6 Steps to Becoming Effective Leaders

Being a leader at the best of times is not easy. It's made even harder when, if you're like me, you got promoted or find yourself in a leadership role with no training whatsoever. In the last episode, we discussed 6 key challenges that leaders have to contend with. But knowing the problems is only half the battle. What strategies do you need to overcome leadership challenges that are endemic to our occupation? And that's coming up next on Marc Haine Live. Welcome to this episode of Marc Haine Live. This is where small business owners and entrepreneurs pick up core skill sets to help them work on their business, not just in their business. I am your host, Service Expert and Master of Experiences Marc Haine. And today, we're going to discuss 6 key steps you can take to overcome some of the leadership challenges that most of us face. But we'll get to that in just a moment. In the meantime, why don't you go ahead and subscribe to this program? I want to make sure that you don't miss an episode if you're interested in this content. And while you're at it, why don't you go ahead and leave a comment or a review about today's episode in the comment box below. And even more importantly, If you think this is a valuable podcast, if you think the information is valuable, why don't you go ahead and share it with somebody who you know can benefit from it? Being an audacious leader is not easy. It seems like every day we are bombarded with issues that strain our knowledge, stress our capabilities, and challenge our values. As Simon Sinek says, leadership is a choice. It is not a rank. This brings me to our Question of the Day. So, are you the perfect leader you think you ought to be? If not, what would it take? I'd love for you to be part of this conversation. So, go ahead and put some answers in the comment box below. below and share your experience. You know, I have to tell you, I feel a little bit ripped off as an adult leader. I mean, when I was growing up, when I was in my teens and my early 20s, my bosses all knew everything. Like, I mean, there was nothing they didn't know. Now, keep in mind that I am the last of the baby boomers. I'll admit it. In the late '70s, we were still very much in the Middle of the Industrial Age style of management. Our bosses told us what to do, when to do it, and many times, they told us how to do it. Back then, employees were hired for their hands to actually do the work, to make things happen, and then to punch out at the end of every day. If we were privileged, once a year we got to get an annual feedback, annual evaluation that outlined What they thought we did well and more importantly, what they thought we needed to improve on. But nowadays, we don't just hire hands. We hire people's brains and we hire people's hearts. And big surprise, as leaders, we don't have all the answers. I think part of the problem leaders have today comes from the clash of evolving from the Industrial Age type of leadership to the Knowledge Age and now to the Heart centered age of leadership. As leaders, we now have new expectations, new sets of values on how we lead. Funnily enough, most of the issues that we have with leadership is internal to us. It's personal. It's inside us as human beings. So today, I'd like to take you through 6 steps to overcome some of these prevalent issues that we're seeing now in leadership. To start though, I think it's necessary to break down our issues into 4 distinct categories. They are our own internal challenges. That's the first one. That's the first kind of category is internal. It's how we see ourselves, our own motivations, our own biases, and our own expectations. As I mentioned, I grew up with leaders who never showed weakness, who never showed doubt and who always had the answers. How very limiting because the only thing they got out of their business is what they created. And never, never in all my years working for people in that age did I ever hear the words, I'm sorry, I was wrong. So, our internal challenge is one area that we absolutely need to address. What are those biases? What are those expectations and so on? The second category that needs to be addressed is challenges of skills and capacity. As I mentioned at the start, many of us never trained as leaders. We might have been amazing at what we did and got promoted. Or we set up a business because we loved an aspect of what we do. We wanted control over doing the core part of the business. A cook doesn't necessarily start a restaurant because she loves running a business. She starts a business because she loves to cook. A florist doesn't start up a flower shop because he wants to run a business. He starts a flower shop because he loves arranging flowers. People start businesses and get themselves into these leadership roles because they have a passion for how they can change their little corner of the world. And as brilliant as you might be in your business's core product or service, You can't know it all. The third category that we have to address today is challenges with communication. Being able to move your ideas and goals and aspirations from your brain to everybody on your team. Being open enough to your team dynamics so you can recognize conflict and stress on your team and still have the fortitude to have the tough conversations. And the last category of challenges that we have to address today is that of crisis leadership. If the pandemic has taught us anything at all, is that anything can happen at any time. The businesses that are able to manage through crisis will come out on the other end always a little bit stronger than they were when they started. While the others Just fade away into oblivion. I used to laugh at an old joke quote I heard way back. And I think, I actually think it was Jughead Jones in the Archie Comics who said, if you are keeping your head while everybody is losing theirs, you probably don't know what's going on. But the reality is our job as leaders is to absorb the stress of our team. Not to be the source of it. But at the same token, it is a lot easier to carry a burden when it's shared. Great leaders rally their troops when things get tough. The best are actually in the trenches with their team facing the crisis head-on. So, knowing those 4 distinct categories, I'd like to go through 6 steps you can take to overcome these 4 distinct categories of leadership challenges. And then, we will get to that right after this.

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Our conversation— welcome back. Our conversation today is around how you as business owners can get back to do what you love to do inside your businesses while running an effective business. You know, there is an irony to this episode. Because of the nature of what we are talking about, the one trait you need to tune into this episode is curiosity. Actually, it's 2 traits: curiosity and the big one is humility. For me, it is probably one of the biggest virtues we need as a leader. And that's the irony. Leaders who don't have humility are the ones who don't feel that they have anything to learn. They're the ones who are ruling from the roost. Making all the decisions, typically not listening to anybody else except themselves. They're the ones who would typically look at me and go, Marc, if I want your opinion, I'll tell you what it is. They are the ones who look at their subordinates and say, you have to listen to me. I'm your boss. Or, you have to listen to me. I'm the owner. Which by the way, from a leadership perspective, anytime I've heard any leader use those words, it's usually because they've lost complete control. And they're trying to establish their reign. They're trying to establish their authority. They've lost complete control. That's the only time I've ever heard anybody turn around and say, you have to listen to me. I'm your boss. Anyway, as much as they are the ones that need this information, they are the ones who are not tuning into this episode. In fact, when I do leadership training, when I train intact teams on better communication or or dealing with difficult people, or whatever. And I'm dealing with leaders. The one comment I get 100% of the time is, gosh, my boss should be here to hear this. Boy, I wish my boss was here. And that is actually our first step to dealing with our leadership issues. The realization that around you is all these subject matter experts that you have hired. People with minds, people with hearts, people with hands. As an audacious and brilliant leader, you must have the humility to own up to the fact that you don't have all the answers. And to be successful, you need to leverage the power of those you've hired. But I'm getting way ahead of myself. So, step number 1 is you must tap into your own humility. You must be ready to learn and to grow. And I know you are because you are here with me right now. Number 2, you have to remember your why and set your goals. If you're a business owner, you need to remember why you created your business. I've had the privilege of interviewing many, many entrepreneurs and owners. And when I talk about how they got started, that is usually one of the questions. Hey, how did you get started in your business? They absolutely light up. They get so excited. You could see that there was pride and passion in what they were doing. There was excitement about what they did when they first started up. And I think we all have that because when you first start up your business, you have a picture in your head of what you're going to accomplish. After a few years, I noticed that with a lot of business people, this wanes. It fizzles. And a lot of business owners lose that spark. They get so enthralled in the day-to-day minutiae of what's going on in their business, all the crises, all the challenges that they have. people not showing up for shifts, late deliveries, whatever, customer problems, whatever it is. They get so caught up in that that they actually forget why they started their business. Is that something that you identify with? I want you to tap into your excitement of when you first started in your current position. Write down the feelings. In fact, write out a narrative. If you remember the date, write the date. What was your first hour like when you Opened the doors to your new business, or when you got promoted and you walked in for the first time as that leader. Write down the feelings you had. What were your dreams? Write down the values you feel are important to your business. And then, I want you to start listing your goals. Go back in time and sit down and say, when I started my business, or when I started in this role, Here were my goals. And then, I want you to start thinking about what are your goals now. I challenge you to go onto YouTube. Look up goal setting on YouTube. You'll find a bunch of different tools that you can use. You'll find SMART goals, FAST goals. The tool is not what matters. Reconnecting to the direction you want to go in, that's what's important. You see, if I said to you, I need you to drive to Denver and get there by Tuesday, you get clarity as to the destination and the time frame. The very first thing you would do is you would look at a map. Well, the very first thing aside from telling me to go jump in a lake. No, the very first thing you would do is you would look at a map and you would see how to get there. And you would think, how long will it take to get there? And you would plan Your trip. From that point on, every decision you make will be focused on that one destination with that one time frame in mind. During the drive, you will invariably come up against road construction, traffic jams, road closures where you will have to make decisions. You wouldn't just stop behind a road closure or traffic jam and say, oh well, there goes that goal. I guess I can't go any further. I guess we failed this