The 2 Best Tools in Your Leadership Toolkit

Hello, my friends.

I'm Brendon Burchard, host of the Brendon show and founder of growthday.com and I'm honored to be your high performance coach today. I believe that every day we can be inspired. We can live with intention and purpose. We can bring the joy and honor the struggles of each day to push ourselves to grow, to serve, to be a role model, to lead extraordinary lives. I believe that every day is a great day to grow. That's why I started my company, growthday.com it's an online personal growth platform where you can get me and the world's best personal development teachers live coaching you every week, sharing our wisdom, keeping you motivated and accountable, encouraging you to find the aliveness and the connection and meaning of life that we're all after. If you're not a member yet, please go sign up@growthday.com and join our huge worldwide community of achievers. For less than a dollar a day, you get the world's best teachers live every week. And look, you've probably known for a long time that you needed some expert guidance and inspired community and life changing tools. So please, your breakthrough awaits you@growthday.com now let's get to today's episode. My friends, please listen closely. Maybe you take some notes so you remember these insights of personal growth and share this episode with three of your friends because we all have to share more positive messages in the world today. So share this with three friends just like you who are committed to their personal growth. And also be sure to tag me or DM me on Instagram. Rendon Burchard, join our million plus community there on Instagram so I can say hi. Thanks again for listening.

Now let's begin. Leadership is all about alignment, autonomy. And your job as a leader is like a sculptor, like an artist. And the two tools that you have as an artist, as a leadership artist, they're both chisels, you know, and you're gonna go shape something. You've got an alignment chisel and you got an autonomy chisel. And you got to use these two to shape your culture, to shape people's behavior, to shape how you direct things. You're an artist and it takes artistry to understand them too. So let me talk about each one of them. Okay? First one is alignment. Your, your role or your position or the influence that you're developing with other people, which we'll talk about is so much about you learning. How do I align people to towards that vision, that vision, decision. How do I align everyone's thoughts, feelings, beliefs, efforts towards something significant. How do I align everyone's thoughts, feelings, efforts towards something significant? You're really playing an alignment game. I hope by now you read my book High Performance Habits. I'm so blessed with the success of that book, but also never worked harder on any research study in my life than High Performance Habits. But one of the things I always hear from readers literally around the world is the love of that one story where I tell about the story of the woman who she discovered as a striver her whole life. She could get things done. She could knock off the to do lists, she could make it happen. She could set the plans, she could mobilize people. You know, she was a high performer. She was great at what she did. But one day she realized that achievement wasn't her problem. She kept thinking she had to achieve the next thing to be happy, achieve the next thing, achieve the next thing, achieve to the next thing. And then one day she realized actually achievement wasn't her problem. Alignment was her problem. She was getting things done, but it wasn't aligned with the truth of who she was. She was capable, but a lot of her efforts were all over the place and they were aligned or focused. She wanted to live a great quality of life, but her lifestyle and work style weren't in harmony so that she could enjoy or be satisfied by her efforts. And so she was a great achievement. Terrible at alignment. So she was miserable. Wow. I literally can still remember her voice when we had that breakthrough as I was coaching her. He's like, click. She got it. Oh, I'm good at achievement, but I suck at alignment. No wonder I'm miserable. Well, guess that comes into your family too. That comes in your personal life, that comes in your work life. That comes in your teams. It's like you might be getting a lot done, but if people don't feel aligned, the culture sucks. You might be getting a lot done, but if you don't feel aligned, you're getting the wrong things done. You might be getting a lot done, but it's not aligned with your true interests, your true passions, things that draw from you that twin powers of curiosity and enthusiasm. If it's not aligned with that, oh, you could do it all day long, but now it starts feeling miserable. Even if it contributes, even it makes a difference. Some of you are doing great things that make a difference in the world and you don't care about it anymore and you're torn up and guilty inside and you feel shame. I have this opportunity to make a difference I'm not doing it. What's wrong with me? There's nothing wrong with you. It's not an opportunity that's aligned with you. There's nothing wrong with you. You haven't found alignment yet. That's all. That practice goes into every area of your life. That principle goes in every area of your life, I should say, is that your marriage is like, you have a great marriage, but if you're not, if you're both not aligned, it's just going to be so difficult to survive the hard days, the financial troubles, the challenges with the kids, the difficulties in each other's careers or lives. It's like, oh, we got to be aligned in this vision decision that we have made together. It's so important. And your job in this principle is to constantly be noticing who's in alignment, who's out of alignment, what behavior on your team is in alignment, is out of alignment. Because. Right. You're creating a cultural expectation of behaviors too. As we'll talk about who's in alignment, who's out of alignment. You might have five people who are just rowing the boat in the same direction and one guy in the back who's putting the paddle in the wrong thing. And way off in that alignment ruins the rhythm, ruins the ability for that thing to speed ahead. Right. You got to know who's in alignment, who's out of alignment. I always say, you know, I've been blessed to be in like crazy negotiations. My life, one of, one of the greatest, coolest moments of my life was I got to see a billion dollar deal transpire. I was in the room, a real billion dollar deal. This is when, this is before the days in which every company became a unicorn somehow. And I got to see this and I got some coaching from that person who literally executed a billion dollar deal. She walked in, she made this amazing deal happen, became one of my great mentors, and she told me one of the things she thinks of before she goes into negotiations is alignment. Who's in alignment in that room, who's not in alignment, of all the people they interact with in that room, outside of that room, their peers, their co workers, their teams, who's in alignment. You finding where there's going to be that conflict of alignment, that's like your leadership vision. You're like scanning for it all the time. You're scanning for misalignment. That's what you got to do. That's part of the not fun part of the job. Sometimes you're just scanning for alignment and it's kind of like you're trying to get. You know, it's like when the kids are all lining up for the bus, you're trying to get them in one line.

