5 Must-Do Practices For Great Leaders

No one wants to work for the spreadsheet leader. They want to work with the person who has the heart and soul, who can talk about behavior and behavior change and patterns. And what patterns do you need to recognize the habits? What are our collective habits? Because if we improve those, the panels, the outcomes, the KPIs and the OKRs get better. But if you start with those and you get obsessed about those, and you're trying to manage and lead people to those, they get frustrated, bored, detached. It's not inspiring. What's inspiring is how do we summon the best of who we are together? That's inspiring, that's motivating, that's leadership. These next five are just tactical things every leader has got to remember to do in order to allow that, you know, that forum for people to support what they create, for having those vision decisions, for making sure there's alignment and autonomy, for making sure that you're embodying it and showing it to people, and ultimately making sure you're managing the energy and the resilience of the groups. So here we go. Practice number one is you must establish the rhythm of the teams. You've got to establish the rhythm. And what that means is, let's say you're running an organization. The rhythm of the organization results in two ways. I want you to think about it. There's an internal rhythm. The way that you meet, the way that you set goals. The rhythm of planning your quarter or your OKRs, your KPIs. It's all the internal rhythm of the things that you do to function and run the business, right? Then there's the external rhythm. That is your release rhythm. That is your launch rhythm. That's your marketing rhythm. That's the public facing, public publicity rhythm. It's what the world sees of you. Now, those two rhythms are sometimes different. They're different organizationally, they're different in families. They're different in how you might run a new team versus an established team. But it's so important that you, as a leader, take that on the helm of like, oh, what does that need to look like? And you won't know, unfortunately, until you practice principle number one. People support what they create. I'll give you an example. In my company right now, we've added a whole bunch of new people and we're still trying to figure out, okay, what's this new rhythm going to look like? And so the new team has to come in and see the rhythm we're doing now. And then we've got to adjust and pivot to the new team to establish the norms. You all know this from storm and forming and norming in team research experience. Well, our job is to figure out, okay, what should that rhythm be on across the company, like your all hands meetings and processes to what each team or each organizational unit does or how you're going to improve? Families have to do this too. So you're a parent, okay, what's your family rhythm? What do you do Monday through Sundays? What are your rituals? What are those time slots that you're going to repeat? You might have a rhythm that you have with your partner or spouse. You go out to date nights on Fridays, right? Or you might have a rhythm that you have with this child versus that child in order to create that connection with them. Everything has to be thought of in terms of a rhythm or a ritual or a patterned calendar slot in order for everyone to feel like, oh, we're moving in unison here. When leaders don't establish or work to establish with their teams or their culture or their families what the rhythm is going to be. Everything feels random all the time. Everything feels like we're fighting fires, fighting, fighting. It always feels like we're fighting fighters, we're in emergency mode and we're going to burn out. And so I see this all the time and it's the hardest part because you as a leader often don't know what the rhythm needs to be yet. It has to happen in motion, which is why it's so important to be a good listener. So many leaders come into new companies and when they come into new companies, you know, I recently, I think it was last, it was two quarters ago, helped a CEO transition into a company where they had 12,000 employees. And I got brought in by the board because he was in trouble. And so I got brought in his 360 valuations from the whole team. He'd only been there like six months. Everyone hated the guy. And I couldn't like, it took a while to figure out. Very likable, emotionally intelligent, fun, smart business person. And I'm like, what, what is going on? And what I found out was when he came into the company, he just, he said, well, this is, this has to be our rhythm. Here's our quarterly goals, this is our yearly goals. This is how we meet. And just imposed a rhythm on an existing team. They weren't ready for that. And so it was like a revolt. And for them, they got used to doing something. This whole thing changed everything. It was too fast. And if you're an organizational leader, you know that, that's super hard. It always happens. Every company goes through it. Transitions in leadership are always difficult, always challenging. But your job is to be aware of that. And your job, if you're, if you're the person who has that vision decision, you have to work really hard to establish that normal rhythm, normal meeting cadence, normal way about trying to achieve a goal, normal way of managing a project, normal way of meeting a quarterly stretch. You have to establish that. And you're probably going to need help with it. This is a great