S4:E3 Factors of Effective Leadership with David Rendall

Almost everybody needs to lead other people, and yet almost no one gets taught how to lead people, at least in the formal educational part of learning their trade or learning their craft or their profession.

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Most business owners, they fall into business ownership. It's like they're typically very good at the trade, whatever their work is, and they've built the business around that. But I think they quickly learn that business is about so much more than just doing the technical work. Building a successful business is really all about leadership because you're leading your team to deliver great outcomes for your clients. Then the question is, what does it take to lead a team? That's what I wanted to explore today with my guest David Rendell. He has a Doctor of Management degree in organizational leadership. He's also the author of a great book on the topic, The Four Factors of Effective Leadership, speaks on the topic around the world. So I couldn't be more excited to be joined with him and dive into this topic. So if Thank you, Dave, so much for making some time.

Yeah, I'm excited to be here. And actually what you said there at the intro kind of has me thinking about— I was just on a webinar or coaching session that I do every week for, or every month for IT business owners on how to speak in public more effectively. And he, a guy was talking about, they work with dentists and he's like, dentists get taught how to be dentists, but not how to run a dental business. And I'm like, that's everybody. CPAs get taught how to do accounting, but not how to run an accounting firm. Plumbers get taught how to fix leaky sinks, but not how to run a plumbing company. And I think this is another version of the same thing. Almost everybody needs to lead other people, and yet almost no one gets taught how to lead people, at least in the formal educational part of, of learning their trade or learning their craft or their profession.

Well, maybe the first question then is, what do you think makes a great leader then?

Yeah, I think first and foremost is somebody who can manage themselves, right? I think you can't— the whole concept that I teach in leadership is this idea of inside out, that you can't manage other people, you can't lead other people if you can't manage yourself. And so that kind of personal mastery that self-control, that self-awareness. I think those are the most important building blocks. I think too often when people are asking that question, how do I become a better leader, they're really asking like, how do I get those people to do what I want them to do? And the actual answer is be better at getting yourself to do what you want yourself to do. We had an American football coach, college football coach, university football coach just last week get arrested for going over to his girlfriend's house. He wasn't supposed to have a girlfriend. He was married. He got her pregnant. He ordered an abortion pill delivered with DoorDash to his college. The whole thing came out as a scandal. He got fired. He literally lost his mind, went and threatened her life, threatened his own life, and now he's in prison. He went from making $5 million a year and having a prestigious job and a good family to probably spending a significant amount of time in prison and being unemployed and broke. And that's because he couldn't control himself, right? He couldn't be an example of what he was trying to teach to other people. He couldn't be a role model for the behavior. I'm sure he preached discipline and effort and delayed gratification and self-control to his football team, and yet he couldn't do it himself. And so, I think that's the biggest building block is, do I have the ability and am I willing to hold myself accountable to the same kind of standards that I want to expect from the people I lead? And if the answer to that is no, then that's the place to start. How do I get myself to do what I want myself to do, what I need to do to be an example for the people that I'm leading? Because if I can't do that, none of the other tips and tricks are going to be effective.

In the book, you actually mentioned about the 4 factors that almost make up that great example. Like, you want to lead by example and not be a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do type leader. You want to be in the front line, in the trenches, going, hey, no one's above the law here, no one's above the rules. We've got a particular way that we operate and we all operate that way and be that example. Those four factors that you pulled out in the book— influence, integrity, inspiration, and improvement— there are a lot of factors and there are a lot of words that you could have picked. What kind of got you to narrow in on the four?