goal. No, no. You'd You'd make decisions on what do I need to do to move forward. So, with every decision, you will be asking yourself, if I do this, will it get me to where I want to go on time? If I do this, if I make this turn here, can I still make it on time? What do I need to adjust to do it? The destination is so very important. In Alice in Wonderland, a disoriented Alice asked the Cheshire Cat, Would you tell me please which way I ought to go from here? That depends a great deal on where you want to get to, said the cat. I don't much care where. Then, it doesn't matter which way you go. With a defined goal, a clear purpose of your why, and your strong defined values, you will always have a benchmark to measure every decision, every action against it. You just have to keep asking yourself, if I do this, will it get me to where I want to go on time? So, setting the goals, setting that destination not only provides you clarity but it gives you clarity to be able to communicate that forward. Setting those goals, resetting your why and setting your goals is step number 2. Step number 3. Now, you remember when I said at the very beginning, leverage your people? Well, that is step number 2. And that is delegate. Now that you have a goal in your mind, you have a vision of where you want to get to, you have a time frame. Now, it's time to leverage the people around you. Last week, I told you about a business owner who has 8 employees and who is So frustrating with having to manage them. Frustrated every day. It's about stress. What was missing for him was a system where he could analyze what he could systematize and then what he can delegate. So, you have the 2 aspects. What can you turn into a system to make it easy to execute? Is there technology? Are there systems out there that you could use to to get some of the tasks done. And then, other things are the things that you can delegate. But to delegate effectively, we need to understand our preferences, both in what we decide we want to delegate and what we're willing to do to support delegation. Because here's the thing. Delegation is not about, hey John, do this. It's about, hey John, do this. What do you need to do to be successful? Hey John, when you do this, let me know if you need a hand. Hey John, do you have any questions about this task? It's really important to know our people. Who has the skills and knowledge? What training and support do they need? We have to fully understand the nature and purpose of the tasks that we're delegating. If you can create a purpose for the task, it gives it meaning. It gives it importance. Instead of saying, I want you to do it because I said so, you give it a bigger purpose. Being able to give it a purpose helps people connect with what needs to be done and connects the individual to the outcome. And then finally, we have a process to follow up. And create accountabilities for the task. We have to develop ways to help the people we delegate to. We have to at some point be able to help motivate them through some of their obstacles. That is what we do as leaders. We have to be able to be the coach, the mentor, and we have to be able to measure successes or measure failures. So, that's step number 3. Is we have to learn to delegate. Step number 4 is leverage your uniqueness. We've brought skills and passion into our business personally. We know what we're good at. We also know what we're worth. But here's the thing. As I mentioned earlier, as a leader, we are always going to be bombarded with issues. People like things pulling us off track, roadblocks, traffic jams, road construction. Having a clear definition of what we are good at and what we're not so good at would help us. We also want to figure out what is it that we're passionate about and what is it that we hate in our business. Having those definitions are essential to be able to isolate what we're capable of doing and what we're not capable of doing. We have to leverage our skills. We have to understand what brought us to this position that is really the magic that we bring to our teams. But here's a huge cautionary. To move forward, we have to know our value. I've seen leaders who bury themselves in menial tasks. They start using the excuses of, I can do it faster. I can do it better. These are really limiting statements and can actually hold us back from being an effective leader and from growing our business. Not giving people the chance to be able to do what you want them to, what you pay them to do is a challenge. And then of course, Sticking yourself in to doing a minimum wage job. Let's try to figure that out. Are you worth in your position, are you worth $15 an hour? Or are you worth the $40 an hour, the $60 an hour, the $100 an hour? And so, you need to be looking at these differentials and saying, where is my time best put? And if you have somebody who's doing the $15 an hour job and they're not capable, or they're letting you down, well, that is your call to action. That is your call of duty to stand up and say, I am here to support you. I'm here to help you. And take the time to make sure that you invest in that one person so that you don't get relegated to doing those kinds of jobs. I hope that this is making sense and providing some clarity. It's nice. Thank you very much for the thumbs up. Feel free to drop comments and leave reviews about this episode. We'll get to steps number 5 and 6 right after this.

