Leadership and Motivation: The Fifty-Fifty Rule and the Eight Key Principles of Motivating Others

What motivates people is an important consideration for captains of industry, commerce and the public sector – in fact anyone who works with other people – since people are central to the success of organizations.

Leadership and Motivation explores the subject in depth. Leadership guru John Adair reassesses the theories of Herzberg and Maslow – still the major contributors to our understanding of motivation – in the context of Action-Centred Leadership – the concept pioneered and developed by the author.

Central to the book are the Fifty-Fifty Rule and the Eight Key Principles of Motivating Others. With the Fifty-Fifty Rule, Adair states that half of a person’s motivation comes from within and half is due to their environment – especially the leadership they encounter there. His Eight Key Principles of Motivating Others are:

1. Be self-motivated;
2. Select people who are also self-motivated;
3. Treat everyone as an individual;
4. Set challenging yet realistic targets;
5. Remember that progress motivates;
6. Create a motivating environment;
7. Provide fair rewards;
8. Give recognition.

About the Author

John Adair is now widely regarded as the world’s leading authority on leadership and leadership development. The author of 30 books on the subject, he has been named as one of the 40 people worldwide who have contributed most to the development of management thought and practice.

Educated at St Paul’s School, John Adair has enjoyed a varied and colourful career. He served as adjutant in a Bedouin regiment in the Arab Legion, worked as a deckhand on an Arctic trawler and had a spell as an orderly in a hospital operating theatre. After Cambridge he became Senior Lecturer in Military History and Leadership Training Adviser at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, before becoming the first Director of Studies at St George’s House in Windsor Castle and then Associate Director of the Industrial Society. Later he became the world’s first Professor in Leadership Studies at the University of Surrey. He also helped to found Europe’s first Centre for Leadership Studies at the University of Exeter.

John Adair now acts as a national and international adviser on leadership development. His recent books, published by Kogan Page, include Not Bosses But Leaders, The Inspirational Leader and How to Grow Leaders.