In a commercial career, your motivation comes from money and from your sense of power in an organization. Accumulation - more and more and more. In a nonprofit career, the people who are coming here, you know, our salaries are very different than they are, and so I can't pay you much more. So it's not like I can give a boatload of money more. And, we are a humanitarian organization, scrappy outfit. So it's not like you're going to get this great power base or 50 people. So what do you live for? How do you excite and engage people in that? Was that transformation of, ok, how do you motivate people, was the biggest change that I had to learn about. Took me about three or four years and the lessons were pretty straightforward.
One, when it comes to individual motivation, you have to get people to know how their work, their hourly work, their daily work, their weekly work is helping us contribute and reach our mission. So that's what gets staff motivated. And that's a very, very important lesson for a leader loan is how do I motivate people who I can't in money or power, but I motivate them from a sense of mission, accomplishment and their contribution. Not easy to do and complex. But once you get it, you know it. The other was completely counterintuitive. It was, to build a great team, you need talented people. In my previous job, I could give big amounts of treasure and I could attract talent. Right? I sat on the top of Wall Street. I could pay them enough, they'll come. Here, I have no money. What am I gonna do?
So, you have to believe this - talent attracts talent. So that's what we did. And that's why right now I'm in the middle of doing it, once you get a talented group of people together, let them loose, start to get them to perform and to excel. And they start seeing results. You know what happens - other talented people want to come and join them. So that's that to me, those are the two secrets of success in humanitarian work as a leader.
One, figure out how to get people excited about your mission and then let them know how they're contributing to the mission. Two is to always make sure do your hardest to get talented people on board. Once they come on board, they will attract other talent.
