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The Five Traits that Motivate People to Support a Strategic Decision

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Every Great Motivator Has Its Failing

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As I look back on every SOBCon event, a continuous them is …

Decide and Do.

Decide literally means to kill off all other options. But how do we choose the motivating strategic decision — the one that not only moves us forward, but also enlists, engages, and motivates people to join us in executing that decision?

Strategic decisions are built on understanding position and predicting.
On the most quantitative level, people are part of both position and prediction.
Yet too often we make decisions without considers how the decisions might impact the people who we want to keep closest to us.

How Do You Make a Strategic Decision that Moves People to Action?

Too often when we make decisions — especially important and urgent ones — our thinking narrows too tightly. We lose sight of the people and focus only on facts and information. We see the problem, but lose sight of the people who will help us achieve it.

Our decision is only an half strength if we don’t consider the people who execute it. Each of those people brings his or her thinking, traits, perceptions, and responses with individual goals and personal intentions.

How does a leader motivate people to support a strategic decision? A leader looks to the characteristics of the people he or she wants to move to action. Motivation is 100% about aligning goals — being mission critical to THEIR mission. Once we set our course and direction, the next strong step is to consider what fuels the people who will fuel our mission. The key to moving people to action is in how we communicate that decision. It’s important to reach out to the higher values that drive the members of the community.

The Five Traits that Motivate People to Support a Strategic Decision

The people we try to motivate will have have these five traits in differing levels. Addressing these traits when you communicate a strategic decision will increase your success in motivating people to move to action. Before you announce your decision, review these five questions.

  • Dedication: Do they care? Commitment and caring are deep strong motivators. Know which people care and invest their commitment deeply for the goal. People of commitment dedicate themselves to reaching the goal. Tie the goal to commitment and you’re likely to capture their deep and unswerving investment in the mission. .
  • Intelligence: Do they learn well and understand and deeply? Sharing the sound thinking that drives a decision will motivate the community members who value deep thinking. Don’t be stingy with communication.
  • Courage: Do they respond well to change and in times of uncertainty? Acknowledging the risk and the reward of the decision allows the brave ones to step forward to protect and serve and to know how to shore up the possible vulnerabilities.
  • Discipline: Do they value the systems and the rules? Chaos is uncomfortable and change can be confusing. A few clear rules of what will guide the strategy to success can enlist those who most need clarity of action.
  • Trustworthiness: Do they trust your decisions without explanation? Explain your thinking anyway. Trustworthiness is demands that you value their trust and respect it, especially in times of change.

You’ll know you’ve communicated well if your community starts selling you on the validity of your decision as they move to action.
you form strategy and make decisions that help you enlist the right team of people to carry out your life mission.

What do you consider when you want to motivate people to action?

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Do You “Get” How Important Your World View Is?

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What You See Is What You Are

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Once I thought other people had a better view of the world than I ever could …

I suppose that’s reasonable the people around me were worldly, experienced, and smart. I great parents, great teachers, and outstanding friends. When it came to some of my bosses and boyfriends, perhaps I thought ideas through before I bought in.

It was as if he were a prince with insight beyond my own and for a moment I believed in his view of the world.

He always thought that only mountains could be beautiful. I heard him proclaim it. Yes, proclaim is exactly what he did when he spoke of them. He found his own thoughts worthy of public decree. He’d announce that flat lands had their use, but then ask what possible beauty could a man proud as he ever find in a place with flat air?

No matter the metaphor I couldn’t convey the lovely feeling and the wide open space of the grassland without trees only blue skies above it. The green is so green and blue so blue, that the clouds must show off for fear of being thought to be boring.

A sky like this, with no mountain in view, would mean nothing to him.

So today as I look out over the lake as wide as the world, I watch the cloud ballet and think of the adventures, of the characters we might have invented had we been here when we were kids.

I watch the changes, breathing in every minute. I drink in gratitude for a world that is made like this. I’m particularly glad I had the good sense to quit dating that proclaiming brat before I left college. I can’t imagine what a different person I would have become if I’d adopted a world view like his.

No one guy’s view is better, further, or more beautiful than my own.

