Being A Leader: Inspiration vs. Motivation

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Hello and thanks for visiting.

One thing many dont consider or realize is that there is a big difference between inspiration and motivation.

Inspiration comes from outside
It is the art of pushing and moving people to do things better than they believe themselves that they can.
It is about helping people find their best sides and using them. Helping people find the energy to work as hard as they can.

Motivation comes from within
Motivation can not be given too you. It comes from within.
It is our own driving force leading us to succeed.

The meaning of these to leaders
As a leader you have to understand the difference and importance of these aspects.
If someone isn’t motivated it doesn’t matter how inspiring you are, your words will fall on deff ears.

On the other hand motivation is like a spark. It has to be taken care of, nursished into a flame.
If you dont it will eventually burn out.

This realization is what differs good leaders from poor ones. The understanding that wasting you time on someone who isn’t motivated is futilie and that you should spend your time helping and inspiring your motivated colleagues.

An Example
When I was new in sales I was extremely motivated. I worked harder than anyone. Finding new ways to use our CRM-system to increase my activity level and efficiency.
I made more calls to customers than anyone at the company. I also did my best to learn, by listening to my peers, my boss and by reading about sales.

Therefore I quickly excelled and was promoted to assistant manager. This of course flamed my motivation and kept me working harder and harder to improve.

I started taking evening courses to get an even more understaning about sales, leadership and marketing.
Before long a position opened up as manager for our department. I was the obvious choice to fill the role, as I was assistant manager and had done my job well. My colleagues expected it and so did I.

That day the vice president of the company asked me out to lunch.
He told me that the manager was leaving and that they were therefore going to need a replacement.
All I could think about was what I would do once he said the words “Are you interested?”, as I had made sure he new I was.

Instead he said “We are not going to give you the job, we are taking in someone from the outside”. My obvious answer was “why?”.

He answered “To be honest, you are to good at your job. You are to good a salesman and we cannot lose your numbers.”

This was an incredible shock to me. Not only was I not going to get the job I had lusted for, for two years. The reason I didn’t get it was because I did my job to well.

My reaction was not very subtle. My numbers went down. They dropped like a rock.
The motivation was still there, I still wanted to succeed and be the best. But the inspiration was missing. I realized that doing my job well wasn’t the key. Maybe doing the job badly was.

Not long after the president was fired from the company and the new president and I had a chat. He had heard of my numbers, but not the situation. I explained it to him and he understood and started working together to find a solution.

He found that inspiring me wasn’t all that difficult as I already was motivated and it was he who gave me the chance to become manager and later open our first office abroad.

The moral of the story
It is that no matter how mmotivated your colleagues are, you have to take care of them. Nurture that spark into a flame and keep it burning.
I was as motivated as they came and could still have my flame put out.

An example of the opposite action
It isn’t all about the managers though. Even if you are great at inspiring others, some are uninspirable.
Also towards the beginning of my career one of our other departments had a very good manager. He was both a role model and a inpirationalist. He helped people find energy to work when they were down and helped them improve to the best that they could be.

He once told me about a young man he had worked with.
This guy came in with a world of potential. He had a great sense of the customers needs, how to hear if they were interested and which buttons to push.

His first week he made the top ten list at the company for most deals.
Everyone thought that he was on his way to become the best salesmen every to have walked in through our doors.

What happened though was the opposite.
The rest of the department kept producing great numbers whilst his just declined.

Instead of getting better each week, he was getting worse.
The manager tried to motivate, coach and talk to him. But he just couldn’t find a reason to keep working hard and quit just a few weeks later.

These different situations where we easily can see the two sides of motivation and inspiration act out are important to remember. Because if we don’t we risk putting to much time into people we can’t help anyway, whilst forgetting to help those that can really become stars with a little nudge.

//Daniel

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