Episode 346: Uncommon Greatness with Mark Miller

He said, you look at people who have growing influence, growing impact, and growing opportunity over the course of their career, and they're the men and women who have committed to lifelong learning. The way I talk about that conversation now is your capacity to grow determines your capacity to lead. And when you can't grow anymore, your influence, your impact, and your opportunities will be limited. Now, you might not even feel that immediately, but the fuel source for influence, impact, and opportunity is lifelong learning.

What if you could step out of the day-to-day and see your business from a whole new perspective?

Welcome to Above the Business, where we empower you to rise above the daily grind and embrace a higher way of business ownership. Get ready to build your business by design. Welcome to another episode of the Above the Business podcast. My name is Bradley Hamnew, your host. You know, the podcast name used to be called the Club Capital Leadership Podcast, and I just kind of came up with that name on the whim years ago, and then we've transformed it to Above the Business. But the reason I share that is because at its core, one of the elements of business that I love to be able to discuss and love to have people on is around leadership. And we've looked at leadership from a lot of different ways. But looking back on it, one of the guests that we've had on, who's the former vice president of high performance leadership at Chick-fil-A, is Mark Miller. At the time that he came on in the last episode— we'll make sure we link that in the show notes— was when we were talking to him about his book Smart Leadership. Well, we have him back on today for a second time talking about his latest book that just was released in February of 2024, Uncommon Greatness: 5 Fundamentals to Transform Your Leadership. This episode is absolutely an incredible discussion, certainly not from me, but from him. I thought his last one was great. I think you're going to get an absolute ton from this. I took 2 full pages of notes and things that I'm actually going to go and do with my team. I can't wait for you to dive into it. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Mark Miller.

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Mark Miller, welcome back to the Above the Business Podcast.

It's great to see you again.

Great to see you. Well, I'm really excited about this conversation. Over the years, I've been so fortunate to get to meet a lot of different people, and I love talking about the different aspects of business, but there's one certainly that I just don't really think that we could talk about enough, and that is around this idea of leadership. And we're going to take this a lot of different ways, but you have just released your newest book, Uncommon Greatness: The Five Fundamentals to Transform Your Leadership. But I'm curious specifically, what do you even mean? What is the definition of uncommon greatness in your mind?

Okay, I need to give you just a little bit of context. I actually believe that most humans desire to be great. And I think greatness is within our reach. But what I've observed over the course of more than 4 decades is a lot of leaders— let's focus on leaders specifically— they're pursuing, they're chasing greatness, and many of them achieve amazing things. And the vast majority, I would say almost all of them, find that when they do achieve those things, that it's not satisfying, it's not fulfilling, it doesn't give them joy, it doesn't give them life. They, in many cases, regret what they paid for that fleeting moment of greatness. And so, I've said I want to encourage leaders to pursue a different type of greatness. Uncommon greatness. Greatness that does bring joy, does bring fulfillment. It doesn't put you on the pedestal, but instead you enable others to produce greatness. And it's enduring. And we believe there's only one path that you can take to move from common to uncommon greatness, and it's uncommon leadership. And so that's what we wrote the book about.

Well, I have to tell you, you wouldn't have known this, but even what you shared, it resonates with me personally so much. I've shared elements of this possibly, but maybe not in this context. One of the things that I pursued for years is to achieve this big goal. And we tried year after year after year to try to make it. And we finally made it. We try— finally achieved it. And the moment that I realized and got the email that we had made it was one of the loneliest and the worst feelings that I had felt in my business career. And I could not figure that out for years. I had no way of making sense of that. This thing that I had pursued, not for a year, not for 6 months, but for several years in a row, we finally have made the thing and we did it. We hit the goal. And now I feel empty. Why is that?

Yeah, I think you just are giving a personal example of what I've described. The way that you may have heard this talked about in the past is that you've been climbing a ladder, you've been climbing a ladder, you've been climbing a ladder and exerting the energy and the effort to climb that metaphorical ladder. And when you get to the top, you realize it's leaning against the wrong building.

Mm-hmm.

