Mark Murphy

By Mark Murphy, CEO of Leadership IQ | Aug 15, 2011

It would be great if employees spontaneously turned into Hundred Percenters without any help, like an amoeba reproducing through mitosis. But they don't; they need an outside push.

Remember your high school or college physics class and Newton's First Law of Motion: An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. Apply that law to your employees, and it says they will keep doing what they're doing--unless you do something about it.

As a 100% Leader, you already know that being a Hundred Percenter is significantly more fulfilling than squeaking by. When we do only what's required, or less, we incur untold personal, organizational and societal costs. But unless your employees have been convincingly presented with these facts in a way that speaks of the benefits in words they can hear, they have no reason to stray from path of the status quo.

Imagine you have your legs crossed (you're kicking back, reading this article, and you just happen to have your legs crossed). As long as crossing your legs is a comfortable position, you're likely to keep them crossed. Now imagine that out of nowhere, your legs suddenly cramp, and crossing them becomes deeply uncomfortable. What would you do? (This is not a trick question.) Of course, you'd uncross your legs. Without the leg cramp, the status quo of crossed legs would remain unperturbed. However, make the status quo uncomfortable, and the old state is replaced by something new (and ostensibly better).

The first critical lesson of being a 100% Leader is, if the status quo felt bad, people would have changed already. So we can infer that if employees haven't yet changed to Hundred Percenter performance, they must think the status quo is A-Okay.

Unfortunately, it's not just a lack of awareness of "acute badness" that gives us an attachment to treading water at "just good enough to get by." It's also the fragility of our egos. Whatever our current state may be, we arrived here by virtue of thousands of decisions made along the way. Every project where we had a choice of the hard way or the easy way, work late or leave early, take a risk or play it safe, led us to where we are today. And presumably, we feel pretty good about the decisions we made along the way.

If you come right out and tell an employee to change the state he or she is in, in effect, you're saying, "Undo all those decisions you made previously because it turns out that they were bad decisions." It gets even worse if up until now you've approached employee motivation primarily by appeasing: coddling, loving 'em up, and telling them they're doing a great job. Conquering the ego is risky business. If you suddenly throw the present system into reverse, you're going to make heads spin, and that's counterproductive. Creating Hundred Percenters doesn't mean pulling the rug out from under your people. Instead, you need to give them a whole new platform on which to stand.