Part 2 - How Great Leaders Inspire Teams To Rise Above Average

Welcome to this edition of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

So many people, I've seen this over my career. People would hear of a new system. Everyone's always looking for a new system. A system is going to be the answer and a lot of times it is. But it only if it comes in with what you have in into a situation where everyone is set up to do something great and everyone is unifying around the idea we want to do something great. We don't want to just exist. We don't want to be average. We don't want the numbers come out and get beat by. We want to be somebody. We want to amount to something. We want to be proud of where we work. And so then when you bring in a system into that kind of environment, it's like the mentality is that we're going to do something great, this is going to help us do something great. Rather than, okay, this is going to do, this is going to make us great. The system is going to make us great. The system is never going to make you great. You got to make yourself great. And if the system is helpful, great, that's wonderful. But it's because you used the system and that's up to the leader to kind of set that expectation. I've seen so many times. We can have people copy the things that are working, the flows, the systems of thinking in parts of the country. It's just, they're just having popcorn growth and take that, install it in another part of the country. And they had the same kind of dishwater numbers they've had for the last 20 years. And so it's like, what's the difference there? Well, it's that expectation and I wanted to mention it, David, because it's so easy to miss. It's so easy for the leader to miss the fact that I haven't set the expectations here that we want to do something great. I want to do something great. Are you with me or not? And I can remember when we turned our organization around in 1980, we went from recruiting like 50 people in a year and we recruited 1800 the next year, 7200 after that, 15,000 the year after that. And I started all that off with a meeting where I said, here's what I'm going to do. Who wants to go with me? And either get with me or get out of my way, because I'm going. And so the thing is, the leader has to, has to set the charge to let people know what you're all about there. And my best friend came up and after it was over, the mate who was over Larry, you're not going to do. You're not going to do anything, right? Everything's going to be the same. I looked at him like, you're dead to me. You're dead to me. He was my next door neighbor, the single most talented person in my organization, but he wasn't with me. And so he just got left in the dust. And so the thing is, the leaders have to. At some point, you got to set the tone and you got to let the people know I'm going with or without you. And have you had moments like that?

Oh, yeah. But I think, I think that there are. I'm an optimist. I've been an optimist my whole life. I believe in people. But ask. And I used to. I was a teacher through the Teach for America program. There are people who will never get it right. I mean, there was. And it's kind of interesting, right, because I, I do believe in the potential of every person. But there are people that. They do not have good intentions. I think they're few. I think they're very rare. But I also think that there's a lot of people who don't want to work that hard and that's okay. Right? Like, not in our organization. Right. That's not the type of people that we attract. And also, I very much believe that a few bad apples will absolutely rot in the bunch. So I think, I think servant leadership is about setting the tone, modeling the tone, and working really hard to light that fire in each and every person. But there are some people who just. The wick isn't there or the gasoline isn't there or whatever.

As a leader, you gotta be smart enough to not just be a Pollyanna. And you gotta wake up and say, what am I seeing here? I want to believe, but like you say, there are very few, rotten to the core, just evil people out there. Very few. But there are some. But there are a good number of people that are excited about other things other than work. And where they put their energy is into family or community or whatever. And they just go. They work so they can make some money, but what they're thinking about during the day is not their job. And so we've got to be aware that we. We got to have people that are with us to some degree. They're going to water us down.

I can't believe I didn't talk about this back in 2021, the last time I was on the show. But we actually. It's so fitting on Million Dollar Mastermind to talk about. I ask a question during. When we interview everyone a part of our team to join our team. I called the million dollar question and I ask them, sobox is going to give you a million dollars every quarter, adjusted for inflation, for the rest of your life. You don't have to show up for work. You don't.

What do you do?

And what's interesting is you get to learn a lot about someone. And most people say if they have any debt, take care of the debt, then they take care of their family, then they take care of their parents, then they go on vacation. That's usually the standard response, some amalgamation of those four first things. But then I just keep asking, I'm like, you're getting a million a quarter. Like, what do you do? And all the people who say, man, I just want to sit on a beach or I want to. I always love cooking. I want to go, I want to really learn how to cook. And I want to. And anything that's not related to why we're hiring them, we don't hire them. It's not a bad thing, right? Like, it's just when people tell me, they're like, man, I love cooking. I've always wanted to be a chef. I was. I'm like, I asked them in the.

Interview, I'm like, why aren't you a chef?

Like, why are you applying to be a supply chain analyst within our team? Like, that seems like a real big dismiss in terms of what. What you say you love and what you're getting paid to do for the majority of your waking moments in life. This doesn't add up. So the biggest success that I've seen with, with talent management is when you find someone who loves their job so much that they do something similar to their job when they're not working.

Yeah. And they'll do that because they're thinking about it when they're not working right now. It's in their mind.

Right. And when, Lara, when you get people who are so.

And.

