CHAPTER 20

Inspire

Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech is widely regarded as one of the great acts of leadership by one of history’s greatest leaders. If you haven’t watched it lately, I recommend it.

What was the point of the “I Have a Dream” speech?

I’m not asking rhetorically. If you’ve heard the speech, what was its point? If you haven’t heard it recently, listen to it again and try to answer the question, what was King’s goal? King was a leader, and the speech was a clear act of leadership. He didn’t give the speech for his health.

When I ask this question in classes, seminars, and workshops, the room quiets. People look thoughtful. Some struggle. They suggest things like “to raise awareness,” “to raise consciousness,” or “to inspire people.” While the speech does those things, they’re vague answers, and effective leaders don’t lead vaguely. Do you think he could have written and delivered such a speech thinking, “I want to raise awareness”? King had goals and wanted listeners to play their roles achieving them. He specified those roles in the speech. They were difficult and dangerous roles, but people followed.

Moreover, his structure was the same as Lead with Empathy’s. I didn’t make up the practice of inspiring people to act by connecting their passion to a task. I identified what worked and created exercises to learn it through practice. King was one of my models and inspirations.

Let’s see how he did it.

He started by setting the context and tone—invoking the Gettysburg Address, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Emancipation Proclamation, referring to the inequality of the day as a promissory note marked insufficient funds.

The context and tone set, King continued to where he gave specific instruction:

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. And some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.

Did you see the imperatives? It’s the most clear and direct instruction in the speech: Continue to work. Go back. Go back for what? To face suffering as continued civil disobedience.

His task for his followers was clear: Knowing the risks, go to Mississippi, Alabama, and the other centers of inequality and face jail, battering, brutality, and other suffering. “Creative suffering” meant beatings, being attacked, and risking being murdered.

Few leaders instruct people to such difficult tasks, but his followers continued to follow him more than ever. Why? People don’t risk their lives through being convinced of the logic of nonviolent civil disobedience. Many disagreed that it could work anyway. They did it because he inspired them. Leadership rarely means inspiring people to do what you want. It means inspiring them to do what they want. In Dwight Eisenhower’s words, “Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.”

To inspire people by connecting their passion to a task, they must believe you understand them. For all of King’s challenges, he knew that most listeners felt he understood them. His home had been bombed. Four months earlier, he had been jailed. He still kept working. His “Letter from Birmingham Jail” painfully recounted the personal suffering and inequality he faced and kept working past. He had experienced unearned creative suffering. They knew he understood.

So challenging a task needs a matching passion, which King supplied—his dream—and connected to the task of nonviolent civil disobedience. King concluded his speech with that passion:

When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

In essence, amid the vibrant imagery, brilliant rhetoric, and everything else that made the speech great, King gave the simple, clear leadership message:

Create freedom for all by practicing nonviolent civil disobedience in the most risky places.

Millions followed. They may have looked from the outside like they were risking their lives, being blasted by fire hoses, and being jailed, but in their hearts and minds they were creating freedom. They may have looked like they were following his instructions, but inside they were working for themselves—in particular, to becoming free at last.

A task without passion is at best management. Passion without a task is idle dreaming. King imbued their work with meaning, value, importance, and purpose by connecting their passion to an effective task. Nobody wants to go to jail, get attacked by dogs, or risk their lives, but everyone wants freedom.

You may never speak to hundreds of thousands of people and instruct them to risk their lives, but Lead with Empathy will still give their work MVIP. Follow the script—behave and communicate so that they feel comfortable sharing their passions with you, make them feel understood (which is different from understanding them), connect their passion to your task—and you will inspire them.

Doing so will also develop your empathy, compassion, listening skills, and so on. Practice Meaningful Connection, Lead with Empathy, the Confirmation/Clarification Cycle, and Universal Emotion until you master them, and you will lead as effectively as anyone.

The Inspire Exercise

Most students do Lead with Empathy tentatively, as if they’re walking barefoot in a dark room, afraid to stub their toes. This chapter’s exercise, Inspire, is to repeat the steps of Lead with Empathy. Experience has shown that repeating Lead with Empathy leads you to perform it as if you are striding into a bright room, confident of each step. Like any skill, if you rehearse, you get it and it looks effortless. If you don’t, you won’t.

The confidence comes from seeing people respond enthusiastically and finding meaning in the task. A leader acting assertively, confidently, and empathetically—based on experience, skill, and awareness, not authority, aggression, or entitlement—is easier to follow. Success with Lead with Empathy will give you that confidence.

Your teammates will feel inspired when you Lead with Empathy with confidence. Inspired people

Work harder, more diligently, and longer than uninspired people.

Work for internal motivations, emotions, and passions.

Feel like they’re working for themselves, not someone else.

Feel liberated, like, “Finally, I can work for the reasons I always wanted to”.

Feel deeply thankful to the person who motivated them.

Feel the work rewarding in itself.

Want to do more when their project finishes.

Look back fondly at the amount of work they did.

Value missing less-rewarding activities, no matter how fun, not as a sacrifice.

Care about quality and make it happen.

Put aside distraction to focus on their tasks.

Feel like the person who inspired them understands them deeply.

Want the person who inspired them to lead them again.

Sounds like how Abdul-Jabbar described playing under Wooden to me.

Mastering Performance

As you Lead with Empathy, like an actor rehearsing lines or a musician practicing a piece, the focus of your attention will evolve and your technique will improve. You will go through the following process, the same as a musician, actor, singer, or other performer.

The Evolution of a Performer’s Focus

Basic mechanics

Technique

Emotions and expression

Audience and followers

Beyond—revolutionizing or redefining a field

For example, consider someone who wants to learn guitar to become a rock star. First, he needs to learn the instrument and basic chords. He has to focus on where to put his fingers and how to strum. His work is mechanical and hardly related to music. That’s all he can do.