This all started personally for me. I was a young person who got opportunities to lead at a very young age in, in nonprofit organizations helping people with disabilities And because of my, you know, knowledge and because of maybe my motivation and who knows what else, I was sometimes supervising people my parents' age. And I knew that people my parents' age weren't excited about being supervised by a 24-year-old. And so I was reading everything I could get my hands on. I was studying everything I could get my hands on. I was going to workshops. I was listening to, at the time, tapes and CDs. And eventually, as you said, got my doctorate in management leadership. And when I put together these 4 factors, the idea was, what are the consistent themes that I see over and over again, not only in the stuff that I lead, but the, or the stuff that I'm reading, but the stuff that I'm experiencing and the stuff that other real leaders have done and have experienced, sort of the examples we know about Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Jesus and these famous leaders, Mother Teresa, that we're aware of. What are the things you can count on? Because you could probably come up with a list of 80 things you need to do to be effective leader. But I was looking for those, what are the things that are mentioned the most? What are the absolute foundational requirements? What are those themes that you see over and over again? And so it really was explicitly unoriginal, right? Because what I think hurts the leadership world sometimes is everybody's trying to make their thing sound like it's a new thing or a different thing or a better thing than somebody else's thing when all it is the same thing with different words or different dressing on it or whatever. So I'll give you an example. Simon Sinek is famous for his Start With Why, and he's got a TED Talk with 60 million views. But I do a time management talk, and when you study anything about time management, you have to start with purpose. Like, you can't manage your time if you don't know what direction you're going in. And I do a stress management talk and I did a bunch of research on stress management. And one of the things that, that makes things less stressful is knowing that the difficult thing you're doing is directed towards some kind of purpose, right? And Factor 3 in the Four Factors of Effective Leadership is inspiration, which is mostly about a meaningful purpose. So purpose is really everywhere when you study anything about— just about anything related to leadership or personal effectiveness. But Simon Sinek does a thing and it was unique enough in the way he presented it that a concept you can find almost anywhere sounded interesting and useful enough for people to just go wild for it. And so that's what I was trying to do is this person is saying this, but they're not the only one. And you could also find this here and here. And if there's enough of that, there's probably a reason for that. And it's probably more valuable than the thing you've only ever heard or seen one time. So that was really the method is just what are the themes of the things that I'm reading and hearing and studying and how do I put that all together in a way that's useful for people?

I think that idea of making it useful, I mean, going from intellectually reading it into putting it into practice is always the hardest, especially with leadership. And we're talking about influence, integrity, inspiration, improvement, like they're big ideas that then make it very hard to get down to the tactical side of things. I'd love your thoughts. Like, I talk a lot about systems and process, which is really just another way of saying what is a documented habit. So I'm curious to know what some of the habits— and maybe we go through each. Like, I'd love to go with influence. What is it that good leaders do consistently from a habit perspective or the way that they act to remain influential?

Yeah, that's a great question. So that's really— we'll end up touching all of them, but let's just— because the same thing applies to me as a speaker. If I'm on stage and I'm working on a book right now on how to be a better presenter, and I've done a 2-day workshop on that, if I'm on stage doing a 2-day presentation on how to give good presentations and my presentation is bad, fundamentally doesn't work because I'm doing the thing that I'm teaching. And if it's obvious I can't do the thing that I'm teaching, then it just simply doesn't work. The whole thing only works if it's a good presentation about how to give good presentations, right? So I think it— leaders don't want to believe this, but the reality is everything you do sends people a message. About whether or not you can be trusted. We don't ask unfit people for advice on fitness. So, if you're unfit physically as a leader, people are going to take a couple points off. Okay, here's a person who's telling us all to work hard and be disciplined and be effective and manage our time, and yet they don't seem to be able to get out and walk on a regular basis, or they eat terribly, Or they clearly— and so everything. They drink too much. What does that do to their decision-making? Or do people start to question whether the person has an addiction or an unhealthy connection with alcohol? The drugs you do or don't take, the alcohol you do or don't drink, the food and the healthiness of that food, the exercise that you do or don't do. And this one moves over into improvement. But are you learning? Are you growing? Are you studying? Are you taking classes? Are you reading books? Do you have healthy relationships? Do you care about your own children? The stories are endless of the person who ran their company effectively but neglected their spouse and their children. The person who neglected their health for the sake of the organization. But sooner or later, those things end up crossing over and your failures in the one area start to affect even if just people's impression of you, right? Oh, this person's saying these things and they do that at work, but they're living a different life at home. They're living a different life in private, so I don't have to listen to them because they're not really living out what they're saying. So I think all of the habits that you have or don't have, or the good habits that you have or the bad habits you have, end up affecting your leadership either positively or negatively. And so there's no real point at which you get time off as a leader, or you get to check out as a leader. Because everything you do ends up sending a message to people. What you wear when you're on— when I'm on stage, what I wear sends a message. And what you're wearing as a leader sends a message. And you need to decide, am I doing that intentionally, or are my clothes— and then people say, your clothes, people shouldn't judge a book by it. But they do. But they do. What you wear. And so if you want to communicate that you're casual, if you want to communicate that you're fun, if you want to communicate that you're serious, if you want to communicate communicate that you're a professional, if you want to communicate whatever it is you want, that you're athletic, that you're fit, that you're whatever it is you want to communicate. You have— there's nothing that doesn't matter when you're in, when you're in leadership, because everything is sending signals to people about what kind of person you are and whether or not you can be trusted. Factor 2, integrity. Can I trust this person with my work and with my effort and with my trust? And all the things you do end up sending those signals.

