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MYTH: MOTIVATION IS THE SECRET TO SUCCESSFUL MANAGEMENT

In my book, motivation is the biggest myth of all. It does nothing more than raise the adrenalin - temporarily - which might work while you're kicking the ball. But business, remember, is the game where the clock never stops. Sure, you want your team members to play every day as if they were planting the flag on Iwo Jima, but you won't motivate them to do it.

That's why, when people ask me how to get "a winning attitude," I tell them there is no such thing as a winning attitude. There is only a winning performance.

What is an attitude? Is it something we can see, feel or measure? Is it some vague state of mind rattling around inside a person? Well, yes, I suppose the psychologists would say so. But as a quarterback or a manager, that is not something I can realistically deal with. All I can deal with is what the human body can do when chased by a bigger human body.

The same thing applies to the rather elusive term "motivation." Frankly, I don't know what that is. I can't see it, feel it or measure it. What I can see and feel and measure, however, is performance. Once when Bum Phillips was comparing Earl Campbell and George Rogers, he said, "Rogers sees daylight, Campbell makes daylight." To me, Campbell's work was the more crucial.

Let me put it more directly: If one of my linemen was making consistently good blocks, I considered him to be "motivated." As far as I was concerned, he had a "winning attitude." What he really had, of course, was real and measurable good performance.

When you're out there 6 points behind with third and ten and only thirty seconds left on the clock, you aren't looking for that undefined thing called a good attitude, you're looking for performance. The real question is, "Can this man get it done?" Better still, will he get it done?

I don't care if a man picks his nose or hates my face or dresses ugly, if he is the right guard who can block those pass rushers on that critical play, he is giving me a winning performance, which gives me a chance to win, too.  To me, a winning performance is a winning attitude. Charlie Pell, Clemson football coach, said it best. Above all, he demanded attitude coupled with action from his players. "I want them to think as positively as the eighty-five-year-old man who married a twenty-five-year-old woman and ordered a five-bedroom house near an elementary school."  If you play as determinedly as that old man, nothing can keep you from winning.

The motivated guy may seem the cheeriest, most likable and best-thing-for-the-company soul. But what good is he really? I have teamed up with many players I did not like. I didn't want to socialize with them or go out and be seen in public with them. On any football team, you have maybe four or five guys who are your friends. Then there are a bunch of others who you think are okay. And finally there is another group that you consider, quite frankly, assholes. No matter what kind of a team you are now playing on - in business or in sports - I think you know what I mean.

Now, who in these groups has the "winning attitude"?  The guy who never misses practice, works hard and yet can't quite produce the winning performance; or the lazy troublemaker who somehow always delivers when it counts? He might not have liked me, the coach, the team or even the game of football. But if he knocked the defensive guy on his ass, that was a winning performance. This is a slightly exaggerated situation, but I would have to say the bad guy with the winning performance is the one with the "right" attitude here. Attitude and performance go hand in hand.

The same thing happens in business. You have some people who are always there, who speak to you and smile every day, display every intention of doing their best, but somehow just don't make those sales. And the person you like least may in his own way be getting the job done better. This is not a brief for unscrupulousness or the philosophy that "nice guys finish last." It is simply my observation that attitude and performance have to be one and the same.

I believe a winning attitude combined with performance springs from the kind of management you have. I have seen great football players turned mediocre by mediocre organizations. Lousy management can destroy a winning attitude.

I have always had a "winning attitude" - which is just another way of saying I had my share of wins and so I expected to win. It was more a response to a learned behavior: winning. And I will admit I was extremely lucky in this regard because I was successful at sports.

What produces a winning performance in business or sports is a solid organization that the players or employees can believe in. And it starts at the top. If you don't believe in the leaders of your organization, how can you truly believe in the organization? There must be serious people at the top who sincerely believe in the product, who give good direction and feedback, who send out the right vibes and hire the right supervisors, managers or coaches.

Perhaps the key quality of all is consistency. The members of your business or sports team have to know what is going on, know what they can expect for themselves and their teammates and not be blindsided for reporting truthfully when something is going wrong. (The day your players start telling you what they think you want to hear is the day you know you're in trouble.) If your players know you are consistent and your organization is without significant cracks, they will go to the wall for you. This is a far greater motivator than Knute Rockne speeches or sales contests with trips to Hawaii as prizes. This is what makes football teams such as the Miami Dolphins, Dallas Cowboys and Minnesota Vikings consistent and perennial winners: they have solid, dependable management. And the opposite is what has doomed the New Orleans Saints and the Detroit Lions to erratic performance. There is terrible disruption in their management. Coaches come and go. Ownership changes. It is impossible for strong leadership to emerge.

