The Best Way to Motivate People

The Best Way to Motivate People

At some point in your life you are going to need to motivate someone. It may be you need to motivate your spouse to help with the household chores, your co-worker to help with a project, or a group of potential customers to buy your product. Whatever the reason, the first and foremost rule you need to remember is that there is a huge difference between motivation and manipulation.


Manipulation involves coercion. You may be able to get someone to do what you want through manipulation, but it will almost always end up with them resenting you or at least the task. No one wants to be told what to do. No one wants to be forced to do something that they do not want to do. Let me give you an example. You may get an employee to perform a difficult task through threatening to fire him. Out of fear, the disgruntled employee may do exactly what you want. However, the consequences of fear based motivation is not worth the results. The employee may give you what you supposedly want, but in a few months you might be going through the hassle of hiring another person. You may have to replace the one that was "doing his job", yet very unhappy. This kind of "motivation" is counterproductive.

The key to great motivation is to get someone to own the project, task or even "act of buying" as their personal idea. People are happy to do things they want to do out of their own free will. In the example of the employee mentioned earlier, the wise boss would approach the employee with the following scenario:

"Hey Bob, I have a very difficult project. I'm going to be upfront with you, this will not be easy. But out of all my employees I felt that you could handle this more than anyone else! I'd love to get your input and ideas on how you would handle this task."

Wow! Do you see the difference? This boss has just transferred ownership of this difficult task to the employee while making him feel valued, and like it is an honor to be able to work on it. When this employee is finished, he will have a sense of pride in a task accomplished for his boss rather than a sense of resentment. The two ways of approaching the employee make all the difference in how they leave feeling about the boss, the project, and themselves. Learn to motivate wisely. And YOU, with the help of others, will accomplish much in life!

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