And I have seen, and our research validates, that the best leaders are really focused on helping others achieve greatness. Now, greatness is not a bad thing. And I would argue it's a stepping stone. For so many leaders, because if you're not pursuing personal greatness, then it's going to be real hard for you to have the moral authority to raise the bar, which is what you're doing. And you're telling other people, yeah, yeah, congratulations. Now let me show you what you can do and how you can leverage what you've already accomplished. And if you just shift your focus from yourself to others, you can use all the skills that you've developed. Now, you may need a few more. Because what we're talking about here is a bit countercultural. Most leaders were not taught, nor was it modeled for them, that they need to think others first. That's one of the core, we call them heart habits, of an uncommon leader is that you cultivate and nurture the ability to think others first. That's just one of many things that we think you need to do to become the type of leader we're describing.

So I shared just anecdotal evidence of my own journey. And you have had so much experience over the years in your own leadership. And you could really be able to write your book specifically just around your own journey and the things that you've experienced. But what I love about all of your work is you do so much research to not just almost maybe validate or maybe not validate your own experience around things. And so you surveyed 4,000 leaders across, I think, 6 different countries.

6 countries. Mm-hmm.

What are the things that you found from that?

We found a lot of things. I'll just give you a few. We found that the fundamentals that we outline in this book are valid. Now, you would hope that would be the case. But let me give you just a little bit of the backstory. And I don't think you know this, and I'm pretty sure your audience does not. We did our first work on what we're now calling Uncommon Leadership 25 years ago. And we did extensive, and I would even call it exhaustive qualitative work and desk research. We interviewed a bunch of leaders. We read a couple hundred books on leadership. We studied global best practices. I mean, it was really rigorous, but there was nothing there that would qualify as quantitative. It was all qualitative. But we came up with many of these principles and practices 25 years ago. And so we decided we were going to do this book, and we said, let's go back and do some quant research. Said, A, we trust that it will validate what we did 25 years ago, but if not, we need to know that. And two, it will probably provide new insight and new perspective on something we've actually been actively thinking about and working on for a quarter of a century. And so, we went out and did this research. We validated that, yes, these are 5 fundamentals that the best leaders practice and embrace and work to cultivate in their life. But we found out a couple of other things that were, I don't know if they were insightful, but they were certainly troubling. One thing we discovered is that a third of the global leaders told us they don't have enough leaders today to lead their organization. I knew there was a shortage. I don't know that I would have been able to peg that number. What was even more troubling is 50% of the leaders said they don't anticipate having enough in the future, which to me is tragic and self-indicting. It's like, well, you're the leader, you are the leaders, you need to go fix this and you need to resolve this. Which is one reason we think this work is timely. Because if you're going to create a leadership culture, here's my cut on a leadership culture. It's a place where leaders are routinely and systematically developed and you have a surplus. Now, there are those in your audience that are going to go, well, a surplus sounds wasteful. Well, that's actually how you know that it's working, because you've got enough leaders for today and you've got leaders ready leaders in the wings. Because when you have a problem to solve or an opportunity to seize, you probably want to put a leader on. Now, he or she won't single-handedly solve the problem or seize the opportunity, but they'll put the team together and they'll cobble together the resources and provide the vision, and they'll build the team and they'll make it happen. And so for half the leaders to say they don't have, won't have sufficient leadership in the future, I'm saying, wow, you need to build a leadership culture. So this work becomes important if you're going to create that leadership culture. The starting point is to define leadership in your context. And I would say to define it behaviorally, which is what we've done, which is what we tried to do 25 years ago. There are far too many definitions out there that are behavioral. I mean, they're not behavioral, they're academic or they're theoretical. We wanted a behavioral definition. What do leaders do? And we think that's the cornerstone of building a leadership culture.

Okay, man, I cannot wait for some of our members to, to listen to this podcast because so many people I know are wanting to develop other leaders in their organization. So we definitely want to double tap on this one. So where do you think the difference is between when you're leading people who follow you, but then also when you've identified Mark has a special trait about him, we're going to put him or her on a leadership path. What is kind of the difference in leadership between those two things, leading leaders and developing leaders? And we're going to talk about develop in a second. But where do you see the kind of the difference in those two, or is there even a difference?

