The Leadership Blog is dedicated to bringing you the best leadership tips from around the world. this week our articles will focus on inspiring others around you. Inspiration is such an incredible motivational states. What’s brilliant about working and living with inspired people is that you’ll find you won’t need to ever worry about their affairs.  That special inspired state means that they’ll be putting in all the effort required to look after things on their side, which means as a team leader or manager – they’re ideal to work with. Inspired people aren’t just drops of gold that you need to find, or worse, wait for. You can create an inspired team all by yourself, using the following 3 techniques outlined in this series. Part 3 follows.

2. Appeal to their competitive nature. At our heart, we are all competitive beings. In life we naturally we have to compete for everything, including jobs, partners and even restaurant tables! We all have a competitive spirit to some extent, and this idea forms the core part of the 2nd leadership technique. I will show you how to use competitiveness to to motivate an employee or friend into performing well! As a bystander, you simply have to set the right challenge.

I remember a conversation with my old sixth-form business studies teacher like it was yesterday. The exam results from the first round of examinations had just been released and I was exstatic to learn that I’d achieved full marks on my business exam. My teacher called me to his desk and said to me quietly;

“These results are outstanding, great work! It reminds me of Lucy. About 3 years ago she was a girl in my class who also did brilliantly in her exams. She wasn’t that nice though – a bit arrogant and up herself y’know, but she ended up getting full marks in her whole qualification. Lucy is the only person to have ever to have done that here, but I really think that you could do it too, while not annoying everyone at the same time! It’d be great to see a well-rounded person like you manage to do it.”

What a perfect thing to say! My teacher had set me a challenge to try and complete. I definately wasn’t going to become complacement and start underacheiving in class now! I was going to try and beat that girl. I badly wanted to get full marks without being ‘arrogant’ about it. And so for my 2 year course I put in extra effort in that class,  and came out with a grade to be very proud of. Who was I to prove him wrong in believing that I could do this? He gave me a very good reputation that I didn’t want to let down, and he also gave me a chance to prove I was better than this unpleasant Lucy. It was a perfect combination of challenges that had one great result = dedication on my part.

So if you want to unleash the competitive drive within your friends or collegues:

* Give your employees a good reputation to uphold
* Compare your employees to their rivals
* Set your worker a tough goal to meet, but enough praise to show that you believe they can reach it

If you set your own friends or team mates challenges such as these, you will fill them with a sense of focus and clear direction that would only come them accepting a competitive challenge and striving to achieve success in it.

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Tags: Collegues, Inspiration, Motivation, Teamwork

This entry was posted on Monday, March 9th, 2009 at 2:23 pm and is filed under Leadership Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.