Leadership Law number 1:
The First Person You Lead is Yourself
When I was a year or two into the business, I was complaining to my sponsor about my team. Most of them were lazy, never brought guests to the meetings, and just wanted to wait around for their group to make them rich. I wondered why they couldn’t be more like me.
Unfortunately they were. That was the problem.
I had made the classic mistake of many beginners in Network Marketing: thinking that you can sponsor a few people and then manage them into making you rich.
Sorry, it does not work this way.
In fact, it’s really about personal responsibility. Because our business is one of modeling behavior. It doesn’t really matter what you tell your people; what they’re really taking note of is what you do.
You’re never really off display. They notice if you bring guests, sponsor new people, attend events, and follow the system. They study how you respect and edify the sponsorship line (or don’t). They watch how you handle problems, interact with the company, and speak about others when they’re not around.
You are responsible for going first, testing the way, finding what works, and then sharing that information down the group. (Although hopefully you have a sponsorship line that has done much of that, and your responsibility is more about teaching and perpetuating the existing system of duplication.)
Success requires you be a unique amalgamation of mentor, coach, teacher, commanding officer, and partner. People don’t work for you, they work for themselves, but of course what they do impacts your own results and income.
This requires a delicate dance of supervision, training, demonstrating, and leading by example. And that’s not something you’re going to learn in your distributor kit.
And all leadership starts by example…
You have to prove you are capable to lead yourself first, before you can expect anyone else to decide to follow you. And the paradoxical thing is that when you control your own actions, it actually influences the actions of your whole team. You cause certain behavior to happen and a culture to be formed, but you do it by modeling the behavior yourself and being the example people decide to duplicate.
Leadership Lesson:
When you’re ready to lead, start with the person in the mirror.