By ANDREA KAY
Gannett News Service

Although it's nice, you don't have to lavish people with cash awards, gifts or stock options to energize and inspire them to their full potential. It's more a matter of making them feel 12 feet tall.

This, according to Jack Welch, retired chairman and chief executive officer of General Electric, is how you build self-

confidence in the people around you. Self-confidence inspired by you is what Welch, as well as other extraordinary leaders, believe is what it takes to get peak performance from others, say authors David H. Maister and Patrick J. McKenna in First Among Equals: How to Manage a Group of Professionals.

How do you get to be so inspiring? Take Benjamin Zander, music conductor and teacher. When he realized that as the conductor he doesn't make a sound and that his power depended on his ability to make other people powerful, everything changed. "I started paying attention to how I was enabling my musicians to be the best performers they could be," he says in the book.

To do that, Zander makes an announcement to his music students on the first day of class: "Everybody gets an A. The condition is students have to submit a letter, written on the first day but dated the following May, that begins: `Dear Mr. Zander, I got my A because . . .'‚''

Students have to tell him who they will have become by the end of the course to justify the grade.

"That simple A changes everything," he says. "It transforms my relationship with everybody in the room. We can choose to give out grades as an expectation to live up to, and then we can reassess them according to performance. Or we can offer grades as a possibility to live into. The second approach is much more powerful."

How does he know if the approach is working? He looks in his musicians' eyes, he says. "If the eyes are shining, then I know that my leadership is working. If the eyes aren't shining, I ask myself, `What am I doing that's keeping my musicians' eyes from shining?'‚"

Besides job-specific actions, to inspire someone and advance the relationship you also need to consider doing these things: