LEGENDARY LEADERSHIP HOW TO – use THIS to lead others through the MOST difficult times

Welcome, everyone! Today we’re gonna talk about THIS How to: BE THE LEADER!

How would your colleague describe you?

If you’re in a leadership role in a company, part of managing the culture and part of managing leadership is knowing what personality traits to put forward to have the best come out of your team. 

So the flip side of that though is that it’s really interesting to think about how your team will perceive you in different ways. I’ve thought about this. I would say that there are two different nicks in the office pretty consistently.

The first nick is dealing with people that don’t report directly to me. So if they work with managers or they work with people at my same level or slightly below that do report to me, because those individuals don’t report directly to me, I am not going to metal and get intense with them on their daily tasking unless it’s through one of the people that they report to. So what would they say about me? 

Probably that I’m just super nice, super positive, really not super detailed into what they’re doing on a day-to-day basis. So with those individuals, my job as a leader is to instill positivity and energy. Hey guys, How are you doing today? What are you working on? Wow, that’s great. Hey, are we being competitive? Are we kicking the other guy’s butt? Awesome, Good job. Get back to it, right? That’s the energy, pure positivity, pure energy. Let’s get after it. 

What Strategies Do You Use To Handle Stressful or Time-Sensitive Situations?

The second Nic in the office is a lot more intense because you have to wear both hats. You have to wear the hats of giving your peers and your direct reports, the people that report to you, giving them the very clear a direction that we hustle and we have high expectations balanced with, hey guys, this is a positive environment and we want to engage and have fun while we’re kicking butt. 

So at that point, it just depends on the situation. If there’s not something pressing on the plate, then we can have fun and be positive while we’re getting stuff done and kind of go our separate ways. But when we’re focusing in and grinding on a task that we each have to do separately or whatever but I think it’s extremely important to set the tone that when business is at hand that you get focused and you drill down and you get it done. It’s actually not time to be distracted. It’s not time for side quests or stories or it’s getting things done in those moments. When works past have fun, enjoy it be positive. Make sure the vibe in the office has a lot of energy and positivity, but also drive you are driving towards a goal. 

When you are in a position where you’re in something that’s maybe time sensitive or higher stress or just the volume and the temperature’s a little more turned up, the best thing to do in my experience is the following. To be very loose and to be very calm and sit at that moment as you own it. You’ve been there before. You’ve done this and you know you’re going to perform. 

Some people in those moments, they go crazy. They want to do all this stuff to hype them up. The reality is it’s about being cold and calm, that intensity, but that positivity where you’re switched on and you have laser focus. 

So in a situation, maybe like in interview or a situation where you’re dealing with other people and you need some human interaction in that, and it’s not just you locked in a room, banging out some tasking that’s on a time-sensitive deadline. 

If you’re interacting with other people, be that same energy but be engaging in light at the same time. It’s not about being playful and taking air out of the room or removing something from the intensity or the respect that situation deserves. Instead, it’s settled communication that no matter what happens in that situation, you got this and it’s gonna be okay and you’re in control. That’s equally communicated to the other people in that situation, but you’re equally communicating that to yourself also, if you put your body language and your mental state in the place that you want to be, you will feel that just by tuning in to those frequencies. 

Let’s say you’re in the office and shit goes nuclear, right? It’s full melt-on mode and everybody’s in a panic and you have to deal with stuff literally second by second, by second. The best advice I can give you in what worked for me in the past in extremely stressful, crazy minute-by-minute situations was to shut the emotions off from your decision-making. 

Be the person that everybody around you can rely on to be cool-headed and focused, and the person that’s going to get everyone through it. The storm can be raging, the waves can be crashing. Everybody can go into panic mode. You as the individual need to be the rock and the lighthouse in that storm. If you want to be a leader. Why you do that is by understanding that there’s a stimulus, there’s something crazy happening, there’s an initial stimulus and then there’s a response. Your body responds, your mind responds, you physically respond, whatever that is, stimulus and response but there’s a gap. 

So if you fill that gap in between and you grasp your emotions and you have them under control, then in those moments you can steer clearly. You’re not saying, Oh no stimulus an instant response, because that’s how people spin out and that’s how people lose their cool. 