After mastering the mechanics, he can focus on following a score. He uses what he mastered in the last stage as the tools for this one but plays without expression. That’s all he can do. Many aspiring leaders who only learned to manage are at this stage in their leadership development.

After mastering the score, the guitarist can focus on what he wants to express through the music. He plays with heart. In this stage, he becomes an artist—maybe a studio musician.

He can keep practicing beyond “just” becoming an artist. After mastering expressing himself through the music, he can pay attention to the audience and focus on it. Then he can become a rock star. He uses his tools as an artist, which he can now take for granted, to “play” the audience, as can you as a leader. Martin Luther King Jr. worked at this level, as do movie stars and great sports champions. Effective leaders focus on the people they lead—their interests and motivations. The way to get there starts with mastering yourself, practicing, and rehearsing, the same as the guitarist and masters of every other ASEEP field.

When you are confident enough with your delivery that you can take your behavior for granted, you will focus on the people you lead—their words, expressions, meaning, and so on. You did it before when you learned to walk. You had to concentrate on your legs and where to put your feet. You fell many times. The same with learning to talk. You once had to work hard to coordinate moving your lips and tongue. Now you take for granted the most fine-tuned coordination of all the muscles involved in speech. You just speak. You just walk. With practice, soon you’ll just lead.

In time you’ll feel something missing if you haven’t first learned how your teammates’ relevant passions connect to the team’s work, even for people you aren’t formally leading.

What to Do

This chapter’s exercise is to repeat the steps of Lead with Empathy in each direction but with more confidence based on your experience. You will probably also select a more appropriate task and put the other person’s interests before yours more effectively.

You can do the exercise with someone new or someone you’ve worked with already. You can find a new passion to connect with a new task or an existing one.

1.Think of a task you want done that someone you know can do.

2.Know that if you lead them to do that task for their passion, that they will feel reward

3.Ask “What’s your passion?” or something similar, like, “I can tell you work harder on this than you have to. What’s your motivation to care so much?”

4.They’ll usually give a cocktail-party answer.

5.Confirm your understanding.

6.Confirmation/Clarification Cycle:

•Let them correct you.

•Ask confirmation or clarification questions to refine your understanding.

•Confirm your new understanding.

7.Repeat to Universal Emotion.

8.Connect their passion (their Universal Emotion) to your task.

Stop reading. Put the book down and do the exercise.

Post-Exercise

Few rewards compare with devoting yourself wholeheartedly and unreservedly to a task you feel passion for and finishing it. This chapter’s exercise was designed to enable you to lead people to do that. It’s a tremendous gift to give someone that happens to get your work done, too. The more you give people credit for it, the more they admire you.

Everyone has passions, even those who hide them. And everyone loves telling their passions to people who support them. Meaningful Connection and Make People Feel Understood get people to overcome feelings of vulnerability to share their passions. Lead with Empathy and Inspire give people direction to act. You’ll find many people you lead this way never got to act wholeheartedly on their passions before. Many of them will later speak of you as Abdul-Jabbar spoke of Wooden.

I hope that you reach the level of mastery where you can inspire others predictably and deliberately. As far as I know, it only comes through disciplined, dedicated practice—in the case of leading, Meaningful Connection, Lead with Empathy, and Inspire is a simple path that works. Mastery will make you the leadership equivalent of the rock star musician, champion athlete, inspirational civil rights leader, and commander that soldiers risk their lives for.

Mastery means transitioning you from cautious optimism, wondering if you’re manipulating people, to enthusiastically leading them by meaningfully connecting, making them feel understood, connecting their passions to your task, and unleashing them to act on their passions. It means feeling the intimacy, empathy, self-awareness, sensitivity, and compassion that effective leadership and teamwork create—in work teams and in your closest relationships. It means that you won’t dream of going back to leading impersonally without knowing people’s passions. It means no more pointless conversations about weather, sports, and traffic on the way over. It means seeing leading like Martin Luther King Jr., or whomever are your role models, as a matter of practice and rehearsal, nothing superhuman or that you have to be born with.

The more you practice and hone your skills, the more people will think you were born with them and will call you intuitive or a genius. The irony comes with the territory.

The experience, skills, and beliefs these exercises create will transform your relationships across your life, becoming based in mutual understanding, listening, helping each other, getting things done, and so on. When your teams value their projects, they take responsibility for quality, productivity, and efficiency—more than you could have imposed on them otherwise.

I used to think CEOs said, “Business is about people” so they could pay people less. Now my clients and students tell me that people in their teams contribute more than they could have dreamed of asking them to. In the words of Amy, an MBA and executive,

I took out an Associate who will be working on my team and used your technique. She teared up, saying, no one ever asked her these questions and she is so grateful that I am taking an approach to her work based on what she likes and wants to do. It also revealed some of her deep fears and it was quite profound. . . .

Invaluable, thank you. . . . I felt terrific afterward—in that she felt great and also that I felt I could get more out of her. She is also a friend, so I was conscious that she now reports to me . . . but that really was entirely neutralized in this conversation.

This book focuses on leading one-on-one. The same structure of self-awareness, understanding, empathy, compassion, and inspiration by connecting others’ passions to your task works with leading many, as King showed. Examples of historic speeches available online that did so include, among many others,

Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream”

George Patton’s speech to the Third Army

Oprah Winfrey’s Harvard Commencement address

Susan B. Anthony’s account of her addressing the judge who found her guilty of voting as a woman

I leave it as an exercise to the reader to identify in each speech how the leader creates understanding and empathy and what passions he or she connects to which task.

Inspiration alone motivates people to start but doesn’t finish the job. Leaders ship, meaning effective leaders see projects to completion, which requires supporting and managing your teams.