Because there's quite a lot of these little signals and factors that people are picking up on, like some they're going to be consciously picking up on, sometimes some of these things people are going to be subconsciously picking up on and reading the situation and going, I can or can't trust this person. Are there any things that, particularly from a leadership perspective, and let's say business owners, anything maybe that they're doing unintentionally, that really starts to erode some of these factors. I don't know if there are any obvious ones to you.

That's the whole one of integrity, right? So there's a psychological concept called leaking that basically says, let's say I didn't actually want to be on your podcast right now, that this was some kind of chore for me, but I didn't want to give you that impression. So I'm gonna, before I come on, I'm going to have some caffeine and I'm going to try to pump myself up and I'm going to remind myself to smile. And seem interested. What psychological research has basically showed us is even when you try to do all of that, what you really think and what you really feel comes out. To your point, where other people might not even be able to explain it, but they're like, ah, that didn't seem right, or that guy didn't like that, or I didn't really— that guy didn't really connect with me. So I think one of the biggest ones that affects that is Are you putting on a show? Are you faking it? Are you telling the company, "We really need to get behind this change," but you're not sure? Are you telling the company everything's going to be fine, but you're actually pretty certain things are going to be bad, but you don't want other people to know yet? Anytime your words don't match reality, don't match the truth, don't match your feelings, anytime you're faking it, pretending, putting on a show, manipulating, All of those things are going to have consequences, especially because you might think you're pulling it off. But the reality is people have sensors for that, to your point, even when they can't articulate it. And even when somebody might not even be able to show you on video when it happened. And so that's why integrity is so important. People think, okay, I learned you're supposed to care about people. And so I'm going to try to give people the impression that I care about them. It's no, unless you can cultivate legitimate reasons to care for people and actually begin to care for them, that is going to be an unsuccessful technique because it can't really be a technique. It has to fundamentally come from you. It has to be authentic. So I think that's the one that I reinforce. That's part of that inside out that I reinforce a lot in the book. You can't try to put a show on the outside that doesn't match what's really happening on the inside. You have to actually cultivate it on the inside. Let's take trust. If I want people to trust me, I can't be tricking them into trusting me. I have to genuinely become a person who is trustworthy. That's a lot of work. And so, that's what turns a lot of people off from some of the lessons of legitimate effective leadership is they're like, and we live in this kind of world, what's the hack? What's the shortcut? What's the quick tip? What's the way around it? What's the— and it's like there isn't one. And so that's why so many people end up failing in so many different but very predictable ways. If we had a dollar for every famous person who's thrown away their family and their career success for an illicit relationship, we'd be multi-billionaires, right? So these kinds of things, everybody thinks, I'm going to be the one who beats the system. I'm the one who's going to get past this without any problems. I'm the one who's going to be able to keep the secret. I'm the one. And it's— you won't. And even sometimes in the moment, and that's what's coming out after this story that I told you from earlier, a lot of people knew. A lot of people knew a lot along the way. There was a lot of suspicion before it even became public, and it wasn't being hid as well as the people thought they were hiding it. And it was starting to crumble even before some of these final events that precipitated it. And that's a difficult lesson, but it's important to know the truth, which is that this isn't fakeable.

