For leaders to be effective, they need to connect with people. All great leaders recognize this truth and act on it almost instinctively. You can’t move people to action unless you first move them with emotion.
“People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” You develop credibility with people when you connect with them and show that you genuinely care and want to help them. And as a result, they usually respond in kind and want to help you.
How do you connect with people?
1) Connect with Yourself – If you don’t believe in who you are and where you want to lead, work on that before doing anything else.
2) Communicate with Openness and Sincerity – People can smell a phony a mile away. Authentic leaders connect.
3) Know Your Audience – When you work with individuals, knowing your audience means learning people’s names, finding out their histories, asking about their dreams. When you communicate to an audience, you learn about the organization and its goals. You want to speak about what they care about.
4) Live Your Message – Practice what you preach. That’s were credibility comes from.
5) Go to Where They Are – Remove as many barriers to communication as possible. Try to be attuned to their culture, background, education, and so on. Adapt to others; don’t expect them to adapt to me.
6) Focus on Them, Not Yourself – Focus on others, not yourself. That is the number one problem of inexperienced speakers and ineffective leaders.
7) Believe in Them – It’s one thing to communicate to people because you believe you have something of value to say. It’s another to communicate with people because you believe they have value. People’s opinions of us have less to do with what they see in us than with what we can help them see in themselves.
8) Give Them Hope – French general Napoleon Bonaparte said, “Leaders are dealers in hope.” When you give people hope, you give them a future.
Successful leaders who obey the Law of Connection are always initiators. They take the first step with others and then make the effort to continue building relationships. It’s not always easy, but it’s important to the success of the organization. A leader has to do it, no matter how many obstacles there might be.
You connect with others when you learn their names, make yourself available to them, tell them how much you appreciate them, find out what they are doing, and most important, listen to them.
There’s an old saying: To lead yourself, use your head; to lead others, use your heart. That’s the nature of the Law of Connection. Always touch a person’s heart before you ask for a hand.
STORY
General Norman
Schwarzkopf: "I have seen competent leaders who stood in front of a platoon and all they saw was a platoon. But great leaders stand in front of a platoon and see it as 44 individuals". Schwarzkopf practised this in his own leadership: apparently on Christmas Day in 1990 (during Gulf War I) he went from camp to camp, from mess hall to mess hall, shaking hands with the soldiers. Later he estimated that he must have shook hands with 4000 people that day!
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