Downline Leadership: Blueprint For Network Marketing Leaders

By Eric Walton

Welcome to Downline Leadership, the ultimate guide to leadership development in the network marketing world! Get ready for the most impactful twelve leadership lessons you have ever been a part of. Each of these modules has been carefully crafted to strengthen your network marketing leadership while pulling the very best from you. 
Do

• Language: English
• Publisher: SkillBites
• Release date: Sep 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781942489368

Eric Walton

About the Author Keith Ogorek is the marketing director for Author Solutions and a huge fan of self-published books. This book was inspired by a story he would tell his daughters at bedtime when they were children. It was their encouragement that prompted him to publish this story. About the Illustrator Eric Walton is a student at Taylor University majoring in art. He has been painting since high school and wanted to illustrate this book to be challenged in a different way as an artist.

Book preview

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to my wife, Tammy. Way before she became a Diamond with Young Living, she was my diamond for life. Tammy, thank you so much for your never-ending patience and support for this book. If it weren’t for your love, encouragement, and insight, I would certainly not have written it. You are the most amazing leader I know, and your downline is a reflection of that!

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to:

Julie Gutierrez, who has been my editor, co-coach, and friend. Thank you for always believing in this story and me.

Andrea Johanson, who helped me as an editor, and more importantly, saw things from the perspective of the everyday mom and distributor.

Janell Vonigas, for her work on the cover art with a little help from Sarah Newquist.

Suzi Hershey, who proofread every page and found things no one else could have.

Sarah, Kristin, Andrea, Julie, Tammy, Vida, Pam, Trish, and Stacy, who sat through this program for the first time and helped me rewrite, rewrite, and rewrite.

Judy Weintraub and the incredible publishing team at SkillBites for your hard work getting the words on the screen to show up in print.

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to Downline Leadership, the blueprint for network marketing leaders. This book is specifically designed to help you improve your leadership in this crazy and wonderful multi-level marketing (MLM) world. While the book is applicable to almost every MLM business, the stories in most modules are written from my wife’s and my experience in achieving the Diamond Rank with Young Living essential oils.

Now get ready for the most impactful twelve weeks you have ever been a part of. Each of the twelve modules has been carefully crafted to strengthen your leadership while pulling the very best from you. We highly recommend that you engage with this material in a programmed fashion by participating in a small group led by a coach /facilitator. This program approach utilizes three components: reading the Downline Leadership Book, active engagement in your small group, and intentional application of your leadership learning. You will find that the reading will challenge your beliefs about leadership. During the group sessions, you will have the chance to share your successes and challenges with other leaders who are on the same journey as you. Lastly, during the week’s in-between sessions, you will have the opportunity to apply what you are learning. Why do all this? Because…

This wonderful quote from John Maxwell applies to each of our distributorship businesses. The question becomes: How do we increase our leadership?

The Downline Leadership program is designed to answer that exact question! We will show you how important the ability to develop relationships is to increasing your leadership and what it means to gain influence with your team and downline.

In the end, we all desire to touch more lives and build a thriving business—and we want to help others do the same! In this program, you will learn how to use your leadership to achieve those goals and others. Here are three critical questions to answer:

1.

Do I want my business to succeed?

2.

Do I want to be a leader people follow?

3.

Do I want to develop other leaders?

If the answer to each of these questions is Yes, then you are in the right program!

The questions and answers are important because it is your passion, your interest in personal development, and your willingness to do the work that will determine how far you progress. As with anything worthwhile, what you put into this program will determine what you get out of it.

This program is designed to play a key role in your journey of leadership development. As a business owner, you may have already invested time, effort, and passion toward your growth and development, both personally and professionally. It’s also possible you may have applied some of the principles and leadership dimensions we will discuss. Regardless of where you are on this continuum, learning and growing is a lifelong endeavor, and you can be assured this program will help further accelerate your ongoing efforts. We will help you gain new leadership insights into yourself and your team, as well as teach you how to incorporate leadership into your business and life.

We will help you take stock of your current leadership inventory, your varied experiences, and your viewpoints. As you work together with your colleagues, a more enhanced approach to leadership will develop through shared knowledge and feedback.

The material in this program focuses on helping you to make changes within yourself and your leadership that will leave a positive and lasting leadership legacy. We don’t talk about doing leadership; we encourage you to determine who you want to be as a leader and then be it.