Well, let me say it this way. If you are leading a team of leaders, I think you lead them differently than a team of individual contributors. And I know that because it was one of the times in my career when I totally blew it. I had for many years led a team of leaders. And we did a reorg and I ended up with a team of individual contributors. And I did not adjust. I didn't give them enough time, enough attention, enough focus. I made too many assumptions about what they knew. And what they understood. And it, it kind of blew up. I would say it was probably the low point in my 45-year career. It wasn't immediately apparent to me, but it took some processing. Like, okay, what's going on? What went wrong? Why is— I've led high-performance teams my whole career and this one's a mess. And it was me. It was me. So I think you do have to do it differently if you're leading a team of leaders.

Okay. Yeah. That's a really good example about making assumptions. It's kind of those sort of things I was thinking about. Okay. So here's where I've also gotten this wrong. Identify someone and realize, you know what, we now need a leader in the organization. So then without any conversation with this person, you basically go and peg them. And it's not much different than what I'm about to say. Mark, we've decided now that you're on a leadership track and we're putting you in a leadership position. And then I put them in the position, then I start to develop them, and then I realize, oh, wait a minute, I'm doing this Yeah, totally wrong. Like they were not ready for this. And so what's the right way? I love the way you defined a leadership culture. So if you could maybe repeat that, I think that'd be really helpful and start to prepare people for the role before they jump into the role.

Okay. Yeah. So let me share a principle that applies here, and I think it's a great life principle. So I'm not trying to get into people's personal life, but I'd like you to think about this. And by the way, this works in a lot of areas. I'll give you a couple of examples, but let me give you the principle. Dig your well before you're thirsty. See, when the pandemic hit, people said, wow, your drive-through was amazing. Well, okay, we started working on drive-through about 5 years ago. And people said during the pandemic, wow, it was so great that you had an app. Well, we started working on that about 3 or 4 years before the pandemic. Now, that's not to throw rocks at our competitors, but some of them, when the pandemic hit, started developing an app or started working on their drive-through. So I think part of what we're paid for as leaders is foresight, and that we've got to plan for the future. See, I think too many leaders get caught in the present, and if we don't spend enough time in the future, it's probably not going to be the future we want. It might be the future our competitors want. For us. I just find far too many leaders that don't spend enough time preparing for tomorrow.

Yeah.

And so we have certainly tried to do that. So apply that principle to your aspiring or emerging or potential leader. I think in an ideal world, you start identifying those people while they're under someone else's leadership, and you begin the journey with them. And you can increase their responsibility. I've seen leaders that would challenge this, and I said, I'm not talking about promoting them next Thursday, but give them a stretch assignment. Give them something in addition to what they're already doing. Observe how they think. Observe how they prepare. Observe how they delegate and develop others. Is their first instinct to build a team, or is their first instinct to try and do more themselves? And these are things you can coach them on. But often it's that stress test along the way that actually helps on the journey. Now, let me back up though. I don't want to miss where we started. If you want to help somebody grow as a leader, I think the first thing you've got to tell them is what are your expectations for a leader? So literally, if you buy into our 5 Fundamentals, then people need to know that. And if you've got your own 3 Fundamentals or 9 Fundamentals, like What is it you want your leaders to do? And we always say the first thing you have to do is define it. And which is again another reason we think this book is timely. We also found that a large percentage of organizations— I'm going to share a number with you and hope I've got it right because you can imagine how much data we generated here. But I want to say it was 73% of frontline supervisors globally said if their organization had a definition of leadership, they were unaware of it. Wow. Now I'm surprised that's not 90%, because in my experience, 90% of the organizations or more don't have a stated point of view on leadership. And let me quickly say, that's where we were at the chicken 30 years ago. When you said leadership, everybody nodded. And everybody agreed, but they weren't thinking about the same thing. And I challenge your listeners, next time you're in your leadership team meeting or any setting in your organization, pass out 3x5 cards. I know that's kind of old school, but the little white pieces of paper, hand them out and ask everybody to write down their definition of leadership. And I guarantee you two things. One, everybody can write down a definition of leadership. Secondly, unless you've done the hard work to forge a consensus, All the answers will be different. You can't create a leadership culture unless you have a common united definition. So back to your person versus saying, 'Congratulations, you're in leadership.' If you have the foresight and if you have the opportunity, if you make the opportunity to identify them before they're in charge of something, I would always begin with saying, 'Hey, let's be clear on what we expect our leaders to do.' Isn't that funny?