Uh, yeah.

And if you're not really, if you don't really care about your people, if you don't really care about the company. One time I had a student, I, I used to teach non-traditional students. So these are people getting their university degree, but as adults with families, with careers, and they're coming to school in the evening to study university. And he said, my problem is my people aren't very motivated. And I said, okay, tell me about that. He was managing people. I said, tell me about that. I said, how do you feel about your job? And he goes, it's a job. And I go, I don't— I can't imagine. I can't imagine why your people are uninspired. Like, He expected that he could show up at It's a Job and have people who were intensely passionate about their work somehow. And that's just obviously not true. People wish they could come in late, but have employees that come in early, that they could leave early, but have employees that stay late. They wish they could not focus on quality, but have employees who do. And none of that's realistic, but we even have a phrase for it. You said it earlier. People love. Yeah, but do as I say, not as I do. They somehow imagine that could work, that I can be smoking a cigarette and tell you not to smoke, that I can be— that I can be 3 drinks deep and telling you not to drink too much, that I can have a drug problem and tell you to stay off of drugs, that I can be unfit and tell you to focus on your health, that I can have bad relationships but tell you to keep your loved ones close. The difficult lesson about leadership is it's difficult. And if there was a shortcut, everybody could do it and everybody could do it well. And I think it's a, it's an important lesson, but it's a tough lesson to learn that you actually have to go through the hard work to become a good leader, not to just seem like one. Yeah.

I feel like this is the reality pill that the business owner needs to hear because this is the hard truth.

Because everybody else is selling. Yeah, the opposite. You don't have to. And I talk about that in the book. I call them fact or fiction. Somebody will tell you, just use your position, just tell them they have to because you said so. Just use your power, threaten to take away their job or to punish them in some way or to affect them negatively in some way if they don't. Or have charisma, put on a show for people and seem like a person that you're not. And that will draw people in. Or there's— so there's all these shortcuts that people are selling, but that's because they're trying to do something to you which is dishonest because they know it's what you want to hear. And so it's again a little bit of me doing the opposite, which is practice what you preach. I'm going to give you some difficult information which isn't super fun to hear but is actually the truth and will be useful if you try it.

Well, I'd love your take then on one of the factors being inspiration. As a business leader, business owner, we want to inspire our teams, and that's part of being a great leader. But if I'm running a plumbing business, I'm not landing rockets on the moon, I'm not creating world peace. And obviously, whatever inspiration I'm providing, I have to really believe it if we want to be able to transfer that belief. What are your thoughts on how do good leaders inspire in potentially uninspiring industries or businesses?

