Business Team Leadership: Pull Them, Don't Push Them

Kirk Bannerman

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 (it's 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).

Copyright © 2005 Kirk Bannerman

About Kirk: 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