| author | title | date | image | authorImage | tags |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Trevor Lane |
The Motive |
02/11/2022 |
leadership, notes |
The Motive is a business book by Patrick Lencioni. I dont know much about him other than the fact that he wrote multiple best selling business books and leads a business consulting firm.
The Motive was recommended to me by Alex Hormozi. Alex runs several companies doing about 100MM per year. He often speaks about his businesses and business in general via his podcasts and youube channel. This book was recommended in one of those podcasts.
In the podcast, Alex was talking about hierarchies in business and how the higher one goes, the more one focuses on vision, culture and human growth. He mentioned that many leaders dont realize this and become leaders for the wrong reasons which is what The Motive is about.
The Motive introduces two types of leaders:
- Reward-Centered Leaders
- Responsibility Centered Leaders
Reward-Centered leaders lead in order to gain something for themselves, some sort of reward. My first thought when reading this was, "duh, the reward is the money they earn from a high paying job." On second thought, any CEO of any relatively successful company is likely in the top 1% of wealth. They probably have more than enough money so money likely wouldnt be a hugely motivating factor.
Perhaps status, power control come into play. The book doesnt really get into why reward-centered leaders do what they do. In fact, it mentions that each reward-centered leader is different, but their outcomes are usually the same: They abdicate their responsibilities as a leader, but more on this later.
The Motive talks about how understanding why you want to become a leader is crucial. Most people never do this. They never sit down and seriously ask themselves "Should I do this? Why do I want to do this?". This really hit home for me. I've had several experiences in life were I did something because it was the thing that people were suppose to do a that time. Highschool Sports, a church mission trip, and going to college fit this category for me. Not to say that I regret all of these things, but looking back I'm amazed at how little I thought about these descisions. It seems that a similar situation occurs when a promotion is offered. We rarely ask ourselves if it's something that we actually want.
The Motive mentions the "5 Ommisions of Reward Centered Leaders." I think these are worth repeating:
- Developing the leadership team
- Managing subordiants (and making them manage theirs)
- Having difficult and uncomfortable conversations
- Running great team meetings
- Communicating constantly and repetitively to employees
Responsibility-centered leaders want to serve others. To "do what is neccessary to bring about something good for the people they lead." They "understand that sacrifice and suffering are inveitable in this pursuit and that serving others is the only valid motivating for leadership."
This is such an interesting paradigm shift for me. It seems that, fundamentally, people go into business to make money. If this wasn't the case, we would regularly hear about people working for free. But the book argues that the best leaders are not motivated by money. Which also makes sense becuase, as I previously argued, most CEOs are likely in a position were they dont really need the money earned from the job. This dilema might be something I only understand if I am in a position to lead large organizations and no longer need money to live. For now, it seems that money is certainly a part of the question, but motivation should be multi-dimensional. Perhaps money can be seen as a threshold, once met, other factors matter much more.
About managment, The Motive says "Managing someone is not a punative activity, nor a sign of distrust. And it doesnt't change based on a person's senority or tenure. Management is the act of aligning people's actions, behaivors, and attidutes with the needs of the organization and make sure that little problems don't become big ones."
This point makes sense to me. High performance athletes, world reknown academics, business executives, etc. all seem to be keyed in on having mentors and coaches.
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Seriously ask yourself why you want to be a leader. Think deeply to truly understand your motives.
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Serving others is the only valid motiviation for leadership.
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Managing others isn't about punative action. It's about aligning behaivor around a vision.