This past week, I had a brief twitter dialogue with Shannon Seery Gude (@seerysm) who was wondering how to get teams to track their time spent on projects. For anyone who has ever had to track time, you know it can be a laborious and unsavory administrative task. And worse, it can be frustrating busy work if you feel that your time-capturing efforts don’t serve a useful purpose.

At the root of her question was one that challenges managers and consultants every single day: how do I get individuals to change their behavior and do what I want?

My response: “teams track time when they understand the reasons and meaning…no one wants more silly busy work…appeal to their self-interest.” This deserves some unpacking, particularly since two different angles are contained in this one suggestion.

Angle #1: The manager or team lead helps the team understand why time tracking is important to them and how they use it to make decisions, keep the projects on target, bill clients, etc.

Angle #2: The manager or team lead helps each individual on the team understand how time tracking benefits that individual in some way, either now or in the future. It’s the self-interest that’s embodied in the familiar question, “What’s in it for me?”

Which of these angles do you think will work? Actually both. It’s important for a team to understand why something is important. But it’s self-interest that will ultimately help change the behavior of the individual. Every leader needs to understand that people commit to actions that matter the most to them, not to their managers or companies. Consider this bit of wisdom from Dwight D. Eisenhower: “Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.”

It works upward, as well. If you’re a manager who hopes to get senior management to agree to a new idea or sign off on a pilot project, the first question you need to pose to yourself is, “What’s in it for them?” and present accordingly. Way more often than not, they’re not going to agree to put organizational resources into something new because they feel altruistic; they’ll do it because they see the benefit to them.

If you’re concerned that this feels like manipulation, selling out, or being inauthentic, it’s not. Marshall Goldsmith argues that this is “natural law” and writes in August 2008 issue of Talent Management:

None of us has to apologize for appealing to self-interest. It’s the way of the world, and it isn’t as black and white as selfishness vs. selflessness.

If you want for someone to do what you want them to do, remember there’s no such thing as mind control (though we all secretly pine for the ease it promises). You’ll get more buy-in if you introduce the bigger picture of why something is important and then integrate with how an individual will benefit – based on their values not your own – to be a part of it.