The Motivational Transfer: Your Best Leadership Move.
Leadership is motivational or it’s running around in the dark.? However, your motivation though sufficient is not a necessary factor helping you reach your full potential. Your motivation is a given. After all, if you aren’t motivated, you shouldn’t be a leader. The necessary factor is ???can you transfer your motivation to the people so they are as motivated as you are?
There are three ways you make the motivational transfer happen. 1) Provide information. 2) Make sense. 3) Share your experience.
The first two ways are self-evident.? For instance, many people are motivated to stop smoking when information on the deleterious effects of smoking on their health make a lot of sense to them.?
However, the most effective way to trigger a motivational transfer is the third way.
Sharing your experience involves powerful, human bonding that can provide an inexhaustible store of motivational-transfer material.
The power of those relationships has been demonstrated since the dawn of history. In all cultures, whenever people needed to do great things, one thing had to take place: A leader had to gather those people together and speak from the heart. In other words, deep, human, emotional relationships had to be constituted for great things to be accomplished.
Successful leaders engage in deep, human, emotional relationships with the people they lead, the unsuccessful ones don’t
However, few leaders I’ve encountered know how to go about sharing their experience consistently and effectively.?
A powerful means to manifest the third way is with the “defining moment” technique. This entails having the leader’s experience become the people’s experience. When that happens, a deep sharing of emotions and ideas, a kind of communing, can take place.
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Generally, people learn in two ways — through the intellect and through experience. In our school system, the former predominates, but it’s the latter that is most powerful in terms of inducing a deep sharing of emotions and ideas between peoples and among organizations, because our experiences, which can be life’s teachings, often lead us to profound awareness and purposeful action.
Look back at your schooling. Which do you remember most, your book learning or your experiences, your interactions with teachers and students? In most cases, people say their experiences made the strongest impressions on them; they remembered them long after book knowledge faded. This is where the defining moment comes in. Its function is simple: to provide a communion of experience with you and the people you lead, so those people will be as motivated as you are to meet the challenges you face.
The process of developing a defining moment is simple, too: put a particular experience of yours, a defining moment, into sharp focus, and then transmit that focused experience into the hearts of the audience so they feel the experience as theirs.
Out of that shared feeling they can be ardently motivated to act for results. It’s easy, and it’s a game changer. But if you don’t get the defining moment right, it can backfire. In fact, you could wind up having people motivated against you.
Out of that shared feeling they can be ardently motivated to act for results. It’s easy, and it’s a game changer. But if you don’t get the defining moment right, it can backfire. In fact, you could wind up having people motivated against you.
Sharing your experience is an actual “way,” a course of actions leading toward an objective that often involves the mastery of some transcendent skill. That skill results in the Motivational Transfer, one of the most important actions you can take in your job and career.
The author of some 40 published books, Brent Filson’s latest two leadership books are: “The Leadership Talk: 7 Days to Motivating People to Achieve Exceptional Results” and “107 Ways to Achieve Great Leadership Talks.” A former Marine infantry platoon and company commander, he is the founder of The Filson Leadership Group, Inc., which for 40 years has helped thousands of leaders of all ranks and functions in top companies worldwide achieve sustained increases in hard, measured results. He has published some 150 articles on leadership and been a guest on scores of radio/tv shows. His mission is to have leaders replace their traditional presentations with his specially developed, motivating process, The Leadership Talk. www.brentfilson.com and theleadershiptalk.com.
Besides having lectured about the Leadership Talk at MIT Sloan School of Management, Columbia University, Wake Forest, Villanova, Williams, Middlebury, Filson brought the Leadership Talk to leaders in these organizations: Abbott, Ameritech, Anheuser-Busch, Armstrong World Industries, AT&T, BASF, Bell Atlantic, BellSouth, Bose, Bristol-Meyers Squibb, Campbell Sales, Canadian Government, CNA, DuPont, Eaton Corporation, Exelon, First Energy, Ford, General Electric, General Motors, GTE, Hartford Steam Boiler, Hershey Foods, Honeywell, Houghton Mifflin, IBM, Meals-on-Wheels, Merck, Miller Brewing Company, NASA, PaineWebber, Polaroid, Price Waterhouse, Roadway Express, Sears Roebuck, Spalding International, Southern Company, The United Nations, Unilever, UPS, Union Carbide, United Dominion Industries, U.S. Steel, Vermont State Police, Warner Lambert — and more