Engagement that Motivates and Inspires

The Fourth Leadership Essential

Part 5 of a Six-Part Series on the Essentials of Leadership

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Mike Armour is a featured headliner on C-Suite Radio

There's a number that every leader pays for and almost none of them measures. It's the gap between the least a person can do without getting in trouble — and the most that person is actually capable of giving.

Economists call it discretionary effort: the extra hour management never asked for, the creative solution to a problem well outside someone's assigned duties, the phone call to a customer that goes beyond the service script because a worker genuinely cares.

In this episode of Upsize Your Leadership, I explain why you can command the least, but you can never command the most. Doing the least is merely complying. Compliance can be demanded — written into a contract, monitored, enforced. Discretionary effort cannot. It is given voluntarily, or it is not given at all.

Engagement is the art of gaining the voluntary effort that you are not allowed to demand.

Engagement on the Congruence Ladder

Engaging people in ways that motivate and inspire them is the fourth of the Five Leadership Essentials that I am currently covering in a six-part series of podcasts. The series has been climbing a single conceptual ladder that I call congruence, one rung at a time.

Character is congruence within a leader. Trust is congruence between people. Alignment is congruence among people. Engagement is congruence between a single human being and the work he or she has been asked to do.

Motivation and Inspiration: Two Distinct Engines

At the core of engagement are two roles leaders often blur together. Motivation is the process of connecting the leader's vision to the follower's values. In this episode, I return to the Latin term motus, the root of motive, motivation, emotion, and motion.

Drawing on those words, I offer this working definition: motivation is the process of combining motive and emotion to create motion. Motive + Emotion = Motion.

Inspiration is the second engine. Whereas motivation activates a motive, inspiration supplies the emotional energy that makes motivation sustainable over time.

A motive can be awakened but still lack the fuel to endure. Inspiration provides that fuel through stories, vivid pictures of the future, exposure to heart-touching realities, and testimonials from those who've experienced the vision firsthand.

The sequence matters. Of necessity, motivation must precede inspiration. No one can inspire us to do something that we are not first motivated to do.

Incentives Are Not Motives

One of the episode's most practical distinctions is between incentives and motives. Incentives are external — a bonus, a raise, a deadline, a penalty. They belong to you as the leader. You can give them or withhold them at will.

Motives are internal and always attached to a value. They reside within the people whom you want to motivate. An incentive can awaken a motive, but only if it happens to stroke a value that a person already holds. You cannot give someone a motive. It has to form within the individual around something he or she values.

Whether you lead a team, a department, or an enterprise, this episode offers a clear-eyed framework for turning compliance into engagement and for recognizing the invisible cost that you incur when engagement is low.

Other Episodes in This Series