Many managers, entrepreneurs, and founders would say that they want to be a better leader.

But we need definition before we can come up with any strategies to make it happen. Let’s start with what leadership is. Leadership is… persuading a follower to do what the leader wants. Then we need to understand how do leadership. For that we must understand how leadership influences the follower.

If leadership is to be effective, a leader must influence a follower’s motivation. The leader must do stuff that plays on the follower’s in-person motivation process. In systems terms, leadership moderates motivation. It doesn’t directly modify it. It changes the way the input realises the output in this process, enabling perhaps an improved output for the same input.

Conceptually, if the leader can do something positive to influence the follower’s motivation, good things will happen. The follower will do more of what the leader wants. They’ll put more effort in, perhaps for longer, or they’ll stop doing what they are doing now and do instead what the leader wants. Overall, more of the desired output will be realised for a given input.

This is the simplest model of leadership. It describes leadership as dyadic or binary – involving two people, the leader doing the influencing, and the follower having their motivation improved by the influence.

The job a person does hugely influences their motivation. The job done comprises five characteristics: variety, identity, significance, autonomy, and feedback.

If each is in line with the person’s implicit (non-conscious) motives, or their explicit (conscious) motives, motivation will be enhanced.

The manager as leader has every opportunity to modify the job characteristics to enable motivation. A volunteer or employee doing a job with high variety is likely to be more motivated than someone doing a monotonous job; that job characteristic likely taps the job holder’s motives with greater results. The same applies to the other characteristics. It’s in the manager’s interests therefore to design the job to trigger worker motives.

The model developed so far is incomplete. The output from motivation is a motivated worker. That output itself is useless. It needs to be turned into more practical, usable concepts that ultimately yield volunteer performance and organisational results.

The first step in linking motivation to results is the process of behaviour. Motivation causes behaviour.

Behaviour then causes personal performance. Personal performance yields personal results. And those personal results aggregate to yield organisational results. 

This model is remarkably intuitive, fitting common sense understanding of the way people contribute in an organisation. It is also supported in organisational psychology research.

So, if the leader can influence a follower’s motivation, a change in behaviour results. And they might do that by adjusting the job the follower does. That’s translated to a change in performance which yields a change, ultimately, in the organisation’s results.

Leadership is then all about finding appropriate stuff to do that will be noticed by the follower and that will influence their motivation. In this article, I've suggested adjusting the job done. Of course, there's more. Search leadership in the menu above. Or watch for more articles.