Inspired by 'Call of the Wild' and perhaps the movie '8 Below' I have started training my two Siberian Husky pups to start pulling. Getting them to pull something is not really the problem; it's in their blood. Getting them to stop however, this is what the training is all about. I don't want to sound like an expert in sled dog training, because I'm not. I would be what you call a Google Expert.

Armed with a dozen websites on how to train your sled dogs, I have embarked on this quest with a lot of excitement and probably too little brains. But there I am every morning wearing my roller blades, attached to two powerful engines that pull me through the streets of my neighborhood at a speed faster than I'm comfortable with. It can be quite exciting as we weave through parked cars and of course when they see a cat, it's like someone hit the nitro button.

I have noticed that when we come to small inclines my dogs will almost come to a stop. They press forward one step at a time like a 4 wheel drive in low gear. This incites me to barrage them with a stream of encouragement to pull me up the hill. In my mind I began concluding that maybe they were not strong enough yet to pull me on anything other than flat ground. All of this changed for me yesterday when we came to a gentle but long hill. In fact it was our biggest hill we have yet encountered. I figured that I would need to help them out a bit by using my own energy to get the three of us to the top.

We were on a back road beside an acreage when suddenly two pit bulls came to life behind the fence. They proceeded to bark and then took off up the hill. My twin engines came to life and cranked up the slope at full speed. We were going as fast as we ever had on flat ground. Fortunately there was no incident at the top and my dogs kept on running. I realized at that moment that on previous hills the problem was not my dog's ability, but their motivation. Even armed with a ton of encouragement from their master, motivation was the missing element. They had more than enough power to get the job done; I just hadn't found which button to push.

A large part of leadership is about finding the right buttons to push. Not everyone is the same and even the same people need different motivations for different tasks. The more you can learn about human motivation as a leader, the better you will be at getting people to be their best. Praise and rewards are great but sometimes, like my Huskies, people need a bit more.