What Does it Take to Be a Good Leader? (2020 Business Training)

In this clip, we are going to talk about what it takes to be a good leader and what a good leader actually needs to do. But before we do, don't forget to subscribe, hit the bell button if you're watching YouTube, but subscribe whatever channel you are on because you enjoy tips on growing yourself and growing businesses. Businesses. There we go. A lot of people tend to think, okay, just because I'm a good individual contributor, just because I'm good at my job, let's say. So for me, An example would be back in the day, uh, I got really good at marketing quickly and I was a really good individual contributor and I thought naturally the next progression would be, uh, the next progression would be becoming a manager. And that's actually not true because there are individual contributors and there are managers and managers eventually grow into becoming leaders of companies, whether they are C-suite, uh, director level, VP level, and you know, all the way up there. And so what I learned was it's not really about you at the end of the day. And I learned this from tribal leadership. So there's different, uh, there's 5 different kinds of phases of a company, right? Um, and 5 levels I should say. We'll start with the third, the middle. The middle is where you think that you're really good. You don't think that your company's really good. You think you're really good at what you do. So you are the superstar and those are the people that actually end up being, um, the arrogant people out there. And that was me back in the day. I thought I was better than everyone and you know, I thought I did better work. I thought, you know, naturally I should be the leader, right? And that's actually completely wrong because the companies that are actually really good, These are the companies where everyone thinks, you know, the team, the entire team is good. Now if you go up to level 5, that's when you're like NASA where you, you're just trying to help the entire world. Um, and you're not trying to like fight with other organizations. You're just doing something for the greater good. If you're trying to become a leader, it's no longer about how good you are as an individual contributor. What you have to be good at as a leader, it's a different skill set. So the one book I recommend reading, it's called, um, there's 2 books actually. One book is High Output Management. And then the other book is called The Goal. So The Goal teaches you about the theory of constraints. High Output Management teaches you how to be a good manager because as a good manager, what you're doing is you're, you're managing people and if your people fail, then it's on you. Just like if you're the leader of the company, if there's any failure at any point, it is completely your fault. What a good leader needs to be able to do. There's 3 things here. A good leader first and foremost needs to be able to recruit. Why is that important? Well, recruiting is really important because If you don't have good people around you, guess what? You're not gonna be able to get things done because it doesn't matter how good you are individually. If you're the best person, it doesn't scale. You have to have people around you. It doesn't matter if you're a product-based business, you're a service-based business, you have to have people. And what I learned kind of my first go-around with my, my company that I took over called Single Grain, what happened was I didn't build rapport with people and I didn't try to recruit the best people. I didn't think that was a high priority. But building a great culture, building a really good recruiting process, and then bringing people in, you know, making it very hard to get into your company, that is important because you want to make sure that your company has A players in your company. Sure, maybe if you're really big, then you might have to have, you know, if you're like, you have 10,000+ people in your organization, sure, you're going to have different levels, you know, probably the A's, the B's, and the C's. But, um, you generally want to keep the caliber very high. So if you look at the Googles of the world, the, the, let's see, the Apples of the world, They keep the caliber still very high. They, they, they look at all everything. They look at, um, your, your background and some of them are taking away, um, kind of the requirement to have a college degree. But in general, they're looking at the body of work and they want to make sure that you're a very smart person, which is why their, their interview process, the recruiting process is so rigorous. But you as a leader, you are kind of the, you are the face and you are the person that is going to be able to get conversations with these people initially. And that's literally what I'm doing right now. I'm talking with people that I've worked with in the past. I'm going through my LinkedIn network. I'm asking all my, I'm asking, uh, you know, I'm asking a lot of my friends. I'm talking to a lot of entrepreneur friends too. Hey, who do you know? Who do you know? I'm looking at LinkedIn as well. I'm doing everything right now to try to find the right people and I know it's going to take time because the best people usually aren't looking. So recruiting, I can't stress this enough, it is number one. Uh, maybe in the very beginning you're doing all the work, but guess what? You have to take, let's say each, each quarter goes by, maybe your goal is to try to take off 10 to 15% of Uh, the work and delegate it to somebody else, but you have to hire somebody to, to, to figure that out, right? So you got to delegate. Uh, in order to delegate, you got to hire people. And in order to hire people, you have to have a really good recruiting process. Okay? So I can't stress that enough. Your recruiting process needs to be airtight. Okay? And you as a leader, you're out there having coffee with people, you're having lunches with people all the time, and you're having conversations with people. And I literally, I'm talking with people right now. Where it's just, we're keeping the conversation open. We might not work together this year, but we might work together in a couple of years, right? So it's just kind of keeping those going because when the time is right, it's not like, you know, here's the other thing with recruiting. You have to make sure you're continually priming the pump because the moment where it becomes really urgent for you and you are desperate to hire someone, that's when you start to cut corners and you start to basically sacrifice, make sacrifices or make exceptions to your recruiting process. And guess what? That actually hurts your company because, you know, when times are really tough, when there's a lot of work to be done and you'll take anybody that will come off the street, anybody that looks like they can do the work, you're, oh, okay, they don't meet, you know, 2 of the culture, um, you know, our core values. Um, but that's okay, you know, and I've actually seen that in our, um, applicant tracking system. People are like, oh, I saw some of the comments. People are like, oh, you know, they don't, they don't, they didn't follow the directions here and, you know, maybe they don't fit this, but they can do the work. Okay. So you start to make exceptions. And if you start to make exceptions, your team starts