Brent Filson's Action Leadership™


		Brent Filson’s Action Leadership Report is a monthly e-zine helping leaders achieve more results, faster results, continually. In this issue: Three-trigger Motivational Process: The Key To Getting Great Results Without Breaking A Sweat: (UNSUBSCRIBE AT THE VERY END OF THIS E-ZINE) Subscribers who have not received their free report, “Brent Filson’s 49 Tips On Using Action To Get Results.” 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. 3 Number 3 -- March, 2005 Publisher: The Filson Leadership Group, Inc. brent@actionleadership.com (413) 458-4403 www.actionleadership.com (c) Copyright 2005 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. IN THIS ISSUE: SECTION 1: The Three-trigger Motivational Process: The Key To Getting Great Results Without Breaking A Sweat: SECTION 2: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. SECTION 3: Points of Light. SECTION 4: Message from Brent Filson: New Leadership For A New War. SECTION 5: News. ================================ SECTION 1: The Three-trigger Motivational Process: Need/Belief/Action The days of the order-leader are not just numbered. They’re over. Today, leadership is motivational or its stumbling in the dark. Because in terms of achieving more results faster continually, the order is the lowest form of leadership. Here’s why: Until recently, ever since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the order-giving way of leadership has flourished. Order comes from a Latin root meaning “to arrange threads in a woof”. In the Revolution’s early years, captains of industry dealt with the uneducated country folk in their factories by ordering them where, how and when to work. The most efficient and effective production methods were created when workers were “ordered” or ranked like threads in the woof of production lines. Refined and empowered by the Victorian culture, with its patriarchal power structure and strong links to Prussian military organization and dictates, the culture of the order-giver reached its zenith in the United States after World War II. In the following decades, with most of the industrialized world recovering from the war, 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 those orders were carried out. But with globalization, businesses worldwide are undergoing changes as radical as any since the Industrial Revolution. With competition increasing dramatically, with the volume and velocity of information multiplying, with information becoming accessible to more and more people, with the traditional, pyramidal structures of order-giving flattening, leaders today need skills akin not to ocean liner piloting but white-water canoeing. Order leadership founders in an environment where lines of authority are dynamic, information widely disseminated, markets rapidly changing, and employees empowered. In such an environment, new leadership, motivational leadership, is needed. So, how do we motivate people? There are two ways: the first is to understand the concept and application of motivation. Click here: http://www.actionleadership.com/ezine/v1n5.html And second is to have a process that triggers motivation in others. I emphasize process -- which is a sequence of specific steps to achieve a particular outcome -- because it’s not good enough to motivate people now and then, we must do it consistently. Process promotes consistency and advances the quality, consistency and quantity of results. The process I’m going to show you has been working for many hundreds of leaders for nearly 20 years. It’s called The Three-trigger Motivational Process. And it’s the basis of all my leadership processes. Note that the triggers are in the form of questions. 1) DO YOU KNOW WHAT THE AUDIENCE NEEDS? (2) CAN YOU BRING DEEP BELIEF TO WHAT YOU’RE SAYING? (3) CAN YOU HAVE THE AUDIENCE TAKE RIGHT ACTION? Let’s look into each trigger. (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. For more information on analyzing the audience’s needs, go to: http://www.actionleadership.com/ezine/v2n12.html (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 connecting the activity with many kinds of diseases is absolutely compelling. * 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. http://www.actionleadership.com/products/defining_moment.html 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. So, there you have it, the three-trigger motivational process. Apply it daily and you’ll see the quality of your leadership dramatically increase. =================================== SECTION TWO: The Good. The Bad. The Ugly. ==================================== The Good: In ancient Rome, at a time when having a statue made of oneself was all the rage among the nobles, one famous Roman refused to do so, the great statesman, Cato. He said, “I would rather have people ask, ‘Why doesn’t Cato have a statue done of himself?’ than, ‘Why did Cato have a statue done of himself?’” –There are many ways to apply the three-trigger motivational process. Cato used one creative way. Can you describe what it was? Can you repeat it in your leadership? The Bad: Louis XV once asked Francois Quesnay, a notable French economist and physician, what he would do if he were king. “Nothing,” replied Quesnay. “But then who would govern?” asked the king. “The laws,” Quesnay said. --There is more to this response than meets the eye. Quesnay was the leader of the Physiocrats, a group of Enlightenment theorists who advocated the importance of an agricultural-based economy. He was pointing out a particularly important dynamic of leadership: that often the best leadership is not to exert leadership. The objective of the three triggers is not to have the leader lead but to have the people lead. It gets back to what Lao Tzu said of leadership. “When the people say, ‘Our leader did it, that is the average leader. When the people say, ‘we did it ourselves!’, that is the best leadership.’” The Ugly: Thrown out of yet another state, Confucius