Leadership is one, and then there's other aspects where words get thrown around and nobody has come to an agreement of what do we mean by that. You throw out roadmap and blueprint and this and that, and it's like, wait a minute. And everybody's like, oh, you kind of know what I mean. It's like, no, actually, I don't know what you mean by that specifically. I am quite literally going to do that. And I realize, because I love leadership and I'm not the best leader myself and I want to continue to get better, I'm going to do that. I'm going to find the exact same thing, that everybody's going to have their own definition or they're going to repeat something that they think sounds right. They're going to say influence, right? That gets thrown around. Leadership is influence. And so they're going to maybe say that one as a Maxwell quote, right? But there's not the— to your point, whether you adopt yours in the book or adopt your own, you create your own, at least create your own, having the language of what it is.

Yeah.

Because then you can train, educate, develop, recognize, reward, coach, correct against the definition. Yes, you can measure it, you can model it. I mean, there's so many things you can do once you know what you're trying to do.

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Okay, so we've hinted around and we probably won't be able to go like deep on each one of them, but why don't you go through so that people have the framework of the book of what the 5 fundamentals are, and maybe I'll pick a couple out for us to kind of go deep on for a second.

Yeah. Great. The first of the fundamentals is see the future. Leadership always begins with a picture of the future. What are you trying to accomplish? What are you trying to become? What are you trying to achieve? Why does it matter? Traditionally, it's talked about in terms of vision, but there are any number of ways you can represent that picture of the future. And leaders actually are asked to see the future in many areas, in many domains, right? We're supposed to see the potential in someone often before they see it in themselves. We're supposed to be able to see the potential impact and ramifications of a choice or a decision or a strategy. Yeah, I mean, we have to spend enough time in the future to ensure that we have one that we want. So see the future, critical first step. And I would say real quick, many people ask me if that's the most important, and I'd say, well, we think all 5 are essential, but that is the first among equals. If you're not actually trying to accomplish something, then I would argue by definition you're not leading. I'm not sure what you're doing. You might be managing. You might not be doing anything that's adding value. So you see the future. The second is engage and develop others. Engage and develop others. Because my hope and prayer for your listeners is that the future they see is so big they can't do it by themselves.

Yes.

Because if you can do it by yourself, it's actually probably not much. So if it is going to require other people, well, then the second fundamental is immediately relevant. How do I engage and develop others to help make the vision a reality?

Yes.

And we've worked to simplify engagement. We could talk all day about this. We actually have said it's how much somebody cares. It's how much they care about their work. It's how much they care about their coworkers. It's how much they care about their customer. And it's how much they care about the organization. And we believe that leaders are the ones that determine those 4 things.

Okay. But I'm gonna let you keep going. We don't wanna go off on that. We don't wanna go off on a tangent here, but just that one, you just put the nail on the head about why engagement is so not there for a lot of organizations is because they just don't have people that care. But to that point, it's probably not even necessarily them, but it can be a leadership crisis because they're not painting the vision of what it could be down the road. So therefore, so many people are, quote, checked out, so to speak.

Right. Yeah. So let me just say one word about that and I will move on. Your listeners may know that annually Gallup and ADP and some of these other global organizations produce reports. Gallup's is called the State of the Global Workforce, and the numbers are awful and have been for years, whether you're looking at ADP or Gallup. So in the US, it's somewhere between 15 and 20% of the workers are engaged. So get your head around that. 8 out of 10 don't. Well, there's no wonder organizations are having trouble executing. And every year when those articles come out or those reports come out, somebody's going to write an article or a blog post or do something on the news, and they're going to talk about the sorry state of the American worker. And I disagree. I think that is a reflection of leadership, because I've worked in an organization with engagement scores in the 90s, and you don't drift there. You got to work on it. But engagement is the responsibility of leaders. So You're right.

