Articles tagged with plantations
The biggest leadership challenge, irrespective of the situation, is the ability to build self-motivated, autonomous teams. Teams who after you have built them, work without you and don’t consider you necessary for their success. My greatest success in my years managing profit centers was in building such teams. This is tough because making yourself redundant is not easy, especially on the ego.
My learning in this incident of the bulldozer was the fact that to build credibility it is important to be able to lead from the front. You do not have to do people’s jobs for them. It is not even desirable to do that. But you do need to demonstrate that you know what they do and can do it if necessary. It is when subordinates get the impression that you know nothing about what they do, that it makes them nervous, and they lose motivation. The good ones feel a little lost. The crooks take you for a ride.
But hunger is the best motivator. The newcomers are hungry. The early movers have eaten. The newcomers know that if they don’t succeed, there will not be anything left for them. They are desperate. Their stakes are higher. That is a winning combination, in business. Even in monkey business. If you want to succeed, get desperate about it.
The root of all motivation is to know what one can expect from one’s efforts. WiiFM is a station that everyone listens to. What’s in it for Me? People don’t always ask you that in so many words. But you can be certain that is what is in their minds all the time. If you can translate whatever you want them to do in language that will show them what they stand to gain, you won’t need to do any convincing. For this you need language. Speak the language and you are three-quarters of the way there. One of the things I was very proud of was my knowledge of and relationship with my workers. I knew them all by sight, most by name and of many, I knew their family connections as well. They, in turn, treated me more like a tribal chief cum family elder rather than the Manager of the estate.