Is motivation worth the sweat?

“He failed to motivate them! They were bereft of motivation!”

So ran some of the headlines when one of the North West’s most famous football clubs recently sacked its manager. The fact that motivation had gone missing seemed to be vastly more important than purchasing the right players, choosing the appropriate tactics or putting in the effort on the training pitch.

And this is a serious matter – whether you follow football or not you probably can’t have failed to see this story. How often do you see the word “bereft” in your daily newspaper? For me it brought to mind the famous Monty Python sketch in which a certain parrot was dead, no more and ultimately bereft of life!

In some ways, this felt like someone had died. So it certainly provides a good backdrop for considering if motivation is a skill worth talking about. The context is wide-reaching and it was no accident that one of the commentators brought in by the BBC to discuss this topic was a Harvard professor of business. The skills needed to lead a football team are exactly the same ones needed to lead a team in the world of business.

David Moyes, in my humble opinion, did indeed fail to motivate. I personally felt sorry for him as his tragedy was played out in the full glare of the cameras but then again he was well remunerated for taking those risks. However, I felt he must take responsibility for failing to motivate – any seasoned business person will tell you how vital a “soft skill” motivation is.

Perhaps calling it a soft skill is partially where the problem stems from. For Moyes, there was nothing remotely soft about the nature of this skill which eluded him so teasingly and painfully. So called soft skills are vital in the world of business. The fact that they are linked so closely to emotional behaviour often makes them less accessible to people not prepared or able to change hardened attitudes and take them on board.

It’s not for me to decide whether Moyes was guilty or just unfortunate but insofar as he’s demonstrating a lack of motivational skills which are undeniably vital to successful business I ‘m going to put in my two penn’orth!

Why use the word “hope” when talking publicly about how his players will perform in the future? To my mind this subtly reveals you are hoping and praying which suggest strongly that you haven’t motivated yourself, let alone the players! Hope is not a strategy and even soft things like motivation need planning. Perhaps, like some business people, he underestimated the value of a seemingly optional concept like motivation.

One thing’s for sure, motivation is hard to build up but it can disappear in a second as you fall off the cliff – better not to fall in the first place as it’s an awfully hard climb back up to the top!