Why heavy hitters in MLM are wrong role models for most of us

Did you know that only the diet industry has a higher failure rate than the MLM industry? Did you know that the diet industry has an 80% + failure rate? Well MLM has a 97% failure rate. How about that? Doesn't that make you wonder about the leadership? It might come as a surprise to you but the MLM industry is based on a major fallacy which is that duplicating the heavy hitters will make you, the beginner successful. Wake up: the statistics prove that this is NOT a successful model. When will we ever see that? How do you explain (let alone justify) that only 3% make it? Blaming the 'people' for not duplicating? Doing so could be compared to bad parenting that blames the kids. The answer is more obvious: it is because the model only applies to 3% of the beginners, those with a very specific profile. The others are just fed the wrong information and then asked to take 'massive action'. Now look at the title again: massive action based on wrong information will only produce huge frustration. For most beginners it will eventually result in despair and in giving up. What an enormous waste of human potential! What a shame for our industry...

The heavy hitters could be called the ‘Donald Trumps’ of the network marketing industry. They are strong personalities, often very charming and convincing but (apart from the inevitable exceptions) they are inherently self-centered people, even after they learn all the so-called 'people skills'. They are often very much admired because they are absolute go-getters and amazing survivors. You can put them in the most difficult situations and they will find a way out. Think of how Donald Trump lost everything and in no time he was a billionaire again. How many of us could duplicate that? At another level: what makes the leaders of MLM companies think that people on Main Street can duplicate the heavy hitters? The answer might be this: most owners of MLM companies are themselves former heavy hitters. We are looking at a severe case of the blind leading the blind: the least duplicatable people of all people in MLM are being held up as THE examples to follow. They also design the training programs in their own image (or if not, the programs are mostly modeled after them)... In this hub, we want to show how this might affect YOU and what the missing link is (actually more of a black hole in the industry)

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The so called leaders in our industry are not leaders in the sense that defines great leadership. How else can an industry have a 97% failure rate? Heavy hitters are leading the race, not the people. They are called leaders because of their production capacity, not because of their effective leadership skills. Most of the typical heavy hitters are in essence task oriented people, not relationship driven people. They get things done, against hell and high water. They are DOERS. While go-getters are brilliant recruiters, the great coaches are go-givers, not go-getters. To understand the full extent of what this means, we need to know a bit more about personality types.

Let me tell you about an ancient Chinese way to describe personality types – still true after 5000 years. It is a system based on what is called ‘the elements’. The ‘elements’ are the elementary building blocks of the universe. The Chinese used archetypal metaphors to name those: ‘earth’, ‘fire’, ‘air’ and ‘water’. Westerners would call those ‘matter’, energy’, ‘space’ and ‘time’. They are the components of everything in the physical universe and our personalities are no exception to that. Every person has all 4 elements in his personality but there is always one element that stands out - sometimes two that are very prominent as a duo. The Chinese archetypes are amazingly well chosen when it comes to really understanding the human personality types (a test like the Myers-Briggs is built on those 4 basic types but with one added dimension). I will give you a very brief description of each type and then offer more details on the personality type that generates 90% (probably more) of the heavy hitters. 

The ‘earth archetype’ is a person who likes structure and continuity. They are in no way risk takers. That is why they are not born entrepreneurs. They hate uncertainty and risk. People with a dominant earth element are very patient but they are also slow to change. They can be very stubborn. They usually are very factual rather than imaginative or conceptual. They tend to be very kind and tolerant and that is why they also get abused. These personality types will easily fall for recruiters who promise a ‘system’ because that is what they want: structure and permanence. I could easily write a whole article of 4 - 5 pages on each personality type but that is not the purpose of this hub.

You immediately have a very different picture when you think of ‘water’ as compared to ‘earth’, don’t you? ‘Earth’ has structure, water doesn’t. Water can take on all shapes. It is the most flexible element. Personality types with dominant ‘water’ are flexible but therefore also very changeable and very easy to influence. They are the ones who will go with the next opportunity that sounds convincing than the previous one... They are great prey for the very convincing heavy hitters.

‘Air’ can pervade the entire space and enter the smallest openings. It has no mass. The air personality archetype is the abstract type, the detailed oriented thinker. They are great planners but often do not get into action. They keep preparing and perfecting the plan. They love doing more courses, and then even more… They are very analytical and they love things to be well organized. They can be real perfectionists. Ever heard the saying ‘analysis paralysis’?

