Leadership and Business Growth

One of the most important but underutilized elements of leadership.

Meaning leaders create & support small teams of leaders who have the autonomy to make decisions to move the mission forward.

As even the best leaders can only truly invest their time and knowledge into a handful of people. 

These people then lead their downline.

This is why its mission is critical to develop a team of leaders and not only followers.

As with a team of only followers, an organization cannot be truly transformational.

True execution happens when you decentralize command and empower others to lead.

The ability to lead yourself.

Sounds basic but it’s extremely true.

When you develop the ability to lead yourself by creating discipline in your life (eating well, exercising, being an early riser and overall highly dependable).

You will be able to accomplish many things from a productivity perspective as its first value point.

But much more than that, you will become a source of inspiration for others who then buy into your leadership.

Discipline is at the foundation of this which is a core value here at Fit Body..

So the more of the story and todays lesson?

If you develop the discipline and ability to lead yourself, you then can develop the ability to lead others.

But remember, it’s an internal game that starts with you and starts with discipline..

In fact and in the words of Jocko Willink…

There are no bad teams. 

Rather, just bad leaders.

That’s incredibly humbling, but also incredibly empowering.

As the greater you lead yourself, the greater you can lead others.

It starts with you.

And once you accept this very difficult reality that your current leadership is the lid on your life and our business, things become much easier.

But you must first accept the difficult fact of life that leadership is always the problem, and always the solution.

So invest in your leadership growth, and let’s get to solving.

Communication is an ally of Leadership.

The better communication skills you develop, the better leader you become.

Why?

At its root, Leadership is about creating clarity.

Clarity for yourself, clarity for your team, clarity for your clients, clarity for your following.

So the more effective communicator you are, the more clarity everyone has and consequently the better leader you are. 

Todays call to action?

Be a student of communication in its various forms (written, spoken, group, 1-1, etc) and your leadership will transform!

Simply put, effective leaders play to win. Thus, in order to win you must have a default aggressive.

To provide some other perspective and in sales, there’s a famous quote saying “Timid Salesmen have skinny kids”.

This is also true of leadership.

This in mind, there’s many times as a leader it’s in the best interest of your team and clients to take the softer approach. There is much truth is this. In fact, this is the challenge of leadership knowing when to decipher between the two.

But as a defaut, effective leaders thermostat is set as aggressive.

Just when you thought we were complete with Jocko’s 4 laws of combat and leadership, I am here to exceed expectations and provide the final 2 and a summary from the notepad.com 

Now on to lesson Number 5!

In Leadership Strategy and Tactics: Field Manual, Jocko Willink compares two of his Platoon Commanders early in his career as a SEAL. One of them wanted complete ownership over planning. The other allowed his reports to do the planning but he would review it.

The leader that wanted complete ownership over planning couldn’t detach from his own plans. He couldn’t take a higher-level look at it. He would blame others when things went wrong: the plan was poorly executed or there were outside factors.

Because they did the planning, the reports felt ownership over it and were more motivated to execute it properly during a mission.

The leadership lesson?

Find a way to detach from your plan. 

Step away from your drafts. Have someone else review your outlines. If you’re leading others, remember that their feeling of ownership is important. 

You’ll always have that feeling because you have other people looking to you to lead. Find opportunities for them to reinforce their own feelings of ownership.

As a continuation from the last 4 weeks, I read the expert from MSP magazine and wanted to share its break down.

Number is 4 Decentralized Command and this is the sole purpose of me sending this weekly message to better your leadership.

Why?

Because Decentralized Command means everybody is a leader.

That’s what you want as a business owner. You want a team that doesn’t need to depend on you for everything. A team where everyone is a leader.

“And I used to tell this to the young SEALs — you’re not going to be able to handle it all. What you need to do is to use decentralized command and let your subordinate leaders actually lead.”

And the way you lead with decentralized command is by making sure that everybody on the team understands: the mission, the goal, the end state they’re trying to achieve, the parameters they’re trying to work within, the perimeters they’re allowed to maneuver in, and finally and most important: why they’re doing what they’re doing.

If they know why they’re doing what they’re doing, they can go out into the field, make decisions, and they all can lead.

Jocko also reinforced that when it comes to growing into your full potential as a leader, the most powerful motivating tool you have is to give someone control over their own destiny. In other words, giving them ownership.

Let’s say it’s been a few weeks after that security breach and the client is still a bit uneasy.

