My experience working with thousands of leaders world wide for
the past two decades teaches me that most leaders are screwing
up their careers.
On a daily basis, these leaders are getting the wrong results
or the right results in the wrong ways.
Interestingly, they themselves are choosing to fail. They’re
actively sabotaging their own careers.
Leaders commit this sabotage for a simple reason: They make the
fatal mistake of choosing to communicate with presentations and
speeches -- not leadership talks.
In terms of boosting one’s career, the difference between the
two methods of leadership communication is the difference
between lightning and the lightning bug.
Speeches/presentations primarily communicate information.
Leadership talks, on the other hand, not only communicate
information, they do more: They establish a deep, human
emotional connection with the audience.
Why is the later connection necessary in leadership?
Look at it this way: Leaders do nothing more important than get
results. There are generally two ways that leaders get results:
They can order people to go from point A to point B; or they can
have people WANT TO go from A to B.
Clearly, leaders who can instill “want to” in people, who
motivate those people, are much more effective than leaders
who can’t or won’t.
And the best way to instill “want to” is not simply to relate
to people as if they are information receptacles but to relate
to them on a deep, human, emotional way.
And you do it with leadership talks.
Here are a few examples of leadership talks.
* When Churchill said, “We will fight on the beaches ... “
That was a leadership talk.
* When Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for
you ... “ that was a leadership talk.
* When Reagan said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
That was a leadership talk.
* You can come up with a lot of examples too. Go back to
those moments when the words of a leader inspired people
to take ardent action, and you’ve probably put your finger
on an authentic leadership talk.
* Mind you, I’m not just talking about great leaders of
history. I’m also talking about the leaders in your
organizations. After all, leaders speak 15 to 20 times
a day: everything from formal speeches to informal chats.
When those interactions are leadership talks, not just
speeches or presentations, the effectiveness of those
leaders is dramatically increased.
* How do we put together leadership talks? It’s not easy.
Mastering leadership talks takes a rigorous application of
many specific processes. As Clement Atlee said of that
great master of leadership talks, Winston Churchill, “Winston
spent the best years of his life preparing his impromptu
talks.”
* Churchill, Kennedy, Reagan and others who were masters at
giving leadership talks didn’t actually call their
communications “leadership talks”, but they must have been
conscious to some degree of the processes one must employ
in putting a leadership talk together.
Here’s how to start. If you plan to give a leadership talk,
there are three questions you should ask. If you answer “no” to
any one of those questions, you can’t give one. You may be able
to give a speech or presentation, but certainly not a leadership
talk.
(1) DO YOU KNOW WHAT THE AUDIENCE NEEDS?
Winston Churchill said, “We must face the facts or they’ll stab
us in the back.”
When you are trying to motivate people, the real facts are THEIR
facts, their reality.
Their reality is composed of their needs. In many cases, their
needs have nothing to do with your needs.
Most leaders don’t get this. They think that their own needs,
their organization’s needs, are reality. That’s okay if you’re
into ordering. As an order leader, you only need work with your
reality. You simply have to tell people to get the job done.
You don’t have to know where they’re coming from. But if you
want to motivate them, you must work within their reality, not
yours.
I call it “playing the game in the people’s home park”. There
is no other way to motivate them consistently. If you insist
on playing the game in your park, you’ll be disappointed in
the motivational outcome.
(2) CAN YOU BRING DEEP BELIEF TO WHAT YOU’RE SAYING?
Nobody wants to follow a leader who doesn’t believe the job can
get done. If you can’t feel it, they won’t do it.
But though you yourself must “want to” when it comes to the
challenge you face, your motivation isn’t the point. It’s
simply a given. If you’re not motivated, you shouldn’t be
leading.
Here’s the point: Can you TRANSFER your motivation to the people
so they become as motivated as you are?
I call it THE MOTIVATIONAL TRANSFER, and it is one of the least
understood and most important leadership determinants of all.
There are three ways you can make the transfer happen.
* CONVEY INFORMATION. Often, this is enough to get people
motivated. For instance, many people have quit smoking
because of information on the harmful effects of the habit.
* MAKE SENSE. To be motivated, people must understand the
rationality behind your challenge. Re: smoking: People have
been motivated to quit because the information makes sense.
* TRANSMIT EXPERIENCE. This entails having the leader’s
experience become the people’s experience. This can be the
most effective method of all, for when the speaker’s
experience becomes the audience’s experience, a deep sharing
of emotions and ideas, a communing, can take place.
There are plenty of presentation and speech courses devoted to
the first two methods, so I won’t talk about those.
Here’s a few thoughts on the third method. Generally speaking,
humans learn in two ways: by acquiring intellectual understanding
and through experience. In our schooling, the former
predominates, but it is the latter which is most powerful in
terms of inducing a deep sharing of emotions and ideas; for our
experiences, which can be life’s teachings, often lead us to
profound awareness and purposeful action.
Look back at your schooling. Was it your book learning or your
experiences, your interactions with teachers and students, that
you remember most? In most cases, your experiences made the
most telling impressions upon you.
