Motivation is an important element of leadership. To motivate means to stimulate someone’s interest and enthusiasm for doing what the organization needs him or her to accomplish. 

Leaders can make people happy by letting them daily take long lunches, long breaks, leave work early and come late without recording it on their time sheets. Though those people may appreciate their leader, all may feel a great sense of loyalty to each other, the leader and the employees would be failing the organization.   

Mission Matters Most

Mission matters most is a mantra of The Three-Dimensional Leader: Negotiating Your Mission, Resources and Context, which says, “Mission is the reason and purpose the organization exists... [,and] the reason leaders and employees exist within the organization.”   

Leaders and employees are paid to fulfill an organization’s mission; not to pursue their own individual humanistic horizons of self-fulfillment, on the company’s time and at its expense.  One-dimensional leadership and employee behaviors are selfish or are “all about me.” Three-dimensional leadership and employee behaviors fulfill the organization’s mission in the prescribed organization’s way.  

Motivation Means Emphasizing the Main Thing

Strategic plans can be useless without appropriate leadership to implement them. Leaders must keep the main thing the main thing.  What is good for mission fulfillment must guide every decision.  People will attach themselves to a cause that seems worthy and is greater than themselves. Leaders should hold up the mission as that worthy cause to which people should rally.  

Mastering Motivation

The art of leadership is getting people to want to do what the mission requires.  Wise leaders elevate the mission to rallying-cry status by infusing it with the inspiration of vision and the passion imbedded in the organization’s values.  That is the art of motivating in a way that matters most. 

The Foundations of Organizational & Community Problem Solving

Most problems persists not because more money is needed, but because the people who can solve them need to overcome barriers to achieve the Triple-C Synergy of 

1. communication, 
2. cooperation and 
3. coordination.   

Synergy means the output and outcomes from a well-functioning diverse group is greater than the mere mathematical sum of its individual parts.  Chapter eight of The Three-Dimensional Leader: Negotiating Your Mission, Resources and Context.   explains the process for achieving the three-C’s so “Great teams obtain synergy from their diversity to effectively negotiate the context” and overcome problems.  Diverse groups can make the best teams -- if they obtain the benefit from how each member is wired differently, and thus naturally motivated to achieve things that the other members are not. 

Every team, however, experiences challenges initiating, arriving at and maintaining the three-C’s.

Getting The Most From Working Relationships  

The book and MRC training help participants identify the three major barriers to communication.  Overcoming them is foundational for achieving coordinated synergy. 

Your team also gains resources to effectively work through the forming, storming and norming process to emerge as a group well focused on a common mission and flowing in the triple-C’s to achieve it. Storming does not have to frustrate and side track your team and derail synergy.  

Helping Your Team Reach Its Potential 

The 3-D MRC value system compels triple-C synergy by equipping people of various psychological perspectives to identify and work through their communication challenges and misunderstandings to collaborate with each other to identify and achieve the mission that matters most in all situations. 

A Three-Dimensional MRC focus and initiatives, implemented with triple-C processes, are necessary for organizations and communities to achieve the collaborative synergy from their diversity that solves problems.    


Please feel free to comment and share you thoughts on this issue.  

The Vampire Diaries, based on the young-adult book series by L.J. Smith, is about two brothers who approach their situation from two very different perspectives and attitudes.  One wants to avoid killing people and the other enjoys it. Both are manipulated by a third vampire, a captivating female, who appears as vulnerable and sympathetic as she is cunning. The trio is a paradigm for what I call the “Vamployees” who disrupt workplace environments.  

“Vamployees” are employees who act like one of the three types of vampires described in The Three-Dimensional Leader: Negotiating Your Mission, Resources and Context. Vamployees corrupt teams and organizational performance, as they over react to stimuli, overstep boundaries, and make bizarre justifications for their behaviors.  

The book contains a section called: “Vying with Vampires,” which asks, “What is the difference between 

1. a real vampire who enjoys being hominus nocturnus; 
2. a person who is a vampire but is in denial about it; and 
3. a person who is delusional and thinks he is a vampire but, in fact, is not?”

The section is accompanied by vivid detail explaining the behaviors of these three types of vampires and how they drain synergy from their coworkers, managers, supervisors and organizational processes. The outcomes of their behaviors are explained in a section on “The Four Types of Employees.” A section on “The Role of Supervisors” gives us practical advice, and strategies for dealing with them.  Case examples also are included to show the outcomes you can expect from deploying the anecdotes.      

Do you have difficult employees whose behaviors are challenging to define? Want solutions to end their masquerade? Do you have the courage to uncloak your vamployees?  The Three-Dimensional Leader will give you tools for “Verifying and Vying with Vampires.”