Chapter 9
Inspire Others

When I was a teenager, I worked at a greenhouse and had a boss who gave vague instructions, such as, “Go water the plants.” That’s pretty nonspecific in a nursery that covers five acres. So I would disappear and water plants for several hours, never knowing how much water to give, or which plants required more or less water. In addition to the lack of direction, I found the whole thing pretty boring. I lasted about six weeks before I quit. I never questioned what I was doing or why. Inspired I was not.

The previous chapters describe ways to build great teams and lead them, but the one component that every great leader needs is inspiration, as we explore in this chapter.

One of the greatest predictors of effectiveness, happiness, and success in work is our capacity to inspire others. As Canadian researchers Val Kinjerski and Berna J. Skrypnek found in studying the effect of inspiration in the workplace, “Inspired leadership emerged as central to influencing individual experiences of spirit at work.” It was also “strongly linked” to a sturdy organizational foundation, organizational integrity, a positive workplace culture and space, a sense of community among members, opportunities for personal fulfillment, continuous learning and development, and appreciation and regard for employees and their contribution.¹

Inspiration is rooted in passion, in curiosity, and in our desire to live our lives to the fullest. To inspire, we must be inspired, and to be inspired, we have to take time to notice the small acts of leadership readily available in any situation.

There’s nothing quite so inspiring as seeing someone embrace his work in the pursuit of excellence, or in service of a greater mission. There’s nothing quite so moving as witnessing small acts of excellence, generosity, and kindness. Often the most moving and inspiring stories are about competitors who become comrades or everyday people taking deep pride in their work.

For example, there’s the beautiful story of high school runner Meghan Vogel, who helped her fallen competitor, Arden McMath, cross the finish line of the 2012 Ohio State Track meet.² Or the following story of quiet dedication and inspiration that Martin Seligman recounts in his book Authentic Happiness.³

Embracing Your Life's Calling

Psychologist Martin Seligman was visiting a dear friend in the hospital. His friend, Bob Miller, at the age of eighty-one, was still a vibrant, joyful man. Gregarious and an avid runner and tennis player, Miller had been hit by a truck while running, and now lay in a coma in a hospital bed for the third day.

The neurologist gently asked Seligman to look at Miller’s do-not-resuscitate order and consider removing the life support system. Seligman was distraught as he considered the possibility that his friend would never rise again. He asked for a moment of quiet, the doctor left the room, and Seligman sat down in a chair to watch the orderly working.

The orderly was quietly rearranging art on the walls. He took down a calendar, pinned up a Monet print, and took two Winslow Homer prints from his bag and placed them with consideration on the walls. Next to Miller’s bedside, the orderly taped a photograph of a Peace rose.

Seligman gently asked the orderly what he was doing, and the man replied that his job was being the orderly on the floor, but he brings in new art prints and photos every week. The orderly explained why: “You see, I’m responsible for the health of all these patients. Take Mr. Miller here. He hasn’t woken up since they brought him in here. But when he does, I want to make sure he sees beautiful things right away.”

In his memorable “Street Sweeper” speech, Martin Luther King Jr. also extolled the values of embracing our work: “If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. . . . If you can’t be the sun, be a star. It isn’t by size that you win or you fail. Be the best at whatever you are.”⁴

Some people have jobs, some have careers, and some have callings. Jobs are a means to another end, such as supporting family leisure time. Careers are driven not only by money but also by professional advancement. Often, when advancement stalls, alienation and disengagement set in. As we learned earlier from the Ernst & Young study, in chapter 3, professional advancement ranks among the most important motivators for professionals.

Yet a calling is a pursuit of something greater than oneself, and this is the path to the highest inspiration for others, as epitomized by a story Peter Drucker tells about a Nurse Bryan in his classic book The Effective Executive.⁵ This nurse elevated the level of care and excellence by constantly asking the simple question, “Are we doing the best we can to help this patient?”

