Justin LaBarge
Legacy Magazine Producer
The skills to lead others are well-documented. As fundamental to holding a leadership vision is the ability to persuade others into adopting your perspective, a set values, and outcomes which fulfill on the leadership task. The word we use for leading through persuasion is ‘enrollment.’
Enrollment can be defined as creating an opportunity in others to take some action or contextual shift. Said another way, it is to provide inspiration in someone else to go and pursue it.
A leader who is removing the barrier for another to act on their own behalf is germane to a leader who leads by affinity or charisma, but certainly any leader would benefit by learning the skill of enrollment.
How can you go about creating opportunity in others?
- Be clear what you want to enroll another into doing.
As a leader, it is contingent upon me to hold a vision embodied within a purpose, establish the critical outcomes which define success. When enrolling another into action, one must create concrete and granular results to their plan. - Put yourself in the other person’s world.
Critical to leadership is to know and understand the person they’re leading. This personal connection with a background of relatedness would place you as the leader to understand what values our follower values. What are they here to give? Just as important is what gift do they possess which you can count on them to bring? - Lay the groundwork for the other person to reach the conclusion for action.
This is the actual tip of enrollment, which goes like this: Our job as leaders is to connect the very values – to give and to gain – of the people we lead with the action we are enrolling them into. We connect what they need with what needs be done, as a natural outcome. The people we lead must overcome the resistance toward action because the outcome suits their values, with the outcome they can earn and own for themselves. - Establish accountability to those actions.
The fallout of our calling others into action which they say yes, is to create a set of accountabilities. Locking in place the logistics is a system of support for your aims, channel and manage expectations and secure the people we lead into an enabled space. We are locking in people and their actions into the plan for success.
Those are my thoughts on enrollment.
What are your thoughts?
Is there some aspect of leadership that’s missing here?
Comment below and contribute to this “Helpful Guide for Enrolling” others.
Tell people up front there is a cost and how much it is.
After so much wheedling I got over my feeling that mdi seemed culty and off and went to 2 meetings and then was told the cost. Couldn’t afford and didn’t want to at that point. Culty and wierd. Be upfront.
Sorry to hear your situation. Yes, absolutely. Without question, in order to be a member of MDI a man needs to pay dues. It sucks that you learned about it the way it did, and that it was a disappointment to you.
Personally, I believe MDI is out to fulfill on its Mission Statement (below). I don’t know the best way to do it, or why it felt off to you personally. But I’ve learned that the men on my men’s teams can be very supportive and generous. One of those issues in my past was support for paying my dues. I believe you might find that benefit from life on a men’s team.
Good luck and god bless.
The Mission of MDI:
“To cause greatness by mentoring men to live with excellence and, as mature masculine leaders, create successful families, careers and communities.”
$30 per month.
Weird? – Sure! Proud of it. Who wants to be normal in this insane world? I’d say more like “out of the box,” “not pigeonholed to society’s constraining norms,” “not for good little boys trying not to get in trouble,” and … yup “freeing.”
Culty? – I remember my first year in my division. Because of my passion, I was soon offered an opportunity to be in leadership. And when someone questioned if this was a cult, I thought to myself, “Well, then that would make me a cult leader. Am I a cult leader?” Lol. In a cult, one man or woman rules like a tyrant. In MDI, all the men own THEIR team and division to the degree they choose.
Ellis