You might have already guessed that we will find the bulk of the heavy hitters here. ‘Fire’ stand for boundless energy and bursting enthusiasm. They are the movers and shakers, the eternal optimists. They are the aggressive ‘doers’. They have very clear goals and very clear values. They are very outgoing personalities. They are better at talking than at listening. Notice how they tend to interrupt you. They do not listen to understand who you really are but to use what you say to push your buttons (sounds familiar?). Fire divides the world in ’light’ and ‘shadow’: they judge easily and instantly and they like simple theories. 'You get it or you don't get it'. 'You have what it takes or you don't have it'. Very little middle ground...

Let me share with you what I learned from one of the most unique teachers in our industry: there are not just TWO groups in the field i.e. ‘the 3 percenters and the others’ – there are actually THREE groups and chances are you are in group 2.

Here are the 3 groups:

• The 3 percenters

• The 27 percenters

• The 70 percenters

If you were a 3 percenter, you probably would not be reading this. So which one of the 2 other types are you?

Let me begin with the 70 percenters. This is the bulk of all people wandering on the Internet: those with a lottery mentality, those looking for a quick fix, those who are hoping that someone will do it for them. The 70% are also the ones who will blame you, the president and God for the condition they are in. They suffer from what we call ‘victim mentality’. They are the ones who in the Chinese typology are said to be ‘out of their element’. They have lost contact with who they really are. They have become a collection of inflexible patterns. The ancient Chines called this 'being stuck in the metal element'. You are in 'metal' when you are 'out of your native primary element' (be it earth, water, air or fire).

You most probably belong to the VERY FRUSTRATED, LARGELY OVERLOOKED AND MOST MISUNDERSTOOD GROUP: the 27 percenters. We are the ones trying for dear life to learn the ropes from the 3 percenters who tend to give it to us in overwhelming formats. We, the 27 percenters are the ones full of good intentions and willing to work our butt off BUT we are –without realizing this - being fed all this wrong information by our so-called ‘leaders’. And it frustrates the dickens out of us that we work so hard without becoming ‘heavy hitters’ after all… Get this once and for all: almost everything you have been taught about building a network marketing business is built on HALF-TRUTHS. Now here is what Napoleon Hill has to say about half-truths: ‘A half truth is much more dangerous than an outright lie because it is not being recognized as a lie’. Your first relief will come from getting rid of the half truths you have been fed. You can do that by downloading a free e-book here: http://www.the 7mlmkillers.com. Your next step will be to learn MLM in a way that works for YOU and your learning style!

http://www.beginnerscanbewinners.com

Now, before we go on, let’s not forget that all of us have all 4 elements in us albeit in different degrees. We all have some sense of structure, some flexibility, some analytical skills and some kind of action taking. The thing that interests us here is that the ‘movers and shakers’ of this world have a very, very dominant fire element in their personality. That does not rob them of the other three elements but the ‘fire’ clearly rules their life. Let’s have a closer look at what ‘exaggerated fire’ has in store for us and why it is not a good role model for the home business industry, the industry meant to be accessible for the 'common people'.

Can you see how contrary to earth and water (both heavy elements that go downward), fire goes up and up and up? Can yo see how fast it moves? People with a very dominant fire element are very fast movers and they have only one direction: upward. They are passionate, ambitious, driven people. Fire simply burns its way through obstacles. Fire driven personalities thrive on energy and their war cry is ‘massive action’ (how many times have you heard your leaders say that?). They are very focused, like powerful laser beams. Like laser beams they have a strong ‘projection’ factor. Unfortunately for us, that is the opposite of ‘empathy’. They have a very hard time understanding how different you are from them. They just wonder why you are not more like them… (‘You need to be more focused, take more action. You need to have more enthusiasm’…You know the song) As a matter of fact they will even openly preach to look for people like them: ‘find the 3 percenters’. How many times have you been told that one? Fire people can develop great ‘people skills’ but make no mistake: the stress is on ‘skills’ not on ‘people’. You will not find more goal oriented people on Earth. Everything serves the achievement of the goals and that includes relationships. More bluntly: these personality types use relationships to achieve their own goals. They are lightning fast but also easily impatient. They quickly begin to feel you are using up their production time when you ask for help. They try to set up systems to send you to so they do not have to spend one on one time with you.

Contrary to water, fire characters are not flexible. They have very strong opinions, burned in their minds. They usually have no idea how to adapt their leadership style to the other 3 personality types. Fire people often have 'air' as their second element. Blow into the fire and you will find that air only intensifies fire... The combination fire-air is easily irritated by the water and earth dominated personality types. Example:earth is slow, fire is super fast. Example: water people tend to change their opinions easily - fire people have very strong opinions and they see water people as wishy-washy...

