“(Leaders) hire self-motivated people and give them a charge, a direction. Some companies do a very good job of the reverse. They hire self-motivated people and beat motivation out of them.”

Self-motivated people are such valuable assets for companies. They innovate, thrive, and succeed. Companies with self-motivated people innovate, thrive, and succeed. External motivation is expensive and finicky. It is easier to rely on external motivators – easier to control. Self-motivated people are driven by their interests and this is sometimes perceived as a threat to their bosses. Bosses do not always lead and influence; sometimes they just try to control. To lead is to listen as much as it is to direct.

Why do you suppose that some companies de-motivate their employees rather than foster self-motivation?

As Sir Francis Bacon put it:
“Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly.”

Everything and everyone changes. Leaders succeed when they lead change, but fail when they do not recognize the need to change. To recognize the need to change, you cannot rely on the “tried and true,” nor can you make intuitive decisions. You need decision making based on data collected internally and externally to your organization.

The recent term de jure of big data represents the current trend in business – using the plethora of available data (internal and external), inexpensive storage, cloud-based computing, and statistical analytics to learn more about the market place, their customers, other consumers, competitors, the economy, and every imaginable aspect of the business environment.

The problem here is scarcity of the human element: 1) Managers capable of such data-based decision making; 2) Analysts capable of working with big data technologies and performing analytics; and 3) Senior managers capable of driving such initiatives across their organizations. According to McKinsey Global Institute, this scarcity is going to persist for several years to come.

1. Someone in Charge

Every good meeting which I have attended involved someone in charge. There needs to be the director of the meeting to move things along, determine when some discussions are best held offline, and also able to get input from multiple participants rather than allow the dominant personalities to dominate.

2. Have an agenda

Successful meetings have an agenda and the agenda is distributed within a reasonable amount of time prior to the meeting. Depending on the participants and details, this could be a day in advance or even several days to a week or more.

3. Tie the agenda to a schedule

Meetings tend to be very short and unproductive or very longer and even less productive. Of course, I am half-joking. I attend on average about 5-6 meetings every week and the biggest problem is when the person in charge does not take charge or the schedule gets absorbed by a hot button topic to the exclusion of getting to the other topics.

4. The right people participate

A meeting is only productive when people participate! A lack of participation indicates a deficiency of collaboration or the wrong audience.

The next level is to go to those who influenced people who are successful. Find out who they listened to, what books they read, or provided them advice.

The problem here is scarcity. There are fewer former presidents and successful entrepreneurs than those who are providing advice for such.

I adopted this Latin phrase as my personal motto nearly a decade ago. This phrase is also used as the motto for the state of North Carolina as well as multiple universities and institutions. I like this phrase because of the emphasis on actually “being” what you present yourself as or what you want people to “perceive” you to be. What people perceive is what people believe, but when reality differs from perception, trust and confidence is lost – often permanently.

A quote which I recently came across builds on this. Will Durant, in The Story of Philosophy (1926), wrote, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.” Durant wrote this memorable (and often misattributed quote) in summarizing part of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.

You cannot wake up one morning and expect to be an effective leader. Effective leadership is developed over time, through experience, and sometimes even through failing as a leader – learning what NOT to do. To be an effective leader, you need to develop leadership as a habit – an acquired behavior that naturally comes out to the extent of almost being involuntary. This is true for achievement in any area of your life – professional and personal. To achieve excellence in any area of your life, start today to develop the habit of excellence. To become an effective leader, start today to develop effective leadership as a habit. To be, rather than just seem to be or just try to be.

“The probability that we may fall in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just; it shall not deter me.”

“I believe it is an established maxim in morals that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false, is guilty of falsehood; and the accidental truth of the assertion, does not justify or excuse him.”

“Any people anywhere being inclined and having the power have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right — a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can may revolutionize and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit.”

“Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after having given him so much as you propose. If to-day he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, — “I see no probability of the British invading us”; but he will say to you, “Be silent: I see it, if you don’t.”
To provision of the Constitution giving the war making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood.”

“Determine that the thing can and shall be done, and then we shall find the way.”

“The way for a young man to rise, is to improve himself every way he can, never suspecting that any body wishes to hinder him.”

“Truth is generally the best vindication against slander.”

“I have always thought that all men should be free; but if any should be slaves, it should be first those who desire it for themselves, and secondly, those who desire it for others. When I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.”

“I do not like that man. I must get to know him better.”

“No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent.”

“I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men, but they did not mean to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all men were equal in color, size, intellect, moral development, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness in what they did consider all men created equal — equal in ‘certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’”

“If Slavery Is Not Wrong, Nothing Is Wrong”

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds.”

“I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live up to the light I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right — stand with him while he is right and part with him when he goes wrong.”

“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.”

Source: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln

“Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.”
~John F Kennedy

“The leader has to be practical and a realist, yet must talk the language of the visionary and the idealist.”
~Eric Hoffer

To lead people, walk beside them…
As for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence.
The next best, the people honor and praise.
The next, the people fear;
and the next, the people hate…
When the best leader’s work is done the people say,
“We did it ourselves!”
~Lao-tsu

“The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on… The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully.”
~Walter Lippmann

“People ask the difference between a leader and a boss… The leader works in the open, and the boss in covert. The leader leads, and the boss drives.”
~Theodore Roosevelt