We had a fish. He was one of those Chinese fighting ones. Everyday he sat in his little bowl, perched on our kitchen windowsill happily swimming about. It’s always important that you tell yourself and your children that your fish looks happy. “Oh look kids, our fish looks sooo happy doesn’t he?” I mean who wouldn’t be in that tiny glass jar barely big enough to turn around in, two square meals a day, and the regular finger tapping of a 5 year old. Well, as I said, we had a fish and one day we came home to find him gone. I mean vanished, without a trace. Since the fish bowl was beside the sink we were left to presume that after watching ‘Finding Nemo’ he learned all drains lead to the ocean. If only our little Chinese fighter knew that first they go through the sewage treatment plant, he might have stayed where he was. After all, he was happy.

Being a leader has often been described as living in a fishbowl. All eyes are constantly on you and because of this sometimes your moods can be put on display much like paintings at an art exhibit. One thing your employees take note of his how happy you are. No one would argue with me that an unhappy boss is a lousy boss, and I think all of us would agree that having an overall good spirit about you will do a lot to promote a great work environment. The problem is, many leaders are not as happy as they think.  What is it about management positions that have this invisible power to wipe the smile from one’s face. You want to kill that cheery disposition of that star employee? Put them in a leadership position. It sounds terrible but too often it’s true. Its not that leadership makes us unhappy (well sometimes it does) it’s usually a case that we get so busy and focused on other things that we forget to be happy.

A combination of extra responsibility, added stress and being held accountable for people other than yourself can do a lot to a person’s level of joy. If we don’t have the right perspective we wind up spending endless days not unhappy, but not happy either. I guess the word I am looking for here is ‘serious.’  A leader who is too serious and not having much fun casts a long shadow over the workplace. Soon a culture develops where employees hide their own good moods, at least from you, and laughter becomes something done in hushed secrecy. Have you ever worked for a manager whose good moods were so rare that when they happened it became headline news around the office? Comments like “The boss is in a good mood today,” spread quickly from cubicle to cubicle, as everyone breathed a sigh of relief. This is not a culture you want to create. It is not conducive for high morale and low turnover.

The following may be some reasons why you are too serious and not having enough fun.

1.    You do not like your job.
Everyone can tell when you don’t like what you do. There is no spark in your eye, you get easily frustrated and creativity goes down the drain. Sometimes the hardest person to be honest with is yourself.
Solution: Find your passion again or move on. Life is too short to waste it doing something you hate.

2.    You are too stressed.
Stress and fun go together like hairdryers in the bathtub. You may be stressed for a variety of reasons, job pressure, challenges at home, or your financial situation.
Solution: Put in place stress relieving strategies like regular exercise, a good diet, getting more time away, and actually taking lunch breaks. Here is a more extensive list of stress relievers. Stress Relievers.

3.    You are too focused.
But I am supposed to be focused! I have done this many times where I get so driven by what I am doing that I forget to look up and see what’s going on around me. The passion and drive you possess as a leader to get projects done is usually not felt to the same intensity by your employees. It’s one of the reasons you’re the leader. That drive and passion can be great motivation for you to keep cranking. Your staff however may have burned through their tank 2 days ago. While you vigorously bury your nose in your work, your employees are looking for a much needed boost. Some fun would be nice.
Solution: Make sure you daily check on the esprit de corps. If you have a hard time reading the group, have a trusted assistant who can give you the honest truth. Schedule in time each day to mingle among your employees for some lighthearted chat. This is especially important during times of stressful impending deadlines. Bottom line, don’t get so busy that you forget your employees.

4.    You have unresolved conflict
When you manage others it seems there is never a shortage of conflict. Managers constantly have to deal with a variety of ‘situations.’ Often these confrontations drain us and we can soon slip into a state of avoidance. Instead of dealing with someone directly and quickly, we begin to stuff our feelings and avoid the problem. Soon that employee who needs to have his or her work ethic addressed becomes an object of our anger. The more time that passes the harder it seems to bring it up and the angrier we feel. The more situations you avoid handling the less joyful you become.
Solution: Write out a list of all the employees you need to have a talk with and start working it. You will find that most of the situations resolve themselves quite painlessly and you will be feeling lighter in no time.