The format of the program is quite simple. Each week, you will be provided with a new module that describes a particular leadership competency. During the week prior to your group session, you are asked to read the material and answer the questions in the four quadrants found on the last page of the module. The material is foundational in nature and reviews timeless leadership lessons. The secret to the program is applying these lessons to your business and team.

At the group session, we don’t reteach the material. Instead, we talk about how you would apply the lesson to yourself. The magic happens in the group session. Your coach facilitates the session, ensures everyone is engaged and has equal air time, and asks lots of open-ended questions seeking your insight and leadership perspective. Near the end of the session, we have an Intentional Story, where one of the participants in the group plays the role of Storyteller and shares with us a challenge he or she is going through. The rest of the group then asks open-ended questions to help the Storyteller solve his or her own problem. We end the meeting by asking for a leadership-related action item from each participant that each commits to do during the week. We follow up at the next session by asking how it went for each person.

There are foundational themes that permeate the program, and it would be good to introduce you to them so you will recognize them while going through the different competencies.

•

Self-awareness—Your understanding of who you are impacts everything you think or do, and the level of your self-awareness directly affects your future as a leader. We will encourage you to look inward frequently to help you stay grounded as you grow your leadership.

•

Legacy—Everything you do and say leaves a legacy with those around you. During this program you will focus on leaving a positive leadership legacy as you work on improving your leadership skills.

•

Ownership—Leaders own it! During this program, not only do we encourage you to own everything about your business, we will introduce the concept of co-ownership to you. You will learn to look at your downline not as employees, but as partners and co-owners in your journey. We all own it together.

•

Emotional Intelligence—Managers focus on IQ, being reactive, and handling the tasks at hand. Leaders focus on EQ (emotional intelligence), being proactive with their relationships, their team, and how they are affecting and influencing people.

•

Replication vs. Duplication—Your job is not to copy or duplicate yourself. Your responsibility is to replicate yourself in other leaders by modeling leadership. Show them your very best, and challenge them to find the best in themselves. Good leaders develop themselves; great leaders develop others. In this program, we encourage you to do both!

•

Situational Leadership—Leaders are agile and quick to change their approach, style, and role when the situation requires it. Leaders use their intuition, combined with coaching questions, to know which role to adapt to in order to be the most effective leader they can be.

Let’s close this introduction by sharing with you the different leadership competencies we will be going through.

Downline Leadership Program Competencies

Let’s Move on to our first competency!

DOWNLINE LEADERSHIP

Leadership….Everyone wants it. Everyone needs it. However, few know what it is and even fewer know how to get it. In this program, we’re going to help you better understand what Downline Leadership is, how to develop yours, and most importantly, how to develop it in others.

We see Downline Leadership as a full circle of influence. Effective Downline Leaders know how to lead their upline, their downline, and themselves. Leadership begins and ends with you, and it’s ALWAYS about them. Interesting paradox, right? Keep this me/them perspective in mind as you go through this module and program. Leadership is all about who you are, but it gets measured in how they are impacted. NOTE: They and Them are the people on your team.

Module Overview

As a result of finishing this module, you will

•

Discover your unique strengths and weaknesses as a leader and what it means to see yourself as one.

•

See the opportunity to become the leader of your team and influencer of your downline and upline.

•

Accelerate the integration of your management and leadership skill sets.

•

Be introduced to the Downline Success Formula.

•

Explore what it means to be that leader—the one everyone on their team follows and the one who has a great amount of influence throughout his or her team and downline.

What is Downline Leadership?

Downline Leadership is the act of connecting, engaging, and influencing your team and downline toward success. Let’s break this down into its component definitions. Downline is all of the people underneath you, including businesspeople and customers. Team means the businesspeople you have enrolled. Success is defined by each person (and frequently the team) and is generally in the direction of fulfillment, satisfaction, and goals achieved.

We’re going to use the words above (along with some others) often during this program, so let’s spend a little bit more time on these definitions, starting with success.

Success

Success is incredibly important to leaders. When you’re working with your team, it’s critical that you define what success means to each of them and to the group as a whole. Why? Without doing so, there’s no direction for you or the team.

For some, it will be simple—enough money to pay for my own product; for others, it will be more complex, with multiple moving parts, such as hit the next rank. Many will see success as consistent growth in business, increased number of lives touched and impacted by them, and replication of leaders in their team and downline. Either way, you have to know their definition AND this definition has to tie to their why.

