Five Ways to Manifest Your Leadership under Any Circumstances.

You manifest your leadership when a bunch of people accept voluntary to follow You in order to accomplish something that is beyond the interest of each individual member of the group.

Here are 5 Ways to Manifest Your Leadership under Any Circumstances:

1. Authority
You know that You know, and you know what you are talking about, and your people know that you Know what your are talking about. Your confidence in who you are, what is your mission, and what you are after is Unshakable.

Authority is something magnetic. It attracts people to you, and you recruit the followers your need to make your dream a reality.

Your authority comes from the discovery of what is your passion in life, what is your mission in life, or your duty under the present circumstances. Once you’ve discovered your mission or your duty, Your authority manifest itself instantaneously. Then, you become Unstoppable.

Do you know what’s your mission in life? Do you know what is your duty towards your family, your country, towards the world, right now? Your leadership manifestation starts from your personal response to these two questions.

2. Historical reference
People are easily moved by stories, and are inclined to pay respect to their family, country or world history. Historical reference is always a starting point for great leaders. It helps connects people to their ancestors and create a kind of legacy to preserve, to emulate, and add credit to a mission statement which would sound arbitrary instead.

When you need to make a case, The best way to manifest your leadership is to go back to the history of the people you are talking to. Here are 2 examples from Obama two key speeches: his inaugural speech on January 20, 2009,  and his speech to to the Muslim world in Cairo on June 4, 2009:

Excerpt from Obama inaugural speech:

“Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real, they are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this America: They will be met.

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less.

It has not been the path for the faint-hearted, for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame.

Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated, but more often men and women obscure in their labor — who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life. For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West, endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.

For us, they fought and died in places Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sanh.

Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.

Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.

We are the keepers of this legacy, guided by these principles once more, we can meet those new threats that demand even greater effort, even greater cooperation and understanding between nations.”

Extract from Obama speech in Cairo:

“As a student of history, I also know civilization’s debt to Islam.  It was Islam — at places like Al-Azhar — that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment.  It was innovation in Muslim communities — (applause) — it was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing; our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed.  Islamic culture has given us majestic arches and soaring spires; timeless poetry and cherished music; elegant calligraphy and places of peaceful contemplation.  And throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality.

I also know that Islam has always been a part of America’s story.  The first nation to recognize my country was Morocco.  In signing the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796, our second President, John Adams, wrote, “The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims.”  And since our founding, American Muslims have enriched the United States.  They have fought in our wars, they have served in our government, they have stood for civil rights, they have started businesses, they have taught at our universities, they’ve excelled in our sports arenas, they’ve won Nobel Prizes, built our tallest building, and lit the Olympic Torch.  And when the first Muslim American was recently elected to Congress, he took the oath to defend our Constitution using the same Holy Koran that one of our Founding Fathers — Thomas Jefferson — kept in his personal library.

Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance.  We see it in the history of Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition.  I saw it firsthand as a child in Indonesia, where devout Christians worshiped freely in an overwhelmingly Muslim country.  That is the spirit we need today.”

3. Numbers
People are fascinated by numbers: dates, count, statistics. To Manifest your leadership, Numbers  are one of your best friend.

Gandhi started India pacific revolution by asking a simple question “How 66,000 British officers would succeed to put in slavery 350 millions Indians?”

When you inject key insightful numbers in your presentations and speech, people tend not to question your argumentation, and you look far more convincing. “Show me the numbers” is the game you have to play. Science is based on numbers, so people tend to respect blindly numbers.

Here is an excerpt from Blink, the best seller book of Malcom Gladwell, that demonstrate the power of number to make a case:

“On a conscious level, I’m sure that all of us don’t think that we treat tall people any differently from short people. But there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that height–particularly in men–does trigger a certain set of very positive, unconscious associations. I polled about half of the companies on the Fortune 500 list–the largest corporations in the United States–asking each company questions about its CEO. The heads of big companies are, as I’m sure comes as no surprise to anyone, overwhelmingly white men, which undoubtedly reflects some kind of implicit bias. But they are also virtually all tall: In my sample, I found that on average CEOs were just a shade under six feet. Given that the average American male is 5’9″ that means that CEOs, as a group, have about three inches on the rest of their sex. But this statistic actually understates matters. In the U.S. population, about 14.5 percent of all men are six feet or over. Among CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, that number is 58 percent. Even more strikingly, in the general American population, 3.9 percent of adult men are 6’2″ or taller. Among my CEO sample, 30 percent were 6’2″ or taller. The lack of women or minorities among the top executive ranks at least has a plausible explanation. For years, for a number of reasons having to do with discrimination and cultural patterns, there simply weren’t a lot of women and minorities entering the management ranks of American corporations. So today, when boards of directors look for people with the necessary experience to be candidates for top positions, they can argue somewhat plausibly that there aren’t a lot of women and minorities in the executive pipeline. But this is simply not true of short people. It is possible to staff a company entirely with white males, but it is not possible to staff a company without short people: there simply aren’t enough tall people to go around. Yet none of those short people ever seem to make it into the executive suite. Of the tens of millions of American men below 5’6″, a grand total of ten–in my sample–have reached the level of CEO, which says that being short is probably as much, or more, of a handicap to corporate success as being a woman or an African-American. (The grand exception to all of these trends is American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault, who is both on the short side (5’9″) and black. He must be a remarkable man to have overcome two Warren Harding Errors.)”

4. Emotions
Harvard professor, Gerald Zaltman, found that 95% of how we think is unconscious and emotional. To speak to the heart of people you need to master the language of emotions. Logical language is weak to move people, compared to an engagement to make people feel important.

Mary Kay Ash had built a multi-billion company based on emotional intelligence. At the time of Ash’s death, November 22, 2001, Mary Kay Inc. had over 800,000 representatives in 37 countries, with total annual sales over $2 billion at retail. As of 2008, Mary Kay Inc. has more than 1.7 million consultants worldwide and excess in wholesales of 2.2 billion.

Here is how Mary Kay Ash described the principle behind her life and business success: “I have learned to imagine an invisible sign around each person’s neck that says ‘Make me feel important’. I never cease to be amazed at how positively people react when they’re made to feel important. Everyone wants to be appreciated, So, if you appreciate someone, don’t keep it a secret.”

5. Detail work
Every leader has to master and demonstrate his ability for detailed work in order to manifest fully his leadership. You impress people with detailed work, and built credibility by mastering the art of filtering vast amount of information, organizing it in a comprehensive framework, and presenting it in way that show the master of the details and your ability to synthesize.

Alan Ehrenhalt, the executive editor of Governing magazine, in Newsweek, how Obama 8 years spent as state legislators prepared him for detailed work and made him the best candidate to win US presidental Election:

“During the years that Obama served in Springfield, 1997-2005, he was forced to wrestle with the minutiae of health-care policy, utility deregulation, transportation funding, school aid, and a host of other issues that are vitally important to America’s coming years, but that U.S. senators are usually able to dispose of with a quick once-over. State legislators have to do this largely on their own, without ubiquitous staff guidance, because staffing is not lavish even in the more professional state capitols. They enter into day-to-day bargaining relationships over the details of legislation with colleagues of both parties; there is no one else to do it for them. At the end of the session, they are likely to know the strengths and quirks of nearly everyone who serves in their chamber.

When Obama was in the Illinois Senate, he was obligated to sit down in a small room day after day with his Republican counterparts and work out the details of legislation expanding health-care coverage and revising campaign-finance law. He played in a regular poker game in which party and ideology were utterly irrelevant. Maybe there are still poker games in the U.S. Senate. I haven’theard of one lately”