Why?

Actually don't know why they. But anyway, there I get it in one line. It's like, okay, can we give them a line?

Why?

Because it's a little more efficient. Okay, cool, great. It's easier to figure out, okay, cool. You've got to find that way to line things up. See, you mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually are aligning with your work today or you're not. You with your team, your culture, the people you're trying to serve, you're in alignment with that or you're not. You with the customers who you serve and you love and you care for. You're in alignment with them in their journey, in their lives, or you're not. And it is binary. It is aligned, misaligned, aligned, misaligned. And either you got to get your mind right to be in that vision decision. You have to summon yourself and like, oh, right, I got to realign here. I got to realign. Let me get in this game. Let me be here. Let me row together. Or you got to get out of the boat because you don't want to be that guy or gal with that, that, that. Or and. And you're moving that rudder all over the place, ruining everybody else's alignment and their speed. You've got to take accountability that leaders. If you're in the wrong place, you got to remove yourself fast. Ditto. If you're the leader and you got someone that. Who you've. You've said, hey, man, put that ore in here. The same time we're all doing it. Go like this. Hey, are you okay back there? Do you need anything back there? Seems like we're not in alignment here. Got to get in line in here. What do we got to do? Let's have some conversations. Oh, you can't get alignment. You refuse to get in line. It get out the boat. You can't have people who are misaligned on your team. You just can't do it. Now, I know that brings up the other person, but what if that's my husband? What if that's the kids? It's like, okay, great. Then you take that ability for yourself to stay internally aligned with what's important to you, but then you got to come together on what that decision is for them to move forward towards. That's those things all coming together.

Hey, it's Brandon jumping back in here. Again, are you looking to go to the next level in your life right now, the next level of joy, abundance, success? Then you already know that you need to journal about your lessons learned in your life. You got to track your moods and your habits. You have to learn from the best personal development coaches and teachers in the world. And you got to stay inspired and accountable so that you can be more focused, disciplined, joyous and keep growing. That's what the Growth Day app is going to help you to do, my friend. It's the world's first all in one personal development app. It has all of the tools you need, all the coaching and the community that you need to level up, to progress every week, to track your breakthroughs, and to keep growing in every area of your life consistently over the long term. So go start your transformation right now@growthday.com or just download the Growth Day app on your phone right now.

Every day.

You can keep improving every day. We are here for you and every day is truly a great day to grow together. So let's make self improvement a way of life. Let's make that self improvement stick. Go to growthday.com right now.

