Subscribers who have not received their free report, “Brent Filson’s 49 Tips On Using Action To Get Results” and the “QuickSpeech” download, www.actionleadership.com

“Authority is a poor excuse for leadership.  Poor leaders order people to do a job.  Action leaders have those people choose to be the cause leaders of that job -- for more results faster, continually.”  –Brent Filson

Vol. 2  Number 10 -- October, 2004 
Publisher: The Filson Leadership Group, Inc.
brent@actionleadership.com
(413) 458-4403
www.actionleadership.com
(c) Copyright 2004 The Filson Leadership Group, Inc.

Kindly forward this e-zine to anyone you know who is interested in being a better leader.  If you are receiving this issue as a forward and would like to get your own free subscription, please visit our website at www.actionleadership.com

WE WILL NOT DISTRIBUTE YOUR ADDRESS TO ANYONE. 

PERMISSION TO REPRINT: You may reprint any items from "The Action Leadership Report” in your own print or electronic newsletter. Please include “by Brent Filson” with the following paragraph:

Reprinted from "Brent Filson’s Action Leadership Report,” a free e-zine helping leaders get more results faster (continually).  Subscribe at www.actionleadership.com and receive Brent Filson’s free report: 49 Tips On Using Action To Get Results and the QuickSpeech download. 


IN THIS ISSUE: ACTION: The Most Important and Least Understood Aspect of Leadership.


SECTION 1: The Eight Attributes Of Right Action.

SECTION 2: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.    

SECTION 3: Points of Light.

SECTION 4: Message from Brent Filson.

SECTION 5: News. 

Week 1: Action:
Leaders do nothing more important than get results, and results come from people taking action. 

The trouble is, most leaders have people get a fraction of the potential results because these leaders misunderstand what action really is -- and in that misunderstanding misapply and misuse it.

When you speak to people as a leader, it’s not what you say that’s really important, it’s what people do after you have had your say.  And if you are not having the people you lead take the right action, you are giving short shrift to your leadership and their trust in you, and desire to take action for you.    

The ancient Greeks had a saying that sums of this point.  It went, "When Aschines speaks, the people say, 'How well he speaks,' but when Demosthenes speaks, the people say, 'Let's march against Philip!' ".

To get the best results as a leader, people should be saying in one way or the other after you speak,  “Let’s march!”

Here are the 8 attributes of right action to get people marching in the right way for the right purpose at the right time in the right direction.  By the way, wrong action is simply the negative aspect of each right action. 

(1) PHYSICAL.  Action is not what the audience thinks or feels.  It is what the audience actually does.  Usually, the audience takes action with their feet and hands and tools.  When thinking of what action you want your audience to take, imagine their actually doing something physical, and you are on track. Getting your audience to take right action involves challenging them to do one specific thing.  When Ronald Reagan said in his speech at the Berlin Wall, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” he was delivering a call-to-action that was a turning point in the Cold War.  In your day to day leadership activities, you are probably not meeting such daunting challenges as winning a war, but you can use the principle to raise the effectiveness of your leadership to much higher levels.

(2) PURPOSEFUL.  People who take action are useless to an organization.  It is only those people who take action for results who are useful.  Make sure their action has purpose.  The secret of success is constancy of purpose.  Look at the action taken by Johnny Weissmuller, the Duke of Wellington, and Peter the Great in THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE UGLY section of this ezine.  Their actions had purpose.  When your audience does take action, they should know exactly what they are doing and why they are doing it.  Purpose in leadership talk has three aspects: reason, feeling and awareness.  People should understand the rational justification for the action; they should have an emotional commitment to the action; and be fully mindful that they are taking action.

(3) HONEST.  If you trick people into taking action or lie to get them to take action, you’ll damage that element on which all motivation is based, trust.  Afterward, you may be able to order them to do a job, but you will never motivate them.  Be honest with yourself in developing your call-to-action.  Marcus Aurelius said, “Never esteem anything as an advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect.”  Be honest with them in challenging them to act.  I do not recommend this merely on trustworthy grounds but on eminently practical ones as well.  After all, we do not know how good we are as leaders unless we are challenging the people to be better than they think they are.  And they cannot be persuaded to accept that challenge if they think were are deceiving them or that you are deceiving yourself.

