Review of Patrick M. Lencioni’s The Motive: Why So Many Leaders Are Abandoning Their Most Important Responsibilities

Executive is a noun and execute is a verb. ‘Execute’ radiates activity. The leader should be involved in executing rather than just executing.

A CEO does not deal with sales, marketing or finance, however much you would like to believe that he or she does. As an executive officer, the only time you’ll get involved in those activities outside of your meetings is when your superiors are struggling and need help or advice.

The best golfers and tennis players and other athletes pay people a fortune to coach them. Why on earth would you think that a head of marketing or sales or finance doesn’t need a coach? Not to mention managing it as a team. It is a sign of negligence for a CEO to stop managing people just because he can get away with it.

Why you lead comes before what you must do to lead

We can talk about what we’re supposed to do as a leader, but if we don’t understand why we’re going to lead in the first place, it won’t make any sense.

There are only two motives that drive people to lead

1. They want to serve others (servant leadership)
2. They want to be rewarded (reward-oriented leadership)

You probably already know which of these motives makes for better leaders. Maybe people should stop using the term servant leadership altogether, because that’s the only valid kind. And that should be the motive that guides you—to bring about good for the people you lead, not just yourself.

That said, you might want to read on to find out why reward-oriented leadership is such a problem. A father who only believes in parental benefits will have a hard time being a father. Only by changing the underlying attitude about what it means to be a parent can that father really get good at it.

5 omissions of reward-oriented leadership

Develop the leadership team

In some cases, leaders delegate team building to the head of HR. And this doesn’t work. If a person at the top of your organization does not believe in the development of their team, you cannot expect HR people to believe otherwise. They won’t take it seriously and it won’t be effective.

So don’t sit back and hope that someone else will manage the difficult emotions and awkward moments, because delegating people’s development never works.

Directing subordinates

Managing individuals is not only about helping them set the direction, but also making sure the direction is aligned with the missions of the organization. It is also about identifying potential obstacles and problems as early as possible and coaching them to success.

It’s also worth noting that trusting someone is no excuse for not managing them. Knowing how they are progressing or falling short is far from micromanaging.

Having difficult conversations

Ford CEO Alan Mullaly was successful because of something the author calls “joyful accountability.” Alan liked to approach people in need of correction and cheerfully let them know that it was entirely up to them whether they would change their behavior or attitude. He would remind them that if they couldn’t, he’d still be their friend, but they couldn’t keep working at Ford.

After all, by avoiding difficult conversations, you’re trading your discomfort for theirs, causing them to feel even more pain when their shortcomings came to light during a performance review, a compensation interview, or worse, an exit interview.

Lead great team meetings

If your meetings are bad, chances are your executives are having bad meetings with their teams. And it just flows from there. The person responsible for running effective meetings is “you” – no one else. You cannot delegate that task as a CEO. It is yours and yours alone.

Continuous communication to employees

Studies suggest that it takes seven communications for employees to believe that leaders are taking the message seriously. Until then, employees consider it company language or internal propaganda.

Many leaders think they are offending their audience by repeating a message. They forget that employees have no idea what is going on in their organization. Think about this for a moment: no reasonable person has ever left a company because of too much communication.

The best leaders see themselves as CROs – Chief Reminding Officers. They are much more concerned about employees being uniformed than about criticism of layoffs.

Now it’s your turn.

Here’s the truth. Almost everyone (including the greatest leaders who ever lived) is susceptible to flattery and fatigue. In other words, even the best of us can slip almost unconsciously into reward-oriented leadership at some point in our lives.

What we can do best is learn from our mistakes, build on our strengths, and get better with every effort. Remember, as with any calling in life, there is no end to mastery in leadership.

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