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And welcome back. We are talking about the 6 steps leaders can take to to overcome challenges so that we can evolve, so that we can move our businesses forward, so that we ourselves can become successful. Thus far, we've talked about coming to the game with humility. We've talked about the importance of setting goals, delegating, and leveraging your unique value, the unique value that you bring to the forefront. Step number 5 leverages everything we've talked about this far. That is probably the most difficult for business owners in particular. Last week, I told you about my mechanic. When I went in to collect the car, he was behind the desk handling my invoice and the payments. And I asked him why he didn't have someone to do that job for him. And he said, I used to have someone on the desk and a shop filled with 5 mechanics. But I spent all my time managing That I didn't have time to get to work on cars. Which again tells me the reason why he started his shop is because he's brilliant with fixing cars. That is his passion. That's the same thing a restaurant owner told me. He started the business because he loves to cook. And after 5 years in business, he hates coming into work because he has to do everything but cook. What he wanted to do was he wanted to create this business And he wanted to come in every day and he wanted to create the lunch specials and the supper specials. And he wanted to play with the food and play with his art. But instead, he had to fight the battles of the day-to-day. He had to be front of house to be able to make up for the shortcomings of the serving staff. He had to problem solve food qualities and customer satisfaction. And so, he came into work after 5 years. He came into his restaurant every day just stressed by it all. My response to both these people is, why don't you hire a business manager? Someone who will run your business for you so you can do what you love. Where does it say that the business owner has to be the one who's on top? Yeah, it's your business if you have the humility to know what your strengths are, have solid destination, a core definition of who can do and what they can do and when they can do it, and are self-aware enough to know what you're passionate with doing. That's fine. But hiring somebody above you, somebody who maybe you can coach into, I want to be accountable to somebody. I want somebody to do the work. I want to be able to sit down with that somebody and look at the structure of my business and then split off and let him do or her do what needs to happen in the business so I can get back to what I love to do. Hiring a manager to help direct the business, someone who can help keep you accountable might be the key. Last Friday, I spoke with a business coach. She said the best decision she ever made was hiring her boss. Now, she was joking. It was a little tongue-in-cheek because I wouldn't say she was joking. I would say that she did it lighthearted. But she said that as a business owner, she lacked focus. She was always stressed about dealing with one thing after another after another that she couldn't concentrate on one thing that she loved. And that was meeting with clients. She was always looking and jumping up to the next shiny object. She had no one to bounce ideas off. And she felt like she was struggling to keep all the balls in the air. So, she found someone that has the fortitude and the strength to push back on her, to test assumptions and keep her pushing towards her goals and her aspirations. What would happen if you had somebody like that In your business. Somebody that you could rely on that would turn around and say, hey, you said your goal was this. You said your destination was this. How is what you are doing leading to that? Like I said, number 5 is really, really tough because part of it is this idea that you want to take your foot off the the brake so you can move forward. And you want to give the throttle to somebody else. Somebody else that you have high trust in. Somebody else who that person has to have high trust in you as well. But that for a lot of businesses could be the solution. And of course, lastly, the number 6 step. This idea that I started again. I started off with at the very beginning. The reason why you're here is because you want to learn. And that's step number 6 is to keep on learning. I know your time is limited. But effective leaders need to know what's changing in their industry. They need to continually grow their capacity. They need to constantly challenge themselves with, what don't I know? I mean, this is the purpose of my podcast. And this is also the purpose of my upcoming Audacious Leaders Summit. I get to partner with some of the world's best subject matter experts to bring you valuable content. My goal is to move you from, hey, I didn't know this, to now, I don't know this. Now, I know I don't know it. The Audacious Leaders Summit that's coming up June 11th to 13th is like my podcast but on steroids. It's where you can get concrete strategies to overcome leadership challenges Network with other leaders and build your own capacity. Now, I don't want this to sound like a sales pitch. But I feel the frustration of so many business owners all over. Business owners who hire leaders or promote leaders who haven't been trained. And then, they pull out their hair going, I don't understand it. He was such a good employee. Why does he suck as a leader? It really does feel like we are constantly pushing But as I mentioned before, COVID-19 has been really the mass leveler. If it's done anything, it's taught us that we are resilient. As an audacious leader, you are still here. You are still learning. You are still looking for resources to help you move forward and out of the crisis. The Audacious Leaders Summit over 2.5 days, I'm bringing together subject matter experts from all over the world. Some who have appeared on this podcast. And they're going to be coming out to share strategies and insights to help you overcome these challenges. As an Audacious VIP, you will have the opportunity to network with other audacious leaders, to participate in virtual meet and greets with our subject matter experts, and have full access to all the session recordings so you can go back and review your learning time and time again. Like I mentioned, the link will be in the show notes. It's audaciousleadersummit.com. I hope you find these 6 steps to overcome leadership challenges valuable. I know that being on this journey with me today, that you are the type of audacious leader that is here to serve your purpose. In your role, you affect your corner of the universe. Your corner universe. Right here, you affect your corner of the universe and bring uniqueness. That is your own. No one can mess with that. No one can compete against what you bring to the table every single day. As always, my offer stands. If you would like 30 minutes of my time to brainstorm your business with you and your team, please book yourself on my online calendar. The link is down below. It's the one that's marked meetme.so/MarcHaine. I am at your service. And if you haven't done so yet, why don't you go ahead and subscribe to this feed? It'll give you the first dibs whenever I bring you content that will help you work on your business, not just in your business. My name is Marc Haine. I hope you stay safe, stay healthy, and dare to be the exception.