Follow the Leader

I was at a client today and a unique situation brought to mind one of the building techniques we teach a new distributor which is:

The people you introduce to the business will do what you do. If you sit back and wait for them to bring in new customers and distributors they will do the same and no one will succeed.

What happened today was odd, without cause, and drove home the point that people tend to follow the leader, any leader. Here is what happened:

One of the vice presidents we needed to meet was late arriving to the office and we were looking for her vehicle. The two rows of parking spaces where she normally parked were completely empty. This person along with another employee normally arrived very early and parked in the first two spaces of these rows. Today both cars were missing when the remainder of the employees arrived and all of these parking spaces were left empty. You may not think this was odd but the 30 plus spaces two across would normally be at least three quarters full by 8:00 AM.

When the Vice President arrived, almost 2 hours after her normal start time, she too parked in an alternate location. The absence of vehicles in these spaces was so odd that the President of the company asked a couple of employees why these spaces were all empty and the only answer was “No one else parked there so we assumed they were empty for a reason.”

The Result: Without special instructions everyone noticed that something was different and instinctively changed what they normally did, following the person before them, assuming everyone before them knew something they did not.

Think about this for a minute and do you think that if you started creating action in your business people would instinctively follow? Every successful leader I have ever met jumped into action and stayed in action, sometimes against the odds. Most will tell you they don’t know what happened they took charge and people followed. Many ended up introducing people who experienced far greater success but because of the compensation plan they still prospered.