Time to give your troops a pep talk

Next week is the last week in October. Christmas and the end of the year are on the horizon.

Over the next two months, there is a real risk your workforce will morph into a shiftless, apathetic, lethargic mass of lackadaisical loafers – unless you take preventative action now!

Thankfully, earlier this week you set some smart goals for your company to meet by the end of the year. If you didn’t, go back and catch up on this Taskmaster column from earlier in the week.

The goals you set must be specific. They must be measurable. They must be attainable – at least with a little elbow grease. They must be realistic. And they must be time related – namely, they must be achieved by the end of the year!

Okay, so here you are with a whole bunch of targets for everyone to meet before Christmas. There’s sales targets, marketing targets, development goals, performance targets.

“Now what?” you ask.

Now is when you rally your troops!

Tell them to down tools or pens and gather round for a 10 minute pep talk.

Picture yourself as John Kennedy Snr on Grand Final Day. It’s three-quarter time and your team is behind! This is where you motivate your players to do something!

During this pep rally, you lay out how important meeting these targets by the end of the year is to the success and growth of “our” business. Note the pronoun here – “our”.

Ramp up those collective pronouns throughout this talk. There is no my company while your jaw is flapping. The term “we” should be in almost every sentence! So should phrases like “our goals”, “our targets”, “our objectives” – and our enemies!

Be sure to denigrate and demonise your direct competitors in the talk. Verbally, show them no mercy. They are the common enemy. Beating them is why it’s so critically important for everyone on the team to succeed at these objectives!

We can’t let them win!

Make the talk to your staff sound like a good old fashioned Southern evangelical sermon! Ramp up the hellfire and brimstone! Your competitors are the enemy! They are evil!

Sell those targets like you’re Martin Luther King Jnr with a dream!

These end of year targets are about smiting them! It’s them or us! Seven bowls of wrath shalt be poured onto their ground!

And don’t just stop at calling them evil! They’re an awful affliction of abominable atrocity! Intentionally immoral and iniquitous! Inimically ignoble! Wrongful and wicked!! The barbarous baleful black-hearted base of badness! Criminally crooked and corrupt! Detrimental and diabolically dishonourable depraved deleterious degenerates! Malicious malevolent merchants of monstrous misfortunate miserable mischief! Noxiously nasty nefarious nit-wits! Outrageously obscene! Profoundly potent portents of pretention! The very vile vicious villains of vane violence! Superlatively sinful and sinister! Harmful and hurtful to humanity! The runes of ruin! The terrible terminal toxic trauma of trouble! And… And… And…

And they’re not very nice people either!

Now, don’t just sit there, give that pep talk that gets your team fired up for the long months ahead! Make those end of year targets mean something to your staff!

Get it done – today!