Yeah, that's a great question. And I thought a lot about that. One of the questions I would ask people at the beginning of my speech for this is who's the greatest leader in the history of the world? People give the answers I said earlier, Gandhi and Mother Teresa and Jesus, whatever. And then later I ask a different question. I said, who's the person, who's the leader who had the biggest impact on your life? Who's the person who's been the most influential person in your life. Mom, dad, brother, sister, aunt, uncle, teacher, coach. It's never the big names. It's a real person who inspired them. But how? Through their daily modeling of the kind of life— it's your message. Yeah, it's not in a moment. It's systematically. My mom went to work that second job for 25 years so that I could have a better life and go to college and get a professional degree. It was my dad grinding it out year after year in a difficult job to help take care of the family and sacrificing the kind of car he wanted to drive so that we could have good Christmas presents, whatever, right? It was that coach who— but so it isn't— that's what I teach people. It isn't, it isn't that, that fake definition of inspiration. It's not big exciting speeches. Nobody thinks Mother Teresa gave big exciting speeches. Gandhi didn't give big exciting speeches. What did they do? Gandhi did the March to the Sea. Mother Teresa got up every single day and helped the poorest of the poor and the sickest of the sick who were in the most difficult circumstances imaginable. And she did it every day after day, week after week, month after month. Real inspiration. I've run a bunch of marathons. And so people say, hey Dave, how do you run a marathon? I didn't do a speech about marathons. I did a marathon. I teach people this over and over. If you lose, I've been to Australia enough to say it the Australian way. If you lose 10, 10 kgs, someone's going to ask you, what'd you do, right? You just inspired them to lose weight by losing weight. So it isn't the plumbing, it isn't the— it doesn't have to be the mission of the organization. It's that person inspired me because they care about me, and that inspires me to care about the people around me. That person inspired me because they put me first, even when it affected them negatively in some way. And I'm— now I'm going to try and be open to doing that same thing. I think another more specific example is the mission of the organization doesn't have to be inspiring to people. What the work accomplishes can be inspiring. So there's a great book about this where you ask your employees basically what their biggest dream is, if they want to buy a home, or they want to take an amazing vacation, or they want to put their kids through college. And then every day you help them. You even hire somebody— this book suggests— called the Dream Manager, who people can meet with on a monthly or quarterly basis where you help them get to that goal. And so this doesn't have to be about the plumbing. It's about helping that person. It's finding out why they come to work. I come to work because I'm trying to give my kids what I didn't have, because I'm trying to be a good husband, because I'm trying to afford that, that nice new truck, because I'd eventually like to start a business of my own. And so that's another way to inspire, is not to try to motivate people with what I care about, but to discover what motivates them. But again, that's an inside-out thing. If I don't know what motivates me, how am I going to motivate anybody else? But once I start to identify those things and I care enough to listen to and understand people, and so that's where self-discipline turns into influence. I understand myself and I can control and motivate myself. Then I start learning more about others and trying to understand the people that I'm leading. And then I use that information to motivate and influence them because I can't control them, but I can influence them. But I use my understanding of them, my conversation with them, my concern for them. And that's where integrity is so important because if people think I'm trying to manipulate them with that information, they're not going to communicate with me. But if they know I genuinely care about them and want what's best for them, they're going to share that with me. And then I'm going to go, okay, this person's trying to be the first person in their family to go to college. This person's trying to, you know, buy a home for their parents. Because their parents have always been struggling and they need to retire. This person is trying to— and so now you're inspiring people with their own goals and their own dreams for success, not with yours. But then that requires some of the other things that we talked about, which is they have to legitimately believe that you want to help them get there. And that's where things like integrity and trust come in.

It's interesting to see how all of these intertwine so well. Because we talk— you touched on that idea of improvement, and we're thinking about you need to be the best example, so you need to work to improve yourself. But also, great leaders are then looking to improve those around them and want to see them doing really well. That book that you mentioned about having maybe a manager that's checking in with them— I don't know if you've seen any other systems or rhythms of great leaders that are consistently investing in their team and in their people. And what does that look like? Because that's challenging for some business owners because they feel like, well, that's a cost, that's an expense. I'm investing in this person here and it's— so sometimes it's hard for them to reconcile that.

So what do you believe is the right word? You just said it though. It's not a cost, it's an investment.

Yeah.

And I think it goes back to Stephen Covey's first habit of Effective People, which is being proactive. I think the habits that I've seen and that I've recommended, for example, one of my disciplines when I was a leader is I knew I wouldn't naturally I wouldn't just accidentally end up giving people specific feedback on a regular basis. So, I would make a list of the 30 people that worked for me and I would make sure that once a month I wrote them a handwritten note that thanked them for something specific that they'd done that helped to move the mission of the organization forward, for example. I think with your key employees, you don't wait to reactively interact with them about things. You schedule one-on-one time with people and you structure it. To make it related to their goals and the organization's goals and finding the crossover and the synergy between those two things. So, I think those are the kinds of things. And also, scheduling your own time. Are you scheduling time for planning? Are you scheduling time for thinking ahead? But also, to your point, are you investing in relationships? One of my favorite things that I've— that I learned a long time ago, it's It goes by different names, the Eisenhower Matrix and stuff like this, but it basically is a 2x2 matrix about urgency and importance, right?