5.    You have not decided to be in a good mood.
You are in control of whether or not you will have a bad day. It’s all about your perspective. Quit moping around and start seeing the good around you. When I mope it’s because I have become so fixated on my problems. As soon as I shift my perspective and start seeing the good things around me like loyal and hard working staff, it quickly changes my mood.
Solution: Decide every morning you will be happy, jovial, and light hearted. You can still get the job done and you will feel that much better about it. Go and find somebody doing something right and reward him or her for it. Now the two of you will be feeling better. To see video of rewarding what’s right, click here.

Remember that leadership has a price. One of them is the fish bowl you live in. When people see that the boss is in a good mood it makes them feel they have the freedom to be in a good mood as well.  Be a happy fish.

On December 29, 1972 Eastern Airlines Flight 401 bound from New York to Miami crashed into the Florida Everglades because of a light bulb. As the plane approached Miami the indicator light for the deployment of landing gear failed to come on. The plane circled over the Everglades while the crew tried to figure out the problem. Either the landing gear was not working and they had a major problem on their hands or it was a simple case of a faulty light bulb. When one of the crew members tried to remove the bulb, he found it was stuck and would not come out. Soon all inside the cockpit were so focused on the light bulb that they failed to look up and see they were losing altitude. The plane eventually slammed into the swamp killing almost everyone on board. It is a tragic example of how we can get caught up in the small things and lose sight of where we are going.

Many organizations today are over-managed and under-led. In other words, leaders get caught up in the day-to-day managerial administrative tasks, and forget to look up and plot the course for the organizations future. A leader’s vision is essential for an organization. Visionary leaders are heavily sought after. People want to belong to an organization with a strong sense of direction, whether it’s a fortune 500 company, community association, or local church. If a leader does not remain a visionary, life becomes stagnant, and the organization grinds to a crawl.

As leaders we will never be able to escape our role as manager, but the key is not letting managerial tasks overtake us to the point where we are swamped with administration. Here are a few tips to remaining visionary despite a busy schedule.

1. Plan a meeting with just you.
   Carve some time out each week to get away from the office and just think about the future of your organization and its current direction. It’s amazing what can come to your mind when you are removed from the situation. Schedule this time into your weekly planner and keep it as sacred as a meeting with the president of the board.
2. Enter the trenches
   Keep in touch with the front line workers – the people on the factory floor, the delivery drivers, the mail-room staff. These employees will often give you insight into things you would never have thought of. Often the best ideas for improved efficiency come from them since they are the ones performing many of these daily tasks. Set up a weekly coffee break with a different worker or a monthly “town meeting” with a certain division to get their feedback and ideas.
3. Stimulate the minds around you.
   Encourage creative and visionary thinking among all your employees, especially your direct reports. Solicit their input and advice on your industry and where they think future opportunities lie. Many people never think beyond their job roles because they are never encouraged to. The more minds contributing to your future, the greater your chances of success.
4. Take care of yourself.
   Proper rest and exercise are the key to staying in shape. What does staying in shape do to contribute to vision? How visionary are you when you are lethargic, stressed, and overworked? Why do so many great ideas and concepts come while people are on their holidays? When your body is rested your mind is in a better place to wander down the road of your future.
5. Inspirational entertainment
   Watch visionary movies or read inspirational biographies biographies. Braveheart, Hoosiers, Glory, Gladiator, and Ghandi, to name a few. There is something about the stories of other men and women who have made a difference that inspires us to greater heights. Inspiration is the fuel for future dreams.

Remember, as a leader you are responsible for maintaining your vision and inspiring others. You will always have your share of faulty light bulbs that need fixing but never forget to keep your head up and plot the course for your organizations future.

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I found this American airlines ad on youtube. It’s a lot of fun. If you want to use it for a little team building yourself, show it to your employees at your next meeting and then open it up for people to share their “Most Uncomfortable Team building Moments.” It should be good for a laugh. Then brainstorm for some things you can do as a team in 2012 that will help you work better together.

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Learn how to transform your leadership in nine minutes a week.

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You know how some people under extraordinary conditions experience a moment of super-human strength. What if there was a way to create moments of super-human motivation?

