Five Stupid Things Smart Leaders Say

If you lead people, you have one of the toughest jobs in the world. At the same time, if you are saying any of the these things about or to your people, you are making your job harder than it needs to be. Eliminating one or all of these ways of thinking and speaking will immediately upgrade your leadership.

“They just are not motivated.”

No. They are motivated. They do all kinds of things without someone making them do it. They go to baseball games, out to dinner with friends, fishing or jogging. They are motivated, they are just not motivated to do what you want them to do. Duh. Find out what is important to your people—not what’s important to you. Let them do some of what is important to them and you’ll see some motivation.

“If we just had better systems or software our people could do better.”

Marginally, maybe. But this is a low return approach. We have been trying for years to solve human problems with technical tools: it just doesn’t work that well. The human being still has to use the tool. No matter how good the tool you still have to understand the human being that is using it. You can’t solve human problems with technical tools,. Human problems require human tools. Yes, cupcake, those are human beings you work with.

“I think you should ___________.”

Don’t think for them. Pretty soon they will stop thinking for themselves, then you will complain that they don’t think for themselves.

“You did a good job, but….”

“But” means, “Forget everything I just said, here is what I really think.“ If you are going to give negative feedback, just give it. If you are going to give positive feedback, just give that. Giving both types of feedback together doesn’t work.

“We pay you to do that.”

If you haven’t figured out by now that most people are not motivated by money—WAKE UP. Most people are not motivated by money, even if they say they are. Money is actually one of the weakest reasons to do something. Think about it, do you want an employee who is doing it for the money or because they are really inspired by the work? Yet, when we say things like we pay you to do it, we perpetuate the opposite. Oops.

So what is the solution?  One simple tool can overcome all of these issues: Acknowledgement.

How to understand and use the one tool you need to instantly upgrade your leadership is in my new book, The Motivation Myth. Get it now.