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January 24, 2013 fm

INTRINSIC The Series

The million dollar question for companies is not, How can we penetrate new markets with new products?   The million dollar question for companies is not, How can we increase our market share by 40%?   One million dollar, 10 million dollar, 100 million dollar depend on another answer…

I remember a warm summer night in Barcelona in 2005.  I was sitting next to the open window front of the bar Mira Blau overlooking Barcelona.  With me, a big shot of KPMG.  He’d come down to Barcelona for a market research project.

As we were sipping our Ribera del Duero he told me about their leadership struggle to find entrepreneurial, intrinsically motivated people in the market.  I shared my personal view with him. Most of the intrinsically motivated people I knew in those days WERE entrepreneurs.  Finding people with an entrepreneurial spirit inside a company is like finding the needle in the haystack.  An entrepreneurial employee? What an oxymoron!  That’s what I thought back then.

It was a struggle yesterday. It’s a struggle today, and it will be a struggle tomorrow.  Finding intrinsically motivated employees is the struggle of HR and corporate leadership.  But it is also the answer to the million dollar question.

So – what to do?

Scientific research is not my stronghold.  I love pragmatic approaches.

If you want to know how to get motivated employees, you have two options:  First, you analyze the employees.  Second, you analyze the person who is capable of motivating others, the motivator, and copy/paste his style and behavior.

I will follow the second path.  Based on my experience as an employee (KPMG) and freelance (speaker and trainer) I will share with you my personal views of what it takes to be a great motivator.

Welcome to the series INTRINSIC!

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In the weeks to come I will write about the following aspects of motivation:

1. What are the traits of a motivator?

2. What is the attitude of a motivator?

  • Trust
  • Involvement
  • Care
  • Challenge
3. How does a motivator communicate?
  • Clarity
  • Passion
  • Enthusiasm/Energy
  • Credibility
  • Emotion
  • Positivity
  • Constructivism

Comments (3)

  1. looking forward to facilitate a continuous exchange of ideas and you are right: the most important resource that founders need is motivated creativity….

  2. I think that when passion, purpose and work overlap then motivation emerges. Marshall Goldsmith talks about the idea of “MOJO” – made famous by Austin Powers. Mojo is that energy that some people have that means that everything they touch just seems to work. The first ingredient of MOJO is Identity – that a person has resolved the conflict between what society (parents, friends, school, boss, wife, kids) want of them, and what they want for themselves. I say “resolved the conflict” because there will ALWAYS be a conflict. Who I want to be and who society wants me to be will always have a gap. Can I accept this gap?

    Rule 1 of motivated people: They Know who they are. They take responsibility for being themselves.

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