Inspiration is the one talent all leaders need to learn, claims Virgin boss Richard Branson. Given his own record, he surely knows something about how it’s done.¹ We want inspiration from our leaders because it gets our juices flowing and makes us excited, keen to participate and add our own contribution. Sadly, few leaders manage to inspire, so it is no wonder many employees fail to perform at their best.

So what exactly do we mean by inspiration? In essence, it’s a feeling – an experience that in some way moves people emotionally. This emphasis on emotion partly explains why some business leaders shy away from exploring their own potential to inspire. They fear looking too closely at their own emotions, or suffering a loss of objectivity, or becoming carried away by an irrational impulse.

Inspiration tends to be seen as the preserve of artists or charismatic personalities. Yet if you have a good idea and feel strongly about it, you can be inspiring too. It’s as if you have received a spark of genius from some other world. Such moments may seem totally fortuitous, but more often arrive as a result of previously intense work and preparation.

“Inspiration is a guest who doesn’t like to visit lazy people.”

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, composer

Future organisations will increasingly expect their chosen leaders to be a source of inspiration. This is how they will reliably tap into the diversity and creativity of their people. Because many leaders need help in this area, there is now a UK employers’ organisation dedicated to helping leaders make work experience more meaningful, relevant and inspiring for young people.⁴ It responds to the gap between young people’s expectation of the world of work and what business expects from new recruits.

Since you are reading a book about leading the way, you probably already know the need to inspire people. Yet have you taken serious time out to master how to actually do it? If you follow some of the actions outlined here and are willing to experiment, you will be able to start inspiring people on a regular basis. Leaders who inspire can generate exceptional results.

How to inspire

So how do you go about inspiring people? What does it take to move someone first to participate, then to move up the intensity levels (discussed in the last chapter) so they become fully and thrillingly engaged? Are there any sure-fire principles that trigger inspiration in others? Our advice is to take a hint from leaders who consistently inspire people. These leaders invariably rely on three learnable actions:⁵

• Saying why you want to achieve something, rather than what.
• Finding your own source of inspiration, before trying to inspire others.
• Conveying passion for what you want to achieve.

The why

As an inspirational leader, try to focus less on the externalities of what you want to achieve, such as ‘become a market leader’, ‘beat the competition’, ‘launch breakthrough products or services’, ‘make money’, and so on. While these envisaged destinations are really helpful when trying to communicate your vision, they are normally the external result of an internal process. Therefore, instead, your message needs to reveal what is happening inside you – what is driving the vision.

Say clearly why you want to achieve these things and keep explaining why it matters to you. Martin Luther King did not say ‘I have a plan’. Instead, he had a dream – coming from ‘inside’ – and this is what inspired others.

Putting it slightly differently, people can connect at an emotional level with why you want to achieve something, and why it really matters. If they are moved by the why they start making their own transition into finding why it matters to them also, and therefore it can trigger high levels of engagement.

Sources of inspiration

The leaders who leave us touched, moved and inspired constantly examine their internal sources of inspiration. Socrates, who himself seemed pretty good at inspiring people, once proclaimed, ‘The unexamined life is not worth living’. Sources of inspiration essentially come from within, even though they may be stimulated by external experiences. So, it’s time to do some personal research.

What truly inspires you? What gets your juices flowing? When do you tremble with excitement? Sources of inspiration vary as much as human beings themselves. For example, inspiration might stem from a poem, a memorable film, a moving past experience, an obsession, a need for control, a hunger for making a difference, an event of great importance to you, encounters with people you admire, past successes and failures, or a cause you want to champion, such as overcoming injustice, generating enterprise or supporting the underprivileged.

You might be inspired to exceptional performance because you are facing an almost impossible, even desperate challenge. Or perhaps you want to make family members feel proud of you. Or you want to leave a lasting legacy that stamps your personal imprint on the world. All these can create an inner drive that inspires.

Sometimes the source of inspiration is an encounter with someone exceptional. For example, being in the presence of the blind and deaf Helen Keller, who was once one of the most famous women in the world, routinely reduced her visitors to tears. They felt the power of her personality and life force. Much the same is said to occur when some people have met Nelson Mandela. Or the source of inspiration may arise from an outside event, which again transforms how people feel. For example, the rescue of the Chilean miners trapped underground proved a potent source of inspiration for many people in countless endeavours around the world.

