How to motivate leaders: John Maxwell on finding what drives people

Executive overview

Most leaders motivate others the way they themselves want to be motivated — which only works for people like them. The real shift is moving from broadcasting your vision to discovering what each person actually wants, then leading them according to that.

Followers seek security; leaders seek opportunity. Motivating leaders requires treating them as individuals with distinct drivers: progress, relationships, recognition, purpose, and financial security.

The leader's job is not to motivate people but to help them find their own motivation — then create the environment for it.

From mountaintop leadership to individual discovery

• Early mistake: motivating everyone the same way, projecting your own drivers onto others
• If it's lonely at the top, you're not a leader — you're a hiker; leaders coalesce people around them
• The shift: go to each person, ask questions, get on common ground, then ask permission to lead them according to their motivational strengths
• Annual question: "As we go into the new year, what's the best way I can serve you?"
• Once you know what drives someone, create the environment — they largely motivate themselves

Leaders want opportunity, not security

• Followers respond to security; promise stability and they fall in line
• Leaders want new territory — new land to discover, new challenges to develop
• Leaders are harder to lead: more complex, more varied in what drives them
• Many leaders avoid developing other leaders because of the difficulty or insecurity
• The return on leading followers is addition; the return on leading leaders is multiplication

Progress through consistency

• Maxwell's early career principle: don't aim for home runs — just get on base consistently
• Consistency compounds — it isn't glamorous, but it's the mechanism behind lasting success
• Most people overestimate what they did yesterday and what they'll do tomorrow, underestimating what they can do today
• Mass movements don't begin with the mass — they become mass through credibility and consistency over time
• The only thing available to act on is now

Relationships as motivation

• All things being equal, people do business with people they like
• High morale at work correlates directly with liking the people you work with
• Cooperation is working together agreeably; collaboration is working together aggressively toward a shared goal
• Maxwell's longest-tenured team members have been with him 20–33 years — relationships themselves are a reason to stay in the game
• When hiring key people, Maxwell's team asks one question after social time: "How much do you like them?"

Shifting from taking to adding value

• Zig Ziglar's insight reoriented Maxwell at 26: help people get what they want first
• Before that, Maxwell was trying to get people to buy into his vision; after, he focused on buying into theirs
• Daily discipline: look at the calendar each morning and ask who to add value to today
• Adding value consistently produces compounding returns — the return isn't the focus, but it follows

Recognition done right

• Ask directly how each person wants to be recognized: public praise, a personal note, time, an experience
• One practice that works regardless of preference: tell the person's family how much their contribution means, in front of the person
• Recognizing someone to their close relationships is more memorable than almost any other form of acknowledgment

Money as a motivator

• Money is real but sits at the bottom of the motivation hierarchy once baseline security is met
• Extrinsic motivation wears thin quickly; lasting motivation is internal — purpose, cause, contribution
• Money gives you options and the ability to give; it follows from adding value, not from targeting it
• Practical: maintain at least three income streams so no single source creates dependency

Playing an infinite game

• Maxwell previously played a finite game — rules, time limits, wins and losses
• The shift: accept there is no finish line; growth means constant change, not arriving at a destination
• If you're growing, you're always changing; change doesn't equal growth, but growth always produces change
• Monthly practice: take someone to lunch, ask questions, take notes — repeated for 40 years