Now the fact that fire people have such strong opinions and that they so easily judge also makes them ineffective observers. They do not observe things as they are; they project their value judgments onto what they see. And that hurts the entire industry. Their solution is to try to make the 97% more like them. That is so ineffective, so ineffective.

First, let’s define ‘effective’ as opposed to ‘efficient’. The difference was first made clearly by Peter Drucker, the man who 'invented' management. Here is how Drucker differentiates the two: ‘Efficiency means doing things right – effectiveness means doing the right things.’ Now when we apply the concept of ‘doing the right things' to leadership, we discover why so many MLM companies have such an enormous failure rate. The problem is not in the people but in the leaders. To understand the magnitude of what I am writing here, you need to understand what Situational Leadership is.

My purpose here is not to explain the model in detail but to show how heavy hitters tend to deal with leadership and how that is one of the explanations of the 97% failure rate in our industry. The model shows the 4 basic leadership styles: they are commonly known as TELL, SELL, SUPPORT and DELEGATE. The key to the model is to be found in the bar you see at the bottom of the page: D1 – D2 – D3 – D4. The letter D stands for Development level and it refers to the development stage of the person you are being a leader for not as a human being but as related to the task at hand. Most of the people who start a home business are in D1 – they have neither experience nor any training about how to set up and run a business. The leadership style that corresponds to that is S1 = directive leadership style -> this means: detailed instructions, somebody holding your hand and lots of follow up. Then after you have gained some of your own experience you move into D2 – you are still very WILLING to make it but you are discovering that it is harder that it first seemed. Most of us need a lot of directive coaching to make it through this stage and the proof that we do not get it is in the statistics: more than 90% of all people fail to be successful with their home business and the majority quits in the first 3 months (or they go chasing another opportunity only to find the same problems). That is an absolute shame. The network marketing industry is the only industry with a higher failure rate than the diet industry that has ‘only’ an 80% failure rate. People who make it through the early stages arrive in D3 where the correct leadership style is SUPPORT -> you now do not need someone to hold your hand nor to motivate you, but to support your further development into a full blown entrepreneur. The task of the leader here is more to be a cheer leader than a coach. Only in development stage 4 are you to be left alone because that is where you have acquired full independence. Now what happens in the MLM industry is that people get a little bit of S1 – brochures, manuals, a starter kit and so on BUT then our well intentioned (often functionally blind) leaders expect you to magically move to D3 where you only have to be cheered on – which is done through all kinds of inspirational talk in team calls and at multimedia conventions OR what happens even more: you are treated as a D4 and supposed to be able to make it on your own. The missing style is mostly S2 and the reason effective coaching is not given is to a large degree to be found in the profile of the so called leaders, the 3 percenters. They are movers and shakers and mostly lack the patience to coach newbies. They are often much more sales oriented than leadership focused and they quickly start to experience coaching time as a waste of sales time. We have been given wrong information for decades now in this industry – 3 percenters are ‘solving’ everything with one slogan: 'you need to take massive action'. It is obviously hard to come up with the correct action when based on wrong information… Do you recognize some issues here?

The big difference between coaching on one hand and consulting/advising on the other hand is that in coaching you are being helped step by step with the implementation of the knowledge. You are being protected against overwhelm because there is a person walking with you who knows the path. But great coaching is also MUCH more than helping to implement knowledge. True coaching also implies moral and emotional support. Coaching builds a person up by building on what is there already. Great coaches build strong people and strong people build strong MLM organizations. In such an organization there is no 97% failure rate. There is a community feeling. There is celebration about each others successes and there is support when the road gets rough (and it will inevitably get rough from time to time). Great coaches are absolute gems. Think of coach John Wooden who just passed away at age 99. Coach Wooden reminds of a quote I once read: 'A good coach changes your performance; a great coach changes your life.' Only people who come from the heart can be such coaches. John Wooden was such a man. People who care first and foremost about their own first line recruiting will never be great coaches. Leaders who are great coaches build deep. Their organizations are built on bedrock. Heavy hitters tend to build wide. Their organizations are shaky. They have to compensate for the high attrition rate by more heavy recruiting. And when the company falls they move fast to another one where they again go after the fast bonuses. Can you see what a terrible vicious circle that is and how it jeopardizes our industry?

If you want to learn about a great coaching system that builds strong organizations, send me an email: lifestylecoaching101@gmail.com. I will gladly share my experience with you.

Option Teacher

http://www.beginnerscanbewinners.com