Leadership Fundamentals

So the first thing I'd like to talk about is the impact of a bad boss and why is it important that we all work on our leadership fundamentals and skills. If you've ever had a bad boss, you realize that a bad boss can have a really big impact on an organization. We recently had an executive summit where we brought together a panel of executives from Best Places to Work in North and South Carolina and And one of the individuals on the panel mentioned how they have perennially been a top 10 performer for Best Places to Work in South Carolina. And this year they dropped, they dropped way down the list into the 40s. They were actually the worst of the best places to work in South Carolina. So, still best places to work, but they were dropped all the way from top 10 down to 40-some-odd. And when they got back the data from their employee surveys, they realized that the reason why was not a holistic change that occurred across the organization. It was one division in one department and really one manager who was having this impact that, that ultimately dragged down the entire team. So if you think it's not important that your leadership skills are put to work and are tested and improved upon daily, that's the testament of how impactful it can be if you're not a great leader, if you're not even a very good leader. So Let's take the time today, and just the fact that you're here shows me that you're interested in improving your fundamentals and your skills, and so we're going to give you everything that we can to make that happen. You know, one more reason it's really important to be a great leader is we talked about that widespread impact, but it continues to get wider because ultimately your customers will never love a company until the employees love it first. And I think the piece that's missing of this great quote by Simon Sinek, and we'll speak more about him later, is that your employees won't love the company unless they have great leadership. So it's your job to ultimately have client satisfaction and customer satisfaction driven from your leadership that inspires your employees and delivers excellent service to your customers. So today we're going to talk about a few different things. First of all, we're going to talk about the difference between management and leadership, and and why you need to be good at both. We're going to talk about the skills that you can easily learn to become a great leader and how to lead a team to a higher level of performance. Once again, for those of you— I believe I know everybody on the call, but any of you watching the video after the fact who are not familiar with me, my name is Matt Vady. You can reach me at matt@ergpayroll.com. I'm the CEO of ERG Payroll and HR. In my career, I've led teams. I've been very fortunate and blessed to lead teams as small as 1 to 2 people and as large as 50 direct reports, from everything as small as a startup when we started ERG to Fortune 500 companies and several things in between. So more importantly though, I've been exposed to great leaders over the course of my career. I would not consider myself to be one of them, but I have stolen a lot of great ideas and thoughts and understanding of what we can do to improve not only ourselves but our teams by great leadership. So, I'm once again available to address any of this stuff directly with you as, as we finish up. So, what impact does it make if you improve your leadership skills? The first thing that I want to look at is the level of engagement in our workforce. So, 70% of the workforce is not engaged per Gallup polls, and this number stays constant pretty frequently year after year in the Gallup polls, and that about 30% of employees are actively engaged. And if you have 10 of your employees sitting around a table, you can probably visualize this. 3 people at the end are in it to win it. They are, they are down for the cause. They will do whatever it takes to get the job done. There's a few more who are, who are very good, but they might still be talking about the game from last night, and they're partially engaged, but they still kind of have some other things going on. And then there's always a few people who are just completely disengaged and, you know, would rather be on Facebook or doing something else. And so as a leader, the impact you can make by taking one of those people who's maybe still talking about the game from last night or maybe not completely engaged and turning them into one of the top 30%, well, that impact— hey, it stops you this massive cost of turnover of $25,000, the average cost of turnover, and hire a new employee, and B, you're gonna get drastically more productivity out of your team, which is going to help you to make your life better and easier and more comfortable when you come to work every day. The average engaged employee, those top 30%, outperform those bottom 70% by 200%. So let me say that again. Those engaged employees outperform the other 70% by 200%. So If you are able to improve the performance of your team, it's gonna have a drastic impact on your team's ability to perform and your satisfaction in your career and your ability to rise and elevate within your organization wherever you want to go. So first, let's look at leadership versus management. What is the difference? There's a lot of narrative around this, and I want to dispel some of the rumors here. So what is leadership? Let's take a look at what it is. There's a lot of different definitions out there. But we have to know what the core fundamentals are. Leadership is defined as the action of leading a group of people or an organization. It's a very short definition, which I like, but it's incredibly vague, right? Leading a group of people or an organization— there's a lot to be, a lot to be still determined from there. So let's look at some of the more specific pieces of what leadership is. The primary goal of leadership is is to produce change and growth. As a leader, you have to be able to envision a better tomorrow and