| Toxic culture doesn’t bubble up from the bottom. It drips down from the top.”— Cicely Simpson Every organization has a culture. The only question is: Is it intentional… or accidental? Culture is not built by mission statements on a wall. It’s built by behavior in the hallway. It’s shaped by what leaders model, tolerate, reward, and ignore. If there is fear, blame, or disengagement on your team, it didn’t originate at the entry level. It was permitted — directly or indirectly — at the leadership level. And the same is true for healthy cultures. -Clarity drips down.-Accountability drips down.-Integrity drips down.-Energy drips down. But there’s another powerful driver of culture: People over profit. Profit is an outcome .People are the engine. When leaders prioritize short-term numbers over long-term people development, culture erodes. Trust weakens. Performance eventually follows. But when leaders invest in people — challenge them, develop them, listen to them, and hold them to high standards — profitability becomes a byproduct of strength, not pressure. Strong cultures are not soft. They are disciplined, clear, and people-centered. So here’s the real leadership question: What is dripping from you? Stephen Daniels LMI USA Franchise Owner in Florida |
| 7 Guaranteed Ways to Motivate Your Team?! By Nick Howes, LMI UK Every leader and manager in every industry and every different type and size of organisation wants all of their people to come to work every day feeling highly motivated so that they perform to the very best of their ability AND feel great about doing so. The idea that there are 7 (or 9 or 4…whatever the number, we’d be on board with it!) certain ways to motivate your people is very appealing. It’s such a vital factor in organisational success that most people would do whatever was needed if the results could be guaranteed. In reality, we know that this is simply not the case. If you’ve led a team of any kind for any length of time, you’ll know that people are not that easily manipulated. You can’t just get them to think, feel and behave as you’d like them to. In fact, often the more people sense that things are being done ‘to them’ in an attempt to get them to comply with certain expectations, the more they push against that. The leadership challenge of the current time is as big as it gets. Much of the workforce is dispersed geographically and divided ideologically. Some want to travel into their place of work. Some would prefer to work from home. Some do a bit, but not as much as others think they should. Every leader has their own view of what they’d like for their team and has to balance this with sensitivity to the circumstances of each individual and the wishes of their own organisation’s leadership. Tough job doesn’t begin to describe it! In the midst of it all, the work still needs to be done. Productivity is paramount. We need highly skilled AND highly motivated people. Where were those 7 guaranteed ways to motivate, again? The stark reality is that you should give up trying to motivate anyone. You simply can’t, and this realisation is a key moment for every manager and leader. You can’t motivate others, but you can provide the environment which is conducive to people to people becoming (or remaining) self-motivated. Equally, the environment created can easily become one which is likely to decrease people’s motivation. If I’m grossly underpaid, guess what? I’m likely to lack motivation.If I’m treated as a cog in a machine, as a productivity tool with arbitrary targets and subject to impersonal appraisal techniques, this too will leave me feeling disrespected, devalued and, yes, demotivated.We could continue this list ad-infinitum. Perhaps it’s worth taking a few minutes right now to add to your own. Write the heading, “I would feel demotivated if…” and list as many things as you can. Then read back through the list and ask yourself the question, “Am I, or my organisation, doing any of these things?”If so, the result is likely to be that some or all of the people working in your organisation are giving significantly less of themselves that they are capable of. Low levels of motivation shouldn’t simply be accepted as normal. First and foremost, each individual is too important for that. The best leaders care deeply about the wellbeing of people and won’t settle for low morale and lack of engagement. The good news is when leaders show this concern for people and strive to create the best environment they can for their staff, productivity tends to follow and everyone wins. Nick Howes LMI UK Master Licensee Guaranteed Results According to Training Industry, Inc., 69% of buyers have stated that their training budgets are increasing in 2026. Leaders are waking up to the reality that the most important asset is their people. People are not to be treated like processes. You can create a process and attempt to implement it immediately. You cannot simply tell a person to change and expect immediate results. People have deep desires, motivators, attitudes, and ideas that are unique to who they are. You won’t be able to override this, nor should we want to. It is what makes us human. In order to tap into each team member’s potential, we must uncover who they truly are as individuals. The only way to do that is to implement long-term change that focuses on your team as unique individuals with God-given abilities and potential! At Leadership Management International, Inc., we are so confident our programs will produce measurable results for your team members, that we provide a money-back guarantee. Try us out. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain! |