Team Leadership: Just Remember To Pull Them, Don't Push Them

This article is primarily directed toward people who work at home 
in a business that happens to involve network marketing. 

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 (its 
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).