100 Ways to Motivate Others : How Great Leaders Can Produce Insane Results Without Driving People Crazy

Good Cop:
Nurturing, mentoring, coaching, serving,
and supporting your people all the way. Keeping your word
every time. Removing obstacles to success. Praising and
acknowledging all the way. Leading through positive rein-
forcement of desired behavior, because you’re a true leader
who knows that you get what you reward.
Bad Cop:
Bad to the bone. No compromise about
people keeping their promises to you, even promises about
Play Both Good Cop and Bad Cop

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performance. No room for complaints and excuses as sub-
stitutions for conversations about promises not being kept.
No respect for whiners and people who do not make their
numbers. No “wiggle room” for the lazy. Clarity, convic-
tion, determination. All cards on the table. No covert mes-
sages. In your face: “I believe in you. I know what you can
do. When you don’t do it, you let yourself and the team
down. I won’t allow that. Time to wake up.”
Obviously you don’t call on Bad Cop every day. Only
after every Good Cop approach is exhausted. But Bad Cop
can be a great wake-up call to someone who has never
been challenged in life to be the best she can be. And once
the Bad Cop session is over, and the person is back in the
game, giving it a good effort, bring Good Cop back right
away to complete the process.
30. Don’t Go Crazy
The older I get the more wisdom I find in the ancient rule of
taking first things first. A process which often reduces the most
complex human problem to a manageable proportion.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower
When I’m thinking about seven things rather than one,
I’m trying to keep them in my head while I’m trying to
listen to you, but I really can’t because I just thought of
three more things that I need to attend to when you leave,
which I hope will be soon.
So I look at my watch a couple of times while you’re
talking to me, because mentally I’m on the run, and I’m a
type-A go-go-guy, doing a million things! But what I’m

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not seeing is that my very fragile relationship with you is
being destroyed by this approach. It’s being destroyed a
little bit at a time, because the main message I’m sending
to you and everyone else on my team is that I’m really
stressed
, and it’s crazy here inside my head.
I even tell my family, “It’s crazy at work. I want to
spend more time with you, but it’s crazy right now. Just
crazy at the office.”
Well, it’s not crazy. 
You’re
crazy. You need to be hon-
est about it. 
It’s
not crazy; it’s just work. It’s just a business.
“It’s-crazy-around-here” managers keep throwing up
their hands, saying, “What? She’s leaving us? Why? She’s
quitting? Oh no, you can’t trust anybody these days. Get
her in here, we need to save this. Cancel my meetings,
cancel my calls, I want to find out why she’s leaving.”
Well, she’s leaving for this reason: You only spoke to
her for a maximum of three minutes in any single conver-
sation over the past year. You may have spoken to her 365
times, but it was only for three minutes. This is not a pro-
fessional relationship. It’s drive-by management.
And whether the go-go manager likes it or not, creat-
ing great relationships is how careers are built, how busi-
nesses are built, and how great teams are built.
Usually, people who think they admire or in a certain,
frightened, way “respect” their multitasking managers,
admit that they feel less secure because of all that is
“crazy.”
When they meet with that manager, the manager says
to them, “Okay, come on in, I know you need to see me.
Get in here, I have to take this call. It’s crazy. I’ve got to
be in a meeting in two minutes, and there’s an e-mail I’m
waiting for, so you’ll forgive me if I jump on that when it