ManagementFirst
Journal of Business Strategy

Brent Filson has published books and articles on leadership, developed motivational leadership strategies, processes and skill sets and created and instituted leadership educational and training programs. In this extended interview, read his engaging thoughts on modern leadership.

An interview with Brent Filson

Interview by Alistair Craven

Brent Filson first learned about leadership as a Marine Corps infantry officer. Since then, he has consulted with many leaders of all ranks and functions in top U.S. businesses.

He has also published books and articles on leadership, developed motivational leadership strategies, processes and skill sets and created and instituted leadership educational and training programs. He is the author of more than 20 books which have been featured in more than 200 magazines and newspapers and scores of radio and television shows. He has lectured at Columbia University, MIT, Boston College, Wake Forest University and many more.



Can you tell us about your Web site www.actionleadership.com?

Brent Filson:

It's all about realizing one fundamental concept: helping leaders get more results faster continually. A human resource director told me that the single most important thing that defines people's careers is leadership, or lack thereof. Now I say that getting results is the most important thing leaders do. So, why not get more results, get those results faster, and get more, faster on a continual basis? That's not just a job imperative, that's a career imperative. I like to think that people can go to my website and click on any button - my articles, my books, my maxims, my interviews, my systems courses - and find great ways to manifest that imperative.


Many years ago you served as a platoon leader in the US Marine Corps. To what extent have your views and opinions on leadership been influenced by your military service?

Brent Filson:

I met all sorts of leaders in the Marines. The best were able to motivate the troops to literally put their lives on the line for them. The worst had the troops wanting the leaders themselves to put their lives on the line for THEM! I came to discover that the difference between the best and the worst was the best could forge deep, human, emotional connections with the people they led. The worst didn't. It was as simple as that. I learned that leadership was motivational or it was stumbling in the dark. I learned that we never know how good we are as leaders unless we are motivating people to be better than they think they are. The great leaders in the military could make that happen, could get the troops to do things they never thought they could do, things that they would look back in wonder at having done.

This holds true in civilian life as well. This is what leadership is really all about, and it goes right to the heart of "more results faster continually." After all, when all is said and done, the end of leadership is not what we achieve but what we, and the people we lead become, in that achieving. As a first sergeant said to me, "Nobody in this Corps has too much rank to dig!"


Where do you stand in the debate about whether leaders are born or made?

Brent Filson:

Great leaders are neither born nor made. They ARE! I tell every leader I work with: "You yourself are not going to become a great leader. Right now, you ALREADY ARE a great leader -- although you may not know it yet."

I'm sure you've heard the story of Michelangelo, the block of stone, and the statue. Asked how he could sculpt such beautiful statues, such as "David", Michelangelo replied, "It's not as hard as you think. Every block of stone has a statue inside it. I merely remove the extra stone to reveal that statue." So it is with you and leadership. Simply get rid of those things covering up your intrinsic greatness. Things like lack of confidence, a proclivity to give speeches and presentations, a misunderstanding of motivation, wrong ideas about results, being oblivious to the needs of the people, and being ignorant of what right action truly is - and is not. It's not as hard as you think! Yet if you don't have the right philosophy of leadership and the right processes, it's impossible. This gets back to what I learned in the Marines. The best leaders could forge those deep, human, emotional connections with people. Simply being human, you can forge those connections. Simply BE human. The art of great leadership is the art of being yourself. It takes years to master that art. And it takes adherence to specific processes. It's taken me 20 years to learn those processes, and they all center on the "Leadership Talk."


Do the challenges of today's modern workplace demand new and more varied skillsets than, say, 20 years ago?

Brent Filson:

Absolutely. First, let's look at the basic concept of leadership itself. The word "leadership" itself comes from old Norse root meaning "to make go." But leaders often stumble when trying to understand who makes what go? Generally, the conventional view of leadership has been one of an order-giving process. Many leaders believe that they must "make" people go by ordering them to do things. Order-leadership in business has its roots in the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. "Order" comes from a Latin root meaning to arrange threads in a weaving woof. The captains of the Revolution dealt with the relatively uneducated country people who flocked to their factories by ordering them where, how, and when to work. The most efficient and effective production methods resulted from workers being "ordered" or ranked like threads in the woof of production lines. Refined and empowered by the Victorian commercial culture, with its patriarchal power structure and strong links to Prussian military organization, the culture of the order-giver leader reached its zenith in the United States after World War II.