We could do a Joe Rogan podcast on that one. But yeah, we'll keep going.

See the future, engage, develop others. The third is to reinvent continuously. The best leaders, uncommon leaders, understand that progress is always preceded by change. I meet far too many leaders that think change is a burden, change is a nuisance, change is an inconvenience. I would argue they don't understand their role. I, I would think our primary role is to create and sustain positive change in service of the vision. If you do what you've always done, you're going to get what you always got, or worse, right? And if you don't like your outcomes, it's because your current systems, beliefs, habits, and mechanisms, they're perfectly aligned with what you're getting. So if you want a different outcome, you got to go change something. So that third domain, that third fundamental is essential if you're going to lead well. So the fourth is to value results and relationships. And I would go ahead and forewarn your listeners that I believe this will be the hardest of the five for about 95% of them. And that's not scientifically derived, but I've been sharing this concept with leaders for almost 30 years around the world. And it's the hardest for leaders all over the world. And here's my quick summary on why it's so challenging. Most leaders have a natural bias. We are either more results-oriented or more relationship-oriented. Now, I believe there are about 5% who have an equal measure of both. And I always say, I don't even like those leaders. Because leading is easier for them. For the rest of us, it's really hard. Because if you can't overcome your bias so that you value both, you will always sub-optimize performance. The way to get performance is not to focus exclusively on results. You will not sustain elite levels of performance over time. But neither is the answer to focus exclusively on relationships. You will certainly sub-optimize performance. It's what Jim Collins talked about. It's an example of the genius of the and. When you can embrace two things that at times are at odds, you release tremendous power and potential by embracing both. And the best leaders, they own their bias and they compensate for that which they don't do naturally well. Yeah. So that's the—

In my head, what I'm thinking is you've got to hold both at the same time. You have to hold both at the same time. I was definitely someone who over-indexed for results, not the relationship. You know, I saw the team as mercenaries to do the work and hit the targets, etc. And I certainly hope now my team would see that, you know what, I need to prioritize the relationship as well. But also, to your point, I think that's well stated, that you can't just over-index 100% for the relationship and then abandon results, because then the business is not going to stay in business at some And let me, and let me give you one more thought on that.

You don't pursue the middle because then you're mediocre. You don't care a whole lot about results or relationship. It's really a case of triangulation. You're gonna choose another spot where if this is the emphasis you place on results, you don't lower it when you raise the value of relationships. You keep them both high. I see. You keep them both high. And that's the magic.

Yeah, I agree with that. That's the one that so far has resonated with me the most of balancing to do that.

Okay. Number 5. Number 5 is to embody a leader's heart. So our picture of leadership for several decades has been an iceberg. And about, if you remember 5th grade, I don't, but they tell me I studied icebergs in 5th grade. About 10% of the iceberg is above the waterline and about 90% is below. We think that's a great picture of leadership. And those first 4 fundamentals are above the waterline. The one below is to embody a leader's heart. If your heart's not right, nobody cares about your skills. And you can probably prove it to yourself. Think of a leader that you know personally who has the skills and you would choose not to follow them. Well, how wouldn't you follow them? My guess is you don't trust their heart. And so that fifth fundamental is absolutely essential for effectiveness. You want to live your life in such a fashion and lead in such a fashion that people actually want to follow you. That's what it means to embody a leader's heart.

Do you think that that's where vulnerability also comes in too, to be able to share with your team and not act like you have all the answers and have it all together?

Oh, absolutely. But you'll see that the leader's heart impacts everything above because if you don't have that vulnerability, you've got to help people understand what you know about the future and what you don't. You've got to be vulnerable when you're trying to engage and develop others. You got to be vulnerable when you're reinventing continuously because you're saying, we're going to try some things and it may not work. And when it doesn't work, you have to own that and own it on your own. So yes, I think that's where you would talk about it. But all of the heart habits— I mentioned one earlier— although they're contained in the fifth fundamental, they inform the four previous fundamentals.

