Why They Follow: How to Lead with Positive Influence
Scott Love
To achieve superior results as a leader, you must first understand why people follow.
With this premise in mind, author Scott Love explores why some employees and colleagues are motivated to comply with a directive—and why some are not—as well as how to increase their commitment to getting the job done.
Filled with engaging stories and salient advice, Why They Follow will help you increase your effectiveness in building a high-performing team with increased morale, retention, and achievement.
Chapters such as “Your Power to Influence,” “Three Steps to Servant Leadership,” and “Show How Their Work Matters” provide powerful examples of leaders overcoming real-world problems and challenges. This exceptional resource will teach you to understand the potency of your impact as a leader—and motivate and inspire you to lead in a way that corresponds to the intrinsic motivations of your personnel.
For fans of John Maxwell and Robin Sharma, this extraordinary book will guide you as you strengthen your management skills and create a willing and motivated staff.
About the Author
Scott Love is a credentialed expert on the topic of employee loyalty. As a successful entrepreneur, former Navy leadership trainer and Annapolis graduate, he shows managers how to be the boss that nobody will leave so that their company will increase retention, decrease turnover, and attract high achievers.
The Emotion Behind the Job
Yesterday I was talking with a professional whom I tried to recruit away from his company. As a recruiter, this is a daily event for me, and over the past two decades, I have seen first-hand that people will indeed turn away better opportunities, all because of the loyalty to their boss one level above them.
“I love it here!” he said. “Even if it’s a better opportunity or even if I could make more money, I wouldn’t leave here.”
This is a frequent response from professionals, and there is a formula for why this happens. And as in all formulas, we can pick it apart, learn from it, and reverse engineer it back together again into a replicable model.
There are four core focus areas that cause people to remain loyal to their boss:
They feel understood. As a leader, you need to listen to your team.
They feel appreciated.
They feel challenged.
They feel connected.
Notice the common verb in the above phrases. Feel. Yes, it’s emotional. If people were going to make intellectual career decisions, then my job as a headhunter would be a lot easier. I’d just have them write up the pros and cons of each option and select the one that weighed heavily in their favor.
But we are emotional animals. As a boss, you are the leader. You are the one people are looking to who can define the relevance of their work and the meaning, the feeling, connected to it.
