Word count: 757

Summary: Results don't happen unless people take action. But there are right and wrong ways to take action. Here are eight ways of right action that every leader must challenge people they lead to take.

In Leadership, The Eight Ways Of Right Action. (Part 1) by Brent Filson

The ancient Greeks had a saying: "When Aschines speaks, people say, 'How well he speaks,' but when Demosthenes speaks, people say, 'Let's march against Philip!'".

To get best results as a leader, people you lead should be saying in one way or other after you speak, "Let's march!"

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

Here are 8 ways of right action to get people marching in right way for right purpose at right time in right direction.

I'll delineate first four ways in part one of this two-part article then in part two, I'll describe last four ways.

Action must be: (1) PHYSICAL. Action is not what audience thinks or feels. It is what audience actually does. Usually, 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 Berlin Wall, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" he was delivering a call-to-action that was a stunning turning point in 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 principle to raise effectiveness of your leadership to much higher levels.

Word count: 687

Summary: Results don't happen unless people take action. But there are right and wrong ways to take action. Here are eight ways of right action that every leader must challenge people they lead to take.

In Leadership, The Eight Ways Of Right Action. (Part 2) by Brent Filson

In Part 1, I said that leaders who can't have people take right action are ineffective, and I listed four of eight ways of right action. In Part 2, I'll describe remaining four ways.

Action must be: (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 leadership equation, their needs are only reality. They don't care about your needs. They don't care about your reality. They only care about their reality. Tie action you want them to take to THEIR NEEDS, not yours. Which means of course that you have to clearly identify their needs.