It’s about realizing the difference between something happening and the response and that in that gap is your moment to take control of your emotions to stay focused, stay cool, calm collected, and make the best decisions for you and the people around you. There will be time for you to respond to this later, know that it’s not about not feeling things, it’s not about rejecting your emotions or it’s not about shoving them down and just never accessing them. It’s about that the emotions are not part of the decision in that moment. It needs to be a calm, calculated, clear decision that you make at that moment and if that’s the case in a chaotic environment, people will know that you are the person that’s able to do that and that is one of the most massive and important leadership traits to steer people through difficult times when everyone else is losing their cool. 

So at different stages of business, there are different opportunities that you have, especially as a founder or in a key leadership position at these key moments. So with that in mind, one of the biggest headaches at certain points, but also one of the biggest investments that you can make are that when something’s new to your team to be involved and oversee that, to make sure that develops into a system. So if you’re gonna do something over and over and over, whether that’s answering a phone, create a script cause you know that there’s gonna be the same 10 questions or the same five questions even more realistically or the same rejections or the same counters. So if you can be involved on the outset of helping to create the systems that are gonna recur in the business, what happens is you move past that and you can hand that to somebody else that now owns that and they can improve it and they can make tweaks, but they’re not gonna do an overhaul on it. So there’s gonna be consistency with your business. 

How do you balance managing employees and moving projects forward?

So then the question becomes how do you manage, how involved you are on tasking with how much you should hand off to your employees? and the reality is the more competent the employees, the more you can hand off without oversight out of the gates. But if you don’t have that a plus team in place today, then you need to be very involved on the outset of a lot of tasking. 

You set those systems up and then you can hand off to the team and you oversee iterations. Hey guys, what notes do you have on that system? What worked and what didn’t? Are we seeing anything on the calls or the emails or the campaigns that are reacting differently than we expected, even though we’ve done this many times? 

But again, the best note is you can hand more to employees that know what they’re doing and if you get good at hiring and you get good at sourcing talent, you wake up in the best position, which is being able to find people that could outperform you every day of the week and know a thousand X what you as a leader could ever do in that same role and at that point, if you find that person, you have them do the most successful system and you just have them document it with the best person doing the best documentation and systemization, you can take that forward in the business from the source. 

What is the fact about you that is not listed in your resume?

The number one feedback I get from friends or people that I know that they learn about me that they don’t expect is that I’m secretly like a huge dork, right? So it’s Star Wars, it’s Game of Thrones, it’s science fiction in general. 

Like I’ve never been more excited for a movie than the next doune coming out. But if that makes with me dorking out about things like finance and fighting sports, things that are more traditionally considered cool, mixing those with my huge dork side. For instance, I’m willing to put a bet out there that I could beat almost anyone in a game of Star Wars trivia. 

I’m pretty dang confident of that. The skillset that I’ve personally found most successful for me and my personality traits are going towards growth, but that includes strategy on one hand and that includes information and execution. 

On the other hand, being able to understand what the big picture is and then being able to break that down into steps to get and achieve that growth. So it’s this weird dynamic where I do most of my best work and my best thought through strategy and big picture by myself and trying to find these zen moments where I’m envisioning different pieces of the business and things coming together. That’s the game plan of what I want to see connected in what ways. 

The other side of that is that I can’t achieve everything on my own. It has to be in a team environment. So it’s the balance of both. 

I think there’s times when it’s really difficult to put together a giant strategy that’s very detailed with too many people trying to collaborate and put it together cause it can get clunky and things can bump into each other. But what I think’s very successful is formulating it on one side and then bringing it to a team and testing that through the team, both with just theory and thinking through and having other people put input of what they can add or what they think might be good to subtract. 

But also most importantly, putting it into practice with the team and seeing how it does on test runs. That’s been the best balance for me is designing on one side, implementing and then changing very quickly. But then the number one thing is speed in this. It’s doing this quickly. It’s not about taking four months to do a one-week idea. It’s putting it together quickly, writing it down and taking notes and mapping it. If you’re a visual person, there’s great tools out there like X Mind or I think one’s called Lucid Chart. There’s really good ones where you can map out exactly the systems that you’re visualizing. 

So you take that, you implement it immediately with your team, and then you see where the snags are and where you’re missing efficiency and you adjust quickly and if you iterate and you make those changes very quickly, you come out with the best result 99% of the time.

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