(4) MEANINGFUL.  Action gives meaning to the emotion your audience feels.  Emotion alone cannot get results.  It's action that gets results.  Action validates emotion, and vice versa.
Go to these past ezines for great tips on investing the action people take with deep meaning.
The issue on MOTIVATION: http://www.actionleadership.com/ezine/v1n5.html

The issue on THE LEADERSHIP STRATEGY:  http://www.actionleadership.com/ezine/v2n1.html

The issue on The SAMMER TEST:
 http://www.actionleadership.com/ezine/v2n8.html

(5) LINKED TO NEED.  The people’s needs are their reality.  If you are an order leader, you clearly do not have to know their needs.  You simply exhibit a my-way-or-the-highway attitude.   But if you want to motivate them to take action, you need to understand that reality.  Because their motivation is not your choice, it’s their choice. Your role is to communicate, their role is to motivate, to motivate themselves.  It’s their choice.  It’s not yours.  So their needs are not only their reality, in the leadership equation, their needs are the only reality.  They don’t care about your needs.  They don’t care about your reality.  They only care about their reality.  Tie the action you want them to take to THEIR NEEDS, not yours.  Which means of course that you have to identify their needs.  I tackle such identification in depth in my books, DEFINING MOMENT: MOTIVATING PEOPLE TO TAKE ACTION and THE LEADERSHIP TALK: THE GREATEST LEADERSHIP TOOL.  Check them out at your nearest library or purchase them at www.actionleadership.com.

(6) URGENT: Patience is a virtue, but it can also be a tender trap.  Urgency is a results-multiplier.  A Roman centurion said the secret to instilling urgency in the troops was summed up in two words, “hit them.”   His credo lives today in the order leader -- not necessarily in a physical sense but more importantly in a psychological sense.  But trying to gain urgency through  “hit them” is far less effective than having urgency come from the people’s internal motivation.   Here’s a process to have people take urgent action: IDENTIFY THEIR NEEDS, SEE THE PROBLEMS IN THEIR NEEDS, AND HAVE THEIR TAKING ACTION PROVIDE SOLUTIONS TO THOSE PROBLEMS.

For instance, in a police academy, an instructor came into the room with a note that said CLEAR OUT THIS ROOM IMMEDIATELY.   The first cadet ordered his colleagues out.  A few cadets left but most stayed.  The instructor handed the note to a second cadet who pleaded for his classmates  to leave.  Again, a few left but most stayed.  Finally, the instructor gave the note to a third cadet.  This cadet understood how to identify needs and have people take action to solve those needs. He said two words, which emptied the room.  “Lunch break!”

People are always willing to take ardent action to solve the problems of their needs.  The question is can you identify those needs.  Once you do, you hare half way home to getting them to take such action.  

(7) DEADLINE: All action you have people take must have a deadline.  Otherwise, it might become a low priority for them, and they will not be especially urged to take it.  Be constantly monitoring yourself when motivating people to take action by asking, “Have I a put a deadline to this action?”  If you haven’t, do it.

(8) FED BACK: True motivation isn’t what the people do in your sight.  True motivation is what they do after they have left your sight.  Many leaders get the “ole head fake” -- people agree with you face-to-face, nodding YES, but inside they disagree with you; so, when they leave your presence, they do what THEY want, not what YOU want.  Make sure that the action you challenge them to take is fed back to you, so that you are aware  --and they are aware that you are aware -- of that action.

For example, one of the best Leadership Talks I have witnessed involved no words being spoken at all.  (See the ezine on The Leadership Talk:  http://www.actionleadership.com/ezine/v1n6.html   It engendered passionate action that was all the more passionate for being fed back to the leader. 

My high school football team got behind 12-0 in the first half to a much inferior team.  Going into the locker room under the stands, we expected our coach to give us a great motivational talk to get us ready for the second half.  He was a master of such talks.  But he didn’t show up.  We waited.  He didn’t come into the locker room.  His absence motivated us more than any talk could have, for we understood that we played so badly he didn’t want to have anything to do with us.  We went out and playing like crazed dogs  in the second half won the game 26 -12, all the time aware of him coaching on the sidelines.   

Here then are questions you may ask when motivating people to take action. 
* What physical action will they take?

* What is the clear purpose of the action?

* What do you and they feel deeply about in regard to that action?  The answer may lie in your Defining Moment.

* How is the action tied to your vision?

* What greater goal is their action leading to?   Remember that a goal is not a vision.  A goal is a quantitative expression of the future.  "Our goal is $100 million in sales next year."  A vision is a qualitative expression of the future.  "Our vision is to transform each salesperson's job into a passionate vow."  See Defining Moment: Motivating People To Take Action.  Pages 43 - 45.

