What you want to do, you do.
“What people want to do, they do!”
— Jerry Johnson
Do you often wonder why you do the things you do? Or more concerning, do the things you don’t want to do or don’t do the things you want to do? Thousands of books have been written to battle this problem; books on motivation and goal setting line the best-seller shelves of all the major book stores. “Lack of motivation” or “the absence of accountability” are catch phrases we use to address this problem, but it seems solutions are difficult to come by. We use rewards and deterrents in an attempt to manipulate motivation, or we micromanage to increase accountability, but these tactics rarely seem to work over the long term.
Twenty-five years ago, I spent the day with my mentor’s mentor, a man named Jerry Johnson. Jerry was in his seventies at the time. He was a great story-teller and could tell you more about leadership with a funny one-liner than most leadership books on the shelves today. One of the lines Jerry threw out that day has stuck with me all these years. I have quoted him thousands of times: “What people want to do; they do.”
At the time, it was just a simple quip to explain away why a certain friend had decided not to join us for dinner. But as I thought about it more, I realized this little one-liner was deeply insightful and potentially the key to unlocking personal growth and was a powerful leadership philosophy. It wasn’t that the friend who skipped the dinner did not want to join us for dinner, it was that he wanted to do something else more! And so, what he wanted to do, he did.
As a leader, you and your employees need a specific and compelling destination in order to choose to do the necessary activities to get there. You, and they, must want to engage in these activities. Intrinsic motivation cannot be manipulated by coercion or reward, and it certainly cannot be micro-managed with some sort of accountability matrix.
So: what destination are you struggling to reach? Is the motivation to get there compelling enough?