I think an example of that would be we're at this place where we can't see around the corner of how exactly AI is going to affect our individual businesses and our leadership and all of those sort of things. We know that it's going to have and already has had a profound impact, but that's going to get exponential over the next 10 years. And so there's this place of like, I'm not really sure exactly what it's going to look like. I can't see around the corner. But I am going to lean in and to your point around number 3, reinvent and embrace the change aspect of it. And instead of being scared of what it could do, we're probably going to be for a period of time where it's going to help improve things and optimize things. And I'll let some other people kind of figure out the long, long-term ramifications of something like that. So, yeah. So Mark, this has been fantastic. I love from this, our first conversation, is that you have an ability to be able to articulate things that we've heard before and maybe even read before, not to diminish any of those works at all, but then it's like, oh yeah, no, that's actually— that makes sense. I feel like I can go from a high level down to an eye level. I can actually begin to take some of those things and improve my leadership on a day-to-day basis. And so that leads me to a question, which is sometimes we hear things and they are kind of theoretical, and then there's sometimes where it's like, okay, I get it, but now what do I do with it? Right? And so if somebody— and of course we're pointing where they can pick up the book in a second— but really more tactically, even if somebody's listening to this on their drive into their office or stepping into the upcoming week, where would you recommend someone start where they say, you know what? I do want to improve my leadership. I just don't know where to begin, Mark.

All right. So, I'll share a quick story that I hope will answer your question. This is a conversation I had over 40 years ago, almost 45 years ago with my supervisor. And I was just a kid. And I wish I could remember more of it. I don't know why we were having this conversation. So, let's just set that out there. I don't remember, but I remember the conversation, and he wanted to talk about my future. And I'm going, okay, when you're 19 years old, what's the future? I don't know. But he wanted to talk about my future, and I'm going to kind of paraphrase the conversation, but he basically conveyed to me, if you want more influence, if you want more impact, and you want more opportunity in your future, there's only one path. And I went, really? He said, yeah. I said, say all that again. I want to be sure I got what you're saying here. He said, if you want more influence, if you want more impact, and you want more opportunity, there's only one path. And I said, well, what is that? And he said, lifelong learning. And I said, you're kidding me. And he said, no. He said, you look at people who have growing influence, growing impact, and growing opportunity over the course of their career, and they're the men and women who have committed to lifelong learning. The way I talk about that conversation now is your capacity to grow determines your capacity to lead.

Oh man, that's good.

And when you can't grow anymore, your influence, your impact, and your opportunities will be limited. Now, you might not even feel that immediately, but the fuel source for influence, impact, and opportunity is lifelong. Learning. So somebody who wants to improve their leadership, I'd say make that choice. Now you may say, well, I'm really not a learner. Some of you are familiar with Strength Finders, like where they have 34 strengths. I'm not sure learner is in my top 25. And I had somebody say, well, you act like a learner. And I said, well, thanks. I made a decision over 40 years ago that if that's how the world works, then I'm signing up for lifelong learning. And I'm still on that journey because I want more influence, I want more impact, and I want more opportunity. So as pedestrian as that may sound as the response to your question. I'll either say, yeah, I really want to get better at my leadership. Okay, good, good. But, but I want to raise the stakes and say, will you commit to lifelong learning? Because if you'll do that, there's no limit to what you can do. If it's just a project or it's just let me try to learn this or learn that, there's value there, but there's much deeper and more profound value if you get on a 20, 30, 40, 50-year march that says, I'm going to be a learner.

Well, you have embodied that. And one thing, there's times I wish that people would hear some of the behind the scenes before we hit record. And so, I just want to share with everybody, before we hit record, you asked me 3 or 4 questions around different things to learn and to lean in. And for you to do that and embody and exemplify what that actually looks like, I wish people could hear some of those things because you actually don't just share that, you actually do it. And so it was really, I was like, man, he's asking me questions, which is pretty amazing. And I'm so grateful for that because you really do. People sometimes catch things more than they're taught, and I just wanted to call that out for people. So thank you for exemplifying that yourself. Mark, people connect with you, pick up the book. Where would you kind of point them to?