Nurse Bryan was not a supervisor, or a leader with a title, yet the patients under her care consistently recovered faster than patients on other floors. Her words became a mantra, known as “Nurse Bryan’s rule,” spreading throughout the hospital system, from doctors to orderlies, with remarkable results. According to Drucker, her creed had permeated the culture and lived on more than a decade after Nurse Bryan retired.

Nurse Bryan’s small act of leadership was to consistently give not only her attention but also her time to her work, and to her patients.

Giving the Gift of Time

Everyone is so busy these days, overwhelmed by complexity and uncertainty, that it’s hard to know what to do or who to talk to in order to accomplish initiatives at work that are daring and unexpectedly awesome. And so we create structure, process, and teams to solve specific tasks or projects. But team composition, proximity, and facilitation matter a great deal in terms of how productive they eventually become.

Some of the very characteristics that define modern professional teams are the same characteristics that undermine their success, including the following:

• Diversity. Assembling teams that are technology enabled, globally dispersed, and diverse is a rapidly growing trend and with good reason, because the ability to leverage expertise throughout the globe is increasingly a powerful component of competitive advantage. But deeply engaged, open collaboration starts with trust. And trust starts with the personal understanding that comes from cultural and emotional fluency. We might get technically proficient collaboration across cultural boundaries, but richer collaboration requires the bedrock of trust.

• Size. Teams are swelling in size to be (or appear to be) more inclusive, gain greater stakeholder buy-in, and leverage more expertise. Teams of twenty or more people are increasingly common, and technology is enabling a swelling head count. “My rule of thumb is that no work team should have membership in the double digits,” says J. Richard Hackman, formerly of Harvard University, who spent his career studying teams, “and my preferred size is six.”⁶

• Education. Teams are increasingly made up of people with higher and higher education levels. And, it turns out, the higher the education among the team members, the more likely the team may devolve into petty arguments. One key to overcoming this obstacle is to require teams to have not only task goals but also relationship-oriented goals.

To boost effectiveness and ingenuity of teams, as well as to eradicate “fault lines” within teams, leaders can do one thing that has a powerful effect in scaling excellence: give the gift of time.

Leaders’ regularly giving their time to listen to emerging problems and advise team members about whom they might talk to within the company to accelerate solutions, and to just listen to team members’ aspirations for the work they do, is a defining characteristic of successful cultures in organizations.

Mentoring programs, in which employees (often new hires) are paired with an experienced employee, increase retention rates, as researcher Nicole Frost and her colleagues found: “By incorporating leadership initiatives such as inspirational motivation, individualized consideration, idealized influence, and intellectual stimulation, nurses and leaders can use mentoring to improve professionalism, confidence, and self-worth.”⁷

The upshot is that those who are mentored are likely to stay longer in their role. And it’s not just nurses who benefit from such mentoring, according to Jonah Rockoff, who studied the relationship between mentoring and retention in teachers: “My most consistent findings are that teachers whose mentor had prior experience working in their school were more likely to return to teaching in their schools.”⁸

Whether we are in education or healthcare or a corporate environment, when we, as leaders, make the small act of giving our time to others in a mentoring or tutoring role, they feel inspired, enthused, and energized. One of the most powerful behaviors of effective mentors, as with all leaders, is an ability to listen intently, without bias or interruption.

Truly Listening

We never know from whom the next big idea will come, but we’re unlikely to hear it if we aren’t listening. And truly listening to those around us, no matter who they are, is not as easy as it may sound. Truly listening means not only opening our minds to what others have to say but giving people the time to fully express their thoughts, to express what inspires them and what they aspire to.

Years ago, a young professor at the University of Virginia, James Pennebaker, conducted a series of experiments with his new classes. In his book Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions, he explained that he would divide them up into groups for just fifteen minutes and ask them to talk about anything they liked.⁹ These groups were composed of students who didn’t know one another, so they talked about their hometowns, how they got to the university, what they were studying, and so on.