During the post-war years, many U.S. businesses were like ocean liners plowing through relatively calm seas, their leaders, like liner captains and mates, running things by getting orders from superiors, giving orders to subordinates and making sure that those orders were carried out. But roughly since the mid-1980s, with competition increasing dramatically on a global scale, business leaders have come to need skills not akin to ocean liner piloting but white-water canoeing. Order leadership founders where lines of authority are blurring, the volume and velocity of information proliferating, markets rapidly changing, and alliance and coalition building multiplying.

One of the reasons our nation can do a lot better in this so-called "war on terror" is that we are fighting with leaders who are pretty much order-giving bureaucrats. We should bring leaders who have had to thrive in the highly competitive, fast changing environment of the global marketplace into helping lead the war.


In his interview with ManagementFirst, leadership expert Warren Bennis states that leaders must engage, motivate and animate people in their organizations. How can these challenges be effectively addressed?

Brent Filson:

It's easy to talk about motivation, it's another thing to do it consistently throughout your career. The way you do it consistently is with Leadership Talks.

Look at it this way, there's a hierarchy of verbal persuasion when it comes to business leadership. The lowest levels are speeches and presentations. They communicate information. The highest, most effective way of communicating is the Leadership Talk. The Leadership Talk does more than simply send information. It has the leader establish that deep, human, emotional connection with the audience that I talked about.

That's the kind of connection that leads to great results. That's where business leaders communicate for the best results. You can order people to go from point A to point B. But the best way to get great results is to have people want to go from A to B. Instilling "want to" in others, motivating them ... isn't that what great leadership is all about?

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 all leaders everywhere no matter what their function or rank. After all, leaders speak 15 to 20 times a day - across a desk, beside a water cooler, at lunch, in a car pool, etc. It's in the interaction of those talks that they succeed in motivating people. When those talks are not simply about communicating information but about forging those deep, human emotional connections with audience through Leadership Talks, the effectiveness of those leaders is dramatically increased.

Don't get me wrong. The Leadership Talk is not some kind of "feel-good" way of relating. It took me 20 years to figure out the practical, rigorous processes dealing with how to give Leadership Talks. Usually it takes me two full days to teach people how to do it. Once they learn it, they can use it throughout the rest of their careers. The Leadership Talk is relatively easy to learn and it takes years to master. The point is that through it, you can take specific, concrete steps to motivate people to take action that gets great results.


Cross-functional teams have been heralded as a solution to challenges such as new product development and internal project management. How and where does the issue of leadership fit into the operation of cross-functional teams?

Brent Filson:

This is a very important question; and it's necessary to elaborate a bit to answer it; for the first questions of leadership should not be "What am I going to do?" but "What is going on - and why?"

Clearly, businesses are increasingly relying on the employment of cross-functional teams. A cross-functional team is made up of participants from a variety of functions. For instance, a manufacturer might put together a cross-functional team to develop a new product, a team that consists of designers, manufacturers, marketing, sales and financial participants. Cross-functional teams help companies do more with less. They can increase productivity and decrease capital costs. This trend is not going away. Cross-functional teams are going to be even more important to business success in the years ahead. How well managers do on these teams will to a great extent determine their success of their jobs and careers. Yet most leaders don't know how cross functional teams really work. Also, the team members have a fundamental misunderstanding of what their roles on the team are. They believe that to be good team participants, they must be good team players. Clearly, teamwork is necessary for the success of cross-functional teams - but it is not sufficient. In fact, it is not even the most important thing that participants should do. Participants on these teams should be more than simply good team players. They should be good team leaders. Now I'm not just talking about one person leading a team and the rest being followers. That is the common perception of the way teams operate. But that perception is wrong. Cross-functional teams fail not because of lack of teamwork but lack of leadership. Put another way: teams operate most efficiently and effectively when every team participant takes leadership in their particular team role.

To lead well, you must understand what the fundamental principles of leadership are - then put those principles into practice.

To show you these principles, I must refer, and defer, to Albert Einstein. Einstein is well known for his special and general theories of relativity. But he is not well known for a magnificent quest that he carried on for some 30 years - and in which he ultimately failed. That was his quest to discover a unified field theory of the universe, to describe the basic forces of the universe in a single equation. And it was a quest that inspired me, in my small way, to find a unified field theory of leadership, the UFTL. Just as there are grand forces driving the activities of the universe, I'm convinced that there are grand forces driving the activities of leadership.

During the post-war years, many U.S. businesses were like ocean liners plowing through relatively calm seas, their leaders, like liner captains and mates, running things by getting orders from superiors, giving orders to subordinates and making sure that those orders were carried out. But roughly since the mid-1980s, with competition increasing dramatically on a global scale, business leaders have come to need skills not akin to ocean liner piloting but white-water canoeing.