Each person has a why—the reason they’re in this business. When you know each person’s why and their definition of success, you’re ready to begin leading. You can connect to their why by developing stronger relationships. In a later module, we’ll discuss the importance of relationships for successful leadership to occur, and it will become even clearer why knowing your team members’ definitions of success is critical to you as a leader.

Lastly, you need to rally these same individuals around a team definition of success; otherwise, they have little reason to work together. The team measure of success needs to be bigger than the individual’s and something worth striving for. What should it be, you might ask? Look at the big picture and see the single whys added together. What does that look like—are there any trends or similarities? When you find a common theme, turn that into a BHAG (Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal) for the team.

Vision

Another word you’ll see often is vision. You, as the leader, establish the vision for the team. It’s an inspirational description of what the team can accomplish together in the long term. When the team is defining success, having that vision in front of them becomes a clear guide for future goals and definitions of success.

Culture

Next, let’s define culture. As the leader, it’s your responsibility to engage the team in a culture-setting discussion. Culture is the way in which you and the team want to run your business. Is your culture going to be customer-centric, product-centric, health-centric, or something else? What are going to be your values for your business and team? How do you want to treat customers? How do you want to treat each other? Will you be leading from in front or from behind? What expectations do you want to have about responding to each other? What do you want commitment to each other to look like? Don’t forget that your team members own their own businesses and can do whatever they want, but if they want to be aligned with you and the other team members, then they need to agree to the cultural guidelines that the team sets up. When these guidelines are created, everyone has a much better idea of how to interact, communicate, and talk with each other and with customers.

There are two other definitions to expand on and differentiate: Downline Management and Downline Leadership.

Downline Management

Downline Management can be defined as the tactical discipline of organizing the tasks, resources, schedule, and budget of your business. It includes the enrollment of new businesspeople and customers and the maintenance of your team. Taking care of the day-to-day running of your business while supporting your team and downline is hugely critical work that must be done, or there will be no one to lead. And…your management focus is much different than your leadership focus.

Downline Leadership

Downline Leadership is focused on leading people to achieve success. Downline Leadership is more than just dealing with your team; it’s also being able to pull and learn from your upline, so that together, you and your team can overcome problems, explore new ways to improve relationships, achieve powerful results, and deliver lasting value to people.

People

We believe that the missing ingredient to many people’s businesses is the emphasis on PEOPLE. There’s virtually no downline that exists without people being directly involved in some facet. To become an effective leader, you need to continually improve your skill sets in interacting with, influencing, and leading people.

Self-awareness

The first person you must address on your journey to becoming a stronger leader is YOU! That takes commitment, self-awareness, and examination. Throughout this program, you will be challenged to look inward first. Here are a few questions to ask yourself that can also be used to help others:

•

How do we realize our potential?

•

What is our purpose and goal?

•

What open-ended questions have we asked ourselves?

•

What analogies do we see?

•

What stories can we tell about ourselves?

•

Where has our success been?

•

What do we love to create?

•

What situations can we put ourselves in that will showcase our strengths?

Each of the leadership competencies in the Downline Leadership program encourages you to look inward to yourself and outward to your interactions with other members of the team. When you can lead yourself and effectively influence others toward a common goal, you’ve become a leader.

Downline Success

During this program, you will learn how to build credibility, develop relationships, earn trust, and gain influence that impacts people. You will discover how to create a leadership culture that supports accountability, impactful execution, and innovation while helping people with their businesses. You’ll learn how to wear different hats, such as Director, Teacher, Mentor, or Coach, and why it’s important to leave a valuable leadership legacy. Most importantly, you’ll learn the Downline Success Formula and how to implement it in your business:

The level of Downline Success achieved is based on your competency as a Downline Manager, multiplied by your effectiveness as a Downline Leader. It’s important to note that it is the combination of both your Downline Management and Downline Leadership skills that yields the greatest downline results.

Why × and not + in the formula? Because Downline Leadership effectiveness is a force multiplier, and when you are at the height of your abilities as a leader, you are able to leverage the combined positive impact of more than just yourself. Through your influence and development of others, you will positively impact people and their downlines.

As we discuss success throughout the program, it is important to note that we will use personal success and team success interchangeably. The two are clearly different and must be developed separately, but it is expedient for our text to see them in a similar light.

Why is Downline Management expertise not enough?

How is it possible that a downline that is well managed fails to achieve its goals? Frequently, it’s due to a lack of leadership. The team needs someone to rally them when things are stalled, guide them when the direction gets murky, and coach them when they’re stuck. They need someone to influence them in a new direction, celebrate when a milestone is reached,