Furthermore, management cannot win that does not believe in itself or in its product. If you are going to sell apple pies, you have to believe you are producing the best apple pie around. Or the best tractor. Or the best football team. One of the first steps to a winning performance is believing in what you are doing. That principle cannot be compromised for money, glory, ego, social recognition or anything else. If you don't believe in what you are doing or selling, you are just bullshitting yourself. And that is the beginning of a losing attitude/performance.

In the business world, people have often thought of me as a "motivational" speaker. It is true that I am very enthusiastic about everything I do and sometimes that excitement seems to catch on with the people I am speaking to. At least they are nodding their heads and smiling a lot when I tell some of my stories about the lessons I have learned from football and business. And it is true that early in my career, right out of college, I used to make a lot of win-one-for-the-Gipper speeches.

But after I got into business and began speaking to audiences in the higher-stakes world of corporate America, I began to notice some disturbing things. I could go into a large corporate convention and make drum-thumping speeches that had people on their feet and clapping their hands. But a year later, I would be invited back to make that same speech again to that same company, and I found out their performance and productivity had not really changed that much - which is why they wanted me back.

I once made a series of nearly one hundred speeches for one of America's greatest companies, IBM. Suddenly one day it dawned on me that I was not having any real-world effect on the lives or performances of the salesmen I was speaking to. I could get them all charged up for a day or two, but when they got back out into the field and had the first few doors slammed in their faces, they were thinking, "Okay, where is Tarkenton now?" Tarkenton was off somewhere else to give the next motivational speech and entertain the troops at their annual sales meeting.

This Knute Rockne approach has contributed to the myth in business that the way to get higher performance out of people is through pep talks or by a lot of yelling and screaming. This latter method is also part of the great Vince Lombardi mythology.

I believe Lombardi has been badly misunderstood. We have focused too much on the myth that he said, "winning is the only thing." He didn't, in fact. We have all heard stories such as the one from the great Green Bay tackle Forrest Gregg, who once said, "Lombardi treats us all alike - like dogs." But from talking with many other men who played on Lombardi's teams, and from my own experience playing for him in one Pro Bowl, I have learned there was more to his success than this alone.

For one thing, Lombardi was a very organized, disciplined person. He was a good example to his players. He exhibited many of the qualities that were important to the success of his players: self-discipline, dedicated and consistent efforts toward a goal, the ability to sacrifice immediate gratification for a greater achievement. He was also a very clear thinker. Few people realize that he ran only eight or ten plays on the offense. But the plays were run out of different formations and always very cleanly executed. Like all the great teachers, he had the job of the football player broken down into simple tasks that each man could master. And he was consistent - even with his emotional outbursts, players knew what to expect. Consistency is a key part of leadership.

More important, Lombardi delegated authority. Like Coach Bud Grant of the Vikings, he recognized that he couldn't do everything! Too many managers believe they have to be everywhere and know everything. Not Lombardi: He chose the best experts he could find as his assistant coaches and let them be his field specialists.

I think these qualities had more to do with Lombardi's famous success as a coach than the infamous tirades we have heard about. In fact, it has been my experience that the yellers and the screamers are not the coaches who win. Neither Bud Grant nor Tom Landry nor Don Shula - three of the winningest coaches in modern football - do it that way.

So when I went out to give "motivational" speeches, I began thinking about what was going on. I could get men so enthusiastic at these banquets that they wanted to go out and make some sales calls right after dessert. But when it came to the actual business of doing it a few days later, I had not given them any practical tools to work with. They were up the proverbial creek with a lot of enthusiasm but no paddle.

So I decided to quit giving high-powered pep talks. Instead, I began to equip the people who came to listen to me with the tools for successful performance - the things they would need when they got away from the sales conventions and had to get back into the trenches of real-world business.

I've always remembered what Hank Stram, former NFL coach, had to say about performance: "Yesterday is a canceled check, today is cash on the line, tomorrow is a promissory note."  That's how I feel about doing well at business. Your cash on the line - that daily performance - is all that should matter. Motivation is as good as a promissory note. Try to get yourself a cup of coffee with one of those.

FACT: A winning performance always beats a winning attitude.

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