100 Ways to Motivate Others

102. Learn to Encourage Testing

The biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee how to fail intelligently. We have to train him to experiment over and over and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work.

—Charles Kettering

How do we teach our people to access their “want to”? How do they put time in the calendar? That’s the most important part of achieving anything. So that’s what motivating others is about. It’s about two very curious opposing ideas that most people have connected, called testing versus trusting. Most people believe that those two things are intertwined—I need to trust something before I test it. I need to trust that this will work before I give it a fair test. But when your people learn to drop ...