Do you “get” how important your world view is?
The way you define your world reflects how you define yourself.
In business and in life, what you see is what you get and we slowly become what we look at most.
Surround yourself with colleagues, friends, family — worldmates — who share your view. Fill your life, your heart, and your mind with images and ideas that define what you love and admire.

Don’t take my point of view … “get” your own.

The succcess of your business and your life depend on it.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

It’s All in How You See the Rain

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about rain.
It rained as I was thinking about what to put here. It’s been raining a lot lately, but I don’t mind.
Rain reminds me of something I wrote a few years back …

After the rain has fallen there is a moment, just a glimpse of a second when all of the world stands perfectly silent, when everything seems to stop.

I hear my heart beat. Heartbeats are the sound of waiting water, collecting from raindrops no longer falling. They’re still in my mind with the thoughts that made them come raining down.

Now that I’m quiet and the air is clearer. I see the world again as it truly is — filled with delicate beauty and wonder. Nothing is wrong or right, in tune or out of sync. Nothing is upside down.

There is only what happens, like the rain. There is only what is.

The sun shines through the drops making a prism, a rainbow of color that wasn’t there only a moment ago.

Sometimes we put our own meaning on things that happen, even things like rain.
Rain is only rain. It’s not good or bad. We decide things like that sometimes because we want to, sometimes from habit.

The next time you have an automatic response to a situation, ask yourself, “Am I making the rain something bad?”

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Train Your Brain to Generate Ideas When You Need Them!

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Stop Stopping the Ideas from Coming

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Walking, pacing, staring at a blank page, tearing at your hair, and wishing you could be just about anywhere that isn’t this place … the place where you need an idea and your mind is a blank.

The adrenalin is pumping. Mental sweat is dripping. You hear the sound of your own breathing and the irritating tick, tick, ticking of a clock — though every timepiece you own is digital.

Your mind is working overtime to find irrelevant attractions and less than useful distractions keep interrupting any chance of a reasonable thought that appears. One unanswered question — How will I ever get this done? — is from every direction neutralizing any chance of a new thought.

It’s not that you’re out of ideas.

It’s that you need to stop stopping them.

The RAS — Our Brain’s Stimulus Management System

Ever noticed that the best ideas come when you’re least trying to have them? Great ideas show up when we’re falling asleep, taking a walk or a shower, unpacking boxes and boxes, or sitting outside watching people and clouds go by.

Times like those, ideas seem to be everywhere.
But when we need one, we can seem to see one anywhere.

The problem isn’t that we don’t have anything to stimulate ideas! The problem is that we have too many things! Really.

Everyone has plenty of what they need to get ideas growing. The key is knowing how to work mindfully rather than on adrenalin.

The stimuli that get ideas growing are continuously and constantly bombarding our brains, specifically our subconscious. They come at such a rate that, if our brains let them all in, we wouldn’t be able to pay attention to anything — we’d be distracted by blinking, how it feels to be walking. the sound of our breathing, or the feedback of the chair where we’re sitting.

To keep our brains efficient, we come equipped –- at no extra charge –- with a stimulus management unit called the Reticular Activating System (RAS). The RAS is a valve-like screening device at the base of our brains that filters out most of the unwanted stimuli. Think of it as closed door gateway that allows only useful information into our conscious brains.

Unfortunately that same RAS gateway can close access to the great ideas that we’ve been reaching for. The more adrenalin we have flowing the more it’s likely to be closing.

The good news is that the RAS can be trained.

Train Your Brain to Generate Ideas When You Need Them!

Anyone can increase the number of useful ideas they have. The art is in training our minds to see the ideas and pull them in before our thoughts edit, deflect, or vaporize them.

The best way to stop stopping the ideas from coming is to teach yourself how to keep the RAS open. Here’s how to how to practice using the filter the way you want.

Still yourself — mentally and physically. Spend a few minutes a day in stillness. Practice stillness so that you get good at it. Use that still time to develop these three process models. These ways of thinking keep the filter focused on finding the opportunity in a problem or a new idea from an old one.