And the other thing is, is that, like, look, hey, that also means that you got some weird people on your team. Right. If you got an accountant that loves building spreadsheets in their free time and color coding them, they're probably going to be an interesting mix during the company party. Right?

Right. Yeah.

But that's the beauty, right? It's now it's like now it's empowering each one of each of these people that you have a part of this beautiful tapestry of your team to really like nerd out on the things that make them a superhuman and lean into that and say like, okay, well this.

Is what you love doing.

Let's harness that. I want to put as many resources that we can afford behind making you the best at this.

And that's because you understand your success is going to trigger off your team. It comes down to the team. It doesn't matter how hard you work and this the team. And you're to some extent going to be affected by the weakest link. I think they could be weak because they're new, that's one thing. But weak because they just don't care is that really can't be tolerated. And you as the leader, owing to everybody else on the team, David, to notice that. What I notice about one of the earliest lessons I had of the first. My first decades out of business is when I get and be around top CEOs in New York and get behind closed doors and we would, I know a lot of the same people that we would be talking about, we'd be considering different people for different jobs. And I was at that stage more like the Pollyanna, oh, he's a great guy. He'll be great for that. He'll be great for that. They're like, yeah, but you know, and then I could say, oh, that's why they're CEO and not me. They saw something about the intent, the ability to deliver or the toughness. And we owe it to our team to have the right people in the right place. And if it is not right to go in there and somehow correct it, either make an attitude adjustment, shift some people around, try some other things, and if it all else fails, get somebody else helps in there. And so that's one of the biggest jobs for us, is to have people on the field that everybody else on the field is confident giving their best for. They're playing for each other. And if there's somebody rotten out there, it's just not going to be as tough. They're not going to be as resilient.

What you're talking about reminds me of the classroom and I think what's so interesting. And so I was a middle school teacher. I didn't want to be a middle school teacher. That's where they placed me. But I was a middle school social studies teacher and I taught in a 10 by 10 block radius in Philadelphia that had the highest crime, murder and poverty rate in Philly. So it wasn't. Was that great of a place in terms of demographics that were reported on paper. But I loved my families and I loved my kids and I love that neighborhood. I still love that neighborhood. And I think about how my kids, my fifth and sixth graders would be the first to pick up the moment that I was inconsistent with any of my students and that if I set a rule or an obligation, I had to make sure that that was levied fair and consistently. And I think the other thing that was really interesting is so you, you start to learn so much about human behavior when, when you're a teacher. And the other thing that I jokingly say is that like, adults really don't mature past middle school. We just get better at hiding it. Right? The emotions are still the same. So there's a lot of things where it's just like praise publicly, discipline privately. There's a lot of things in terms of. But then how do you also have a culture of, of fairness, inclusivity, and making sure that you're bringing about this level of candor so that good ideas can come from everywhere in the organization, regardless of where they are on the totem pole. But, man, I just think what you do as a leader, how you model things, how you're fair and consistent. And I think, as we were saying before, the ability just to, is to take a pounding and just consistently be out in front saying, we're going to take this hill and follow me. That is, that is so incredibly important.

I talk to people who write, people who do different things, but one of the things that you'll find is like the prolific writers, they're writing every day. Jerry. This comes up from time to time. Jerry Steve, Jerry Seinfeld. His advice to up and coming comedians is write every day. Write. Never let there be a day you don't write. I won't get into all of that because I mentioned it quite a bit, but Stephen King, he gets up in the morning, he writes every day. Isaac Asimov had wrote 400 books, but they said, how do you do it? He said, well, eight o' clock in the morning, I'm at my typewriter. And he said, it's not always great, but I don't worry about that because he said, if I keep typing, within about 30 minutes, my brain's going to say, this is a bunch of crap. Now start writing something good if I'm going to be associated with it. Let's get our act together here. But part of this as a leader is when you say like today, what happens is your world closes in when things go back, you know, you get shocking news comes in. You know, Unilever did this, they did lot of sons of it. And something totally knocked your knees out from under you. But it's hard to think at moment like that when you're in charge of 800 people or a thousand people or you got all these commitments and everything like that. There's going to be a tomorrow. But what you got to say to yourself is great, unbelievable, but tomorrow I'm going to be here and we're going to be working. I don't know what we're going to be working on, but tomorrow, guess what? And the day after, we're still going. That may have been a body blow, but so what we're going to be. We're still going to be here tomorrow and probably going to come up with a pretty dirt. I don't know what a good idea is, but tomorrow I'll probably have a pretty good idea of what it is. And so you've got to have that. That can give you your resiliency.

I'd like to thank you for listening to part two of this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. Timing is everything. You may feel that now is the time to get moving forward so you can do something even greater with your life. Now, if that sounds like you, I've got a free training video to show you how that transformation can take place. Getting introduced to how the cycle of success works has been a major transforming event for so many current million dollar earners. And that's exactly what this video is all about. And yes, it's completely free. Join us at the video@widelonwinning.com and thanks.

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