A leader is someone who knows where he or she is going.
Well, that'd be the first thing, is like,
how are you gonna lead unless you have a destination?
Ok. Well, a destination implies an ethic,
and then you need to be able
to communicate that and you communicate your destination with a story.
If I want to motivate people,
and that's not the right way to think
about it, you know, because you shouldn't want to motivate people.
That's management idiot speak, that is.
What you should do is figure out something that's worth doing. Right?
That you really think it's worth doing.
Something that you would actually commit a substantial
proportion of your life to, and you should have deep reasons for pursuing it.
And then if you're a leader, well, first of all, you have that established.
But the second is that you can communicate that.
Okay. And then you communicate that in a manner
that also appeals to other people's sense of purpose.
And so you'd say to someone like, if I wanted
to move forward with you on an enterprise,
I would have to say, well, here's the purpose of the enterprise.
And here's the reasons that it's not only eminently justifiable,
but more justifiable than anything else we could be doing at the same time.
And then I'd have to say, well, here's what's in it for me.
And here's what's in it for you.
And here's why the two of us together
can further the enterprise
and further what's in it for you and further for what's in it for me.
And then you have a situation there that Piaget (Jean Piaget)
the developmental psychologist called an equilibrated state.
So an equilibrated state is a situation that's set up by two or more people where
everyone is participating in the state voluntarily.
So when he got that,
he derived that notion in part by looking at how children set up games.
So if children are going to set up a pretend game,
what they do is they negotiate a little narrative to begin with.
It's almost like they generate a little play,
and they assign everyone their parts,
and then they manifest the play, and that's how they think.
But everyone has to accept their part voluntarily. Right?
Or the game won't continue.
Now, Piaget's,
ethical analytic claim, was that,
a game everyone plays voluntarily is more
sustainable and productive than one that people have to be forced to play.
That was his fundamental distinction
between the utility of freedom versus the utility of tyranny.
Because you could say, well,
the authoritarians win: "Do this or else". That's a way of organizing a society.
But Piaget's claim was the enforcement costs are so high that the free society will
outcompete the authoritarian society across time.
Now, if you're going to set up
an organization, you can set it up on authoritarian lines.
But then you're basically
compelling people to perform with punishment and fear.
It's better to motivate them positively,
and the way you do that is, say, look, here's the goal.
Here's your role.
Here's what this will add to your life,
practically, and in terms of, say, significant engagement and involvement.
And then if you can do that, people will
with certain other preconditions in place
competence, for example, and a certain amount of conscientiousness,
then people will participate in the game voluntarily.
You don't have to overlord them.
If you have any experience
in the world at all, in complex processes, you know that that's the optimal
circumstances under which to engage with other people.
It's like, hey, we're all in the same boat.
We're going somewhere interesting.
Everyone's got a role to play.
We're all in this together, and it's working out for each of us as well.
Now there's a corollary to that, which is an interesting one.
So imagine this.
So let's say you have your organization and you have your goals
and you're out to do something worthwhile, and you can tell a good story about that.
So you've got people on board now you really want to get people on board.
And so now you've got two choices.
You could tell people
go home and spend four or 5 hours and formulate
a career plan about how you're going to contribute to this organization.
Or you could say, no, you go home and you formulate a plan for your life
that includes your job at this organization as a subset.
All right. And then you run...
Imagine you do that with 100 people in each group.
Then you run those people in a head
to head competition for a year to see who's most productive.
The answer?
The people who formulated a plan for their life. They're 10% more productive.
So you can gain a 10% increment in corporate level productivity
by having your people write out a plan for their life.
We have a program like that called
Future Authoring, online, that thousands of people have done.
Now that increased the probability
that University students would stay in University by 30%.
And that's part of the narrative issue.
It's like what you want from
your employees is what you want them to be doing something useful with their life,
that they're engaged in, because if they can't do that for their life,
what the hell makes you think they're going to do that for your organization?
And then you want them to see how
working for you serves their higher order purpose.
And if it doesn't, because maybe they can't formulate that,
hierarchical integrated, hierarchical relationship,
well, then they should find another job.
Right? Because that isn't the job for them.
If your job is running at cross purposes
with your life, how the hell are you going to be motivated?
You're not.
At least you're going to be stymied constantly by the internal contradiction.
So imagine what you're trying to do is
you're trying to get everyone pointing in the same direction.
And I don't mean by eliminating all
diversity of opinion, or anything like that.
It's like...
The overall organization has a point,
and then everyone within that organization has their point.
But they're integrated within that overarching coherent narrative.
That's the purpose of leadership.
And...
To make that work at every level of the organization, that's what you want to do.
It's very difficult, but you build a seller organization.
If you do that.
A company often produces a mission statement, sort of
as a side effect of a bunch of other things it's doing, and that doesn't work.
It means that it's mostly handwaving,
and it makes employees very cynical if it's handwaving.
And it's definitely the case
that at the upper echelons of complex organizations,
the people who are running the organizations have to know what
they're doing and why, and maximizing profit in the next quarter
so that their bonuses are larger is not a good strategy.
It's not even a good strategy.
If you want to maximize profits
in the next quarter and make sure your bonus is larger.
And it's a catastrophic medium to long-term strategy.
These words that are bandied about, like vision and leadership,
you can drill down into them very hard and start to make some sense out of them
if you're willing to grapple with them at the level of detail.
And I do a lot of that in this book
because a lot of it is about orienting yourself in your life.
Here's something, for example, we know that...
Imagine that you have your employees write out a business plan
for their own development, so the plan would be,
how can I become a better employee?
And then you have half your employees do that, and the other half you have
write out a different plan, which is how can I put my life together, properly?
And then you wait a year and you measure
the performance of the two groups as the people who make the life plan
outperform, the people who make the business plan.
And that's really quite a stunning finding.
Really, it's not what you'd expect.
And what it means is that if you're going
to be effective at work, then you should, first of all, be effective in your life.
And even more importantly, if you have
a vision for the direction of your life and your job is serving that purpose,
then instantly your job becomes motivating because you might be sitting there
and thinking, Well, why am I doing this repetitive and rather dull task
with these people that I'm not particularly interested in?
Because every job has its maintenance element.
It's like, oh, yes, it's connected to this goal.
And this goal. And those goals are really worthwhile.
People are motivated when they're
undertaking an act that's associated with the goal that they desire.
And
our understanding of that psychologically is very deep.
We know the circuitry, we know the neurochemicals,
we know the neurophysiology.
And so there isn't any positive emotion
without forward movement towards a desired goal.
And there isn't any motivation without that positive emotion.
So that's all...
Vision, Leadership, they sound like sort of impractical
metaphysical concepts that are only
vaguely related to the practicalities of performance.
And that's wrong.
They're concrete vital definable
and you ignore them at your pair all both personally and socially.