distinction between where leadership and management diverge. Leaders work with managers to establish that people support what they create to establish that rhythm. And often the leader doesn't actually manage the rhythm. They help set it up, they agree to it. They go. And then there's project managers, there's mid level managers, there's other people who are going to make sure that that rhythm happens, right? Same thing might happen in your family. You might say, okay, we're all going to do this. But you might not be the person who always makes that thing happen. You might be like, you might have some support, you might have an assistant. You might assign the rhythm of the kids to the older kid, right? That there's an assignment happening there. But you need to be aware of it and ensure that rhythm is happening with great energy. The second big idea is that in that rhythm, your job as a leader is to consistently repeat, what is the vision? What are our beliefs? What should we focus on and not focus on? It's a repetition. What's the vision? What do we believe here? What are we working on? What are we not working on? What's the vision here? What do we do together here? What do we believe? What do we work on? What do we not? It's, you know, I often teach my own teams, I call this like fighting for focus. It's like the leader's job is to say the same thing. So many times, it finally sinks in. And you hope when you're leading teams that they get it. It takes years to get it. You can say the same thing. And I've had the blessing of working with US presidents, two of them now. And one of the common things that they always share, and you can read this in their books too, from presidential candidates and presidents, literally, you know, 200 years back, they all say the same thing. They're so surprised by how often that they have to say the same thing. They can't believe that they have to go from this organization, that organization, this team, that they have to say the same thing over and over. They have to repeat it. Here's our values, here's our vision, here's what we're after. Here's where we're focused on. It has to be so repetitive. You have to build that. People need to hear things. How many times before they get it? Not seven dozens. Right? They have to hear it seven times to understand it or to repeat it or to memorize it, to operationalize it over the long term. Now you're talking about hundreds of times. That's the difference between understanding and memorization and. And operationalizing. That's why too many leaders get in trouble. They think I already said it. It's like you did. You said it, they understood it, but they didn't operationalize it. So high levels of repetition are the most important things. What are we about here? What do we believe? What are we going to do and not do? So hard. So hard. So hard. Very important that you have that on top of mind. Third thing, Third major practice for great leadership. I try to teach my own internal teams this, that you have to ensure mindful striving as a leader. What that means is you've got to know when to hit the gas and when to slow it down. You've got to know when to take on the project and when. Not all. Not in terms of how to achieve it, because management can do that, but how to achieve it with harmony and sanity and avoiding burnout. And everyone struggles with this. Because you know what, if you're a leader, you probably have a bunch of high performers. You have great talent, right? And if you're really a high achieving leader, you've got amazing talent all around you, and everyone wants to go and go 99.99 miles an hour all the time. But every race you've ever seen on a track, the cars have pit stops. The car's got to take the pit stop in order to function at a high level, over and over. So you got to build in the pit stops, you got to build in the celebrations. You got to say, not now, this one thing. I know you want to do that, but let's do this. And that always takes a lot of discussion and conversation. But you hold the heart of the organization. You have to know when you're pushing too hard and you have to know when. You have to just ask for patience. You have to know when it's letting off the gas a little bit. You have to know when, like, okay, we're going to take a little bit less, you know, in this revenue or this quarter than we usually would. But you know what? Our people are stretched right now. And that's the hardest part. That's really ensuring that there's a harmony and an ongoing joy and the ability to have high performance. The reason most people don't like organizational leaders is because the organizational leaders burn them out. They don't listen and they don't practice everything we talked about in the principles in the earlier session of this training. And so knowing that you hold the heart and the energy and the resilience of the company reminds you, like, how do we ensure that we mindfully strive? Mindfully striving means not burning out, but mindfulness also means being attentive to the awesome things that are happening. Because so many people, you know what, you know when burnout sucks, when there's no appreciation, when there's no celebration. A lot of people will push themselves super hard as long as they're appreciated and there's some celebration and we're making the impact. If you take away the impact, you take away the appreciation. Now it just feels like the grind. No one wants that. Being mindful in real life, like our personal development, mindfulness