The most basic experiences can be incredibly powerful in triggering a sense of inspiration, such as the sight of a wonderful sunset, the birth of a child, a poem, or realising you are in love. In business, inspiration may stem from equally diverse sources, including particular individuals, work experiences, new opportunities, products, and so on.

“And then there is inspiration. Where does it come from? Mostly from the excitement of living. I get it from the diversity of a tree or the ripple of the sea, a bit of poetry, the sighting of a dolphin breaking the still water and moving towards me . . . anything that quickens you to the instant.”

Martha Graham, dancer and teacher

If you are thinking ‘But nothing does inspire me!’ do not despair. Just treat this reaction as a sign you have merely reached the starting gate. Turn your search for a source of inspiration from a task into an adventure. Never take inspiration for granted. For instance, people will not feel inspired merely because you are in a position of authority. You have to keep working at it.

People’s values are also great sources of inspiration. We have looked at this in detail in Chapter 1 with regards to you as an individual, but the link with organisational values can be inspirational. There are many companies that attract the best talent because of their strong values.

Take the UK company Lush, which makes fresh handmade cosmetics. It is clearly driven by its ecological values and has a whole section on its website about what it believes. This includes the statements: ‘We invent our own products and fragrances; we make them fresh by hand, using little or no preservative or packaging, using only vegetarian ingredients, and tell you when they were made. We believe in happy people making happy soap, putting our faces on our products and making our mums proud.’ And when you talk to the people who work for Lush you will see how inspired they are by their company’s ecological credentials.

Few people start with a blank canvas on which to develop their personal inspiration. Most of us can identify a few sources of inspiration. With a bit of thought you will soon uncover moments, things, people or experiences that caused you to feel uplifted, even if they lie buried beneath a layer of rubble and alienation. Everyone has this potential to tap into their source of inspiration – you just have to keep at it. But don’t expect to be able to inspire others unless you can first find inspiration for yourself.

Passion

Almost without exception, leaders who inspire people exude a passion that moves people. Having found their own source of inspiration, they are almost unstoppable in wanting to tell others about it. They are willing to make themselves vulnerable in showing what they truly care about. They risk rejection, ridicule and misunderstanding.

If ‘passion’ makes you uncomfortable, try ‘commitment’ or perhaps ‘conviction’. Whatever the semantics, in essence can you talk with energy, enthusiasm and strong emotion about what you want to achieve? You will not succeed if you rely on a logical and apparently watertight case. What moves people are not facts and figures, graphs or tables, tight reasoning or pure information. What inspires people is when you share your energy, enthusiasm and strength of feeling for some course of action you care about. People need to fully grasp why it matters so much to you.

As a leadership tool for inspiring people, passion is often misunderstood. It is interpreted as ranting and excessive emotional outbursts, which set many people’s teeth on edge. In politicians this becomes demagoguery. In contrast, leadership passion that really works is when you emotionally connect to what you want to happen and speak from the heart. You might speak softly, gently or quietly; but you will have a grounded and compelling intensity. This kind of personal connection almost always comes across as convincing and starts to engage other people’s emotions too.

We are referring to purposeful passion, not wild abandon. Passion used well is full of direction, concentrated like a laser beam, slicing through objections, obstacles, inertia and negativity. When you find your passion, you will have located a source of immense power. The bad news is that it cannot be faked; people soon know when your passion is forced.

Passionate leaders are not afraid to let their feelings show. This does not mean being reduced to a tearful mess, though more than one leader has allowed tears to flow in the passion of the moment. If you seek to inspire people as a leader, do not fear passion, but rather fear its absence. When you express how strongly you feel about something, it can transform how people view you and begin to move them from perhaps cool scepticism to warm enthusiasm.

Vision

“The single defining quality of leaders is the capacity to create and realise a vision.”

Warren Bennis, scholar, organisational consultant and author

Vision is an important part of creating inspiration in others and separates leaders from non-leaders. It involves being able to imagine a better future. You envision that future in your mind’s eye. By creating a compelling picture of the future you can talk about it with passion. It should be a bold prospect – something that makes people excited when you describe it. Nor can you stop there. Importantly, let each person know how they can contribute to turning your vision into a reality.