To transfer your motivation to others, use what I call my
“defining moment” technique, which I describe fully in my
book, DEFINING MOMENT: MOTIVATING PEOPLE TO TAKE ACTION.
In brief, the technique is this: Put into sharp focus a
particular experience of yours then communicate that focused
experience to the people by describing the physical facts that
gave you the emotion.
Now, here’s the secret to the defining moment. That experience
of yours must provide a lesson and that lesson is a solution to
the needs of the people. Otherwise, they’ll think you’re just
talking about yourself.
For the defining moment to work (i.e., for it to transfer your
motivation to them), the experience must be about them. The
experience happened to you, of course. But that experience
becomes their experience when the lesson it communicates is a
solution to their needs.
(3) CAN YOU HAVE THE AUDIENCE TAKE RIGHT ACTION?
Results don’t happen unless people take action. After all,
it’s not what you say that’s important in your leadership
communications, it’s what the people do after you have had
your say.
Yet the vast majority of leaders don’t have a clue as to what
action truly is.
They get people taking the wrong action at the wrong time in
the wrong way for the wrong results.
A key reason for this failure is they don’t know how to deliver
the all-important “leadership talk Call-to-action”.
“Call” comes from an Old English word meaning "to shout." A
Call-to-Action is a "shout for action." Implicit in the concept
is urgency and forcefulness. But most leaders don’t deliver the
most effective Calls-to-action because they make three errors
regarding it.
First, they err by mistaking the Call-to-Action as an order.
Within the context of The Leadership Talk, a Call-to-action is
not an order. Leave the order for the order leader.
Second, leaders err by mistaking the Call as theirs to give.
The best Call-to-action is not the leader's to give. It's the
people’s to give. It's the people’s to give to themselves. A
true Call-to-action prompts people to motivate themselves to
take action.
The most effective Call-to-action then is not from the leader
to the people but from the people to the people themselves!
Third, they error by not priming their Call. There are two
parts to the Call-to-Action, the primer and the Call itself.
Most leaders omit the all-important primer.
The primer sets up the Call, which is to prompt people to
motivate themselves to take action. You yourself control the
primer. The people control the Call.
The primer/Call is critical because every leadership
communication situation is in essence a problem situation.
There is the problem the leader has. And there is the problem
the people have. In many cases, they are two different
problems. But leaders get into trouble regarding the
Call-to-action when they think it’s only one problem, mainly
theirs.
For instance, a leader might be talking about the organization
needing to be more productive. So, the leader talks
PRODUCTIVITY.
On the other hand, the people, hearing PRODUCTIVITY, think,
YOU’RE GOING TO GIVE ME MORE WORK!
If the leader thinks that productivity is the people’s problem
and ignores the “more work” aspect, h/she’s Call-to-action will
probably be a bust, resulting in the people avoiding committed
action.
Let’s apply the primer/Call dynamic to the productivity case.
The leader talks PRODUCTIVITY: but this time uses a PRIMER.
The primer’s purpose is to establish a “critical confluence”
– the union of your problem with the problem of the people.
In this case, the leader creates a critical confluence by
couching productivity within the framework of MORE MEANINGFUL
WORK.
The primer may be: LET’S GET TOGETHER AND SEE IF YOU CAN COME
UP WITH AN ACTION PLAN THAT WILL ENSURE THAT THE PRODUCTIVITY
GAINS YOU IDENTIFY AND EXECUTE WILL ENABLE YOU TO WORK AT
WHAT’S REALLY MEANINGFUL TO YOU.
Note what we’ve done: The primer is LET’S GET TOGETHER AND SEE
IF YOU CAN COME UP WITH AN ACTION PLAN.
The actual Call is from the people to themselves: LET’S INCREASE
PRODUCTIVITY BY WORKING AT WHAT’S MEANINGFUL.
With that Call, the leader moves from just getting average
results (YOU MUST BE MORE PRODUCTIVE: i.e., you’re going to
solve MY problem) to getting great results (YOU COME UP WITH
WAYS TO TIE PRODUCTIVITY INTO MEANINGFUL WORK: i.e., you’re
also going to solve your problem.)
So, here’s what the leadership talk Call-to-action is truly
about: It’s not an order; it’s best manifested when the people
give themselves the Call; and it is always primed by your
creating the “critical confluence” -- they’ll be solving their
problem as well as yours.
The vast majority of leaders I’ve worked with are hampering their
careers for one simple reason: They’re giving presentations and
speeches -- not leadership talks.
You have a great opportunity to turbo charge your career by
recognizing the power of leadership talks. Before you give a
leadership talk, ask three basic questions. Do you know what
the people need? Can you bring deep belief to what you’re
saying? Can you have the people take the right take action?
If you say “no” to any one of those questions you cannot give a
leadership talk. But the questions aren’t meant to be stumbling
blocks to your leadership but stepping stones. If you answer
“no”, work on the questions until you can say, “yes”. In that
way, you’ll start getting the right results in the right way on
a consistent basis.
2004 © The Filson Leadership Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
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