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.