Sometimes a leader’s vision comes in disguise. For example, when Lou Gerstner was parachuted in to rescue IBM he famously declared that the last thing it needed right then was a vision. But that did not stop him pursuing what was indeed a vision: transforming IBM from a computer company to a technology and services company in which the internet played a key role.

A powerful personal vision usually differs from those will-o’-the-wisp statements that permeate so many mission statements adorning corporate walls. If your vision is to be more than just a ‘nice to have’, somehow you must bring it alive for people. Research shows that only 3 per cent of the typical business leader’s time is spent envisioning and winning people’s commitment to their vision.⁶ Leading the way demands that you not merely have a vision but that you have one that you can share with others – so that they come to own it too. A shared vision does not happen with merely a 3 per cent investment.

When it comes to vision there is seldom a miracle moment, rather it’s a daily journey. It’s a journey that requires constant investment in modelling the right behaviours, and in communication and the management of people’s expectations.

Your colleagues can help you identify your vision, expand it and translate it into a universal message. For example, FedEx’s famous three-word vision is ‘People, Service, Profit’. By themselves these words are useless and may as well stay where they belong in some mundane dictionary. FedEx leaders, though, have turned them into a reality so they now drive the company’s day-to-day working. But it took considerable time and much mutual help to evolve.

Your vision as a leader can be strategic, tactical or personal.

• Strategic vision is long-term and describes how the world would look if you could somehow eliminate all obstacles and achieve what you want. If you are a senior leader, this is likely to be an overriding philosophy and provide a framework into which all activities fit. For example, Google’s strategic vision is to help organise the world’s information; and the vision of Brazil’s energy company Petrobras for 2020 includes the goal of becoming the preferred company among its areas of public interest. Even if you are not a CEO you can still have such a vision: simply apply it to your local sphere of influence.
• Tactical vision drives short-term action and provides people with clear guidance on what to do in different situations. It is best if you can evolve this with those you want to make this vision come alive. For example, your tactical vision might be to sell more products and services, expand market share domestically and overseas, retain enough cash to sustain long-term profitability, or create an office environment that truly expresses your culture.
• Personal vision is your own view of yourself – how you want to be. This might be an aspiration, or some state of being you are reaching for, rather than one already acquired. For example, you might have a vision to build a powerful personal network, raise your profile within your industry, make a major creative contribution in improving health care, be known as influential in your sphere of interest, or build a company that makes a difference to how people spend their time at work.

Whatever the vision, it must really matter to you – no half measures. Unless it is important to you, it will never convince or inspire others. One way of tapping into your vision is to start with your own values – your core beliefs that seldom alter.

Many who aspire to be leaders complain that because the top team does not seem to have a vision, therefore they cannot have one either. This is a narrow view of what vision offers. All visions operate within constraints. It is like saying that because you cannot decide how the world will be in the future, you cannot picture how your home could be improved. You just need a bit of imagination.

“Imagination is like a muscle. If you don’t exercise it, it goes to seed.”

Joan Littlewood, theatre director

Vision acts as a force within – compelling you to action. It can give you a clear sense of purpose. And the power of the vision and your devotion to it can inspire others. They will sense your resolve and commitment.

Communication

“Communication is talking with people, not at them. And when you talk at people you do not get execution.”

Allan Leighton, chairman of Pace and former CEO of Asda

In late 2010, Marc Bolland, the new CEO of Marks & Spencer, revealed his long-awaited vision for making the stores more inspirational and how he would dismantle many of the strategies put in place by his predecessor. Spelling it out in more detail, he explained he wanted to concentrate on improving UK stores by focusing on the clothing, home and food businesses.

Bolland’s vision would be useless locked inside his head. If you truly care about how the future should look you will be driven, like Bolland at M&S, to share it with others. Around the time you become sick of talking about your vision, people will just start to get it. Communication is a continuous process, a constant drip, drip of the same messages until they finally land. For example, can your team repeat back your vision or values for what drives the team? If you dropped in to see them, would they explain it with words that roughly match yours?

Tomorrow’s organisations will rely heavily for their success on building relationships, seeking collaboration and working across organisational boundaries. This implies a demand for leaders who can support these complex requirements by communicating vision in compelling ways. Do you need to hone your skills of influencing, persuasion and story telling? Are you familiar with techniques to support your message?