After a number of years of researching, consulting, and writing books and articles about leadership, I have come upon what I call the unified field theory of leadership success, the UFTLS. I describe it as a series of three propositions. Members of cross-functional must understand these propositions in order to do well.

UFTLS Proposition 1: Business success happens when people get results.

At face value, it seems like an obvious, motherhood-and-apple pie proposition. But on a deeper level it may be one of the most misunderstood concepts that apply to cross functional teams. Many leaders whom I have encountered don't really believe that it is people that get results. They may talk about how people get results; but they walk a different mindset. In their heart of hearts, they believe that technology gets results or that numbers get results or that marketing or sales strategies get results - anything but people. So they treat people as the bond servants of those drivers. The old joke that the company of the future will have just two creatures to run it, a man and a dog, the man to feed the dog and the dog to keep the man from touching the machinery encapsulates this mindset.

The fact is, however, that the most effective leadership in cross-functional situations begins with a passion on the leader's part that the key drivers of all results are people. You will increase your effectiveness on the cross-functional team when you take the time and expend the resources to understand the needs of the other team participants. See those needs as problems and then bring solutions to those problems.

For instance, a manager I've worked with who does well on cross-functional teams has a simple philosophy. He says, "I always believe that the other members of the team can 'fail it' for you if they want. So when the team has a job to do, I'll get the lead person of that team and ask how the job should be done. I first listen to that person. I don't demand. I have to get the team members sold on the job or it is not going to get done well. So the first step in getting others to do well on a cross functional team is to listen."

UFTLS Proposition 2: Leaders do nothing more important than have people get results.

When we talk about leadership and results, we have to go back to Einstein again. Einstein's unifying of time and space led to powerful technological applications, from atomic energy to electronics that transformed the 20th century. Our unifying two forces, results and leadership, gives us the opportunity to create applications that can transform our world.

For instance, in regard to the manager who does well on cross-functional teams: He makes sure that he not only listens to the team members but that also has them develop a clear definition of the results they should be getting. This is important: the business has its needs and expectations of team results. But when you have the team members define what they believe the results of the team should be, you involve them deeply in the activities of the team. When members of a cross-functional team do not think the results they are being asked to get are meaningful, they will 'fail it' for you. Have results meet the SAM test. Results should be Sizable, Achievable, and Measurable. Once you clarify the true results you must get, then clarify precisely how you and the team will go about leading to get those results.

The word "have" in the proposition is a passive word. But in that passiveness is great leadership power. For leaders themselves can't get results - unless we want to lead units that are nothing larger than one-man bands throughout our careers. If we want to progress in our careers, which means if we want to do well being in charge of larger and larger organizational units, we must acquire the knowledge, skills, and experience in "having" others get results.

UFLS Proposition 3: The best way to have people get results is to motivate them to take the leadership in achieving those results.

There are two aspects to this proposition, motivation and leadership.

Let's first look at motivation. The word "motivation" begins with two key letters, "mo." We see these letters in such words as "motor," "movement," momentum," mobile," etc. What all the words have in common is physical action. "Motivation" involves physical action. It is not what people think or feel but what they do. Furthermore, motivation is also something we cannot do to anyone. We communicate, the people we want to motivate must motivate themselves. The motivatee and the motivator are always the same person. Finally, motivation involves emotion. The words "emotion" and "motivation" come from the same Latin root word meaning "to move." When we want to move people to take action, we engaged their emotions.

Now let's apply those concepts of motivation to the leadership aspect of Proposition 3.

Our world changes when we understand that we are expected to lead. As long as the participants in a cross-functional team see themselves in the "doing" mode, they could not realize their full potential on the team. There is a clear difference between team participants "doing" and those same participants "leading." When doing tasks, we simply get jobs done. Period. But as leaders we must do more than do a job. As leaders, we must have a vision of where we are going. We must communicate that vision to others. We must motivate others to get results that realize that vision.

For example, participants on a cross-functional team lead well when they realize that their job is to motivate others to help lead as well. I call this a "cascading of cause leaders." So the managers on cross-functional teams get the best results when they are developing a cause leaders inside and outside the team.

A final tip: Beware, when you are a member of a cross-functional team, of the Committee Syndrome. The most serious danger that faces every cross-functional team lies in the danger of its becoming a committee. There is a difference between a committee and a team. A committee usually analyzes and reports on a particular matter. A team on the other hand is supposed to take action to get results. And the difference between committees and cross-functional teams is leadership.


Leadership and motivation are inexorably linked. How can leaders maintain high levels of motivation amongst their workforces?

Brent Filson:

Most leaders can't motivate people consistently because they don't understand what motivation is.