Yeah, the first thing I would do is offer my cell number. It's 678-612-8441. And if you're driving, I'm assuming we can put that in the show notes. So for those of you drivers, 678-612-8441. My email is mark@leadeveryday.com. And our website is leadeveryday.com. So if I or our team can serve you, please reach out.

Awesome. Mark, last question before we let you go. The name of the podcast is Above the Business. What resonates with you about that? What do you believe getting above the business actually looks like?

All right. So I'll share a quick story. We did some work a few years ago. I talked about it the last time I was on your show. It's a book we published called Smart Leadership, trying to help leaders improve their effectiveness. It's not a book on how to lead. We've got other books on how to lead. This is men and women who know how to lead, but they realize, whether they've realized it themselves or their supervisor told them, that they're not really leading to their full potential. I've often likened it to a major league pitcher that's not throwing enough strikes. They don't need to learn to pitch, they're already in the big leagues, but they need to make some adjustments so they could hit more strikes. And so I want to share one practice that I think for many of you might be a game changer, pun intended. As you try to throw more strikes. And it's the discipline of margin. Now, if you're struggling, the metaphor we use in that book is quicksand. If you're in quicksand of busyness and complexity of distractions, you're thinking, man, if I had margin, then I might not be in this mess. Well, well, hang on, just stay with me. And I've even had leaders say, I don't need— I don't have time for a vacation. I'm going— I'm not even talking about that. I'm talking about the leadership discipline of setting time aside at whatever frequency or interval that you need to reflect, to assess, to think, to create, to plan? When do you do that? And I've had— oh, it breaks my heart when leaders say, well, I don't do that. Well, who's doing it if you're not doing it? You're the leader.

Yeah.

Reflect, assess, think, create, and plan. They just finished a study not too long ago. Harvard looked at the calendars of CEOs for 12 years, had a group of CEOs they followed. They found that they spend on average 28% of their time every week alone. Wow. And people say, well, what are they doing? Because those are busy people. I said, yeah, but they're spending 28% of their time alone. What do you think they're doing? I know what they're doing: reflect, assess, think, create, and plan. Now, I'm not saying you need 28% of your time I don't know how much time you need, but the bigger your hopes, the bigger your dreams, the bigger your problems, the bigger your challenges, the more time you need alone to reflect, assess, think, create, and plan. And so my encouragement to all of you is begin to cultivate the habit and the discipline of building margin into your life. It's not going to happen spontaneously. And as a specific challenge, I'd like you to try to take 1 hour next week, 1 hour, put it on the calendar, meeting with me. When somebody calls and wants that time, you say, oh, I'm sorry, I've already got a meeting scheduled.

Yes.

And spend that hour, reflect, assess, think, create, and plan. And I think it could change your life and your leadership.

Amazing. Best answer we've had to that question yet. Mark, so grateful for you.

Thank you for coming on.

Glad to be with you.

Well, goodness, where do I begin? Genuinely, that is one of my favorite interviews that we have, an interview guest. We've had some incredible guests on. I think it is personally because I love learning about leadership. And sometimes when we talk about leadership, it makes it a little ethereal. It makes it hard for me to kind of get my hands around that. And for those of you listening, you won't be able to see this, but I mean, I took two full pages of notes and circles and highlights and things to kind of go back on. And there's not many podcasts I would go back and listen to for obvious reasons, but this one I definitely would. I appreciate Mark. He has such a wealth of experience, humble. He genuinely did, uh, was asking several questions ahead of the podcast, and he's just a great guest and has just really fantastic. Not only this book, but also his previous books are just wonderful. So definitely check out his latest book, Uncommon Greatness. Smart Leadership is the last book that we had him come on and talk about, and hopefully he'll continue to produce some books and we'll have him on again in the future.

I mean, what are some of the things I personally take away?

