The Law of Connection-2

The Law of Connection-2

Last time I promised to share lessons I learned from watching the movie Invictus and the tape Law of Connection by John Maxwell. Here are the lessons:

Connecting with people means they see you as their friends. It means developing credibility with people. For people to follow you, they must trust you and believe you are their friend. This is what positional leaders do not understand. They usually think the position they occupy automatically bestows on them the right to lead people. They fail to realise that leadership is basically influence. And if this is so, everyone who aspires to be a leader must strive to build influence with the people they intend to lead. This means your followers are willing to follow wherever you go. Jesus Christ, Nelson Mandela, Indira Ghandi, Martin Luther King (Jnr.) are perfect examples of people who connected with their followers. They earned the trust of their followers by showing them they truly cared for them. You must have heard the saying: People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.

To connect with people means to touch their hearts. You must realise that that the heart comes before the head. Maxwell sums this up with the statement, leaders touch your heart before they ask for a hand. Influential and effective leaders have come to understand that followers will do a thing if it feels right and not necessarily because it is right. Humans are emotional beings. Thus leaders have to realise that you cannot move people to action unless you move their emotions. Followers need to feel good about a particular course of action before they can carry it out with enthusiasm. They need to feel good about their leader before they can wholly commit themselves to them. And the way to make them feel good about you is to connect with them, identify with them. They should see you as approachable and someone who can relate with them. Leaders who value the importance of connecting with others must realise that they have to make the first move at times – they are initiators. They do not wait for their followers to come to them before a relationship can ensue. They do not believe connecting is the sole responsibility of followers.

The impact of connection on an organisation or group is tremendous. Followers develop extreme loyalty. The vision of the leader becomes the aspiration of the followers. So I want to urge you today to learn to connect with people whether you are a leader with a title or without a title. If you understand the fact that a true leader is a leader who has influence, then you will understand that you do not need a title to become a leader.