaced skilled workmen with unskilled laborers. The efficiency of this new innovation helped Ford to reduce the assembly time of a particular model of car from 21 days to 4 days and cut labor hours by 60%. Innovations can eliminate competition by creating and shifting demand.
(ii) Deccan Airlines introduced a new scheme of low priced ticketing for Indian Airlines, thus creating a new uncontested space for growth. With other airlines also gradually imitating their low pricing scheme, competition gradually return making it a red ocean. It shows that companies need to be innovating continuously to maintain the blue ocean status.
(iii) Automobile giants were engaged in a fierce battle for making a more fuel-efficient car with less environmental pollution when Reva introduced an electric car creating a blue ocean for itself.
(iv) Aravind Eye Hospital introduced a very low cost eye surgery scheme by getting their doctors to perform a very high number of operations to keep the cost per patient down. It resulted in netting in many new patients by making it possible for low-income groups also to enter private hospitals for medical treatment.

There is the classic example of the “Half filled Glass of Milk” to illustrate the contradictory perceptions of an optimist and a pessimist on an identical situation. The optimist sees a glass half full of milk whereas the pessimist sees it as a half empty glass of milk. Both are factually correct, but idealistically different. Optimists are focused on the brighter side of things and are forward-looking exploring for opportunities to achieving more while pessimists are more concerned with the obstacles on the way and the “futility” (as they see it) of trying to overcome them.

Dr. Martin Seligman, Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania has done groundbreaking research on optimism and related human attitudes. In his book titled “Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life”, he says that optimists tend to outperform pessimists in all spheres of life from professional successes to personal achievements, general well-being and longevity.

Studies further reveal that optimists or pessimists are not born, but made from their past experiences, training received in looking at things in a positive or negative perspective, and the ability to shift from one view to the other as necessary. So the good news is that any pessimist can become an optimist with proper training. The capacity to be an optimist at one time and a pessimist at another, depending on the situation presented, is the best approach.

Let us now look at some practical aspects of optimism.

 Can optimism lead to a downfall of a firm?
A pessimistic leader, by viewing a challenge through the eyes of his or her bad past experiences sends negative signals down the line, adversely affecting morale, resolve and motivation. No organization can prosper under such poor leadership attributes. However, an optimist with self-motivation and positive thinking achieves the impossible by looking at the same goal as a challenge to be accomplished and taking positive action to achieve it. This does not mean that you could achieve anything by being simply optimistic. Being overly optimistic as to set prices too high above the market demand could result in loss of sales, precipitating the downfall of an enterprise. Experimenting too far with innovations solely on one’s intuition ignoring factual evidence based on modern research and IT could also spell disaster to a firm. What is required is learned optimism devoid of a tendency to rush in like fools where angels fear to tread.

 When leading an organization through a crisis, would you show up as an upbeat person to keep the motivation up?
Unless you really believe in a cause you are promoting, an assumed false bravado could show up; and if it does, it could be counter productive. A better strategy would be to keep the motivation up by all means, but put your cards on the table and bare and share the true facts with all concerned. In spurring Great Britain to war and final victory, Sir Winston Churchill only said, “I have nothing to offer, but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

 When you are cautious, you might be labeled as a pessimist – How will you overcome that perception?
Remember, when you are driving in thick fog, it is pragmatic to be more pessimistic than optimistic by visualizing realistically that a vehicle could materialize in front of your windscreen at short notice! It is how realistically you assess a situation that is more important than whether the approach is optimistic or pessimistic.

 A happy mood displayed by a leader is conducive to increasing productivity; but, as a worthy leader, would you display a happy mood in this present economic setup? If so, how will you justify it?
A happy mood displayed is a reflection of the leader’s inner confidence and optimism of being in good control of the situation in hand. There is not much of a difference in the outcome of events through optimistic or pessimistic thinking only. It is actually through the productive action set in motion through your optimism or the inaction through pessimism that makes the ultimate difference. Henry Ford once said, “If you think you can, or you think you can’t, you are right.” Even under the most uncompromising situations, a great leader should have the capacity to see the light at the end of the tunnel, apprise and motivate the teammates, assess the situation realistically and map out the escape route, and continue with the happy mood while executing the options of hibernation, action, inaction and their precise timing appropriately.