Well I may not have a secret formula for you but I do have the next closest thing and its called emotion. When you add emotion to motivation it acts like a multiplier, kind of like that high-octane fuel you use in race cars. A few drops can go a deceptively long ways.

So how do you tap into this super-charged fuel for motivating people? It all starts by tapping into the power of purpose and painting pictures, which rouse even the sleepiest heart.

When employees are able to see a connection between what they do, and some kind of tangible impact they have on the greater good, it ignites a higher level of personal motivation. Recently I was working with a management team and I was walking them through an exercise to help them connect purpose to pay. One of the things this organization does is run the recycling program in their community. When I asked them how they could link purpose to pay, someone said, “Our company helps the environment.” While this is true, and it is on the right track, it still does not evoke emotion, and remember emotion is that motivation super juice. So I asked them to get more specific, to which someone else replied, “We recycle paper and save trees.” OK better, were getting more specific but still not quite there. I asked how many trees? No one knew but someone had the formula to figure it out. Within 60 seconds, someone crunched the numbers and came up with the answer. “We save on average 1,446 trees a month.” Suddenly a heightened sense of pride came over the room.

I can see trees better than I can see “We help the environment” and when it comes to evoking emotion, its all about painting pictures that connect with the heart.

Last year when Adam Grant did a study on the fundraising department at the Wharton School of Business he found that a group of employees who were given letters to read from past scholarship recipients chronicling how the scholarship had changed their life, resulted in the employees raising twice as much money the following month. Doubling your production sounds like Super-Human Motivation to me. The fundraisers at Wharton were fueled by a new sense of purpose, driven by images they could see; the stories of lives changed because of the work they do. Someone could have told them they do a great service to society by raising money for scholarships, but it would not have the same impact as a picture, which tugs on the heart. Those pictures were found in the letters they read.

So to connect purpose to pay in a way that has maximum impact, you must find ways to paint specific pictures of how you impact people and the world around you.

Try and find ways to connect purpose to what you do, but get as specific as you can. When people can see it as if watching a movie, it has the ability to illicit emotion which super-charges motivation.

A few examples

To the House Keeping staff at a hotel

Instead of a generic“We help people relax and recharge.” you might say something like  “ You’re the reason why a mom can get a day off from making the bed and vacuuming the floor.”

A Parks and Recreation Department

Instead of “We help the community live active lives.” Try painting pictures such as “We’re the reason why some teenagers will avoid getting into drugs because they can spend Friday nights at open gym night instead of out roaming the streets.”

Alternatively “If it were not for us, people who work from home would have a harder time making friends. We give them the chance to meet people through our programs. So lets make sure they are run with excellence.”

It takes some practice to come up with these but the more you try the better you will get. The important thing is to create word pictures that resonate with the heart. When people can picture whom they are helping it ignites a deeper source of motivation within us.

Try writing out 10 different pictures that connect purpose to pay. Make sure they are tangible and not abstract statements like “We help people live better lives.” Take the best three and use them with your staff this month.

Imagine trying to get someone to run fast while attached to an open parachute. Its hard.  So how do we motivate this person to run faster? If you said “Get rid of the parachute” you would be wrong. While eliminating the obstacle will make the job easier and they probably will be able to run faster, but it does not mean we have increased the motivation of the runner.

A very common misconception is that in order to motivate employees you need to identify the de-motivators and then eliminate them. While this is always helpful, it does not always lead to a motivated workforce. A better way to think of de-motivators is to imagine them as rocks in everyone’s shoes when they are climbing a mountain. The pebbles make the journey a lot more difficult. Removing them will definitely create a more satisfying environment but does it increase your motivation to climb the mountain? Probably not.

The first person to make this distinction between motivators and de-motivators is a psychologist by the name of Frederick Herzberg. By studying workplace motivation, he made a profound discovery that is still talked about more than 40 years later. Herzberg found that the things which satisfied and motivated people at work, are different in kind from the things that make them dissatisfied. Things like low salaries, uncomfortable workspaces, stupid processes, annoying bosses, and dysfunctional teams, lead to job dissatisfaction. Herzberg called these Hygiene Factors as they were mostly related to the environmental factors surrounding a job, rather than the work itself. Herzberg’s research also found that people are more motivated by achievement, recognition, increasing responsibility, growth, and the work itself.