Now, I said you have two tools. One is alignment and the other one is autonomy. Autonomy. I think in the last decade the word trust got a lot of play, which I love. But I think autonomy is one of the actual tools that sculpts that outcome. Autonomy means you give other people decision making authority and trust to do stuff. Autonomy means you let the other person be the other person. You let them express themselves fully, be who they really are, choose to align or not. In other words, autonomy means to hold up the autonomy tool, you got to put down the control stick. You got to go, okay, all right, I'm going to hand you some power here to make this decision or do this thing, or autonomy means I'm just going to let you do your thing and I'm going to be okay with it as long as you're aligned. Be you. I mean, the famous story, and I have my, my executives always read this book called 11 rings. And it's the story of Phil Jackson taking the Chicago Bulls to six rings and then the LA team to, I think five rings, if I remember right. An absolute, probably the best coach living today. And his story is so extraordinary. And he shares in the book and as he talks of the famous story of, you know, you had Jordan and Pippen and then some changes and then you had Dennis Rodman, this wild character, this person who was uncontrollable by Other teams who had been fined and sanctioned and almost kicked out of the NBA and no one could get ahold of this guy. And you see that what Phil was a master at was help allowing Dennis Rodman to be Dennis Rodman, making sure that he was part of the process, making sure that he understood where everyone was going, what the needs were, where we were aligned, what we were working on, but allowing Dennis to be Dennis Rodman. Do the Rodman thing. And I think it's so important as a coach, as a leader, that you understand autonomy means let them let their authenticity fly. Let them let that authenticity be part of it. Don't micromanage it, don't control it, don't cut it out of existence. Let people be who they are in your family, on your teams, and demand that of yourself too. Right? Demand that of yourself, that you are authentic. Demand of yourself that you are autonomous and not just pushed around doing everything else everybody else says to do. That's Personal Development 101. Guys, we're in growth day. We got to talk about that. It's critical. I want you to think about that, okay? Who in your life, you got these two tools to shape things, okay? Who could I give a little more decision making authority or trust to? Who could I go and validate and cheer on and allow themselves to be more of themselves? How can I recognize or reward people so that they feel autonomous and like, oh, wow, this is me. This is me here at work. I like this because if you try to box people in or control people, well, we know what happens in families. Same thing happens in companies. Same thing happens in relationships. They die, they end at some point. The more you try to control somebody's autonomy, the more their vision for their life breaks from reality. And when that happens, they're going to make some hard decisions and they're going to leave you, they're going to leave the team, they're going to leave the organization because they're going to want to go express themselves. They're going to want to be who they really are in their own way and be allowed to do that. So important. Every time I have something across my organizations or teams or brands and I want to micromanage it or I want to super control it. It's like I have to pull myself back and like, okay, where are they in this life cycle? Where are we here together? What are we working on? Where's the alignment? Where's the misalignment? What's happening? And every time I want to do something where I feel like it would be taking away some control. It's like, don't. Right. I literally just last night had this conversation with this executive who got in some hot water because they got in trouble because they demanded of all their executives that when they're on Zoom, they use this exact same background. It was like a company wide thing and it caused so much turmoil. It created all this dilemma and all this back fighting and all this drama in their company. And they were both shocked by it and they couldn't understand and our team's revolting and this, they're terrible. And I'll go, why did you feel compelled that you had to take away that level of control of what their background looked like? And they were like, oh, well, no, you know, because we're trying to create this theme. And I'm like, that's people's houses, that's people's lives. Like, why can't they just show that? You know, I mean, I get the idea of not having naked people running around the background and you got to blur some backgrounds once in a while. Guys, I'm not saying let anything fly. What I'm saying is that was a unilateral decision to the entire team about a thing that's not significant towards the vision and the efforts and the rhythm of the company. That sounds like micromanagement to me. No one likes that. It steals away their autonomy. Like you need to change that. And they could. Like, it took them probably 20 minutes to understand what I just told you. Because for them, they, a lot of people need control. But see, they misaim the control. Their tools for autonomy. Break alignment. See, if those two cross, it's kind of like in Star Wars. If you cross, it's bam, explosion. It's terrible. It's like you got to make sure that those two things are in unison together. So here's their alignment ideas. Was we're all in this together. We're a culture. We're all awesome together. We love you, we respect you. We want you to be your own person. Isn't it great to work here? Great. That's alignment. That's where we're going. And then they take this autonomy thing and they turn it into a control thing and they slice into that alignment and now everyone revolts. So here's my thing for leaders. One of the simple principles when you understand alignment, autonomy. Notice micromanagement is not in those two hands. Be very cautious, my friends. That's where people mess it up all the time. You micromanage the kids, what happens? They don't develop the autonomy, what happens? They follow the wrong crowd. You got to be careful. It happens in every area of our relationships. You micromanage that spouse.

It has to go here.

This has to be this way. At some point, they're like, jesus, I feel like I'm in a prison here. This is crazy. Why does everything have to be an exact, exact way all the time? It's like, let me. Let me be a person. Let me do my thing. You got to be careful. You got to be aware. You got to give them autonomy. You got to keep people aligned. It's one of my favorite topics in leadership. I hope this supports you all.

Okay, my friend. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Brendon Show. Tell some people about this episode. It's on each of us to spread positivity and empowerment during these times of chaos and negativity, right? So I'm asking you to be the dealer of hope and personal growth and education in your tribe. So take a screenshot right now and share the screenshot and this link to this episode with three of your friends today. Post it on social media. Use the hashtag growthday. That's growthday, because that's the name of my company and we're always giving away prizes to our community. If you'd like to, to help me personally, then please rate and review the podcasts on Apple Podcasts. Give us some stars, cheer us on, leave a review. Because believe it or not, that stuff actually really does help. And I read all of them. So my last thought for today, please remember, you are stronger than you think and the future holds good things for you. Tomorrow can be an inspired day. Every new morning is a second chance. Every day is a great day to grow. We're thankful to have you here in the Growth Day community. So be sure to go deeper with us@growthday.com.

Sam.