No person is an island. We need to be connecting with various people all the time in our personal as well as official lives. There is no such thing as the right people to connect to. Everybody has some role to play and a contribution to make in their own spheres of life that can have an impact on ours too at the most unexpected times. Therefore reaching out and connecting with people is universal should be a continuous process.

On the personal side, its much easier to see who connects better with people than some others. Call it whatever you like: empathy, a genuine interest in others, body language, eye contact, poise, self-assurance, tactfulness, transparency and integrity; there is no doubt that all or some of these traits make some people better connectors with their counterparts than others who lack such attributes. They apply just the same whether it is to do with your personal lives or in the fostering of good social, cultural, business or political relationships.

Tom Peters, the author of “In Search of Excellence” and many other international best sellers, believes that women generally connect with people better than men. Does that mean that women would make better liaison officers, leaders and the like for businesses and all types of important projects? Going by the famous women who have, or who still continue to dominate the American scene with their highly influential and successful roles in social, public and international affairs at the highest levels like Condoleezza Rice, Hilary Clinton, Ophra Winfrey and Angelina Jolie, just to name a few, bear adequate testimony to its truth.

5 Steps for Connecting Effectively with People:

 Take the Initiative to Move Towards People:
Most people tend to stay in a shell due to fear of being rejected, or lack self-confidence and a vision. You need to drive away their fears, and arouse them into action in order to tap their true potential.

Ask the right questions to encourage them to come out with their thoughts and aspirations. By so doing, you can indiscreetly help them to release their pent-up emotions and frustrations, for which they will become more attached and endeared to you.

Doing a favor to a person initially can clinch many favors in return later.

“You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.” – Zig Ziglar, the American salesperson, author and motivational speaker.

 Searching for Common Interests and Getting Familiar:
Starting a chat on a topic of common interest or at least one of possible or known interest to the targeted person is a very effective approach to drawing a person out of its shell to the open. Once the ice is broken, let he or she be the star speaker; and you, only the enthralled listener. You have to cherish other person’s desire to express him or herself over and above your urge to drive home your own high points. When it comes to your turn to do the talking, maybe at a later time, the other party is certain to reciprocate, and give you a better hearing.

When you next meet the other party, address him or her by the first name and strike up a conversation concerning a past incident in that person’s life drawing from some past conversation between you and that person. When people see that you care about, and remember even their trivial matters, they are likely to respond more warmly and appreciatively towards you.

 Communicate from Your Heart:
People are bound to be repelled from you if you appear to be insincere, and/or not what you speak. You need to align your deeds with your words in order to be authentic and not appear as a phony.

Its human nature to respond to passion; and you can really touch other people’s hearts when your communication comes from your heart. Keep to your promises. Always try to give something more than you promise, and never less. You can build good rapport this way. It will form a good platform from which to launch your own proposals when the time comes with far better prospects of striking deals and reaching consensus and even impossible agreements.

 Share in Common Experiences:
A leader participating in unofficial and extra curricular activities and social activities like indoor and outdoor sporting events, picnics, trips, parties with the employees and particularly of the lower rung workers, can build good relationships cemented with mutual trust and respect, sooner. Such acts foster loyalty and commitment from others to the cause the leader represents. It helps enhance team spirit and rapport making communication and passing down instructions more effective and result oriented.

If you happen to give them a treat, order their favorite menus and dishes. When you have a singsong, be the first to break out with the songs that they like. Make pleasurable references to shared past incidents that you had enjoyed together, or battles you had fought together, whether in official or unofficial capacities.

Don’t criticize others in their absence. Even when charges are brought up against someone who is not present, be the first to rise up in defense and clear that person of all blame until that person is given an opportunity to clear him or herself. Showing in deed and word your sincerity, loyalty, concern and oneness with others strike sensitive chords closer to their hearts as well as those of others who hear of your acts; making them too react positively towards you in like manner.

 Acknowledge and Respect Opposing Points of View:
When you display tolerance and respect for diverse personalities and points of view, and try to accommodate people on their own terms, they too will try to reciprocate to your sensitivity, well-balanced approach and open-mindedness. In a business environment, this will foster mutual tolerance and respect for opposing ideas and views resulting in fewer confrontations with the achievement of a higher level of mutual understanding and greater peace and harmony for all. Be open to receiving and acting on feedbacks. People will always reciprocate and appreciate you when you show your appreciation of them. Encourage suggestions and constructive criticism from all quarters. Many business organizations encourage think tanks even among their lower rung employees. Some keep suggestion and complaint boxes at vantage points for anybody to contribute openly or in anonymity. Never scoff at even the seemingly silliest suggestion; there will be some idea even of little value behind most contributions from which the company may benefit. Be eager to search out for those needles of bright ideas from the haystacks and appreciate them; while openly rewarding the really good ones. Many innovations and groundbreaking improvements in industry have come about through ideas contributed by employees. These are the gifts of connecting with people positively.