* How can you make that action specific and small in scope?  Often just having people dial a phone number, write a letter or just shake somebody's hand is the best kind of Call-to-Action.

*  How can you put a deadline to that action and have it fed back to you?

Next month we will analyze The Call To Action. 

SECTION 2: THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE UGLY. 
Getting people to take right action often takes spur-of-the-moment decisions by leaders.  Here are three examples of how quick-thinking lead to situations being turned around through action. 

THE GOOD: Johnny Weissmuller, who won five gold medals in the Olympics during the 1920s and played Tarzan in the movies a decade later, found himself in 1959 caught up in the Cuban revolution in which Fidel Castro overthrew the dictator Batista.  Driving in a car, Weissmuller was suddenly stopped and surrounded by a squad of Castro’s militia.  They pointed their weapons at him and told him to get out.  Out of the car, he drew himself up to his full height, pounded his chest, and let out his trademark Tarzan yell.  The militia were momentarily stunned.  Then they yelled, “Tarzan!  Tarzan!  Bienvenido!  Welcome to Cuba!”  They all got his autograph and led him in triumph to his destination – a golf course where he played a round as the fighting moved on toward Havana.

---Sometimes, it’s not what you think through that provides the best leadership, but what comes to you on the spur-of-the-moment.  Be ready for those moments when you’ll be challenged to make a spontaneous decision. 

THE BAD: Shortly after his successful Spanish Peninsula campaign against Napoleon’s troops, the Duke of Wellington was back in London at his desk going over paperwork.  The door burst open and a man with a dagger charged in, “I must kill you!” 

Wellington did not look up.  He said calmly, “Does it have to be today?”  The man, taken aback by his calm demeanor, stopped in his tracks.  He said, “Well ... they didn’t tell me exactly when.  But ... soon ... surely.”

“Please make it another day,” Wellington said.  “Can’t you see I’m busy?”

The man was seized by guards and taken away.  It turned out he was an escaped inmate from a local insane asylum.

–As a leader, you can often take control of a situation by exhibiting the opposite behavior than that which is apparently is called for. 

THE UGLY: A fanatical cadre of officers plotted to kill the Russian Czar Peter the Great.  The officers of this secret society went through grueling exercises to inure themselves to the torture they knew would surely come if their plot was discovered.  One officer was captured and tortured mercilessly to get him to reveal his co-conspirators.  But he remained silent in the face of excruciating pain. Peter went to the man, embraced him and shedding tears said, “You have been punished enough.  Now confess freely to me on the account of the love you have for your Czar.  I’ll pardon you completely and make you a colonel.”  The man was so unnerved by Peter that he made a full confession.  Peter kept his word.  He pardoned him and promoted him a full colonel. 

–Making a simple, human emotional connection with people often goes much further in having them do what we want than simple, brutal means.
                                        
SECTION 3: POINTS OF LIGHT.
“Great leaders know the difference between action and motion.  Poor leaders don’t.”  –Brent Filson

“We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it.”  Ralph Waldo Emerson.

“The materials of action are variable, but the use we make of them should be constant.”  –Epictetus

“Refraining from wrong action is sometimes the best action.”  –Brent Filson

“Action is eloquence.”  –Shakespeare

“Dreams grow holy when put into action.”  –Adelaide Procter

“Execute every act of your life as if it were your last.”  –Marcus Aurelius

“Doing is the great thing.  For if, resolutely, people do what is right, in time they come to like doing it.”  –Ruskin

“If you say you’ll take Vienna, then you must take Vienna!”  –Napoleon

“If you can’t feel it, they won’t do it.”  –Brent Filson

SECTION 4: MESSAGE FROM BRENT FILSON
NOW I KNOW WHEN ARE AT WAR.

I guess the other shoe had to drop, but I wasn’t ready for it.  When it did, I realized that you often don’t know you’re in a war until you are really in it, and that’s a leadership lesson.

Here’s the deal.  After 9/11, our nation’s leaders said we were in a war. Most people could agree with that.   We saw war on television, in Afghanistan, in Iraq.  We read about it in the papers.  But for me on the civilian side of things,  it didn’t seem like war.  Life went on as before.  We saw people on the streets, at their jobs, at airports, on the highways.  They were all supposed to be at war.  Don’t you make sacrifices in war?  Nobody but the troops were making sacrifices.  Life on the home front seemed pretty much like the peace before 9/11.  