and his disciplines came upon a woman weeping beside two graves. He asked who had died. She said one was for her husband, whom a tiger had killed and the other for her son, whom had been killed by the father of her husband. Confucius asked why she elected to live in such a savage place, and she replied, “Because there is no repressive government here.” “Remember,” Confucius said to his followers,. “a repressive government is worst that a tiger!” –Might one say the same for repressive leadership? ======================== SECTION THREE: Points of Light. ========================= The secret of success lies not in doing your own work, but in recognizing the right man to do it.” -- Andrew Carnegie Now who is to decide between “let it be” and “force it”? –Katherine Mansfield Achievement needs three things, the leader, the cause leader, and the moment. –Brent Filson By mutual confidence and mutual aid, great deeds are done, and great discoveries made. –Homer It takes two to speak the truth -- one to speak, the other to hear. –Thoreau It is not just the body but the understanding that takes the action. –Brent Filson Skill to do comes of doing. –Emerson After the event, even a fool is wise. –Homer A bad cause requires many words. –German saying. Don’t ask for success, BE the success you want. –Brent Filson =============================== (SECTION FOUR: Message From Brent Filson: New Leadership For A New War. ================================= PERMISSION TO REPUBLISH: This article may be republished in newsletters and on web sites provided attribution is provided to the author, and it appears with the included copyright, resource box and live web site link. Email notice of intent to publish is appreciated but not required: mail to: brent@actionleadership.com Word count: 1465 =========================================== Summary: The author observes that the war on terror calls for a new kind of leadership. Just as the war is “asymmetrical”, it needs “asymmetrical leadership” to help win it. Fortunately, such leadership doesn’t have to be invented. It’s already been developed by business leaders for the past several decades in the global marketplace. =========================================== New Leadership For A New War By Brent Filson Military analysts call this “asymmetrical” war (as if war has a terrible symmetry); and we know that it will be as different from conventional war as three-dimensional, blindfolded chess is from conventional chess. But one thing is certain, leadership lies at the heart of achieving victory. You only have to look to history to understand that when people needed to accomplish great things, whether in war or peace, great leaders had to rise to the occasion. Because asymmetrical war is a new kind of war, a war that is more about waging peace on many different levels than waging actual war itself, a war/peace in which accountants, logisticians, diplomats, economic experts will also be the front-line troops, it calls for a new kind of leadership — asymmetrical leadership. Just as asymmetrical war is fluid, multi-dimensional, and global, asymmetrical leadership must be too. But we don’t have to create asymmetrical leadership from scratch. To some extent, it’s already being developed and modeled in a few forward-thinking American businesses. What does business leadership have to do with waging asymmetrical war? During the past 15 or 20 years, many businesses have had to compete in asymmetrical markets, markets that are global, multi-faceted and swiftly changing. To succeed in these markets, the leaders of these businesses have had to discard old leadership methods and practices and put into action new ones. In short, they’ve had to develop asymmetric leadership. To understand such leadership, 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. This is where asymmetrical leadership comes in. Asymmetrical leadership is to traditional leadership as white water canoeing is to ocean liner piloting. Here are a few characteristics of asymmetrical leadership. Asymmetrical leadership is motivational: Businesses that engage in asymmetrical leadership find that motivation is a critical factor in achieving success. After all, since leaders do nothing more important than get results and since they can’t get results all by themselves, they need the people they lead to get results. In markets where speed, innovation, change acceleration, and global reach are important, motivated people get far more results than people who are simply responding to orders. And if our nation’s leaders expect to meet the challenges of asymmetrical warfare, they must come to grips with the motivational aspects of asymmetrical leadership. In fact, if asymmetric leadership isn’t motivational, it’s simply running around in the dark. But leaders often misunderstand motivation simply because the English language fails to describe how it takes place. English construes motivation as an active verb — as something one person does to another person. The truth is that leaders can’t motivate anybody to do anything. Leaders communicate — the people whom they lead motivate. They motivate themselves. Only they can motivate themselves. In asymmetrical leadership, the motivators and the motivatees are the same people. To engage in asymmetrical leadership, leaders must recognize that they are motivating people only when they, the leaders, create an environment in which those people are actively motivating themselves. Motivation is the people’s choice, not the leader’s choice. It’s the people’s free choice. If that principle is not driving leadership activities, people are not engaged in asymmetrical leadership. For instance, a critical battlefield of the war are the streets of the Islamic world where hatred of America seems to be rampant. As long as masses of people hate America, as long as they continue to see the American government as the actual terrorist, our nation cannot bring this war to a just conclusion. Clearly, this isn’t a