Yeah.

And it— what it really says is that the most effective people focus on things that are important and not urgent. And so I think those are the habits that I— that most people never get to, and they're all the ones I recommend. Learning is never urgent, but it's important, and so it never gets done because you never have a learning emergency. You might have an emergency that comes up because you didn't learn something, but learning isn't going to be the that fixes it in that moment. And you might have a relationship emergency, but you can't fix it in that moment. It's because of the deterioration of the relationship over time because you failed to invest in it. Because to your point, you saw it as a waste of time or a waste of energy or something that you could have used somewhere else that you saw as more valuable. So I think those are the things that I think leaders miss the most, is they'll do a lot of reactive, urgent habits or practices and then say, I don't have time to plan ahead. I don't have time to build relationships. I don't have time to talk to people about their goals. I don't have time to cast a vision. I don't have time to talk about the future. I don't have time to learn and improve. I don't have time to invest in myself. And then that's where everybody else then has that same excuse. Even a habit as simple as When I walk into the room for a meeting, I take my phone and I shut the ringer off and I set it down in the middle of the table. And as the highest ranking person in the room, that gives everybody else permission to do the same. And then we all talk and interact as a real team instead of I'm sitting there like this, but I'm hoping other people probably pay attention and interact with each other. If I can't do it, then nobody else will either. So I think those are the kinds of habits that people need to invest in. Is this an investment? And the reality is those investments are investing in your retirement. You guys call it superannuation funds. We call it 401(k)s. Investing in your retirement is always important, but it's never urgent until you want to retire and you're broke. And at that point, it's too late to get that compound interest that's actually going to turn it into something. And so, investment is a good I would tell— here's a practice for leaders. Do a leadership— do a time audit and ask yourself, what percentage of my time am I investing in things that are important and not urgent? And for most people, that would be really low. And that gives everybody else permission to do the same all the way down through the organization. And then pretty soon everybody's just dealing with emergencies or wasting time because they're exhausted from an emergency, and very few people are building actual value in the business.

It sounds like you've been working on these ideas for a long time and adding to them, and you're just— your body of knowledge. Is there anything about leadership and these qualities that you're seeing has— is changing or has changed, whether that's just because of what's going on in society or your understanding of the topic, the more that you've been focused in on it over the years. They seem pretty foundational, pretty fundamental, like influence, integrity, inspiration, improvement. These are evergreen and will stand the test of time. But how's your thinking evolved on the topic?

