Your Experience + The Leadership Talk = Great Leadership
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Word count: 770
Summary: The author asserts that most leaders neglect the human
relations aspects of the challenges they face, diminishing their
results-generating potential. He provides a tool that's been
working for leaders for more than two decades to achieve great
results by developing great relationships.
Your Experience + The Leadership Talk = Great Leadership by
Brent Filson
To best communicate an idea, wrap it in a human being. Words can
be superficial aspects of communication. True communication, for
better or worse, happens through deep, human interactions that
transcend words. Even though words may be exchanged and at times
be necessary, they are not sufficient to explain or promote
communication's aggregate opportunities.
For instance, you're having an argument with someone. You're
getting angry. You're saying things you're hardly aware of,
things to defend yourself and attack the other person. You feel
injured and want to justify yourself and make the other person
see your side and maybe even hurt that person. You're borne
along on a current of hot emotion. Later, you may regret the
words you used. Or you may get even angrier over the words the
other person used. Later, you may think of something biting you
should have said. The point is, the words, like froth on the
roiling river of your being, were really a partial aspect of
your experience. The words may have provoked anger in you and
the other person, but the anger itself, the experience of it,
the pain of it, the all consuming nature of it, and even quite
possibly the perverse pleasure of it, goes beyond words.
This is a leadership lesson. Working with leaders of all ranks
and functions worldwide for the past 22 years, I've seen that
most either misunderstand this truth of human nature or miss it
altogether. When communicating with others, they primarily go
for a narrow band of information dissemination and overlook what
can be of tremendous benefit to them, the broadband of human
relationships and the rich development that can take place in
those relationships.
The irony is that as human beings, we swim in relationships
--good, bad or indifferent relationships --every day. However,
relationships are so familiar to us, we ignore their uniqueness
and their importance in driving leadership results. We grasp at
meager bubbles while all around us and beneath us lies an ocean
teeming with results-engendering opportunities.
How do we seize these opportunities? I teach a process to do
just that. That process is the Leadership Talk.
The Leadership Talk has one objective: to help leaders get great
results -- far more results than if they do not use it. I call
it, "More results faster continually." Leaders can only get
more-faster-continually by mining relationships through
Leadership Talks.
The Leadership Talk is based on the idea that leaders speak 15
to 20 times and more a day: across a desk, at a water cooler, at
lunch, in meetings, etc. When those speaking opportunities are
manifested through Leadership Talks, the effectiveness of the
leader is dramatically increased.
In my articles and books, I've explained the inner workings and
the personal and professional benefits of the Leadership Talk.
Suffice to say, whenever you intend to communicate as a leader,
you should assess not only the information you want to impart
but also the human relations aspects of how you will go
imparting it -- and then use the Leadership Talk to further
those relationships and the results they engender.
For instance, the Leadership Talk teaches that the best way to
get results is not to order people to do a job but to motivate
them to choose to be your cause leader in doing that job. This
is an obvious point. What's not obvious is how you do it. One
way is to transfer your motivation to others.
A key Leadership Talk process tackles this challenge. The
process is called "the motivational transfer." Its aim is to
interact with the people you lead in such a way that they become
as motivated as you about tackling the challenge you face. You
can make that transfer happen by (1) imparting information to
the people, (2) making sure that what you have to communicate
makes sense to them, (3) making your experience their
experience.
The latter is by far the most effective way to promote a
motivational transfer. You have your experience become their
experience simply by remembering those experiences in your life
that had a strong impact on you and that provided a lesson to
solve the problem of their needs -- then simply communicating
that experience and the lesson.
When your experience becomes their experience, you are on your
way to delving into those deep, human, emotional aspects of
their realities, aspects that are triggers for great results.
You are the absolute expert on your own experience. When that
experience becomes a solution to their needs, it'll become their
experience too; and when it does, you'll have laid the
groundwork for becoming an exceptional leader.
2006