Page 129 - ConvinceThemFlip

feed the personality
‘Here’s what I need from you over the next quarter, and
it had better be good or you’re gone.’” But Steve had
already learned that this approach wouldn’t cut it.
I met Steve at one of my seminars when his hand went
up during a discussion of dreamers. He’d asked some
very perceptive questions, and at the end of the day we
got together for a few minutes and chatted about how to
motivate his creative crew.
“Your staff are professional dreamers, and you are a
controller,” I told him. I didn’t tell him specifically how
to deal with them, but I did tell him how to engage a
dreamer’s imagination. I explained that the way things
look, sound, feel, and even smell and taste is essential to
his team’s productivity and that a constant flow of new
experiences and stimuli is essential to their process. He
admitted that the current stimuli obviously weren’t work-
ing. Although his instinct was to get tough with them,
he realized that it would be completely counterproduc-
tive to pressure them. Instead, he decided to work his
KFC—figure out what he wanted, in the positive, and find
a way to get it.
I heard from Steve later that he caused a bit of an
uproar at his company when he decided to take his team
off-site for a retreat to try to jump-start their creativity.
Some of his executive team thought he was rewarding this
team for not performing.
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