Even in your personal relationships, give everybody a patient hearing and an opportunity to express themselves. What they speak reveal their sense of values. You don’t necessarily have to share in their values in their entirety; but you’ll find certain areas where you can compromise or agree on. Clarify and probe further where necessary. Don’t hesitate to apologize for any omission or mistake on your part. All these go to build solid foundations for human connectivity to prosper. Only people can make extraordinary things to happen!

Nevertheless, the main reason for most humans failing to connect well with others is due to being more concerned with being understood by others than with a genuine effort to understand others. If these priorities can be reversed, we can expect to see a big improvement in the communications and connectivity among all peoples of the world.

For our ancestors living in the bush, a sudden movement or the slightest sound at close quarters often meant death from predators or other lurking dangers. Such signals left no time for logical reasoning; but called for immediate reactions for sheer survival. These feelings and reactions that spring forth from the gut, or your inner self, we call instinct. It has not died off with time. Sportsmen/women, fire fighters and trauma physicians and the like often make the most unpredictable and seemingly suicidal moves dictated by their instincts and intuitions to completely turnaround hopeless situations in their favor and clinch ultimate glory and victory. It is true that instinctive behavior springs involuntarily and instantaneously to a given stimuli without recourse to rational thinking; but intuition is more developed and refined instinct. Prolonged periods of exposure and constructive observation combined with knowledge derived externally leads to an area of expertise where intuitional skills operate with increasing familiarity, regularity, confidence and certainty.

Successful entrepreneurs including traders in stocks and foreign currencies especially in the short term rely on their instinct, observations and intuition rather than on university degrees, management consultants, sophisticated spreadsheets, or even Monte Carlo simulations in making all the big moves that reap in millions of dollars in takings. Their intuition motivates them to buy instead of sell or enter into a deal or even go “against the wind” disregarding trend indicators and conventional procedures at times. Hunches pay off for some with more uncanny regularity than for others. On the flip side, those who play according to their hunches, gut feelings or instincts without adequate supportive exposure or knowledge, may lose heavily in a matter of seconds.

If you were to ask or read the biographies of those at the helm of most successful organizations that have made major breakthroughs in the business world like Bill Gates, Walt Disney, KFC or Oprah Winfrey; you will find that a hunch or an intuition at some stage of their development had been instrumental in catapulting them to those undreamt of dizzy heights to make them what they are today.

Constant or regular exposure to similar situations where initially you react purely by instinct, get registered in databases within your inner self so that with time, your instincts mature into intuition. Unknown to you, your inner self prompts suitable actions and solutions based on its information from the data inputs of real experiences, facts learned and combined with logical reasoning. Intuition can be developed naturally as well as academically, and it is a tremendous asset to possess. In drawing a line between instinct and intuition, birds, fish and other animals that migrate seasonally can be said to be doing so by intuition rather than instinct.

Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios had this to say about his tremendous success in the course of a commencement address delivered to graduates at the Stanford University on June 12, 2005: “I never graduated from college…. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out….  So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made…..”. Later he went to Reed College where he studied Calligraphy that he found fascinating. Of this, he said, “I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.”

Here’s a quote from Camarda, the Deputy Director for Advanced Projects for NASA’s Safety and Engineering Center at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. He played the key role in troubleshooting the cause of the Columbia space shuttle disaster in February 2003 and helped develop the technology to ensure the safety of astronauts and future shuttle flights, “Yes, you’ll look at the answers you are getting through (a lot of) computer codes, but you should also use your intuition,” .

With more practice, trusting your instincts should come easily and naturally to you. By playing the game rationally, you can continue to prosper as an entrepreneur; but you will find that your big dream always stays just out of your reach!  However, I would like to conclude with this note of caution from Malcolm Gladwell: “Intuition and instinct are by no means always right. But, they are powerful tools in your decision-making,”

The life of that great US Presidents, Abraham Lincoln, was strewn with more failures than successes all the way. Before being elected president in 1860, he tasted defeat at four consecutive elections; twice to congress, once to senate and once for vice presidency during the preceding 12 years without a single victory. He saw failure thus: “My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.” Another past US President, Bill Clinton, lost a re-election bid after having served as Governor, the previous term; but he came back to win in 1982, 1984, 1986 & 1990. He was later elected the 42nd president of US in 1992, was re-elected in 1996 and survived an impeachment trial too in 1998.