After the group broke up, Pennebaker would ask them to estimate how much talking each person did in the group, how much they enjoyed their group, and how much they learned from others in the group. Consistently, those who did most of the talking claimed to have learned the most, and liked their peers the most. It seemed that the more they talked, the happier they were about the people around them. In fact, as Pennebaker repeated the experiment, he discovered that the larger the group, the greater the effect and the more the biggest talker liked the group. The effect diminished as the group got smaller, to the point that, in a one-to-one conversation, if one person dominated the conversation, both people reported disliking it.

Energizing Others

Slydial is the app that lets you go straight to voice mail, safe from the possibility that someone might actually answer your call. Slydial exists in part because of the energy vampires in the world— those people you dread talking to because they leave you depleted, bummed out, frustrated, or annoyed with every conversation. However hopeful you remain, they will figure out how to suck the energy from the conversation. Sure, maybe you use Slydial because you just don’t have the time for a conversation and a text would get lost in translation, but I don’t think that’s the biggest reason it’s so popular.

Being an energy vampire is antithetical to being a source of inspiration. To avoid being an energy vampire, we should ask ourselves, “When people leave an interaction with me, do they leave feeling more or less energized?”

How important is being able to energize those around us? According to Rob Cross, associate professor at the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce, our ability to create energy in the workplace, with our colleagues around us, is a more powerful predictor of our success than other criteria, including function, title, department, expertise, seniority, knowledge, and intelligence.¹⁰ These are all descriptors. Creating energy is a behavior, and it can be learned. The ability to generate energy in those around us is so important that many successful executives and leaders place it at the top of the list as the most important attribute in team members.

Inspiring others by energizing them doesn’t have to do with backslapping or pumping people up with platitudes or grandiose conference-room speeches. We can all become energizers by developing the characteristics energizers have in common:

• They are fully present. Creating energy does not require that you be extroverted. We don’t need to jump up and down, or stand on a chair and cheer, or high-five our colleagues. As we explored in the previous chapter, it simply means that we possess the ability to see opportunities as others describe them and reiterate those ideas in a way that conveys true understanding.

• They open up possibilities. Energizers possess the ability to ask provocative questions that open up possibilities and encourage pursuit of action. It means being present and engaged in each conversation. It means building contagious enthusiasm in a constructive way, with emotional fluency. Opening up possibilities is about giving those around us the creative latitude to explore ideas that perhaps fall outside of usual organizational boundaries.

• They follow through. Getting enthusiastic about something can be infectious. But enthusiasm and action are different. There’s nothing more de-energizing than walking away from a project meeting feeling fired up, thinking we’re working diligently on a shared vision, only to return to working on the project and find our colleagues haven’t done anything on it. That’s a case of unrequited inspiration. Energizers follow through on their promises and consistently demonstrate that a project can be done by actively contributing.

• They add value instead of trying to top others. I’m sure you have been in a meeting before in which an idea is tossed around, and each person in turn tries to outdo the others to look smarter. This is not adding value but rather “topping” someone else—trying to sound smarter and more important than the other person is and competing with her instead of contributing to the conversation. So when someone says, “We went to New York for our vacation,” and then you say, “Oh, we went to Spain,” that’s not building value. That’s trying to top someone else’s contribution.

• They use supportive questions. Sometimes we can fall into the conversational trap in which we tend to lead the conversation toward our own interests, ideas, and concerns, what Charles Derber, a professor of sociology at Boston College, calls “conversational narcissism.”¹¹ Someone says his child is playing the trombone, and the narcissist says, “Oh, I used to play the trombone. Let me tell you about it.” And off you go for half an hour, lost in memories of middle school band.

