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Business Team Leadership: Pull Them, Don't Push Them
This article is primarily directed toward people who work at home
in a business that happens to involve teamwork in a network
marketing environment.
I am often contacted by members of my business team with
complaints regarding a lack of response or lack of action on the
part of their affiliates. Their complaints typically go
something like..."I send out lots of emails to all of them and I
very rarely get any response and it seems like very few of them
are taking any action. What am I doing wrong'".
There are many types of internet-based home businesses where
feedback and interaction are quite important and getting an
affiliate or business team member to communicate with you is a
definite objective. It's not at all surprising that this can be
a challenge when you stop to think that what you are trying to do
is initiate a dialog between two complete strangers who have
never even seen each other.
In the case of network marketing, it is of critical importance to
build a sense of trust with your team members. Network marketing
is very definitely a relationship business and each relationship
typically starts out with two complete strangers sitting at their
respective keyboards.
The team building aspect of network marketing is of vital
importance to the success of each individual member and to the
team as a whole. Two key elements of team building are trust and
confidence and these factors play a very large role, particularly
for new team members.
With all that being said, many people love the IDEA of making good
money working at home in their own business and expect it to just
"happen", but have no willingness to take any action or put forth
any effort to make it happen.
Having been involved with team building and network marketing for
some time, I have come to adopt the following as my operating
credo..."if you have the desire and are willing to put in the
effort, I'll pull you along so you can go faster down the road to
success, but if you don't want move on your own, I'm not
going to waste my time trying to push you forward".
Its like working with a length of chain...pulling it along works
fine, but trying it push it forward only results in a pile of
frustration.
You need to be able to distinguish between people that have a
legitimate interest in developing a home based business and
those lost souls that feel that they have just joined another
chat group and only want to engage in an endless "debate" about
the virtues of whatever business you are promoting, but never
actually had any intention of establishing a business...you will
have to develop your own method of reading people like this (its
mainly a sense of feel...sort of a belly button thing).
You can help someone reach for success...but you can't
reasonably expect to make them want to be successful. Its just
another variation of that very old and tired cliche...that "you
can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink".
Another way of looking at it is if you are trying to move people
forward, you pull them from in front (a leadership position), but
if you have to push them it will be from behind (not a position
of leadership).
About the Author Kirk Bannerman operates his own successful home based business
and also coaches others seeking to start their own home based
business. For more information visit his website at http://www.home-based-business-team.com
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