I mean, goodness, it's hard to even narrow it down to a few. Lifelong learner, just really reminding myself of that. And what things that I'm doing to continue to pour into myself from podcast and books and being around other people. Dig your well before you are thirsty. Just even the conversation around developing leaders has made me begin to kind of think, because there's one particular situation in one business that I'm thinking around this one person that I kind of see and want to pour more into. Well, what are the things I'm doing to begin to kind of cultivate that? And specifically starting with What is my definition of leadership? And so I'm going to go and look at what his definition is from the book and then also see, do I agree with that? And maybe what are some of the changes I need to do? And I'm going to do the exercise of actually asking my team, what is their definition of leadership? And we'll see where it is. Maybe I'll report back on that and do a Friday Solo podcast about it myself. So hope that served you. I know it certainly did me. Shout out to our podcast Partners, Coach P Consulting, Today App Pro, Autopilot Recruiting, and of course Club Capital. Look, you can't be a leader, you can't really lead people unless you have people to lead, or even developing leaders. Well, to do that, you kind of need two things. One, you need a bench of people. You need an ability to kind of recruit on a regular basis. People talk about that all the time, but sometimes it's really hard to put that in practice. I would hear that I hear somebody come on stage, I go to a conference and hear the importance of recruiting all the time. But I was like, yeah, okay, I get that. But like, I don't have time to do that. Well, one of the biggest parts is just constantly having or consistently and routinely updating the job descriptions that you have and the job postings that you have and reviewing those resumes and filtering through some of those people that may be a good fit, may not be a good fit. Well, Autopilot Recruiting can do all of that heavy lifting for you so that they're handing over fantastic people that are already really well vetted. Now, are they all going to be a perfect fit for you and your team? No, but they're doing the part that most of the business owners and teams and leaders just don't love to be able to do, and they can do it at an incredible monthly rate. They can really help you to buy back your time because at the end of the day, we make more money, but we can't get back more time. Autopilotrecruiting.com. Autopilotrecruiting.com. Now also, you want to be around other people who are trying to do the same things that you're doing. And oftentimes I talk about Coach P Consulting here on the podcast, specifically in reference to like your team being developed and being a part of something. But today I want to take a slight detour and talk about the importance of you being in an environment and a culture of other business owners and leaders trying to do the same thing that you are. Reality is, you know, whenever your team is on there and they're developing with Coach P, which they get that, that's valuable, right? But it's also important for you. What are the things that you're doing to be a lifelong learner? Well, Coach P can absolutely help you to do that with their monthly agent calls. You can be around people that are right, your peers. They're struggling with the same things, but they're also succeeding. and you can learn not only from David, but from other people in the group. If you want to be a part of that, go to coachpconsulting.com, coachpconsulting.com. You've heard me say often mindset, skillset, and toolset. And we've talked about mindset at times. We even talked today with Mark and really kind of around some leadership skills, but then also there's tools. Well, tools can look like. An Excel spreadsheet template that you have, a Word document, a Notion page. It can look like a lot of different things, but it can also look like the software that your team uses to track their sales, to track their pivots, to be able to connect with your corporate-approved CRM, and also to be able to put some of the word tracks. What is the tool that you're using? If you're using an old Excel spreadsheet, while I love the simplicity of a Google Sheet or an Excel spreadsheet, and they have their place. There's just sometimes a difference between having something like that and an all-in-one solution where it puts the word tracks and the work and the sales and the bonus and the compensation plan in place in one beautiful location. That's what you get with TodayApp. Go to todayapp.com. TodayAppPro.com. TodayAppPro.com. Now I think a lot of the times software can be kind of clunky. It can be just frustrating to get started, and sometimes it can feel like that the switching cost is like switching banks. Have you ever had that feeling like switching banks is like, oh my goodness, there's just a pain to do that. That is not the experience you have with TodayApp. They'll make that experience whether you're moving from another software that you've used before or from an Excel spreadsheet to really help you to be able to migrate that information over and get you off to a really quick start and start using it straight away. todayapppro.com. Well, we're just coming out of tax season. How was that for you? Was that good? Was it bad? Did you have any major surprises through a big refund, a big tax bill? Well, either way, whether it's good experience or bad experience, but especially if it was not kind of experience you want, go to club.capital. They can help you to get— be able to get on top of your financials so that it goes from just burden to actually something that's a strategic advantage for you to be able to make decisions off of. Go to club.capital. All right, everyone, hope this served you. Till next time.

Lead well.