Motivation isn't about bands playing, flags waving, pep rallies, pep talks and the like. Those are superficial aspects of motivation. The motivation I'm talking about has nothing to do with noise and everything to do with the quiet, deep bonding that takes place between people when they go to meet challenges together.

Most leaders aren't aware that there are laws of motivation, four laws to be precise. I touched on those laws when I spoke of cross-functional teams. One is that motivation is physical action. It's not what people think or feel, it's what people do. Two is that there is no leader who can motivate anybody to do anything. Motivation isn't what the leader does to people, it's what the people do to themselves. Leaders communicate. The people make the choice to be motivated. Three, motivation takes place in the realm of emotion. Unless people are emotionally engaged in a challenge, they are not motivated. And four, motivation best happens with face-to-face speech. Now, given these laws, I have found that the best way leaders can attain high, consistent levels of motivation are through constant Leadership Talks. When during the 15 to 20 or more times daily leaders are speaking, they are not simply communicating information but are forging those deep, human emotional connections with audience through Leadership Talks, connections that motivate people to take ardent action for great results, then you have leaders sustaining motivation on high levels.


You have worked with thousands of leaders of all ranks and functions worldwide for over 19 years. What have been some of the key challenges and achievements that stand out in your memory?

Brent Filson:

Here's the key challenge that all leaders face - whether they are conscious of it or not: motivating people to take action to get great results. Leaders do nothing more important than get results but they can't get results by themselves. You've heard of the Peter Principle: "People are promoted to their level of ultimate incompetence". But what the Peter Principle doesn't tell you is the nature of the incompetence. For the most part, it's leadership incompetence. Throughout their careers, people are promoted to take charge of bigger and bigger groups -- until they hit the wall when they take over a group that's too big for their leadership competencies. This all presupposes that leaders must know what motivation is, what action really is, and what results really are. Most leaders misunderstand all three, and in that misunderstanding hurt their job performance and careers. What a shame. What a tragedy! By far, the vast majority of leaders are making choices that damage their careers. What to do about it? Start with the Leadership Talk and go from there. I have found when people understand what the Leadership Talk is all about they change what they say to others. What they would have said before learning of the Talk is far different than what they will say when they come to know the Talk. And when they change what they say, people will change what they do. There's no doubt about it, the Leadership Talk is the most important career driver than any leader can have. The trouble is, less than one percent of leaders I've first encountered don't know the first thing about the Leadership Talk.

One of the key achievements I remember personally was how Jack Welch made General Electric so successful. I started consulting with GE leaders in the mid-1980s - before Jack Welch was known as Jack Welch! I didn't work with him face-to-face, but I worked with many of his lieutenants, and I saw first-hand how he got great results through those leaders. Brother, he could give Leadership Talks! Of course, he didn't call them Leadership Talks, but that's what they were. Sure, he threw up a lot of air balls and stumbled in many ways, but he had a fundamental understanding of motivational leadership, and he applied his understanding daily. Aside from helping make a lot of middle-managers, not to mention the senior leaders, multi-millionaires, he did three important things: he made General Electric, a big company, be responsive as a small company. He led leaders to be far better than they ever thought possible. And he created a culture of leadership excellence in the company which lives today. In fact, Jack Welch's greatest legacy to GE may be in the leaders and the culture of leadership he left behind. That a lesson for all leaders. It's not only what you do that's important but what you leave behind. He's a little out of favor now in many circles of business, but I believe when history is written about the last quarter of the 20th century, Jack Welch will be seen as one of the world's most important figures.


Finally, can you tell us about the last good business book you read?

Brent Filson:

This is not a book on business but it has tremendous importance regarding business. It's Buddhism Without Beliefs by Stephen Bachelor. It's not strictly about Buddhism either but about how to maintain skepticism in the face of organizational culture that demands adherence to the status quo and group think. The only way leaders can get more results faster continually is by going up against the status quo. In fact, as soon as one goes after the great results, the status quo will attack them, an attack that takes the forms of everything from passive resistance to outright rebellion. Buddhism Without Beliefs shows a process promotes healthy skepticism. Skepticism - not cynicism - is one of the most important attributes a leader can cultivate!

To find out more about Brent Filson and what he can offer your organization, visit www.actionleadership.com.

Brent's latest book The Leadership Talk: The Greatest Leadership Tool, Motivate People to Get More Results, Faster Results, Continually is available from amazon.com

For thought provoking, hard hitting articles that focus on the practical applications of business theory - look no further than the Journal of Business Strategy. Written in an informal, easy to read format, each issue covers a range of issues concerned with business strategy from creation, to development to implementation and control.


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Next month this interview will be archived in our Strategy Interviews section.

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on Friday 01st of April 2005