design the change that's going to get your organization from here to there. And the piece that most people lose in that link of being able to get from where you are today to where you are tomorrow is the ability to innovate. I think we've all met people along our career where they reached a certain rung on the ladder and they ran out of room to grow inside of the organization because they just, they couldn't innovate to take things past where they were. They were a good manager, but not necessarily a good leader. And leaders need to be able to change and grow and innovate. And I love this quote with Ralph Nader. You know, obviously, not a lot of folks agree with his politics, but the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers. And I think that's something that you need to be really conscious of as we talk through this, because we're going to talk a lot about developing your team, is that your success is going to be defined by your team's success. So the better you are at making the people around you better, the better leader you're going to be. So hopefully most of you out there have already seen Simon Sinek's great TED Talk. Start and/or read his book Start with Why. In this TED Talk and book, he points out that everyone in an organization knows what it is that you do. So everybody knows that you create widgets, that, you know, in order to get that job done, you— what's the how? How do you actually create the widget? Every day we come in and we stamp those widgets together. But very few people know why they they do what they do. And that's your job as a leader, is you need to start with why. You can't expect your team to rally around, you know, increasing shareholder value or increasing profitability. They need to understand the purpose of the organization. What's the cause? What are your beliefs? Why does the organization exist in the first place? And making money can't be that why. And so, conversely, they need to understand that about you as an individual. What's your why? And if you don't know why you do what you do, how is anybody else going to know? And one of the things I'll challenge you to look at is, you know, if you're a new leader or even a more tenured leader, is what are your 3 sort of non-negotiable core values as a leader? You know, looking at things like gratitude, growth, happiness, recognition, recreation, prosperity. There's, there's just a ton of great common values out there. What are your 3 non-negotiable values? You know, for me, it's integrity, persistence, and authenticity. And I've got to have those things, and I've got to have them from people around me. So, I challenge you to make sure that we're going to talk through a lot of different things, action items you can walk away from this conversation with, but what are your 3 non-negotiables at the You know, the first thing we need to do as leaders is establish trust with our team. And if people don't know what you stand for and your why, then they're not going to trust you. Trust isn't a checklist. You've got to earn it by communicating and demonstrating that you share the same values and beliefs as the organization on a daily basis. So, start with your why and ultimately look after your employees first. 'Cause your happy employees are going to make sure that you have happy customers or clients, and then your happy clients are going to help you to succeed in the market. Now let's look at some of the differences of management. So while leadership sort of exists in the future and a little bit more sort of vision-based, management exists in the why, or in the today, the tactical. The getting things done. So we want to create order, consistency, and live in the tactical on the management side. And, you know, the focus shifts too from narrow and internal for managing. We're going to be focused on things like we've got a project that's got to get done and it's got to be done inside of a week. Whereas leading is going to be more broad and external. We're going to be scanning for market opportunities and understanding things that are happening inside of our competitive landscape. So oftentimes management and leadership are at odds with one another. You know, creating change and growth is kind of different to getting the project completed today. And so you need to make sure that you're spending time doing both and that you've carved out time in your week to focus on leadership-related activities, because we can get really hung up on the management side of things on a daily basis. Now, here's where I want to kind of differentiate from the normal conversation around leadership. There's been this ongoing narrative in the media and amongst the blogosphere, as you might call it, for the last decade or so that, you know, leaders do this and that's why, and managers do that. And, you know, basically trying to say that, hey, if you're a great leader, you're not focused on management-related activities. I think we all know that's kind of nonsense, right? Because you have to be a great manager and a great leader. You can't do one or the other. You can't be talking pie in the sky and strategic vision all day long and not be able to get things done on the ground level on a daily basis. So, don't get too hung up though on the management side. You have to carve out time for yourself during the week to focus on the vision and the strategy. So, I love this quote from Peter Drucker, and you'll see a lot of quotes sprinkled in here, and that's, "Management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things." And I think that's incredibly important. We'll talk a little bit about, you know, a little bit more about that trust, integrity, and honesty that comes with being a great leader. You have to know when to manage and when to lead. Decide when and how often you're going to be tactical, strategic, or visionary. Sort of spending time asking about current projects and deadlines, that's in the tactical realm. Helping people develop in your one-on-one weekly or monthly meetings with professional