Three people working together to build a brick wall outdoors. One person is standing on the ground and holding a brick, another is on a ladder placing a brick, and the third is passing a brick to the person on the ladder.

THINKING – Sprint 11

How to motivate others to help you

The reason for this sprint

Building powerful relationships with the people on your team is essential to work effectively, but you need a different skill set to get strangers or groups of people whom you do not have the time to know personally to help you achieve your vision.

This sprint focuses on understanding the skill sets involved with motivating others to dedicating themselves to helping you successfully achieve your vision. It involves knowing how you ask people to help you and how you design work to make people feel autonomous, masterful and purposeful.

This skill set is important for entrepreneurs aspiring to build enterprises with more than 8 to 10 full-time employees, volunteers, part time employees or contractors. And also applies to anyone where time and distance makes it impossible to get to know them well enough to create powerful one-to-one relationships.

Sprint exercises

The article “How to motivate others to help you” explains how everyone shares three intrinsic motivations that you can use fuel their desire to help you.

We help you understand how to make employees and contractors feel autonomous and masterful in the work they do for you as well as feel their work is for a good purpose.

To get a feel for how to do this, we suggest you reflect on your own experiences:

  • Is there a job or chore you’ve done that made you feel autonomous? Why?

  • What job or chore that you felt expert at? Why?

  • Have you felt “connected” to any job or chore you’ve been responsible for doing? How and why?

  • How will you describe your product or service to strangers, including potential employees, to make its purpose sound and feel relevant and exciting?

  • Who have you asked for new and additional ideas on how to make your product or service better for users, and easier to deliver?

As a way to get these ideas further embedded in your thinking, turn this around and think how to make your customer motivated to use your product or service:

  • How can your product or service make your users feel more autonomous, masterful and purposeful?