  • Change points of vision. View the question from the inside out, vertically, laterally, at the detail level, and the aerial view.
  • Change your value system. Imagine the suggestions that you might get from a designer, a composer, a writer, a mathematician, a coder, a dancer, a chef, and understanding friend. Then do it again from the view of an employee, a vendor, a partner, a stockholder, a CEO, and a competitor.
  • Change your scope and sequence. Tinker with ideas and viewpoints to stretch them, bend them, reconstruct them into solutions that fit and work perfectly in specific situations. Make it bigger, smaller. Make last shorter and longer. Take out crucial steps and put them in a different order. Add something that doesn’t belong.

If you get in the practice of thinking during stillness, you’ll find that when you need ideas in a hurry, you can stop, be still and get them.

And

None of your decisions will be reactions to a crisis.

Have you ever tried anything like this?

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

The Leadership Role of Blending Work, College, and Family

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The Audacity of Tenacity in Leadership
A Guest Post by Val White

I had finished an Associates Degree in Business when I was younger and pre-children. When my first child came along, I found a way to work from home while participating in my young child’s life. Two years ago, I felt it was time for me to go back to work and rejoin the corporate world.

I quickly discovered that a lot had changed in the 10 or so years that I had stepped away to care for my family. My skills needed refreshing. I wasn’t interested in the same things. I had changed and so had my choice of careers. I knew I needed to go back to school. I also needed to tend to my family and contribute to the family budget with a full-time job. After much research and soul-searching, I settled on a state college that combined virtual program with a “brick-and-mortar” college experience.

Today, I’m in the last course before I’ve fully earned my Bachelors degree in Information, Networking, and Telecommunications (with an emphasis on Web Development). Getting here wasn’t easy. I still have to get that degree to payoff in new career opportunities.

But I can easily say that I’ve achieved a lot.

The Innovative Leadership of Blending Work, College, and Family Life

A favorite article at NewandImproved.com, The Way of the Innovative Leader resonated with me as it laid out five leadership traits found in those who live and inspire great thinking in the people around them. (© 2006 New & Improved®, LLC. Mailto: info@newandimproved.com) And as I read the article over, I came to realize that those same traits were what I came to value as I grew into the role of non-traditional college student, who also had both a family and a job.

These are the five traits I relied on to keep going when I might have stopped. Whatever your situation, these five will serve you well in getting you to your goal.

Integrity:

Say what you mean and mean what you say. Don’t make promises that you can’t or don’t intend to keep. In the lifestyle challenges of family, college, and job, you may find yourself overwhelmed if you haven’t developed the ability to say “no” to things that will add more clutter and demands on your time. Inevitably, something is going to fall off the edge if you fill your to-do list with too much. It’s easy to get your priorities mixed up in the attempt to do it all. The lines easily become mixed: family, college, job – college, family, job – dreams of future career, college, family, umm…job. If things get out of hand, it’s best to stop everything for a moment, a day, or a weekend and reevaluate your priorities.

Tenacity:

Wiktionary.org defines tenacity as …
“The quality or state of being tenacious; as, tenacity, or retentiveness, of memory; tenacity, or persistency, of purpose.”

I also love this definition:
“The greatest longitudinal stress a substance can bear without tearing asunder, – usually expressed with reference to a unit area of the cross section of the substance, as the number of pounds per square inch, or kilograms per square centimeter, necessary to produce rupture.”

I’ve endured a few semesters where I truly felt I would “tear asunder!”

There will come days that it’s all you can do to put one foot in front of the other and make sure the essential tasks have been completed. Truly, keeping a firm and unshakable picture in your mind of your goals and purposes is so very important in order to withstand these days when they come.

Curiosity:

As a non-traditional, adult student with some life experience, I found learning much more of an adventure than I did in my earlier years. Instead of just coasting through a class to get the credits, I found more benefit in finding ways to apply this new knowledge to my career goals and asking myself how it applies to right now or 5-10 years from now.

Being curious will surely expand your vision and enlarge your understanding of your world.

Courage:

What will others think and/or say to me when I tell them I’m going back to college? Is it really a waste of time and money? After all, I have more lost career years behind me than I have ahead of me. Will I really be able to apply what I’ve learned?

It takes courage to face your own demons and plunge into the unknown. For some, it’s an ongoing battle or one they don’t even wish to start. I’ve found that whatever it is that you’re afraid to start or when you want to give up, remembering one simple truth is a great motivator: you’ve got something to contribute that is uniquely you and nobody else can do it.

