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Home » Business And Finance Articles » The Real International Gold Standard The Leadership Talk

The REAL International Gold Standard: The Leadership Talk

Summary: The global economy has been a fact of life for decades now. But the author asserts that most leaders don't understand the right kind of leadership to propel those organizations to great global success. Here is a blue print on how to make your leadership truly effective on an international basis.

Working with thousands of leaders during the past 21 years in the global economy, I have found that most of them don't have a clue. They may know to some extent how to do business on a global level. But to exert the right kind of leadership on that level eludes them; so when I first meet them, they're usually getting the wrong results or the right results in the wrong ways.

Of course, there are many successful global companies and leaders, but my experiences teach that they are successful not because of but in spite of their leadership activities. They may do things right; but they are not doing the global leadership things right. If they got that leadership right, they'd be getting a lot more results.

Clearly, the challenges of leading on a global scale are daunting. Differences in time zones, cultures, currency dynamics can be vexing. But one thing is the same. It takes leadership for organizations to succeed â€" leadership that must drive results, not now and then, not ad hoc, not in patches but consistently in all cultures simultaneously.

First, let's understand what kind of leadership is needed to achieve such success. Then I'll give you a powerful tool to make it happen.

Leaders do nothing more important than have people get results. There are two ways for leaders to get results, order people to go from point A to point B or have the people want to go from A to B. Clearly, the latter is more effective in getting results. Today, with speed, flexibility, and teamwork being driving global competitiveness, the order-leader who tyrannizes and micro manages can't compete against the leader who can build motivated teams to get results.

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.

In short, the leader who can "have" others get results. That means global leadership is essentially motivational leadership.

That's the kind of leadership needed to achieve such success. Now, here's the tool to make that leadership happen. That tool is The Leadership Talk. Here's what the Leadership Talk is all about.

When it comes to realizing motivational leadership around the world, there is a hierarchy of verbal persuasion. This hierarchy extends to people everywhere, no matter what their culture, what job they hold, or what ambitions they have.

The lowest levels of the hierarchy are speeches and presentations. They communicate information. The highest level, the most effective level is The Leadership Talk. The Leadership Talk not only communicates information. It does something much more. It establishes deep, human, emotional connections with people.

The question isn't, "Why is this connection necessary in terms of getting organizational results?" (After all, the answer is obvious.), the question is, "Why is the Leadership Talk the gold standard for international leadership?"

For one thing, I've had top leaders in top companies worldwide applying it for more than two decades, and it simply works. It's all about helping leaders get what I call "more results faster, continually." You can get those kinds of results on a global scale without the Leadership Talk.

The Leadership Talk is motivational, action-focused, results oriented anywhere it's used.

That's because its key process, the Three-trigger Motivational Process, is tied to universal human motivators.

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, quantity, and dependability of results.

The Leadership Talk 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?

When facing a leadership challenge, if you say "no" to any one of these questions, you can't give a Leadership Talk.

(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.

(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.

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 know 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" â€" 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 worldwide 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 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.

The changing global marketplace can force you to confront a world of differences in cultures, time zones, and currencies; but one thing will always remain the same, the need for great leadership to drive great results. When you use the Leadership Talk consistently in your dealings around the world, you'll be putting into circulation the real gold standard that is recognized and valued everywhere.

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...

Stock Research and Market To Be Affected Big Time Post November Election

Stock research normally tells us that pick the right stocks and it really doesn't matter what the market does. When you survey history however, this seemingly true statement turns out not to be the case. You can have all the stock research in the world, but if the market goes against you, it doesn't matter.

The stock market is making new highs with the Dow Jones Industrial Average piercing the 12000 barrier for the first time since the Dow Jones was created. The question now becomes which way is the next 1000 or 2000 points, up or down. The market has always told us that it doesn't like uncertainty. Far better is the devil you know, than the devil you don't know.

