Leadership Influence...Takes Systematic Thinking

I wonder if I should write a book about this and maybe someday I will. Often, clients ask: what’s that one thing? Or you see it on posters, wristbands, web sites. But there is rarely only one thing.

Exceptional leadership and mastering the dozens of required competencies demands having a holistic and systematic understand of the drivers of influence, motivation and persuasion. It requires understanding the cause and effect impacts of behavioral choices and decisions.

Example: if someone asks: “what is one thing I can do to gain trust? I don’t believe there is sufficient trust on my team. “

Reality is there are no leaps to building trust. You can accelerate building trust to a degree, but still there are no skipping of key behavioral focus areas along the way.

Reverse engineering (getting to) trust looks like this (summary version): Trust results from relationships, demonstration of competencies, character strength use, adaptable communication, conflict management, biases, blind spot management, emotional IQ, character strength use and in the beginning, mindset management. Put a culture wrapper around that as social contagion is very real.

That is just one of 100’s of examples of why leadership influence, motivation and persuasion is no one thing, rather the sum total of many leadership competency and behavioral focus areas.