Published July 2005

Motivate with goals,
build with success

Enthusiasm is contagious; that's why it is so much fun to talk with entrepreneurs. They love their businesses, and it shows.

Even with all their enthusiasm, though, sometimes things don't go smoothly. No matter how much a business is loved, it can still develop management problems that affect productivity and profitability.

It isn't at all unusual, for example, to visit a small business that has lost traction and, if you look carefully, find that the energy and enthusiasm of the boss cannot be found anywhere else in the company. Nobody else seems to feel the same joy about coming to work and doing the job.

For managers, especially entrepreneurs without previous management experience, this can be a puzzling experience. The entrepreneur is still the same person, with the same energy and enthusiasm. And he or she knows that the workers are good people; each one was hand picked. What is going wrong? What is the matter with everybody?

In many cases, the mystery only deepens when the entrepreneur begins to talk with workers about the problem. Everything seems fine in one-on-one discussions, and even in work sessions when the boss pitches in to help out with a problem or a sudden workload.

When the entrepreneur has to make a business trip, though, or becomes preoccupied with some aspect of the business — a sales, distribution or legal issue, for example — that takes him or her away from close personal contact with the work team, everything from morale to productivity deteriorates.

As the company grows, the external issues requiring the entrepreneur's attention seem to multiply, so the boss has to devote more time and effort on them. Productivity continues to decline. Profits first drift away from plan, then steadily downward, and no one seems able to pinpoint the reason. More and more often, the boss feels obliged to put on a firefighter's hat and jump in, make decisions, solve a problem and re-energize the team.

But there are only so many hours in the day, and a business makes many demands on an entrepreneur. Eventually, he or she begins to show signs of fatigue, and that is when we begin to hear the first hints of complaint — that young people today just aren't as highly motivated as workers in the past. You may even begin to hear comments like, "it's the schools" or, worse, "you have to watch them every minute."

Some entrepreneurs, facing increasing demands on their time in the form of putting out fires, dealing with "people problems" and just keeping things running, look to automation and systems solutions for help. For a variety of reasons — including the "Hawthorne Effect," where workers respond productively to management's heightened interest in what they are doing — the introduction of automated systems will sometimes improve matters. More often, though, the results are disappointing and the original problems of productivity, profitability and demands on the entrepreneur's time simply won't seem to go away.

What is really wrong? While every company is different, there is a surprising similarity when it comes to these symptoms. The root cause is that the entrepreneur and the workers aren't employed at the same company.

They share a common experience. Each confronts a workday filled with more things to do than can be accomplished. But the entrepreneur sees a bigger picture, the entire game. He or she knows what the goal is and sees that they are making progress, however ragged at times, toward that goal.

The workers see this only dimly, if at all. What they can see most clearly is stuff: the growing pile of stuff on their desks and on their work tables, the growing amount of stuff undone or done poorly for lack of time and resources.

When the gap between the two perspectives, the two companies, cannot be bridged by the presence, energy and contagious enthusiasm of the entrepreneur anymore, something else is needed.

What the workers need is success. While the entrepreneur can be sustained by his or her vision — not forever, but for a long time — the rest of us need the frequent nourishment of success, of something accomplished.

The remedy, then, is in reorganizing the work to allow for success rather than seemingly endless days of staving off failure, accomplishment instead of just surviving another shift.

The best training systems, from business management to athletics to the U.S. Marine Corps, understand that you motivate people with goals but you build them with success. Entrepreneurs can look like great managers if they remember that their workers will never totally share the dream, the vision. That's the entrepreneur's job, and joy. The rest of the team needs the day-to-day sustenance that only a feeling of accomplishment can provide.

James McCusker, a Bothell economist, educator and small-business consultant, writes "Your Business" in The Herald each Sunday. He can be reached by sending e-mail to otisrep@aol.com.

Back to the top/July 2005 Main Menu