Yeah, I think that's a good point, and that's what I'm trying to give people, is something you can always count on, right? This isn't Google SEO practices that are going to change when the algorithm changes, or 5 hacks to get you more viewers on TikTok. These are things you can count on. They're built on human nature. And people want to tell you that people are changing or society is changing. People are not changing and society is not changing. I did one the other day, I need to find it, but I'll do a good enough version. Oh, we can't have democracy, that'll ruin society. You need the good people to rule the bad people. And then, oh, you can't have books, you can't have everybody reading books, you got to have— and then you can't have newspapers, you can't have radios, radio is going to ruin society, everybody's going to listen to the radio all the time. You can't have records, you can't have rock and roll music, you can't have TV, you can't have movies. Everybody thinks that whatever the— now it's social media, and Australia is famous, I think, for limiting it for people under a certain age, which I just, you know, no offense, but I think it's absolute nonsense. Everybody loves to blame whatever's going on now with some new thing. It's human nature. Hey, here's a good example. If I told you that my wife and our 3 kids spent last Saturday curled up on the couch together watching television, and this is one of my favorite Australian phrases, you'd be like, Dave, you're a legend. What kind of family have you built that you could get your spouse and all of your children to watch the same television shows together? What was the biggest fear in the 1980s? You're the biggest loser on earth if you and your family sit around and watch TV together. What is the matter with you? Don't you care about your family? You're just wasting your time. No, it's— why has it changed? Because it's quaint that everybody's watching the same thing instead of all watching their own thing on their own individual screens. But the reality is TV wasn't ruining anybody's life any more than books were ruining anybody's life, any more than newspapers were ruining anybody's life, or any more than social media is ruining anybody's life. One of my perspectives from studying psychology, which is what I did before leadership— and leadership is just applied psychology— is human nature doesn't change that much. People don't change that much. People are still trying to be dictators, even though we've learned that ultimately fails. But they like to hang on for as long as they can until their life ends, usually violently and in disgrace. And people keep trying it. People keep hating the people next door to them at the country that's won over at the religion that's different than theirs. More things stay the same than change. And we love to get sucked into, here's a new tactic, here's a new method, here's something that's new about the world or about people, and everything's going to change from this moment on. And then it doesn't. And so I do think techniques are going to change. For example, How do I influence people in a virtual work environment when we never meet face-to-face? How do I earn people's trust in a virtual work environment when we never meet face-to-face? How do I inspire people? That the factors don't change, but the tactic of how you implement that might change when you're in a different environment. But then even that, sometimes the answer is you don't. You realize that people need to meet in person and you go and you physically meet with those people on a regular basis because that's necessary even if the majority of the time is to work online together. You travel. There was an old commercial in the United States for an airline, but they put it out for the first time in the 1980s and said, "Instead of being on the phone with our customers," and the person handed out airline tickets, "we're gonna go meet people face-to-face like they did in the good old days." You could make another commercial for that with email. Then you could make that same commercial relevant again with Zoom calls and all this other stuff. The principle doesn't change. Relationships are built face-to-face, in person, in real life. The question is, are you going to invest in that, or are you going to see it as a cost and that's a waste of time and energy and not acknowledge that reality? And at— but at the same time, Again, there are techniques that can help you with each of these factors. For example, in a virtual work environment, because the world has changed, but even though it has, there's airplanes. So fly to the place where your virtual assistant lives and meet them in real life. Fly to the place where your outsourced workforce lives and build relationships with them in real life. Take advantage of those same technologies that we have and build real relationships with people face to face. Which will be even more valuable in a world that's become so virtual.

I love this. One of the key themes I think I'm going to take away from our chat, it's just do the work. There is not shortcuts here. And I think intuitively a lot of people know that, and business owners know that, that they need to be the best example. And you know what from wrong is, and your company values you need to display that, and that's what's going to attract more people in that resonate with those values and repel those that don't. My last question is, I don't know if you've got any advice for, let's say, a technically brilliant leader, as in they're technically— they know how to do the technical work and they're great at doing that, but they struggle with leading people. And I suppose it's like, to try and wrap up some of the ideas that we've got here. I don't know if you have any, yeah, words for that type of business owner.

Yeah, I think this is going to be weird advice, but I would say don't. After I wrote The Four Factors of Effective Leadership, my next book was called The Freak Factor, and it was about how I was always in trouble because I couldn't sit still and be quiet and do what I was told. And now people pay me to stand up and talk and run my own business, right? So what it turned out was a lot of my weaknesses were also strengths. In fact, all of my weaknesses were also strengths, and all the things that I was trying to fix and other people were trying to fix about me were actually my best qualities. And one of the, one of the implementation activities for that truth is I'm not the right person to be doing everything. If I get to a point, and I'm a solo business owner, so I'm in the position that we're talking about, if I get to a point where I need a website and I don't know how to do websites, and I also am not the kind of person who does well with those kinds of technical challenges, I can either spend a lot of time and energy trying to get better at websites, or I can hire somebody to do websites for me. When I get to the point where I know I need to do more marketing but I don't really understand it, I don't really have a facility with it, and I also don't really enjoy it, and my time could be better spent somewhere else, I hire someone. So what I teach people is partner with someone who's strong where you're weak. And so if you look at technical industries. Microsoft, for example, Bill Gates has always had basically a co-CEO, even when they weren't called that, who had interpersonal skills, the charisma, and those kinds of things. And at one point, he even quote-unquote retired to become the chief software engineer and let someone else basically run the company. So I think there's no shame when you're the founder, when you're the CEO, when you're the president, when you're the whatever, when you're in charge, there's nobody who says what that person has to do and what they can't do. You ultimately, you have the ultimate in delegation authority to craft that role in a way that works for you. And so, I'm a big believer in partnership that you don't need to and you won't also be good at it of trying to become some different kind of person. And if you're very technical and you're very skilled in your technical abilities, then find a person that you trust, cultivate a relationship one-on-one with a person you trust who probably isn't as technical, but is much more interpersonal and relational and work together as a team to run the organization. And again, this has happened at very high levels at Google. They even had 3 people being co-CEOs at some point. But again, I don't even think it has to be co-CEOs. You could be CEO and COO. You can craft it in a lot of different ways. But I think the answer to that oftentimes is just partnership. I think your strength is being technical, being good at the work, knowing how to do the work, pick the pieces that you think fit best with that, and then outsource the ones that don't usually to one person. But again, CEOs have been doing this for years with executive assistants, right? I'm not organized. I'm not detail-oriented. I'm not good with schedules. But those seem like— we like to think of those as like lower-level work, which they're not. But that same principle applies to quote-unquote higher-level work. And we should be okay sharing that kind of stuff with a person or a team of people who we all complement each other. And together we're a powerful leadership team, but we all have weaknesses that are complemented by the other people on the team.