In order to increase motivation, we cannot only focus on eliminating these so-called “Hygiene Factors,” but must also find ways to enrich the jobs themselves, so employees can experience achievement, recognition, increasing responsibility, challenge and interesting work. So our goal should be to reduce sources of employee dissatisfaction while striving to increase motivation through enriching the jobs themselves. Herzberg’s theory is called the Motivation-Hygiene Theory, also known as the Two-Factor Theory.

Practical Application

Make your own list of Hygiene Factors (rocks in everyone’s shoes) that are currently lowering job satisfaction. Try and figure out which of them are the most prevalent and see if you can proactively begin to eliminate the problems. Secondly, take a long hard look at the work which each of your direct reports is required to do each day. Within their job functions, ask yourself if there are ample opportunities to experience achievement, recognition, challenge, responsibility, and interesting work.

Below are a few ideas on how you might enrich someone’s job in order to increase their motivation.

-       Introduce new and more difficult tasks not previously handled

-       Remove some of the controls and give them more freedom in how they accomplish their role

-       Grant them additional authority in their role

-       Help some of your staff specialize and become experts in certain niche areas

-       Let employees be able to touch a project from start to finish increasing their sense of achievement

-       Make sure employees have specific feedback which helps them see their progress

-       Make sure employees are regularly recognized for achievements

Reducing Hygiene Factors as well as increasing job enrichment are both essential for creating a  motivated and satisfying workplace.

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What will define you in 2011? Specifically, I am talking about your leadership. What will it mean to be led by you over the next 12 months? Its a great question to ask because it forces us to look at things from our employee’s perspective. This is the foundation of Autonomy Supportive leadership.

To move beyond a rhetorical question however, lets get practical. I’m going to give you a powerful exercise.

1. First write down one paragraph detailing what you want it to be like for people who are under your leadership. When people ask your employees what its like to work for you, what do you want them to say.

2. After you do that I want you to summarize your entire paragraph in only three words. What three words are going to define your leadership in 2011? Will it be Inspiration, Fairness, and Excellence? How about Visionary, Innovative and Creative? Or maybe Execution, Results, Caring. You pick your three words that you want to define your leadership this year. To help, imagine one of your employees at the end of the year chatting with a friend who asks “What’s your boss like?” and after pausing a moment they sum you up in three words. What are they going to be?

3. For each of the three words write down 10 practical applications. For example if one of your words was Visionary then you want to write down a list of ten possible ways you might demonstrate this quality. Maybe its how you will conduct your team meetings, or telling one employee each month how much you believe in them, or creating a unique scoreboard to measure your progress, or learning to speak in a more compelling and visionary way.

This exercise is very powerful and it helps you take what are sometimes nebulous concepts, and put them into practical action.

To finish, find a creative way to print out your three words and post them somewhere you will see them on a daily basis.

Download the worksheet below to walk you through this exercise.

If you missed the previous two entries for this article on the Four Questions You Must Answer In A Speech, you can access them here: Four Questions

Question Three – How
Answering “How” is especially important for those people who really want the practical steps outlined for them. This type of learning style does not care as much about why or what, they just want the action steps to take. This is the learning style that doesn’t bother to read the introduction or forward to books or even the first few chapters. They want to jump ahead to the solutions. Of course having practical steps to take in any speech is a good idea but a certain segment of the population needs to hear this if you are going to keep their attention.
So lets take the example we used above about metabolism and weight loss. We have already answered “Why” and then “What”. So next we can segue into a series of steps on how someone might speed up their metabolism. It might be the top 5 foods to eat, or the the 7 things you can do today to speed up your metabolism. This practical list of steps will really meet the needs of this learning style.

Question Four
The last question we want to answer is “What if”. For example, “If I start eating the five foods you are telling me to eat, what should I look for, or how will I know if it is working.” In this step we are telling people what to look for “if” they have done the steps above. This helps people create their own feedback system which is important for any sense of achievement to take place.

So there you have it. Four questions you want to answer in most speeches you give, no matter how long they are. So next time you have to give a speech or convince your employees of something at your next meeting consider structuring your presentation to answer the four questions.

Good Luck