Motivation

Section 1: I was sitting in the conference room, talking about the project schedule with my customer, Ms. Gu, who was 40 years old, the Finance Manager in China State Construction Engineering Corporation (CSCEC). The meeting came into a deadlock. Because Ms. Gu wanted to accelerate the project process without any rational reason. And she even expected to accomplish the project within 5 months, which was two-thirds of the originally planned time. On the other hand, Mr. Li, the professional consultant in our company, was reluctant to spend extra work time to meet this demand. Even worse, he had asked for sick leave three times in the last two weeks. Actually, as the project manager, I preferred to maintain the schedule as usual, thus I didn’t have to make more effort.

Section 2: Obviously, we held the different expectations on this project. Although I thought the demand could be achieved, I did not really want to make the project ahead of the plan by increasing workload. Furthermore, I didn’t expect to get a promotion or any reward from this program. So comfortable work time worked for me. As far as Ms. Gu was concerned, she was very much eager for quick success and instant benefits. Her require of adjustment was probably due to her strong desire of winning the incoming CFO contest in CSCEC. As for Li, he was the project technology consultant with strong skills in computer programming. But at that time, I felt that he had a negative working emotion. He hadn’t been engaged in the project group discussion with other consultants much. I knew he had a baby 2 months ago, and he might be under a great pressure of raising his family.

Section 3: When I recalled this previous experience, the first thing I began to rethink about was why the people’s performance was so different in the same situation. Ms. Gu showed her strong demand and desire. On the contrary, I preferred to maintain the schedule. One of the basic reasons I found out through learning the “expectation...