03. Leadership: Effectively Leading Change

Hey, my friends, welcome back to Leadership in a Nutshell, where we're cracking the code of the driven mind. I'm your host, Kenny Chapman, and today I'm super pumped to be with you for episode number three, leading Change in a Nutshell. And change is such a massive topic, and I want you to think about, we all kind of hear the whole deal of, oh, yeah, change is amazing. Everybody loves change. And then they look at you and go, yeah, you go first. Right? So, you know, change is obviously a near and dear thing to my heart. I speak on it a ton. I coach on it a ton. We do transformation work with people around change as a concept. And one of the things I just really want to focus on in this episode is how can we learn to really predict, manage, and actually even enjoy change? Because if we know that our organizations have to change, if we know as leaders we have to embrace change, then perhaps we better begin to learn to enjoy it ourselves first. And, you know, I know I spent a lot of years as a young leader thinking, well, if my team would just make some changes, this company would be so much better. Right? Rather than really understanding that everything begins with the leader. That that's why we're spending this time together in this podcast and sharing our energy and our love for leadership. And you can't love leadership without really looking at change and embracing it. So why is this so important? We know that leading change is crucial. And one of the things is when we talk about leading versus managing change, right? So if we want to get involved in leading change, then we're able to address some of the unknowns. And one of the biggest challenges that our teams have is the uncertainty. Right? Tony Robbins talks about human needs and desire. We desire uncertainty, and we desire certainty almost at equal levels. And one of the things that our team knows is they want to have certainty. They want routine, they want to know expectation. They want certain specific things to happen, certain times, certain ways, certain shape, certain forms. And then when that's upended, when the market shifts or we as a leadership team decide to shake things up, if you will, it's like, wait a minute, what happened? However, all of us know, based on recent market things that depending on when you're listening to this, there's been some massive market shifts and changes that have addressed us that a lot of people didn't see coming at all. And so if I really want to get into leading or even creating the change versus having change happen to me, so if we can all agree that change is absolutely going to happen, and it's part of the necessary evolution of business, of life, as our time on this planet together goes, then what if we actually get involved in creating it? And when we get involved in creating it, we can actually instill confidence in our team. And confidence is such a necessary component. I've got an episode coming up where we'll actually dive into confidence as an entire concept. But you can't think about change without thinking about confidence, because when change happens to us based on our level of confidence is directly related to our effectiveness of results when we go through it. Okay, so a lot of times, you know, when it comes to change, as I say creating change, I also want to have, you know, kind of caveat that with we want to make sure that we're creating change for a specific reason. I want you to think about predictability, I want you to think about planning, and I want you to think about stopping creating madness. Stop the madness, if you will. And what do I mean by that? I know that in my life, I have absolutely created messes by just creating change. I'm a driven entrepreneur. My mind is going nonstop. I'm always knowing there's a better way, there's a different way. If we're doing the same thing two weeks in a row, then it must be time to change it. And that can be a very good thing or it can be a very challenging thing. As you watch some of the companies over the history of time that have had the biggest success, they haven't changed a lot in some of core, right? Correct. Core value, core vision, core specific things of how they operate. Certainly they change with strategies, tactics, different things like that. But leadership is really about having that core. And again, I'll talk more about purpose and vision in some upcoming episodes. But really, when we think about creating messes by just changing to create change. And one of the things that really impacted my life was when I really began to understand and embrace the concept of implementing ideas versus implementing plans. So as a young, driven entrepreneur, I created a lot quickly. When I first started in my very first service business, I created massive change. I shook up the entire market. It put me on a national stage. It gave me the ability to. To embrace my speaking career and coaching and training. And, you know, then several years later, I launched the Blue Collar Success Group, and then I wrote a couple books, And I created kennychapman.com and I started working in transformation. I've done all of these different things, meaning that I change fast and I do things a lot very quickly. However, one of the things that really hit me was that I am really good at implementing ideas, but I have to be more strategic when it comes to implementing plans. And