Humility:

Referring again to wiktionary.org, the definition of humble is,

“thinking lowly of one’s self; claiming little for one’s self; not proud, arrogant, or assuming; lowly; weak; modest.”

This doesn’t necessarily appear to be an attractive trait, does it? In reality, when approaching this lifestyle of family-college-job, there will be many opportunities to practice humility … and come out stronger from it. Simply entering a college program is a statement that you don’t know it all and you’re in need of help in achieving your future goals. You’re going to need to engage with instructors and other learners in discussions that might prove that others will have better ideas than you do. But more than this, you’ll find humility when you reach out to others around you for support, advice, and help with daily tasks.

So, how did these experiences and traits contribute to my job of being a role model?

Quite simply, my husband and children watched me – day by day and night after night of late night homework. They cheered with me when I reported my test and homework scores. They listened to my frustrations and they helped lighten my load when they could. I hope that I offered my family.a chance to see and develop these essential leadership traits to serve them in throughout their lives.

You have no choice about being a role model. You are one … it comes with the job. The only choice you have is which role you’ll model. – The Way of the Innovative Leader

Those concise three sentences are the sum of the reasons I chose to finish my college aspirations as an adult.

And why I know I’ll also achieve all of my goals.

What is your leadership role?

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Val White is a mom, web developer, and student at FHSU fhsu.edu. She is just now venturing out of the safe confines of the FHSU online class discussion board and looking for new opportunities to contribute on the web. You can find her portfolio at valwhitewebdev.com.

Thanks, Val! Amazing story. 🙂

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Why You Aren’t “You Living the Dream”

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What is between you and your dreams? Probably one of the toughest questions to ask yourself is, “why am I not living the dream?” Do you foresee yourself starting a business or living a harmonious life in a dream city, what is stopping you? Is it lack of money? Are you waiting for next big break? I have heard every excuse in the book from people who complain about life and out of every 100 complaints, about only 1 of them was valid enough for me to not argue with them.

Nike says it, all successful entrepreneurs live it, and you are avoiding it. Stop hiding from the future and “just do it.” Stop waiting for the moment for everything to be perfect, drop your books and set up an action plan to live your dream. It may take a bit of luck along the way, but hey, the journey is what makes the goal in mind worthwhile. If things came easily, we wouldn’t appreciate anything.

Ask any entrepreneur if they waited for the opportunity to start a business or if they created the opportunity. I bet 99% of them created an opportunity from something they loved. Getting on the bike is the hardest part. Dick Costolo, founder of Feed Buner says, “the key is to just get on the bike, and the key to getting on the bike… is to stop thinking about ‘there are a bunch of reasons I might fall off’ and just hop on and peddle the thing.”

Fear of Sacrifice
We all have to give up something to get to where we want. My entrepreneurial endeavors have taken a major toll on my personal life. Instead of working 8-5 and being able to spend time with friends, I work 8am-1am on my startup. Are you afraid of working hard? I don’t believe in failures, I do believe there are people who aren’t motivated because they haven’t found their calling in life. Putting everything into something we love is worth it… if we truly love it.

Fear of Failure
Are you scared of your dream project failing? If you don’t get behind the wheel you will never give yourself a chance to fail. Michael Jordan was once quoted saying, “I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.” Putting yourself out there is the sauce to the stew.

Waiting For Everything to be Perfect?
The worst excuses I’ve ever heard are “the time isn’t right.” I hate to break it to you all, but the time will never be 100% perfect. There will not be a solar eclipse moment in time where the planets align, and set your business rolling. To get a successful dream accomplished, takes grind out work in inopportune times.

Keep the dream alive. Whether you are a 40 year-old mother wanting to blog or a an 18 year old college kid with hopes for Mars, the barriers to achieving our dreams are often high, but learning how to overcome barriers, truly changes the world. Our time is precious, so you shouldn’t wait. Draft up an action plan today highlighting what you are doing to live the dream.

Image Credit: Armenian Now

Matt Krautstrunk is a writer and social entrepreneur, touching on topics ranging from social media marketing to postage meters for Resource Nation; and online resource providing purchasing advice for small business owners and entrepreneurs.