to make exceptions, and you end up hiring a bunch of bozos on your team. Okay? You don't want to work with bozos. You have to be the stickler too, because there's going to be people in your company that are like, oh my God, you know, this, this, this leader, Eric, you know, what is he trying to do? Like, you know, I'm just trying to hire people. I'm trying to do better. I'm trying to do work, uh, you know, and just get work done for clients. But he's holding everything back. He's bottlenecking everything. In fact, you need to be the person that does that because if you are not hiring ahead of time and you start to make exceptions and those exceptions actually end up performing poorly, let's say they're like a C player, And then you have, you know, A players on the team, they're not gonna wanna work with that person. They're not gonna do good work and you're gonna waste a lot of time. Okay? So hiring, super, super, super important. I think they say each hire on average might cost anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 plus. If it's a technical hire, you're probably paying $150,000 to $200,000 plus on losing, you know, losing the, the, the, the, the amount of time that you waste on that is a lot of money. Okay? And in some cases I read in other places, it's, you might be losing like 3 to 4 times the salary of that person. just by making the wrong hire. So you cannot do that. I can't stress it enough. Number 1 is recruiting. Number 2 is managing the growth engines. Now there's this book by Victor Cheng, and I had him on the Growth Everywhere podcast, called Extreme Revenue Growth. And a growth engine is just, you might have different product lines. A different product line might be, if you're a web design agency, you might have mobile development, not web design, we'll just call it design agency. So you might have mobile design, and you might have kind of web design as well. There's a bunch of different things that you can do. These are your different growth engines. Now, if you're a product business, you might have different product lines and you're selling them at different prices. Um, these are your different growth engines, right? And you might have a really creative, uh, marketing channel. Let's say you use, you throw your own conferences to grow your business. That might be a growth channel as well. So for example, we had our Marketing School Live conference a while back and you know, that actually generated, I mean, you know, one was a client already that, that generated kind of deeper relationships and then one person that was there actually became a client. Um, and then there's another one there, um, that, um, is, is on the way to becoming a client as well. Think about that. Like, what are your growth engines? It could be product lines, it could be different channels of growth for you. These are the channels that you need to manage as the leader of the company because if you can't manage them and if you can't come up with new growth engines, so let's say you're a marketing agency and you know, let's say you're doing paid media for example. Well, you have to look ahead too because there's a lot of, um, there's a lot going on in terms of AI. A lot of the work that we might be doing, Um, in the future, um, if I'm a paid ads or paid media agency, uh, it might actually become invalidated or it might be done completely differently. So looking ahead, what are the growth engines there? What can we do around data? What can we do around AI? Right? Those are some things to kind of look into. Now the third thing right here, uh, when it comes to what you need to be doing as a leader is you have to focus on accountability because you are the leader of the company. If people aren't hitting numbers, because at a certain point, You can't keep track of everything. All you can keep track of are numbers. And if people aren't hitting numbers, you have to make a very tough decision. You know, when I look at the past, one of the mistakes I made is, is not moving quickly enough when it comes to moving, uh, or holding people accountable and moving, making sure that we put people in the right seats. And if you leave someone in the wrong position for like a very long time, what's going to happen is they're going to become very demotivated. You're going to become more and more frustrated. I know for me, I've become very frustrated. And what happens is everyone just ends up becoming disappointed. So you have to be holding people accountable to numbers and you know, sure, some people are going to try to wiggle out of it. Ah, you know, it's, it's, it's tough. We're trying new things. Sure, you've been trying for, you know, 4 or 5, 6 months plus, but if you're not hitting numbers, something's got to change because at the end of the day, I've talked about this before, you are a high performance sports team. Sports teams out there, like even with the, you know, let's say you are a, Let's say you're Michael Jordan. Let's say you're Kobe Bryant. At a certain point, you're going to start to age out. They can't stay loyal to you forever and you can't do the job as effectively anymore. I'm not saying you should, just because people are getting older, you should make any changes there. I'm saying that as long as people are performing, great. But if people aren't performing, you have to hold people accountable and that's on you. It's not about you being nice. It's not about you making friends. It's about first and foremost, it's about business results. It's about performance. Because I'm hoping if you're watching this right now, you probably have your friends, you probably have your family. I don't know if you came to work just to make more friends. Or if you're a leader, if you're a leader and if you're the entrepreneur, you want to be able to hold people accountable. So it's, it's, it's difficult sometimes to say, oh, but I want to be friendly with people. I want to be liked by— sure, that's fine, but maybe don't be the leader or maybe don't be one of the leaders of the company because it's not easy to hold people accountable. In fact, it actually is very lonely. Now in the startup world, it's recruiting and then people talk about keeping cash in the bank and people talk, talk about vision. So they are kind of related, right? So we talk about recruiting. Okay, that's in there. Now we talk about the vision, right? Um, the vision is kind of managing the growth engines, looking ahead, right? And then keeping cash in the bank is, um, keeping cash in the bank could be okay, making sure that we're getting sales coming in, making sure that we're hitting numbers, that kind of stuff like that. That all kind of ties into keeping cash in the bank, right? So, you know, for general, for generalists, I think, you know, for most of you that are bootstrapping, I still think it's the first level, which is recruiting, making sure that you are holding people accountable and is making sure that you are managing the growth engine. So that is it for today. And if you enjoyed this, leave a comment below and don't forget to check the next video and don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell button and whatever platform you're coming from. Don't forget, uh, just subscribe, leave a review, all that stuff. It's beautiful. It inspires us to do more content like this. And that's it for today. We'll see you tomorrow. Bye.