Your first responsibility as a leader Is to become successful
Not because you’re supposed to be selfish, but because discovering the correct path, becoming successful yourself, and then modeling that behavior is the most helpful—and selfless—way to lead your team. You can’t show anyone how to become a specific rank in the compensation plan unless you have attained that rank yourself.
Let’s revisit the wise words of the legendary Zig Ziglar: “You will get all you want in life…if you just help enough other people get what they want.” No arguments from me. But in terms of practical application, what that means in our business is that you blaze the trail first. It’s well meaning to think you should help your team become successful first, but that’s not how it actually works.
You learned in my earlier definition of leadership that the first element is inspiring people to become the highest possible version of themselves. That isn’t accomplished by your remaining static and lecturing your team on why they should grow. If you want to actually inspire people, you do so by modeling the path they will need to follow. Approach your responsibility with the mindset of pursuing your own success, while reaching down a helping hand to your personal enrollees and bringing them along the journey with you.
Once you’re doing this, you’re meeting the first requirement, inspiring others to become the highest possible version of themselves. But what about part two—enabling an environment that facilitates the process? Let’s unpack what that looks like.
Build the Foundation
A huge part of this involves having the right infrastructure in place: training procedures for team members, tools that help them develop skillsets, events for promoting the business to candidates, and a delineated “ladder of escalation” that candidates are brought through. This infrastructure helps the team handle the mechanics of building the business. I spent a great deal of ink explaining that in Direct Selling Success, so I won’t repeat that info here. The focus of this field manual is to dissect and explain your leadership responsibilities in this process.
As you’ve probably deduced, one of your foremost concerns must always be the duplicability of what you practice and teach. This requires a deft touch and some intellectual nuance. There are many potential problem situations along the way.
Time Expectations
For example, once you’re a successful leader, you could easily be working 30 to 50 hours a week running your business. But the business practices you teach your new enrollees to follow must be able to be accomplished in 10 to 15 hours a week, maximum. (Because most people will be entering the business part-time, along with working their existing job and practicing their other family and societal obligations.) Because we work from home, our business has very little separation between work life and personal life, and it can easily become all consuming. Let’s explore an interesting way you could set off a tripwire that harms your people, when you’re simply trying to help them and be friendly: socializing with them.
You might think it would be a great idea to have a regular social event for your local team. It could be something as innocuous as playing laser tag or putting together a bowling league. This can actually be harmful.
Here’s why: The new people in your group will be trying to finesse the adjustment from their normal schedule to finding 10 to 15 hours a week to work their new business. For a lot of people, this will create stress in other areas, often their family life. Their spouse might see the new business as unwanted competition for the team member’s already scarce free time. If the new team member adds another evening a week for social time with your group, this could be the tipping point that moves the spouse from guarded support or skepticism to outright opposition. You can end up losing team members over this.
Financial Realities
Often this creates financial stress as well. If you’re a successful mid-level distributor in the business, spending $20 for lunch or $35 on a social event probably means nothing to you. But to someone who is starting out in a tight financial situation and investing in their new business, even relatively minor expenditures like these can become quite stressful. And as your business (and income) grows, the amount of stress you create for your team can become more pronounced. After you’re successful, you might be eating at restaurants where dinner is $500 a person or staying in hotel suites costing $2,000 a night. Trying to keep up with you could then produce a serious threat to their family budget.
You may find that instead of your people getting “fired up” about the rewards of success, they are demoralized because they aren’t traveling in those kinds of circles yet and are fearful about their ability to get there.
Social Connections
Certainly, social connection is a huge part of our business. For that reason, I recommend you build parties or social connection into your regular team training events. For example, as we design the agenda for our two- or three-day major events, we usually make Saturday night a party night. We have a different theme each time (disco party, ’80s night, talent show, superhero costumes, etc.).
Another example is the practice of giving gifts during the holiday season. My recommendation is you set the culture in your team that could include a team-wide celebration and well wishes, but no exchange of gifts. This might appear counterintuitive to you, as it does to many people. Leaders love the idea of giving gifts of business or personal development items, as doing so seems inspirational and congruent with the philosophy of growth in the business. But once again, there could be stress points.
Someone just working their way up through the comp plan could be at a level where they have 80 or 100 members on their team and are reinvesting all they earn back into the business (buying recruiting tools, building long-distance lines, etc.). If they want to buy gifts for everyone, it could require going into debt, which would not be prudent.
There are people I respect who have a culture of gift giving, considering this integral to relationship building, showing appreciation, and creating loyalty. They have systemized the process, including team guidelines on who you give a gift to and how much to spend. If you’re going to have a culture of gift giving, be sure and follow their example.
As you can see, some practices look benign on the surface but end up backfiring in the important area of duplicability. Begin by leading yourself, then filter everything through the lens of how it will affect the people many levels below you. Once you’ve made this commitment to the success of those you sponsor and worked to ensure that the infrastructure and team practices promote duplicability, you have to do something unusual in business (and even relationships) today…
Care Enough About Your People to be a Truth Teller
If you read my last book, you know I make two promises to everyone I enroll:
1 I will never knowingly lie to them.
2 I will never knowingly tell them something that is not in the best interests of their business.
But being a truth teller goes much further. It means you respect people enough that you don’t pander to them or just tell them what they want to hear. Nothing is more harmful to a person’s growth and development than having coaches or mentors who only compliment and indulge them with “happy talk” and don’t