The massive uncertainty facing the country is which way does Iraq go? Iraq is eating at the social fabric of this country. Traditionally, Presidents are held on a short leash when it comes to wars, and entanglements. Yes, as a country we have always fully supported the President initially, as we rally around the flag. As time moves on, Americans become impatient with their Presidents. This has been true in the past, and it is true today. Patriotism will only carry a President so far. Harry Truman was a very popular President at the end of World War II. A year into the Korean War, he saw his approval ratings fall to such lows that he couldn't even think of running again for the Presidency in 1952.

Viet Nam destroyed Lyndon Johnson's Presidency in spite of being elected up until then, by the largest popular vote landslide in history, almost 16 million more votes than his opponent. Jimmy Carter found himself entangled by the Iranian hostage situation, and lost his Presidency as a direct result. During the last 2 weeks of the 1980 election, I was told by Ronald Reagan's campaign manager that if Carter secured the release of the hostages from Iran, Carter would win the election. The release never came, and Carter was driven out of office in a landslide.

We now see President Bush entangled by the Iraqi conflict. How does the war work itself out from this point forward? All Washington insiders if quizzed privately would tell you that the President is between a rock, and hard place. The wish that the Iraq people would embrace freedom, and democracy has turned out to be a Presidential vision that the Iraq people never shared, or embraced.

Democracy is every Iraqis' second choice. If you are a Kurd, your first choice is that the Kurds be in power, and you are willing to fight and wage terror for that goal. The same is true of the majority based Shia, and the minority based Sunnis. When Saddam Hussein was in power there was an old story, "Did Saddam make Iraq, or did Iraq make Saddam." It is inconceivable to believe, but nevertheless may be true that only a despotic, merciless dictator like Saddam Hussein could shape Iraq into a country. In Saddam's case, he embraced and required terror to govern.

How does Iraq play out?

Enter the Iraq Study Group (ISG), a group headed by former Secretary of State James Baker, and former Democratic Congressman Lee Hamilton. The public purpose of the group doesn't matter, the private purpose does. This President knows that his policies in Iraq have FAILED. He needs political cover to effectuate massive change. The Iraq Study Group will give him that cover. They will probably propose everything, and anything that is different from the current course we are on.

If the President is shrewd enough, he will embrace those portions that suit his purpose. That purpose is to change our current policies. The President also recognizes that the momentum this November is for the Democrats to take over the House, and perhaps come close to taking the Senate. As I write this, the Senate is in play, which means the Senate could also go either way. If either chamber of Congress changes party affiliation, the President's hands could be tied severely.

Only the Congress has the authority vested in it constitutionally to appropriate and authorize the spending of funds. We could reach a point in time where spending for our military activities in Iraq will not be authorized. President Bush must act before we get to that point. The Iraq Study Group will provide the alternatives that this Administration will pick and choose from, to change our direction and get us out of the mess, which we have put ourselves in.

Two of the issues the ISG must deal with is why do we have the same number of troops (140,000) when the police and military in Iraq now number 300,000 plus. A few years ago, there were no police and the military was sent home - what gives? A second question is how do we leave Iraq, and not destabilize the country to the point where we throw the country into the hands of Iraq's long-time enemy, Iran.

We are in a dilemma which is defined as a situation requiring the choice of two equally undesirable alternatives. The President will have to act very quickly after the election. He will not have much time if there is a new party in control in either chamber of Congress. The stock market will begin to act in a downward manner due to the uncertainty as to future policy choices.

We will probably have to consult and deal with both Syria and Iran, even though we do not want to. Both countries are major players in the region. Our dealings will be independent of other policy considerations involving Iran's desire to possess nuclear armaments. The great experiment in creating democracy in Iraq is coming to an end. It could have worked, but the steps necessary had a brief window of opportunity, and that window has now closed.

The disbanding of the Iraq army years ago, along with the police, plus the firing of the top layers of the people who ran the government were all retrospectively MISTAKES. There is NO GOING BACK to revisit them. When the Iraq Study Group makes its recommendations after the November election, President Bush will have a brief window with political cover to change directions. If he does, the stock market in this country will more than likely continue to prosper. If he doesn't take decisive and long overdue action, all bets are off.

Goodbye and Good Luck

Richard Stoyeck
stocksatbottom.com" class= "hft-urls">http://www.stocksatbottom.com