So you tell someone on your team to go follow up by saying, “Bob, here’s what I want you to do, here’s the briefing I want you to give to them, here’s the new software they need to install, here’s what it’s going to cost, and so on. Go make that happen.”

How much ownership does Bob have with that?

None. He’s just a robot. You’re just telling him what to do.

But if instead you say, “Hey Bob, I want you to reconnect with this client who got hacked last month. I want you to touch base with them. Find out where they’re at. Rebuild that relationship and bring it to the next level. Come up with a plan and tell me how you want to do it.”

So now, instead of being a robot following orders, he’s totally empowered and on board. He’s got control over his own destiny.

And that’s what motivates people more than anything else!!

As a continuation from the last 3 weeks, I read the expert from MSP magazine and wanted to share its break down.

No. 3 Prioritize And Execute

When Jocko ran these SEAL Leadership trainings, he went to great lengths to make them as realistic as possible.

“We had high-speed paintball guns like real guns. Set designers from Hollywood to make our training sites look like they were villages in Iraq. Special effects people, pyrotechnicians, actors, and actresses.”

This is how the training would play out.

A SEAL platoon would go to clear a building, and as soon as they kicked in the door, there would be explosions, people screaming, fake blood everywhere, nonstop gunfire: It was chaos. Which meant you had a whole lot of crazy going on all at once that needed to be handled.

That’s why Jocko’s Third Law of Combat leadership is to prioritize and execute.

Identify the problem that needs to get solved and get it fixed now. And keep going. Prioritize. Execute. Repeat.

Note that the mistake people often make is to think this means you only take on one problem at a time. Wrong.

Let’s say one of our top owners has had a serious security breach. They’ve been hacked and you need to make things right now.

If you have 10 people on the team, that doesn’t mean you have all 10 doing the same thing. You prioritize and execute on multiple fronts. You start by containing the damage, running an antivirus, and probably resetting passwords. You figure out which systems were corrupted and what data’s been compromised. You make sure the owner is getting status updates and understands what you’re doing to resolve the situation. There may be interaction required with law enforcement. And so on and so forth.

You can’t allow yourself or your team to get fixated on a single target. You need to make sure you understand what your priorities are, then assign responsibilities to handle everything that needs to get done.

But it can’t all fall upon your shoulders alone. And that brings us to the importance of … (wait for next week)

As a continuation from the last 2 weeks, I read the expert from MSP magazine and wanted to share its breakdown.

We all overcomplicate things, especially when it comes to planning.

Jocko would give his young SEAL officers an exercise where they had to craft a plan to assault a specific target. “They’d disappear for five hours and come back with the most convoluted, complex thing you’ve ever seen in your life.” 

The best plan, the most brilliant plan, is the one so simple and so clear that every person on the team understands what that plan is.

But even that’s not enough.

Because if the team doesn’t understand the way that you communicate that plan to them, then there’s no possible way that they can execute.

Whether this involves something as simple as communicating an update to a standard operating procedure or that there’s an effective migration of a legacy CRM to a brand-new system.. You need to make sure with every communication that you’re crystal clear on the exact outcome you want to see happen, and that includes laying out key details, such as priorities, KPIs, and specific responsibilities.

In addition, effective leaders understand that they need to adjust their presentation style to the audience they’re addressing, and this isn’t just from the front of a room backed up by PowerPoint slides — it’s how you express yourself in email, on the phone, or during a Zoom call.

This takes thought, and it takes discipline.

When you keep things simple, you can ensure that everybody on your team understands the mission.

As a continuation from last week’s overview, I read the expert from MSP magazine and wanted to share its breakdown.

The First Law of Combat (and leadership) is cover & move.

It’s a straightforward concept.

“Let’s say there are some bad guys in a building we want to take out. I’m going to start shooting. Then, while I’m shooting, my buddy moves to a better position. He starts shooting, so I can get up and move to a better position. Cover. Move. Cover. Move. We work together as a team until we take the bad guys out and take that building.”

The principle of cover and move is simple and effective, but it requires working as a team.

The challenges we face today require the best minds working together to solve them. Indeed, the complicated nature of systems and projects requires you to deconstruct problems into many different parts before giving team members shared responsibilities, each having the other’s back as they work through the list of tasks.

This also highlights the importance of cross-training in certain applications, so if someone is called in to handle a specific client emergency, you have a backup in place to cover those responsibilities.

You need every member of the team working together to “cover & move” to make your services and your business better and better.