Then one shoe dropped: My son, a Marine who had been a raider company commander in the Far East, a peaceful Far East, was sent to Afghanistan.  Still, I didn’t think this nation was truly at war.  After all, my son had been to a lot of danger areas in peace time. 

Then a few months later, just last week in fact, the other shoe dropped.  A Marine general said, “Everybody in this room will be in combat in a year.  I can assure you of that.”

He was speaking to 60 graduates of the Infantry Officers Course in a mess hall at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia.  These second lieutenants had just completed a tough three month course, learning about the weapons, the logistics, the tactics, and of being Marine small-unit leaders.  They had gone through a lot of training to be eligible to enter IOC, some at the Naval Academy, others at Officers Candidate School, and all of them a six month program called the Marine Corps Basic School.  But the training they received these last three months added the important edge to their leadership.  Now they were headed out to the real world, to what the Marines called “the fleet,” the Fleet Marine Force.  And this general was providing the send off. 

My youngest son was one of these young lions. Within three days, he would pick up a rifle platoon at a Marine base in North Carolina. After six months training, they would deploy eastward.  He and I were sitting together having just eaten a breakfast of steak and eggs, traditional for that graduation, which always takes place early in the morning so the lieutenants can get a quick start traveling to their far flung duty stations.

The table cloths were Marine Corps camouflage. The Marines were in their camouflage field uniforms.  The ceremony was stripped down to bare essentials: simply, each officer getting his graduation packet and a handshake from the general, standing before the assembly, reciting a quote that usually had to do with leadership and war, then returning to his seat. 

The general went on to talk what about he’s learned about leadership over the years, primarily that there is a spiritual component to all leadership, and about his visiting the wounded Marines in the Naval hospital in Maryland and meeting the flag-draped coffins coming off the planes at Dover Air Force Base, and that there will be many more wounded and many more flag-draped coffins in this time of war and finally that there was no more hallowed pursuit than leading soldiers into combat.

So, now I know.  Our lives go on, the baseball playoffs and world series are coming up, it’s the fall and football and tail gate parties and falling leaves and first frosts, but now for me it’s all different.  A difference that happened at a breakfast in Quantico, Virginia with the stark words of a general. 

 “Every body in this room will be in combat in a year.  I can assure you of that.”

Sometimes you don’t know you are in a war until somebody wakes you up to the fact that you are really in a war. 

NEWS: Brent’s latest leadership book, THE LEADERSHIP TALK: THE GREATEST LEADERSHIP TOOL, is available in bookstores.  You can purchase copies by calling 800-403-5368. Mention this e-zine and you’ll receive a free wallet card with the Leadership Talk processes. If you purchase the hardcover book, you’ll receive a free copy of Brent’s new book,101 WAYS TO GIVE GREAT LEADERSHIP TALKS. In addition, you’ll be eligible to receive a set of Brent’s previously published books at half price.

QuickSpeech is up and running.  If you have a speech to give, go to the QuickSpeech button at www.actionleadership.com and download the template.  Fill in the blanks, and you’ll have a powerful speech.  Quick Speech is the highly popular companion supplement to Brent’s book, EXECUTIVE SPEECHES, 51 CEOS TELL YOU HOW TO DO YOURS.  QuickSpeech has sold thousands of copies, but now it is available to you for free.  Remember, the speech is not an end in and of itself but the gateway to The Leadership Talk.  Learn to give speeches Brent Filson’s way and you’ll be better grounded to give Leadership Talks later on. 

Radio Blitz: Brent has been interviewed on more than 95 radio shows since Memorial Day.  He is shooting for at least 150 radio and tv interviews before the fall election.  If you are interested in having him on your show or at your meeting: http://www.actionleadership.com/media_room/index.html and   

http://www.actionleadership.com/meeting_planners.html
                                
The Filson Leadership Group, Inc. is putting together a CD collection of interviews with leaders, called the “Leaders Speak” Series.

http://www.actionleadership.com/leadersSpeak/index.html    Brent says, “I want to interview leaders from a broad spectrum of human endeavor to be represented.  Don’t be surprised to find landscape contractors, gang leaders, horse trainers, sports coaches, as well as business and political leaders.  Leadership is practiced by practically everyone, and we will bring it to you on the CDs in all the richness of human relationships.”  For more information, call the F.L.G. headquarters, 413-458-4403 or email Brent brent@actionleadership.com


******************Earn Referral Commissions** ******************

Commissions can be earned selling Brent’s books and product as well as helping him get booked for speaking engagements.  For more information, email: commissions@actionleadership.com