command-and-control issue. People cannot be ordered to stop hating. We have to employ asymmetrical leadership. We have to motivate them — in other words, we must set up, through a variety of means, the environment in which they motivate themselves to become our allies, in which they make the choice to work along side us as full partners in concluding the war. It will take a long, superhuman, multifaceted endeavor, an endeavor that cannot succeed without our employing asymmetrical leadership. Asymmetrical leadership is action-based: Businesses faced with rapid, global change have come to understand that motivation isn’t what people think or feel but what they physically do. A key aspect of how asymmetrical leadership views motivation lies in the first two letters of that word. Those letters — “mo” — are also found in the words “motion,” “momentum,” “motor,” “mobile,” etc. The words denote action — physical action. To engage in asymmetrical leadership, leaders must constantly be challenging others to take specific physical action across all the dimensions that leads to results. Our motivating people who hate us to ultimately become our partners in peace will entail not our simply paying lip-service to such a partnership. We must undertake concrete actions that will begin to establish the motivational environment. Asymmetrical leadership demands that we and “they” ultimately take action together to redress the many social, political, and military wrongs that breed hatred. Asymmetrical leadership is results-driven: Businesses have discovered that in order to succeed in asymmetrical markets, their leaders and employees must have a passion to achieve results. After all, people who simply take action are useless to a business. Only those people who get results are useful. This seems like a simple enough dictum; any leader will say that they have a passion to get results. But I have found out that what most leaders have a passion for, whether they know it or not, is engaging in the tradition, linear, captain-to-mate-to-crew leadership — either because they know no other way of leading or because they are more comfortable being engaged in such leadership. For such leadership has a materially different focus than asymmetrical leadership. Traditional leadership focuses on the activities that get results; whereas asymmetrical leadership focuses on the results that get the activities. When you are leading organizations in asymmetrical markets, you must not be wedded to activities but instead to results and only to those activities that achieve those results. This means that if activities are not getting results, you change them or eliminate them and institute new activities. In organizations run by traditional leadership, changing activities means changing the status quo, a vastly difficult job. For instance, to get results in asymmetrical markets, many businesses have had to eliminate those traditional activities that achieve results and engage in new, innovative ways. They had to break up their linear lines of reporting. They’ve had to reduce the tiers of leadership, they’ve had to downsize their staffs and decentralize their functions, they’ve had to institute just-in-time inventory systems, they’ve had to cultivate the capability of quickly formulating and disbanding results-focused teams — all with one aim in mind: to get more results, faster results, and “more, faster” on a continual basis. In short, they have had to become masters of asymmetrical leadership. America’s new war demands new leadership. We don’t have to invent this leadership. It already exists. With the emergence of new, global markets, a corresponding new vision of leadership has been emerging with some businesses. Asymmetrical leadership is being developed and applied in the crucible of global business competition. It is the very kind of leadership that can and must be applied to all the multi-faceted endeavors of asymmetrical war. ============================= 2005 © The Filson Leadership Group, Inc. All rights reserved. ============================= The author of 23 books, Brent Filson’s recent books are, THE LEADERSHIP TALK: THE GREATEST LEADERSHIP TOOL and 101 WAYS TO GIVE GREAT LEADERSHIP TALKS. He is founder and president of The Filson Leadership Group, Inc. – and for more than 20 years has been helping leaders of top companies worldwide get audacious results. Sign up for his free leadership e-zine and get a free white paper: “49 Ways To Turn Action Into Results,” at www.actionleadership.com ================== SECTION FIVE: NEWS: ================== Brent’s latest leadership book, The Leadership Talk: The Greatest Leadership Tool, is available in bookstores. You can also purchase advance 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. Listen to an audio of Brent been interviewed recently on Audiomotivation.com. http://audiomotivation.com/go/brent-filson1204.htm Brent has put together two great systems that will boost your leadership and your leadership communication abilities. One is Brent Filson’s Leadership Talk System: http://www.theleadershiptalk.com The other is Brent Filson’s The CEO Public Speaking System http://www.theceopublicspeakingsystem.com During the past few months, Brent has been interviewed on more than 125 radio shows – and many more are on the way. If you are interested in having him on your show or at your meeting, go to the Action Leadership website and click on either the “meeting planner” button or the “press room” button. Check out Brent’s latest news releases: http://www.actionleadership.com/media_room/index.html The Filson Leadership Group, Inc. is putting together a CD collection of interviews with leaders, called the “Leaders Speak” Series. It will begin this month and can be found on the Action Leadership website. Click on “Leaders Speak CD Series.” 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 at 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
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