The Grenade Knows: Why People Move and Speeches Fail

Who wants to go back to their girlfriend at home?
All of us nodded.
Someone in the group mumbled something about relaxing on his soft couch in front of the TV.
The corporal held a hand grenade on display for all to see.
You will learn about this weapon.
You will learn what to do and what to avoid. If you listen to my instructions, you will live to go home.
With that sentence, our corporal mastered the art of motivational communication.
His hard sell reinforced an emotion, a yearning, a reason for surviving that session.

Often I watched and listened from the wings while CEOs extolled the virtues of the business and regurgitated standard motivational glitter.

Rewind your own experiences to all those speeches including must, should, need to, have to, and will. Few of those speeches touched me on a level where I kicked myself into action and started doing as soon as I could get back to my desk. For all those who went back to their desks after the big-moves speech and weren’t “motivated,” ask this: why weren’t you motivated?
That’s a tough question, often near impossible to answer.
What motivates me? Comfort, especially the comfort that follows certainty. That one is a biggie.
No pain, or little stress, is another motivator.
Being seen, being heard, moving through satisfying moments, living with the hope that those moments can be repeated.

The big speech seldom hooks into the human that needs to be motivated and rather focuses on the mechanics of communication.
Communication is more of an art than a science, though. If it moves you to a place where you want to be and helps you move others to a space where all can be comfortable and aligned with your space, you succeeded.
If not, your communication failed.
Our corporal never promised anything above and beyond what would happen anyway.
A seven-day home pass was coming our way, and he reinforced our expectations.
Companies easily conflate internal and external motivators for moving people: the free beer promised for celebration at the end of the quarter is fine, but it might not touch the feelings of a real human need.
Managers with solid emotional intelligence could have opened with, “We all want to have a great weekend without the stress of patching things that are fragile all the time. I’m proud of what we’ve done. Joe, Andrew, and your teams, good work. Let’s have a coffee early Monday to debrief, share some good news, and get the business guys off our backs.”

Next time someone asks you why they need to stay late after work for a project, what is your reason going to be, the reason that they will want to believe? “Why did you get into this lift?” a colleague once asked.
We had just returned from yet another tech conference that left us cold. No, we were not motivated or even inspired.
“I wanted to go get my stuff,” he answered. So there’s the essence of motivation, he replied: if I could get you to enter a lift each time, convincing you it’s in your best interest, even if it was my idea.

People don’t step into lifts because they’re told to, they step in because they know where it takes them.

(The pic shows a practice session with phosphor grenades. In 2024, I wrote about Neil, the tall dude in the middle.)