development, that's a little bit more strategic. And then sharing the company's growth for the next 5 years, that's sharing your vision. So you really want to live in those 3 buckets. So the tactical, the strategic, and the visionary. We'll talk a little bit about some of the skills that can get you in each of those as we progress. All right, here's our first action item as we talk through what the differences of management and leadership are. So schedule some structured time for leading. So put aside a little bit of time where you can focus on the future, Think strategically. Think outside of the walls of your organization. Consider things like researching, analyzing your industry, looking at what your competitors are doing or not doing, networking with other professionals, and just dream or vision boarding new ideas, engaging in your own professional development. So, I'll challenge each of you as we get off of this call today to schedule 3 hours of focused leadership time inside of the next 2 weeks where you can really focus exponentially on things that are outside of those daily management activities. All right, so what are some great leadership skills? And the thing I like to preface this with is now we've got a little bit of an understanding what the difference between leadership and management is. There are some essential skills that I see lacking in many of the leaders that we partner with. And so, whether it be a new manager who's coming to a role or somebody that's tenured that is just trying to take their organization to the next level, there are a few things that come up very frequently, especially when it comes to interacting and dealing with teams, that I think are fundamental in your understanding and your development as a leader. The first is kind of, we say this, this is one of our core values at ERG, and that's integrity. And integrity by definition is the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles or moral uprightness. We, as we look at our 10 core values, we say, oh well, this is one that kind of goes without saying. Integrity, you've got to have integrity. But I think that we all know from having worked in the market for a long time that it's not necessarily, it doesn't really go without saying. Nearly every day there's the opportunity to either say something false to a client or to a teammate that could make your life a little bit easier, or just, you know, little white lies here and there that, you know, the order didn't come on, come in on time to us, which is why we were late to you, Mr. Customer. Just those little opportunities to operate outside of a high level of integrity that when the people around you see you making those concessions, they lose trust in you and they lose the ability to follow you as a leader. So I would definitely press on you and say, hey, if you're taking these actions that while they might seem harmless at the time, could diminish the trust of your team, you need to make sure that you start on the right path. It's not too late to turn around and say, hey, I can do the right thing going forward. I don't necessarily have to always have done the right thing, but I can earn the trust of my team back. It's not as easy losing their trust, but I can certainly earn it back. If you find yourself taking some— making some bad decisions on occasion in how you handle operations, this would be a good opportunity to sort of course-correct on that. All right, let's talk about the first imperative skill of great leaders, and that is communication. I know some of you on the line have heard me talk about the curse of knowledge before. So, there was a study given a couple years back where they had tappers and listeners. So the tappers choose from a list of songs that are well known to the people in the experiment, like Happy Birthday or Row, Row Your Boat. And then the tapper would tap the song out on the table, and the listener's job was to guess the song. So if I'm tapping Happy Birthday to you, you're sitting across the table from me trying to guess what it is I'm tapping out, and you're just hearing a bunch of nonsense being tapped on the table while I hear the song Clear as day. So the tappers were asked to then predict how often the listener would understand the song that they're tapping out. And the tappers predicted that the listeners would get it 50% of the time. So I think you're going to get the song that I'm tapping out right 50% of the time, which seems pretty good. I mean, they're basic songs that you think everybody knows, and you're obviously crushing it in your head as you're sitting there tapping it out on the table. But in reality, the people, the listeners, only knew the song 2.5% of the time. So instead of the half of the time that the tappers thought they would know the song, they were only getting it 2.5% of the time, 1 out of 40 times did they actually know the song. And so the reason I bring this up is because I see this intent-to-impact gap all the time in communication between leaders and employees. So you think you're tapping out a beautiful, perfect song when you're trying to explain to your team how to perform in a task or maybe the vision for the future or your strategy, whatever it might be, you think you're communicating it clear as day. You're tapping it out perfectly. However, they don't understand what it is you're trying to communicate. So we need to make sure not only that we're clear communicators, but also probe for understanding from the other side of the table and that the message that we've delivered is understood and we've said it in a way that can be understood. And now to take this a step further, not only do the people get the song wrong most of the time, But the tappers actually got frustrated that they didn't know what they were tapping. So how many of you have been there before? I know I have, where I'm trying to communicate something to somebody, or I tell them to do something, and then they come back and they didn't do it right, and I get mad at them because you did a