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Home » Business And Finance Articles » In Leadership The Eight Ways Of Right Action

In Leadership, The Eight Ways Of Right Action

The ancient Greeks had a saying: "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, the people you lead should be saying in one way or the 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 the action people take after you have had your say. And if you are not having the people you lead take the right action, you're giving short shrift to your leadership, their trust in you, and their desire to take action for you.

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

Action must be:

(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 stunning 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. 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 we're 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.

Leaders who find little meaning in their jobs or the results associated with those jobs, shouldn't be leaders, or they should change jobs and/or results. Most leaders understand this. But few leaders understand that meaning also involves the jobs of the people they are leading and the attitudes of those people toward those jobs and the results the jobs aim for.

Your cause should be meaningful to the people who must carry it out. If it is only your cause and not their cause, the action they take will get insufficient results. Your cause will be meaningful to them when that actions they take to meet the challenges of that cause are solving the problems of THEIR needs. So, before you challenge them to take action, identify their needs and the problem solving actions.

(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 clearly identify their needs.

(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) GIVEN A 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 "head fake" from the people they're leading -- their nodding their heads and saying, "Yes," face-to-face with the leader; but inside saying, "No." 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.

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 speaking to people, keep the eight ways of right action in mind so people take the right action to achieve the right results.

2006 © The Filson Leadership Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

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

And here is another random article you might be interested in...

Forex Course: A Quick Forex Guide for Traders

In this Forex course we will review some steps you need to take care before you venture into your trading journey. Most traders venture into the Forex market with little or no experience in the Forex market. This results in painful experiences like loosing most of the risk capital, frustration because it seemed so easy to make money, etc.

The first thing you need to realize is that, it is not easy to make money. As every other endeavor in life, where important rewards are to come after mastering it, you need to work hard. You need to get very well educated and experienced before having the possibility to receive important rewards on it. The key on mastering the Forex market relies on commitment, patience and discipline.

Ok, you have decided you are going to trade the Forex market, you have seen several advertisings featuring how easy is to make money in the Forex market. You might think this is your opportunity to reach your financial freedom, right away, time is money, why waiting any longer if you have the opportunity to make money now. I know, I've been there, but you have a chance now, I didn't, no body told me what I am going to tell you.

We, Forex traders, make transactions based on a set of rules. These sets of rules are what we call a Trading System. Our systems tell us the exact time where we need to get in the market and out the market in order to make a profit (i.e. buy low sell high.)

Creating a system is the first big step you need to take care first. Why is this so important? Because you need to build a system that suits your personality, otherwise you are going to find hard to follow it, thus hard to profit from. A system can be based on technical indicators or what we called a mechanical system or based on experience and intuition or what we call discretionary systems. I highly recommend using and trying first a mechanical system, because discretionary systems are dangerous during the early stages of a Forex trader (can lead to indiscipline.) With experience, on later stages, you will find out which signals work better and which ones to avoid.

The next step in this Forex course is to try your system on a demo account. Most Forex brokers offer a demo account, an account with virtual money. This is an excellent choice to test your trading system as there is no money at risk. In this step you will figure out if the strategy works for you. If you feel comfortable trading it, then it is most likely to produce good results. How much time should you stay in this step? It varies, but you shouldn't go one step further until your system gets consistent profitable results over a period of time. It can take many months, but remember, you need to be patient.

You must be honest to yourself; you need to take every single signal generated by your system, not only the signals you thought were going to work, otherwise, you are going to have problems in the next two steps.

Ok, by know you had consistent profitable results on your demo account. You might think its time to go full. Nope, nope, nope. There is a big difference between trading a demo and a real account. The most important difference lies on emotions (fear, greed, anger, etc.) These are psychological barriers that affect every single decision made by traders regardless of what he/she is trading (stocks, bonds, Forex, futures, grains, etc.) These emotional factors, in my opinion, are the most determinant factor that separates profitable traders from the others.

The next step in this Forex course is specially designed to deal with emotions and to confirm the results obtained in the prior step (consistent results in a demo account.) At this step you need to trade in a real account with limited funds. Some brokers offer fractional lot trading. Meaning you are able to trade any desired amount (even cents.) The important thing here is that these emotions we've been talking about are present only when there is real money at risk. At this stage, you are going to see if you are really comfortable trading your system and if you are able to trade with such system, remember different systems produce different emotions. If you are able to produce similar results than those obtained in a demo account, then ready for the next step. If you didn't, then you might need to create another system, there is chance your system never fit you. If you created consistent profitable results on this stage, you have a chance to produce similar results in the next one, on the other hand, if you didn't produce good results in this stage, you will not be able to make on the next stage. Remember, you need to do things right, and be honest to yourself.

The last stage is trading in a real account with sufficient funds. If you are at this stage, and have passed successfully every prior stage, then you have a chance to make it, go ahead and try it, you need to be confident in yourself and in your system, your strategy have already produced consistent profitable results, there are reasons to believe you are going to make it. Very few traders fail at this stage (if passed successfully prior stages.)

Trading successfully is no easy task, it requires a lot of work, patience, discipline, and education. By completing the steps outlined in this Forex course, you have a chance to produce profitable results. I repeat it again, you need to be honest to yourself about the results obtained in every stage. Some times you might need expert guidance regarding your system development strategies.