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 1 follows.

1. Talk to their Dreams. How many members of your team wishes to do the task they have been set? 50%? 25%? You’re not even close. How can I be sure of this? I can be sure because I am talking about their deepest wishes and desires. If your team mates had 5 years left to live, would they gladly spend it achieving the goal you’re working torwards? Probably not.

We usually have far higher and grander wishes for ourselves that sometimes seem to have no relation to what we spend our day to day lives doing. Perhaps members of your team want to run their own business, or get married. Whatever their desires, they all have their own dreams and if they’re organised, maybe a grand plan as to how they’re going to achieve them. What you have to do is show your team mates individually that their current task will take them one step closer towards their dreams.

Easier said than done? Well, let me give you a couple of examples.

If a friend or collegue’s dream is to run their own business; don’t let them punish themselves with the idea that this task isn’t what they truely wish to be doing. Instead, emphasise how working on this project will actually help them achieve their goal in the long term. For instance; emphasise how from this task they’ll learn skills that would be valuable to an entrepenur. And that when they do start their own business; they’ll already be learned in many areas on how to run one. What you are doing here is aligning their goals, and hence, their deepest motivation, with their current task. As well as it being a relief to your collegue that they are actually helping themselves, you should also expect to see their productivity increase.

Time for another example.

If someone’s dream is to become a high flying career person, then you can mention the transferable skills they’ll gain from this task and be able to put on their CV for their next promotion. If the person wants to work for charity then you can point out that by learning from this experience they’ll have more to offer a charitable organisation in the future. It’s a simple technique that requires little thought and carries huge benefits.

You’ll soon discover that all forms of work gives experience, and all experience can help your collegues’ future career; you simply have to word it so that you show how important a step this job/task is on the path to fulfilling their dream. This will get easier with practise.  Once they see that their current task actually slots neatly in to their grand plan, your workers will steam on with the job at hand!

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Tags: Collegues, Inspiration, Motivation, Teamwork

This entry was posted on Monday, March 9th, 2009 at 2:35 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.