Speaker (owner/leader) reflects on early leadership shortcomings and lessons for taking charge of a team and business. Key points: leader confidence drives follower commitment; chart a clear course; recognize responsibility to employees and their families; treat past experience as R&D for future decisions; avoid shiny-object spending without market awareness; build structures to listen to others and combine emotional vision (faith) with factual assessment (Stockdale paradox/Good to Great).
Alright. When the leader lacks confidence, the followers lack commitment. So I think one thing, so the process part I wasn't good about patience, part daily work on leadership, just total miss for me. I think I was good on just trying to charting a course. And so I didn't. I mean, it was ugly in the beginning. People were coming on my team, coming off my team. I was kind of leading by example. Not a whole lot of great training going on, but I knew where we were going and I declared these goals and people thought I was crazy and all that stuff. But anyone can steer the ship, but it takes a leader to chart the course and people are depending on you. So I came to realize that when you really think about the people on your team, if it's 1 or if it's 10, they're depending on you to make sure you've got your shit together and you're bringing them in the right direction and you're making good decisions. And their families are depending on their spouse is depending on you and their children are depending on you. So it brings on a level of pressure, but also an exciting realization for me is that I get to impact. We're up to, I think 20 people right now, probably 50 people, 60 people in just the real estate business that we're directly impacting. And then with our personal development training and that stuff, they could share that with their friends. So there's this, what do you call it, Lamp lighting, which I just think is pretty cool. That's the cool thing about owning a business, being a leader, that it's more than just the grind. It's like, man, I could really change this young person's life. All right, so how do we get the best chance of success? We draw on past experience. You know, obviously we don't want to make the same mistake twice. We want to learn from our mistakes. I've become really good at. One thing Dan Sullivan has taught me is that everything that happened in the past is just R and D for the future. So like, if this morning session goes really well or just total bomb, they're like, alright, I can't change it, I can just use it to do something different in the future. And I think just having that, that was a big awareness for me. Everything up to the this point is just ammunition for a different future. So really, really drawing on your past experience just as examining conditions. I think this is a tough one for the shiny object and squirrel chasers, really knowing what you're getting. And I've done some of it. I have a little bit More margin in my business to make mistakes with trying different things but just kind of know where you are in your market before you throw a bunch of money into something. Some that's kind of an example just plan of course of action paying attention to current conditions. This one for me is a total miss. I've gotten really good at it lately and I realized that it showed up in every area of my life, including my wife. It's not easy to let other people influence me and that's not a good thing. I mean really, really bad thing. I just kind of feel like I have all the answers. And that's a big change that we made in both companies is having a structure in place where I don't. I'm the visionary in both companies. I'm very emotional. I make decisions emotionally and it doesn't make for a good, a good situation. And I've made some mistakes there. So really listening what others have to say. It doesn't mean you have to do what they say. But really, I mean your team wants to feel like they're part of the journey and part of your decision decision making process. Navigators make sure their conclusions represent both faith and fact in the book. I forget if it's the Stockdale paradise is that this book or that might be good to great. But basically I look on emotion. So for me it's a lot of faith. Like I just faithfully believe that we're going to sell X homes this year. And people around me are like, well, okay, but we don't have enough agents or these five agents just left or you know, but no, I just on faith we're gonna do it. And so you gotta be able to deal in both words. You got, you gotta. The Stockdale paradise is that you are the, you're the guy or gal that's like we are going this way and we're gonna, you know, impact this many lives and serve this many families. But you've gotta look at okay, we're losing money, you know, or our return on this is not working or we've got major dysfunction on the buyer agent team or whatever your stuff is. You got to be in both worlds and it's this sort of weird thing that you're always struggling with.