The best of companies that keep moving forward towards increased successes (as opposed to blissful stagnation), embrace failures as an integral part of success. “You will see some failures,” Coke’s Chairman & C.E.O. E., Neville Isdell said addressing its shareholders and simultaneously sending out a brave message to the business world and all concerned, “As we take more risks, this is something we must accept as part of the regeneration process It reflects Coke’s culture across the board, be it a profit center or a cost center.

An uncle of R. U. Darby headed west with gold fever and found a gold mine. Keeping it a secret he went back home and returned with Darby and the money to finance the project. Together, they made a good haul which made them two of the wealthiest in Colorado. However much they tried, they could not find any more gold and eventually sold the site and equipment to a junk man. Having no knowledge of gold mining himself, the junkman hired an engineer whose calculations found a far bigger haul that brought him millions of dollars just three feet away from where the uncle-nephew duo had given up the chase!
We can learn three things from this story:
(i) Seek expert advise when you face a failure or there is a high probability of failure.
(ii) The most tragic failure in life is to give up when you could be just one or few steps away from the pinnacle; don’t undo an investment of a lifetime in one instant with one rash decision.
(iii) A failure can make or break you; its outcome depends on your attitude.

A failure is not a matter for pessimism or dejection; but something to be viewed as an “experience” with new lessons learned. A failure in its true perspective is another step forward in bringing you evermore closer to that elusive breakthrough. If you manage staff, keep this in mind!

Max Catanese is the CEO of Almax Mannequins and an HBS alumni. His previous experience is in KPMG and PWC as an Auditor. Almax has mannequins with exclusive positions, faces or finishing’s that have been specially manufactured for international brands, such as: Benetton, Calzedonia, Coin, Diesel etc., Check out their website: www.almax-italy.com

From Max’s Desk:

The economic crisis that has hit the world in the last two years will leave consequences in the way of doing business in the next ten years. It is a global crisis that has worsen the expectations in all the countries. Leaders are living difficult times no matter which industry they belong to. Before August 2007, CEOs were managing growth. They forgot the obstacles of what it means to manage a crisis. Leaders were not prepared because the world was meant to grow “forever”, artificially doped by finance. Not all has been bad though. Industries got back their importance and role and banks have learnt a lesson for the future. Those who will overcome the crisis will get stronger than they were before.

Leading in turbulent times is difficult for many reasons. Results are worse than expected (and in many cases abruptly negative) and tension is high throughout all kind of organizations. People work under stress. Tensions come from inside and outside also. All the stockholders of the companies are under the same pressure. Suppliers are afraid to lose clients who are approached by many substitutes and must give a better service for less money; banks are hit by the crisis and don’t give access to credit as they did before, clients are demanding better service with lower costs. As a result, competition is higher and margins much lower.

A leader has to give strong signals to the organization. First of all, the leader must get the big picture and has to read a complex situation inside and outside the company. The leader has to intervene inside the company with great motivation, always giving the impression of having the pulse of the situation and giving the directions to get out of the crisis. It’s important to be calm and not panic and, at the same time, motivate people to get out fast from this situation. It’s important to follow all the momentum with great attention and give stimulus to the people. Inside the company, nobody must think that the leader is not aware of the problems. The leader must provide the solutions and always indicate the roadmap to follow. Send positive signals and do not give importance to negative signals (that must always be foreseen).

In difficult times a leader must transmit awareness and assure the workers. People are crucial inside all organizations and they must be motivated and encouraged. A leader who is psychologically strong, impacts the result and work of the people. Show good results and don’t emphasize mistakes. Bring tranquility inside the company. A leader must adapt the strategy to the current situation but always keep it on the track for the long term strategy. Changing strategy with no reason would create confusion inside the organization and it’s the last thing needed in a company when things are going wrong. Consistency and positive moves are crucial in the way of success. ]]> http://www.naggesh.com/2010/03/28/leadership-in-the-economy-ceos-perspective/feed/ 0