so you can do a lot of things. You can change a lot. This isn't about, you know, leading change by just continuing to go, idea, idea, idea. We have a concept in our office called, you know, the Squirrel. And we just. The squirrel bounce around. Oh, over here. Oh, over here. Oh, over here. Right. And that's one of the challenges that we have as leaders. I met a gentleman named Keith Cunningham a few years ago, and Keith Cunningham is a very fascinating individual. He wrote a great book called the Road Less Stupid. And he talks in his book about dumb tax. And many of us have paid a lot of dumb tax over the years of implementing ideas that weren't very well thought out. Not having a personal board of directors or a formal board of directors that we bounce ideas off and different strategies and thoughts as driven leaders and entrepreneurs. We go, I got an idea. It's a great idea. And sometimes our team doesn't go, yeah, no, we're not doing that. You come back in a few more days. Right. And so Keith Cunningham was actually one of the rich dads that Robert Kiyosaki wrote rich dad, poor dad about. Robert wrote about two different dads. And one of the rich dads that he wrote about was Keith Cunningham. Why? Keith had the opportunity to come up in the 80s and through the stock market and investment banking and different things, through the real estate game. And he's one of the few people on the planet. I'm grateful to know Keith and be able to call him a friend on a certain level, that he lost $100 million. And you know what's funny is when you talk to Keith, he's like, yeah, nobody's real proud about losing $100 million. Now, the cool thing is he did earn it back. And right now he has nine companies and eight figure revenues and different things like that he has strategically created because of some of the dumb tax that he learned. And he talks about in the Road Less Stupid of how some of the things. It's like, wait a minute. So when I talk today to you about leading change, I really want you to embrace, like, how can you slow things down and how can you focus on plans rather than ideas? Okay, so this podcast is designed to hit you quick, give you a shot in the arm. Just taking a few minutes out, 10 to 15 minutes tops, when we really break some of these concepts down and go, okay, today I'm thinking about leading change. So what are some action action steps today that I can take, Kenny? Well, I'm going to give you four things today, and if you're in a place to write these down, I want you to write them down. If not, it's one of the reasons we do these short. Listen to it again, go back and just capture these at a later time. Number one, slow down. When it comes to ideas, it's because we're running, we're hurrying, we're, oh, I got to go, I got to hit the number. I got to get to the next thing. I've got to hit the budget. I got to create a new budget. I got to have the new goal. I got to have slow down and choose your race. You know, the biggest race you're in is the race against yourself. So slow down. Decide the race that you want to be in. The second thing is when you slow down. I mean, do it now, right? Do it right now. I'll say. And so when you do an idea, you get a chance to do it again, or implement an idea or create change around an idea, you get a chance to do it again most of the time because you don't slow down and make the time to do it right. If you don't make the time to do it right, you will make the time to do it again. Third thing is embrace clarity. It's first, it's foremost. Always get clarity. So as you're slowing down, you're making the time to do it right. You've got to have clarity about what you want. It's easy to get clarity around an idea. Then you sleep on it, you strategize on it, you journal about it, you create a little bit of a plan around it. Then you go to the fourth thing, and that is quality advice, board type advice, maybe some coaching around this specific plan that you want to implement. Because you're in a race against yourself. You're not racing your competition, you're not racing the market, you're not racing against, you know, the gurus in your industry. You're in a race against yourself. Slow down. Decide to make the time to do it right. Get tremendous clarity, first and foremost, and then bounce it off of some people. Get some advice around this. How will this look? Why do boards work? Because they take driven entrepreneurs and thought leaders like you and me, and they go, okay, that's a great idea, but how's this going to work? And you go, oh, man, I hadn't thought about that. But when you take the time to think out a plan, a really good thing happens that way. And the reality is don't resist change. It's going to happen. Why not be involved in creating it, but creating it strategically? And as you create it strategically, you have much more control, which is something that all of us desire. So think about those four things. Your call to action this week. Slow down. Make sure you have the time to do it right, get clarity and then bounce it off of a board type situation. Or reach out. If we can ever help you do us a favor. Subscribe here, Rate us, Review us. I really appreciate the opportunity to spend some time here together on Leadership in a Nutshell, where we're cracking the code of the Driven mind with me, your host, Kenny Chapman. Until we talk, my friends. Make it a better than fantastic week and choose some.