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Law 3. Emotion drives motivation. The words "emotion" and "motivation" come from same Latin root meaning to move. When you want to move people to take action, you must engage their emotions. I'm not talking about getting people emotional. I'm talking about having people make strong emotional commitments to what you're challenging them to achieve.
The best way to make that emotional connection is with Leadership Talks.
My experience working with thousands of leaders world wide for past two decades teaches me that most leaders are screwing up their careers. On a daily basis, these leaders are getting wrong results or right results in 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 fatal mistake of choosing to communicate with presentations and speeches -- not leadership talks.
In terms of boosting one's career, difference between two methods of leadership communication is difference between lightning and lightning bug.
Speeches/presentations primarily communicate information. Leadership talks, on other hand, not only communicate information, they do more: They establish a deep, human emotional connection with audience. For more on Leadership Talk, click on my website in resource box.
Law 4. Face-to-face speech is generally best way to motivate people (i.e., have those people choose to be motivated.) A middle-manager told me, "Where is our new CEO? We call him‘Elvis'. We seldom see him in person. There're only purported sightings of him. Maybe I'll see a blurry photo of him in one of those supermarket check-out tabloids."
In another company, a secretary said, "Our division chief stays in his office most of time. But on rare occasions that he's out and about, only evidence of his existence is odor of his pipe smoke."
Isolation may be good for monks but it's an affliction with leaders. When you want to motivate people, relationship is name of game; and you can't have a relationship, at least a productive one, as an absentee leader.
Get out and about. This is more than MBWA, (Management By Walking Around). The key is what you do when walking around. Don't be about simply sharing information but also creating environment for motivation. People hunger to be motivated. Even more: people are ALWAYS motivated. And if they won't be motivated for your cause, they will be motivated for their cause – a cause that may be at cross purposes with yours.
Make no mistake: Motivation isn't about bands playing, people cheering, hugging, and singing kombaya. Those are only surface features of motivation. True motivation happens in profound quiet of human relationships.
So, in your interactions, strengthen those relationships by keeping laws of motivation in mind. When interacting with people, challenge them to take physical action, understand that motivation is their free choice, their HEARTFELT free choice, give Leadership Talks to develop deep, human, emotional relationships; and take opportunities to speak with them face-to-face.
2005 © The Filson Leadership Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
Brent Filson is the 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 http://www.actionleadership.com