To leave a conversation with both ourselves and other people energized, enthused, and even provoked, we should instead use what Derber refers to as supportive assertions and questions. A supportive assertion could be an evaluation, such as “That’s awesome!” or a comment, such as “You should check out this article on that.” But the supportive question is even better. It shows active, interested engagement in the conversation. A supportive question encourages and deepens the conversation. Through such supportive questions, we lead the other person into sharing more of her experience, ideas, and passions.

• They share their vitality. We all know that feeling when we are not only inspired but at the top of our game, feeling alive, passionate, and excited. “Employees who experience vitality spark energy in themselves and others,” Gretchen Spreitzer, Christine Porath, and their colleagues found, and “companies generate vitality by giving people the sense that what they do on a daily basis makes a difference.”¹²

Telling Real-Life Stories

Sue Mahony, president of Lilly Oncology, is responsible for almost two thousand people. In an interview, she described to me some of the ways she found to inspire her team:

• Avoid suggestions becoming orders, or your team is unlikely to provide honest feedback.

• Lead with questions, composing questions that rely on the strength of the team members and enable their expertise to shine, such as “What would happen if we made this decision?” or “What are the technical considerations if we build this?”

• Conduct listening sessions, in which her only goal is to find out what people around her honestly think, care about, and prioritize, after which she thanks them.

• Get closer to the impact of the work, to be able to judge better how team members are doing.

The last behavior is pretty easy to get team members excited about and driven in their work, considering their goal is to save lives, but it’s also easy to build petty squabbles and get exhausted in dealing with the mundane. This is why Mahony works to regularly remind people of why they are there. Real-life people currently suffering, and recovering, from different forms of cancer specific to the team’s work are brought in to tell their story. And their story is not always about the nature of the disease itself but also about the human side. When the researchers on Mahony’s team hear about the human impact, they are united in their sense of purpose and focus— the stories inspire them.

Hiring the Right People

I had an interview in November 2015 with Victor Cho. He is currently the CEO of Evite, the digital invitation service. You may have used the service to organize a dinner event or your kid’s birthday party. Evite currently has about seventy employees, which, as Cho describes it, is big enough to offer a full spectrum of organizational challenges, yet small enough to remain nimble in this volatile technology market.

When it comes to hiring and placing the right people in the right roles at Evite, Cho considers three primary criteria:

• Skills and capabilities. Do candidates have the skills and capabilities to do the job, and are they willing to constantly learn and gain new capabilities? As he described, it’s certainly important that people arrive with great skills for whatever role they are applying for, but, more important, he believes, is a constant willingness to learn, grow, and develop new capabilities along the way. This is the growth mindset we discussed earlier.

• Points on the board. How much are candidates contributing to organizational goals? It’s something Cho refers to as “points on the board.” That is, how many hard, measurable contributions are people making toward the company’s vision. This could be measured in lines of code, or sales made, or product improvements.

• Energy accretion. Cho describes “energy accretion” as one’s ability to build a positive sense of curiosity, enthusiasm, and can-do attitude on the team. It’s how much people in the organization contribute to and accelerate the positive energy of those around them. If “points on the board” is the science of evaluating performance, then “energy accretion” is the art of evaluation. Cho views this subjective, and hard-to-quantify, trait as more important than short-term contribution or raw skills.

Cho has the least patience with those who disrupt the chemistry in the organization by draining the energy from it. He is more forgiving and patient about the first two factors— skills and capabilities. He knows skills can be learned and developed. And points on the board can be coached, and often can be influenced by external factors.

Bad chemistry and negative mojo can quickly spoil the energy of an entire team. In Cho’s opinion, this is where many leaders can often get sidetracked, holding measurable contributions in highest esteem. It’s an easy trap to fall into. After all, if we want results, who cares how the work gets done, right?

But thinking this way is a mistake. When we start to reward results by any means, at any cost, we celebrate lone heroes and place individuals above the team. Our focus should be on inspiring teams to come together and work toward common goals, creating an environment where we all prosper. As we explore next, teams, when properly aligned, have the power to create something we alone cannot.