4 Tips to Lead with IMPACT!

I always look at how I could have been better, how I could have worked faster, how I could have worked more effective, how I could have reached out to others for help. The ability to blame yourself for the problem instead of blaming others for the problem is huge in business. Reality is, I think all business leaders need to check their ego. I think the CEO needs to check their ego and realize that they have a team of people that are doing things. And the CEO needs to speak last. The CEO's job is to grow our people and to align our people and inspire our people. And that doesn't happen with ego. The CEO's job is to check their ego and remember that they do report to the CEO. It's not their organization and they're not really the tiebreaker. I think there was a disservice that happened in the book Traction by Gino Wickman, where he talked about the integrator being the tiebreaker. You shouldn't have a person who's a tiebreaker. You should have a person who's able to build a team that can actually have good, healthy debate, that can have really good discussions, that can share ideas and can gain consensus as a team, versus one person needing to be a tiebreaker. So it's less about one person shedding their ego, and it's more about all leaders needing to dissolve that ego. I was thinking a little bit about how leaders react and what sets them apart. And the first part is that leaders need to react quickly. We need to actually operate from our intuition, our kind of combined sense of what's happening around the organization and our team are looking to follow. Leaders need to make decisions, be decisive, and move. General Patton used to say that a good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week. And there's a little bit of that momentum, creating momentum where leaders just need to act. Part two of that, however, is leaders also need to slow down a little bit and think before they speak. So somehow we also need to be able to process some of these ideas we have, because people will follow everything we say. And the entrepreneurial leaders often think out loud, and that can be a very dangerous position to be in. So we need to move quickly and act quickly, but we also need to pause and think before we speak. A delicate balance as a CEO. So when I first started in business 30 years ago, I was with a company called College Pro Painters, and I think Greg Clark, the founder of College Pro Painters, put in place one of the core things to look for in leaders, in great leaders. And it was something that they called introspection. And as I recall, introspection was the ability to blame yourself for the problem instead of externalizing and blaming all the outside conditions or forces at play. Instead of blaming another person or blaming an economy or blaming another business or blaming a competitor or blaming whatever, it's blaming yourself. And that's been one of my biggest strengths in business, I think, since day one is I always look at how I could have been better, how I could have worked faster, how I could have worked more effective, how I could have reached out to others for help. The ability to blame yourself for the problem instead of blaming others for the problem is huge in business. Simon is a brilliant thought leader, a brilliant leader in his own right. And he talked about how to be very effective as a leader and manager. You need to have perspective and empathy. And I'll talk about the empathy component first. The reality is every single person that reports to you, every single person that you're leading is a human struggling with the human condition in our day to day lives. Every single person around you is struggling with something today. Whether they're moving, a kid, moving out, a relationship, a health issue, financial issues, the drive to work, the barista who is shitty to them in the morning. Every single person is struggling with something and have some empathy to that because maybe they don't intend to be screwing up, maybe they're just trying their best and if you're the one person that actually cares about them, they'll go through brick walls for you. The second component is perspective. And I think some of this comes with wisdom. Some of it comes with eq, but some of it comes with the leader just slowing down and looking at the whole situation, looking at the whole aspect of the business and just taking some time to pause. I think that's one of the key things I had to work on as a leader was the ability to slow down a little bit, step back from the situation and give myself some perspective. So I think Simon's absolutely right on those two areas. So don't stop now. Click here. There's more great videos that you can keep learning from and together we're unlocking amazing leadership lessons together.