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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

When cultures collide, two things can happen: Tragedy can strike, as in Spain’s conquest of the Aztecs, or both can enrich each other, as when St. Patrick brought Roman literacy to Ireland. (If you’re interested, read How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill. It’s a wonderful read, and you’ll gain important insights into Western history.)

IT and marketing departments are equally divergent cultures, and they’re colliding all across the business landscape. Tragedy can strike here as well, through the creation of just-too-late applications. (The tragedy is to your career.)

Enrichment can strike as well, and it’s going to happen to happen to you today through the simple expedient of reading on.

This will be a family affair: I’m going to pass on some wisdom from Dear Ol’ Dad (DOD) who in other circles is known as the Great Guru of Direct Marketing. (He’s also the chairman of BJK&E Direct, and a tough act to follow).

DOD proposed five great marketing motivators several years ago, and they demonstrably work (which means that using them makes the cash register ring more than not using them in side-by-side tests). They are fear, greed, guilt, need for approval, and exclusivity.

Yes, I know they sound like several of the deadly sins, but hey, we’re talking about effective marketing, not moral purity. Real people really respond to these, whereas they don’t respond when you appeal to their better natures.

You want to be a good manager, and to be a good manager you have to motivate people. Here’s where you can learn something from great marketers: Use their insights into motivation. Yes, you too can get people to do what you want through the appropriate application of these motivators.

Sound manipulative? Sorry. Either you can learn to motivate people or you can’t. If you can, you’ll do so by learning specific techniques better than through vague generalities. And if applying specific motivational techniques is manipulative, then so be it: By that definition all of management amounts to nothing more than manipulation.

So how do you apply these five great motivators to management? The same way porcupines mate: very carefully. Why? Because they’re not equal. Each has its own uses, contexts, and consequences, which you need to understand.

Let’s start with fear, the most powerful motivator known. Take someone who’s overweight and out of shape and scare them. Zoom! They’ve run a 5-minute mile!

You have plenty of power to instill fear in your employees, and it can be a useful tool.

“You’re underperforming, Clyde,” you might say, “and if you don’t pick up the pace I’ll have to find someone else who can do the job.” Zoom! You won’t make friends this way, but you’re likely to get more work out of Clyde, whose job really is in danger.

Don’t rule out the use of fear because it’s somehow “wrong.” When you need to create a sense of urgency for any reason you’d be wrong to not instill fear.

“If we don’t change how we do business, we’re out of business,” is a perfectly valid message to give employees if it happens to be true. And without a message like that, few employees will embrace painful changes.

Here’s what you won’t get when you motivate with fear: creativity. Why? There’s another response to fear: diving for cover. Creativity involves risk, and fearful people won’t be in the mood to take risks. “Be creative or die!” is a useless message.

OK, let’s practice using fear as a motivator. Here goes: Don’t, under any circumstances, miss next week’s column, when we’ll explore how to use some of the other great motivators. Your career hangs in the balance!

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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

One fringe benefit of public speaking is meeting friends I never knew I had.

So it happened when I gave a luncheon speech recently at LawNet, an association for CIOs and IS managers who work for law firms.

You think you have a tough gig? Imagine having no status and no hope of promotion (only lawyers become partners). Imagine having no real company strategy to use in setting priorities, only 20 bosses, each with a priority du jour. Imagine technology being a key competitive differentiator, specifically asked for in requests for proposals but effectively ignored by your firm’s fragmented executive leadership.

After I’d spent an hour babbling about electric fish, prairie chickens, evolution, and IS management, I talked with dozens of LawNet members, many of whom regaled me with anecdotes about bad managers. Bad managers don’t, of course, outnumber good ones, but they sure stick more in people’s minds and craws.

My e-mail reinforces this conclusion. When I write about bad managers I get megabytes of “me too” letters; writing in defense of managers and executives yields the kind and volume of messages usually reserved for commentaries on operating systems or Bill Gates.

Memories of bad managers last longer than memories of good ones and create expectations that the next manager will be just as bad or worse. That, I guess, is how evolution wired us: Failure to anticipate an adverse situation can keep our genes out of the next generation, whereas failure to anticipate a positive event simply leads to a pleasant surprise.

IS Survival Guide is about managing staff well. It’s also about being effective in your job and about how to have a successful career. Managing staff well means building teams and nurturing employees so they can succeed. Managing effectively means getting the resources and decisions needed to accomplish your goals and get the job done. You measure success through career advancement.

These three dimensions of management aren’t intrinsically linked — aligning them takes deliberate effort on the part of company leadership. Sadly, managers can be successful without managing staff well or being effective, because many, and perhaps most, companies are structured so managers have plenty of power to filter information as it rises in the executive hierarchy.

You manage in four directions: down to your staff; sideways to recipients of the services you provide; sideways again to your peers and rivals in the company; and up to the executives above you. In my experience some managers are good at managing staff and service recipients; others excel at managing peers and organizational superiors. Very few are good at all four.

If you want to manage your staff well, be effective, and have a successful career, you have to master all four directions.

You also have to reconcile the three dimensions of management in your day-to-day job. I don’t care how much of a political rat’s nest you work in — good managers insulate the people who work for them from the politics in the rest of the company. Running interference for your employees is, in fact, a key part of your job.

That doesn’t mean you’re allowed to be so naive that you ignore your political environment. Your staff can’t succeed without the resources it needs to do its job. If you’re ineffective, everyone who works for you will be frustrated and ineffective as well, no matter how good a manager you are.

Your success, of course, depends on your ambition, your ability to “manage up”, and dumb luck.

If you want to succeed, or, for that matter, just be an effective manager, you’ll have to play some stupid political games. That’s OK: There’s one thing worse than playing stupid political games, and that’s losing them.

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