means we establish a peace and a harmony and a gratitude and consciousness to, to the moment we're present and enjoying the journey and you ensuring that the journey is being enjoyed by the team. That's mindful striving. We're going for big things together, but we're being mindful, mindful to one another, mindful to our opportunities, mindful to our customers, mindful and grateful for the opportunities at hand. Fourth big idea is as you are trying to evaluate how you're doing, because evaluating the progress of you, the collaborators, the vision is so central to what you constantly have to do. Remember, you're kind of have that leadership vision on you, trying to see where are we out of alignment, where are we not doing well? I always tell especially new leaders or new managers of position, but also parents all the time. It's like it's more important for you to evaluate habits than outcomes. New leaders tend to obsess about the outcome, the KPI, the okr, they, they, they, they bemoan, they brutalize everybody on the final results. What's on the spreadsheet, what's in the metrics, what's in the panels of data. And they, it's all about that. And unfortunately they forget those things aren't real. Those things are outcomes. You don't need to like those outcomes happened. Why did they happen? Because there were habits at play. My job isn't to evaluate the quality of this thing, my job is to evaluate the quality of this thing. So one reason as an example, high performance habits kind of took over the world because it taught a lot of people. It's like, oh, measuring people's personalities or strengths or a lot of these other assessment tools out there actually don't correlate with long term success, well being or positive relationships. What does the high performance habits, because our habits create our outcomes over the long term, our habits create our real relationships, create peace of mind or not create the ultimate results. So you're evaluating the habits of the team more than the outcome. And when you do that now you're speaking their language versus speaking the language of the spreadsheet leader. And no one wants to work for the spreadsheet leader. They want to work with the person who has the heart and soul, who can talk about behavior and behavior change and, and patterns and what, what patterns? You need to recognize the habits of your team, the habits of your consumers, the habits of your kids, the habits of your spouse, the habits of your community, of your church. Like it's all about what are our collective habits? Because if we improve those, the panels, the outcomes, the KPIs and the OKRs get better. But if you start with those and you get obsessed about those and you're trying to manage and lead people to those, they get frustrated, bored, detached. It's not inspiring. What's inspiring is how do we summon the best of who we are together? That's inspiring, that's motivating, that's leadership. Last big idea here today with you all is it's simple practice. And I tease this out from the conversation about mindful striving because I think it's so important, and that is you have to teach the teams, teach the people who are leading, teach the people who you're impacting. You have to teach everybody the importance of recognizing our oneness and sharing love along the journey. That is we are in this together. And I appreciate you and I want to celebrate you. I want to make you the hero. I want to elevate other people. The sharing of love on the journey is so important that people forget about. It's the heart and the soul of leadership. It's like very few people understand that leadership is just a format, a function of loving other people. Because you'll never last as a leader unless you genuinely like people. If you don't love other people, if you don't love elevating them, if you don't love listening to them, if you don't love celebrating their wins. If you don't love working hard together to make something happen, you'll never last. Please don't elevate yourself to a leadership position if you dislike people. We don't need more jerk leaders. What we need is people who are operating from their heart and who love to celebrate other people. And why they love to celebrate other people because they recognize the oneness. They recognize the humanity. I'm like you, you're like me. We can, even though we might see things differently, be from different places, have completely different socioeconomic realities. Here we are together. We've decided to pursue this vision together. We have that vision. We've made the decision. We're all in. We, we're going to do it together. And as we do it together, if I can ensure that you love the process, that you feel cared for, that you feel celebrated when you win, that we are winning together. That's sharing the love, man. That's sharing the love. Your customers. When you make your customers feel loved, cherished, served, you make them the heroes. That's where word of mouth comes from. That's where the community builds. We have to realize it's like, it's about sharing the love. It's just about sharing the love. And you gotta find your way of doing that in your rhythm, in how you talk about others with their habits, in how you mindfully strive together, in how you practice all the principles that we talked about today. This is leadership. It's loving what we are doing together. It's caring for one another. They're not your followers, they're your collaborators, your co creators. That's why I love leadership.