Motivation can often be about appealing to people's natural competitive spirit.
I once ran a customer service seminar, where I showed a short clip from the movie "Terms of Endearment". In it John Lithgow reacts to a rude cashier who embarrasses the customer in front of him who does not have enough cash to pay the total bill and must take some items off the bill. As the scene unfolds, we see a number of service glitches. In the end when John tells the cashier there was no reason for being so rude, the cashier says defiantly, "I wasn't being rude." To which Lithgow replies, "Oh, then you must be from New York." Everyone laughs.
What I did in the seminar is ask the audience to call out the things that went wrong in the scene, which I wrote on a flipchart. When the exercise reached a lull in response, usually after 12-5 things, I mentioned that the last group listed 30 items. The audience is re-energized and street he's to beat the 30 things, which they usually do.
While the plethora of things gone wrong in a service "moment of truth"[2] is interesting, it's the impact of the score-to-beat that I'd like you to think about. As in our prior case [3], production can ratchet-up as we expect more as leaders. But beating a group of peers, even themselves, is more powerful for driving performance. |