Tag Archives: emotional connection

Leadership

Conflict, Leadership And The Leadership Talk

Conflict comes with leadership as the sparks fly upward. If you don’t want to deal with conflict, leadership is not your thing.

Being a leader is not about IF you will tackle conflict but HOW. In fact, no other ability (other than being able to get results) so shapes people’s careers as the ability to deal with conflict.

Conflict and leadership go hand-in-hand because leadership involves challenging people often to do what they don’t want to do. If people did what they wanted, leaders wouldn’t be necessary. Great results don’t drop like manna from heaven. Achieving them involves people having to get out of their comfort zones, make troublesome decisions, and engage in disconcerting new actions. Leadership helps guide and motivate people to do those things.

There are countless books, articles, etc. devoted to conflict resolution. But let me give you one tool that I’ve been teaching leaders of all ranks and functions worldwide for more than 22 years. It’s the Leadership Talk.

Because the Leadership Talk is results-oriented and deals with fundamental human dynamics, it can be an unmatched way to help you deal with the inevitable conflicts you’ll face.

(The many books and many other articles I’ve written on the Leadership Talk can be seen on my website.)

Here are the three essentials you must adhere to in dealing with conflicts and how the Leadership Talk can help you manifest those essentials.

1. Establish a deep, human, emotional connection with the people you’re dealing with. When in conflict, keep in mind that the message is not just the message, the message is the messenger. HOW you deal with conflict and WHO you are in dealing with the conflict are as important, if not more, than WHAT the conflict is. Abraham Lincoln explained the importance of HOW and WHO: “If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend … Assume to dictate to his judgment, or to command his action, or to mark him as one to be shunned and despised, and he will retreat within himself, close all the avenues to his head and his heart; and tho’ your cause be naked truth itself … you shall no more be able to reach him than to penetrate the hard shell of the tortoise with a rye straw.”

The Leadership Talk helps you deal with not only the WHAT of the conflict but also the HOW. It is a clear, practical pathway to winning the hearts of the people you are in conflict with simply because its driving principle is Lincoln’s imperative of convincing the other side of your good will and sincerity.

2. Be guided by and empowered through process. It’s important for your career to have a simple, clear conflict-resolution process to guide your thoughts, speech, and actions. You may not follow it exactly in every case, but it can help you better deal with the countless varieties of conflicts that you’ll come to face.

The Leadership Talk is a powerful conflict resolution process because it engages the human aspects in practical, structured ways. For instance, one of its processes it called the Three-trigger Motivational Process. When you face conflict, you should ask three questions. If you say “no” to your answer to any one of those questions, you can’t give a Leadership Talk. The questions are: 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 action?

3. Stay focused on results. Since leaders do nothing more important than get results, the fruits of how we deal with conflict should be evaluated by whether we are obstructing or promoting results.

In leadership, it’s not enough to resolve conflicts, we must also in the process achieve increases in results. Forget about trying to achieve “win/win.” That can be a tender trap. In fact, in many cases, a win/win objective might impede results by keeping people from going to the next step, the results-generating step.

The Leadership Talk sees conflicts you are engaged in terms not simply of conflict resolution but results generation. Furthermore, its focus is not just about achieving ordinary results but more results, faster results on a continual basis.

Since conflict will always be with you as a leader, you should welcome it as an opportunity to get increases in results. When you’re using Leadership Talks, you’ll find yourself getting those results consistently.

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

The author of 23 books, Brent Filson’s recent books are, THE LEADERSHIP TALK: THE GREATEST LEADERSHIP TOOL and 101 WAYS TO GIVE GREAT LEADERSHIP TALKS. He is founder and president of The Filson Leadership Group, Inc. – and for more than 21 years has been helping leaders of top companies worldwide get audacious results. Sign up for his free leadership e-zine and get a free white paper: “49 Ways To Turn Action Into Results,” at http://www.actionleadership.com For more about the Leadership Talk: [http://www.theleadershiptalk.com]

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Brent_Filson/1911

 

Leadership

Turn Your Speech Into A Leadership Talk

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.

Speeches/presentations primarily communicate information. Leadership talks, on the other hand, not only communicate information, they do more: They establish a deep, human emotional connection with the audience.

Why is the later connection necessary in leadership?

Look at it this way: Leaders do nothing more important than get results. There are generally two ways that leaders get results: They can order people to go from point A to point B; or they can have people WANT TO go from A to B.

Clearly, leaders who can instill “want to” in people, who motivate those people, are much more effective than leaders who can’t or won’t.

And the best way to instill “want to” is not simply to relate to people as if they are information receptacles but to relate to them on a deep, human, emotional way.

And you do it with leadership talks.

Here are a few examples of leadership talks.

When Churchill said, “We will fight on the beaches … ” That was a leadership talk.

When Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you … ” that was a leadership talk.

When Reagan said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” That was a leadership talk.

You can come up with a lot of examples too. Go back to those moments when the words of a leader inspired people to take ardent action, and you’ve probably put your finger on an authentic leadership talk.

Mind you, I’m not just talking about great leaders of history. I’m also talking about the leaders in your organizations. After all, leaders speak 15 to 20 times a day: everything from formal speeches to informal chats. When those interactions are leadership talks, not just speeches or presentations, the effectiveness of those leaders is dramatically increased.

How do we put together leadership talks? It’s not easy. Mastering leadership talks takes a rigorous application of many specific processes. As Clement Atlee said of that great master of leadership talks, Winston Churchill, “Winston spent the best years of his life preparing his impromptu talks.”

Churchill, Kennedy, Reagan and others who were masters at giving leadership talks didn’t actually call their communications “leadership talks”, but they must have been conscious to some degree of the processes one must employ in putting a leadership talk together.

Here’s how to start. If you plan to give a leadership talk, there are three questions you should ask. If you answer “no” to any one of those questions, you can’t give one. You may be able to give a speech or presentation, but certainly not 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 makes sense.

* 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.

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