A Leadership Lesson: Two Guys With Guns

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Summary: All leaders get to a point where they feel blocked in their jobs and careers. They feel they can't go on, or even if they can go on, are progressing much too slowly. The author gives a surprisingly effective pointer he learned from a crime novelist on how to become unblocked.

A Leadership Lesson: Two Guys With Guns
by Brent Filson

Raymond Chandler author of the famous Philip Marlowe detective stories advised writers suffering from writers' block: "Whenever you get stuck, have two guys walk through the door with guns."

Leadership has its own "leader's block." All leaders now and then get a good dose of it. You're sailing along in your job getting the results you want when, for whatever reason or for no reason you can discern, you come to a screeching halt and can't go any farther. You get stuck on getting the same results. You get stuck on motivating people. You're stuck on motivating yourself.

Being stuck, take advice from Raymond Chandler: Have two guys walk through the door with guns!

Chandler was talking about shaking things up in the writer's head and on the written page.

Here's the way you can have the leadership equivalent of Chandler's advice: shake things up in your job and career simply by giving Leadership Talks.

My experience working with thousands of leaders world wide for the past two decades teaches me that most leaders are screwing up their careers.

On a daily basis, these leaders are getting the wrong results or the right results in the 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 the fatal mistake of choosing to communicate with presentations and speeches -- not Leadership Talks.

In terms of boosting one's career, the difference between the two methods of leadership communication is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.

Look at it this way: There's a hierarchy of verbal persuasion. The lowest parts (least effective) are presentations and speeches. Primarily, they communicate information.

But the highest part of the hierarchy of verbal persuasion, the most effective way to communicate as a leader, is through the Leadership Talk.

The Leadership Talk not only communicates information. It does something much more important than what speeches/presentations do.

Now here's the key: The Leadership Talk has you, the leader, establish a deep, human, emotional connection with people