Conversation

As a leader you may be tempted to think that you need to do all the communicating yourself. It is certainly true that you will have to do a lot, and when you do present or communicate it needs to be compelling and memorable. However, given that leadership is relational, most of your communication will be a dialogue rather than a monologue. By promoting discussion and allowing people to explore your messages for themselves, they are more likely to become inspired.

Any communication strategy you devise should include tactics to encourage conversation. You want to get people talking. It is interesting to note how rumours spread round organisations. They spread fast because they address people at their own level of interest and they tend to be quite intimate – hence the phrase ‘whispering campaigns’. If you can spread your own ideas in this way, you are more likely to produce engagement.

Story-telling

“The best stories enthuse wonder.”

Andrew Stanton, film director and screenwriter

We have all been brought up on stories that captivated us as children. They are a natural form of communication and therefore a powerful mechanism for getting our messages across. There is a story in every situation you find yourself in. And that applies to your vision of the future as well. What is the story you want to tell about the changes you want to make? Can you paint a mental picture of what the improved condition will look like? Is your current business story compelling enough to inspire people? If not, what can you create instead?

And the same goes for the legends that are told within organisations. People will always have a tendency to tell stories about their workplace, so you might as well try to harness this tendency and create the narrative yourself. Think about the stories you would like people to spread.

Some company stories have become legends that embody the spirit of the organisation – for instance, the story about the setting up of Innocent Drinks. The founders, Richard Reed, Adam Balon and Jon Wright, tell the tale:

We started Innocent in 1999 after selling our smoothies at a music festival. We put up a big sign asking people if they thought we should give up our jobs to make smoothies, and put a bin saying ‘Yes’ and a bin saying ‘No’ in front of the stall. Then we got people to vote with their empties. At the end of the weekend, the ‘Yes’ bin was full, so we resigned from our jobs the next day and got cracking.’⁷

Trust

No matter how compelling your vision or how strongly or passionately you communicate your ideas and plans, they will only start to inspire people once those people trust you. Their unspoken question, and sometimes one that is actually voiced, is ‘Why should we believe you will make this initiative happen?’

To answer this requires you have to have a manifest faith in yourself. When people see you trust yourself, this self-belief soon communicates and can engender trust in others. The unspoken answer then becomes ‘If you believe it will happen, then maybe we should too.’

“You have got to discover you, what you do and trust it”

Barbara Streisand

Building trust is seldom a quick fix and nearly always a two-way affair. If you can’t trust them, why should they trust you? For example, how far do you trust people who work with you? Are you constantly checking on their progress, frequently asking them to explain their actions, or demanding they clear all decisions with you, regardless of how important or urgent the decisions are?

If you want to get ordinary people to do extraordinary things, you need to win their trust first. That’s inspirational. One method is to hold a view of people that is greater than the view they have of themselves. You entrust them with tasks and responsibilities that help them grow and develop, and you let them know you believe in them.

“Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you’ll help them to become what they are capable of becoming.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, writer and polymath

Challenging goals

Setting great goals is like finalising the decision to become an amazing person. This is why leaders attach so much importance to goal setting. It is how they unlock people’s potential to excel. In Chapter 7 we will look at the process of goal setting in more detail. Yet the essence of inspiring goals, whether a leader sets them or the person sets them for themselves, is that they are exciting challenges.

Sadly, goal setting is often seen purely as a mechanism for driving people to extra effort, and then further discredited by the notion that as soon as you achieve a target ‘they move the goal-posts!’ That is why goals need to be collaborative as well as inspiring. When done with the right spirit, they can be a fantastic way of galvanising people’s energy. You only need to look at some of the extraordinary endeavours that have been sparked by almost impossible goals, whether it be putting a human being on the Moon, building the Hadron Collider or curing malaria in Africa.

¹ Richard Branson, ‘The one skill leaders need to learn’, Speech to SHRM 63rd Annual Conference, Forbes, 29 June 2011.

² Department of Trade and Industry, Inspired Leadership: Insights into People Who Inspire Exceptional Performance, 2004.

³ Mercer Consulting, What’s Working, June 2011.

⁴ The UK campaign ‘Work Inspiration’, a national employer-led campaign; www.workinspiration.com

⁵ See, for example, Simon Sinek, ‘How great leaders inspire action’, TED Talks, May 2010; http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action.html

⁶ James Kouzes and Barry Posner, ‘To lead, create a shared vision’, Harvard Business Review, January 2009.

⁷ www.innocentdrinks.co.uk/us/our-story