I love that, and it fits really well with our model and the way that we teach this idea of system— systemizing all around you, all the things that must happen a certain way, so it creates the space for you to work on your best work, your genius, where you're adding the most value, and you systemize the heck out of everything else to make sure it's done to the standard and the way that you like things done.

Yeah, and that's the opposite of the scenario you just posed. That's usually a very idea-oriented visionary leader who won't spend the time and energy to systematize and organize, and then they need to partner with the systematic organizer, right? In fact, that's one of the types that I talk about in Freak Factor. But they oftentimes won't because they don't want to, quote unquote, give up control, or they don't just understand how that model works, or they think they should be a better person who can do that, but they just can't. Um, and there's nothing wrong with that. And EOS calls that an integrator, and different systems and groups have a definition of that because it's just a universal need that there's technical people who aren't good at the interpersonal, and there's interpersonal people who aren't good at the technical. There's big idea people who aren't good at execution, and there's execution people who aren't good at big idea stuff. Stuff. And we don't need to. And I also— this is a different belief— we also can't become those people without certain downsides to side effects to doing that. And so I think the real solution is that's what organizations are for. My favorite quote that I end that speech with is, organizations exist to make people's strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant. So especially at the CEO founder level, again, back to leadership, are you modeling that? Do you allow other people to make your strengths effective and your weaknesses are relevant, or are you constantly chasing your weaknesses, which then teaches everybody else they've got to be busy chasing their weaknesses, and everybody's doing things a little bit worse than they could be done by the right person because nobody can acknowledge the reality of what they're good at and what they're not good at.

Yeah, perfect. Maybe just in closing, I know it's a really deep topic and there's lots of different ways that we can head. If people wanted to find out more, where would be the best place for them to dig into your work?

Yeah, my website is drendall.com, so D as in David and then R-E-N-D-A-L-L.com. All the stuff's there, all the links. All my stuff's on Amazon and it is available worldwide. It's on Kindle, it's on Audible, but also I think you can get them print version through Amazon Australia if you go on there. The Four Factors of Effective Leadership is available. If not, I've been there a bunch of times and I bet there's some used copies floating around. I even wrote an Australian to American translation guide for somebody in their copy of the Four Factors. I realized that Australian sounds different basically because of the way you make your vowel sounds differently than the way a standard American accent were. And so I wrote those 2 or 3 things down so that they could speak Australian. So there's a Four Factors floating around there. But yeah, it's all there on the website or you go to Amazon. It's all on the World Wide Web.

Perfect. I'll pop a link through to those as well. And yeah, just a huge thank you for your time, David. Thank you.

Yeah, thank you. Well, have a good Wednesday while I'm finishing out my Tuesday here.

Yeah, enjoy it. All right, see you, mate. All right.

Bye.

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