Good Leadership and Teamwork

As a leader you need to build and cultivate your team’s confidence. Your team should have confidence in them self as well as confidence in your leadership skills. As you work with your team you will build a consistent history based on past successes and failures. If you maintain a good track record of success you will create a sense of optimism that future projects will also be successful. If you have a record of disappointment, your team will probably view any new projects as having a high chance of failing.

It is the job of the leader to select projects that will contribute to an overall sense of success within his team. By starting with projects that the team all believes will be successful. A leader will be able to raise the level of confidence for the next project. A series of projects can be completed easily and successfully when they are ordered in such a way to build confidence while the same projects may face failures when done in a different order.

When you speak to people as a leader, what you say that's really important. On top of that the action people take after you have had your say is most important. And if you are not having the people you lead take the right action, you're giving short shrift to your leadership, their trust in you, and their desire to take action for you.

Here are the 4 ways of right action to get people marching in the right way for the right purpose at the right time in the right direction.

Action must be:

1. PHYSICAL. Action is not what the audience thinks or feels. It is what the audience actually does. Usually, the audience takes action with their feet, hands and tools. Getting your audience to take right action involves challenging them to do one specific thing.
2. PURPOSEFUL. People who take action are useless to an organization. It is only those people who take action for results are useful. Make sure their action has purpose. The secret of success is constancy of purpose. When your audience takes action, they should know exactly what they are doing and why they are doing it. Purpose in leadership has three aspects: reason, feeling and awareness.
   
   People should understand the rational justification for the action; they should have an emotional commitment to the action; and be fully mindful that they are taking action.
3. HONEST. If you trick people into taking action or lie to get them to take action, you'll damage that element on which all motivation is based trust. Afterward, you may be able to order them to do a job, but you will never motivate them. Be honest with yourself in developing your call-to-action. Marcus Aurelius said, "Never esteem anything as an advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect."
   
   Be honest with them in challenging them to act. After all, we do not know how good we are as leaders unless we are challenging the people to be better than they think they are. And they cannot be persuaded to accept that challenge if they think we're deceiving them or that you are deceiving yourself.
4. MEANINGFUL. Action gives meaning to the emotion your audience feels. Emotion alone cannot get results. It's action that gets results. Action validates emotion, and vice versa.