bad job, because I really just did a poor job communicating. So once again, that situation can be completely avoided by having better communication skills. And if you're at a stage in your career where you have not done any formalized communication training in recent months, years, I try to do it every 6 months, whether that be writing, verbal communication, speaking, whatever it is. I always want to try to make sure that I'm keeping up on my communication skills because I understand the importance of those in my leadership vocabulary. All right. So, what are a couple elements of communication? I believe we also have a couple individuals on the phone who have served, done us the great favor of serving our country out there. We appreciate that. It kind of reminded me as I was putting this together, communication is more than just how you speak to people. Your body language is also incredibly important. So, in the 14 Traits of Marine Corps Leadership, they talk about one of the traits is bearing. Bearing is the way you conduct and carry yourself. Your manner should reflect alertness, competence, confidence, and control. I think as leaders, oftentimes we forget that people are paying attention to our body language as well as our verbal communication. So, if every time things go bad, you slump your shoulders and you pout and you get upset, your team's going to pick up on that, and they're going to pick up some of that same body language. I know I've been guilty of this myself. So make sure that you have strong body language and you look and carry yourself like a leader. Next, you want to solicit feedback from your team. So, you know, you can do things like— we work with several clients where we provide 360-degree performance reviews where we're interviewing their subordinates, their leaders and their peers, and sometimes even customers, to identify where the gaps are that they can improve on as a leader. So, even if it's just as simple, we'll talk about some of the questions you can ask your team to learn a little bit more about them shortly. You can also look to things as complex as full-blown 360-degree reviews to learn more about yourself and your team. The other thing about communication, one of the biggest faults I see out there, is people just aren't proactive enough. So this goes with the good and the bad. If something good has occurred, you don't need to wait until the next team meeting. You don't need to wait until, you know, the time is just right to share with the team. Just make sure you're sharing the good news with your team and you're patting that team member on the back publicly in front of other members so everybody can understand what a job well done looks like. Conversely, bad news is just as easy to not be proactive with. I think we obviously are a little bit less proactive with the bad news, but if something's going to change and you need to make a change, it's probably best to just be proactive and make things happen. You know, we see this a lot more often when it's client-facing than employee-facing. There's some, you know, there's been a disruption of service, whatever it might be, and you need to get information to a client and you're sort of waiting for them to reach out to you, you should go ahead and just be proactive with that. Your team will learn and be better from it. You'll find that they'll do the same thing in the future, which will help you. And then ultimately, communication is also about listening, right? They say God gave us 2 ears and 1 mouth for a reason. This is one that I am, you know, they say self-awareness is a big part of leadership. I'm very self-aware that I'm not the greatest listener. I do my best. The best way to listen is to ask really good questions that are open-ended and let people answer them. We talk a lot about saying the words "tell me about" to start a sentence instead of "why" or "why did you do this" or "why did this happen." That's not really a great phrasing to start a question to get somebody open. Try, "Tell me about what occurred," and, "Tell me about how this happened." That gets people— it's a little more open-ended and gets people talking for you. And you can answer, ask some second and third-level questions as you go beyond it. And finally, on the communication side, you really just got to keep it real. You can't try to be somebody you're not. If people see right through you, if you're fake, and if you're not authentic to yourself, this is something that's a very big value. It's actually one of our core values is keep it real at ERG, because we want people who are their true selves, and we want you to be able to feel like you can do that to both us and your clients. So, as leaders, our job ultimately at the end of the day is to take responsibility for ourselves and the organization, and communication is a huge part of that. All right, so communication is a huge fundamental skill for leaders. Next up is something that's probably equally as important, if not maybe more important, and that's emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence can be described as 4 skills. That's the ability to understand your own emotions, so being aware of the different emotions you can feel and what situations trigger different emotions. The ability to control your emotions. So, you need to have discipline and control over yourself and not give in to every emotion, kind of going back to if I got some bad news, am I slumping my shoulders, am I throwing something against the wall, am I crying and pouting? You know, being able to control those actions is really critical. And then the ability to read others' emotions. So, can you also act with empathy when your team, you know, there are times where coming at somebody with a hard hand is not going to be the right response. Even though they've made what could be a catastrophic error. You need to understand the emotions of the people around you so that you can understand the proper way to lead and manage them. And we'll talk more about that in situational leadership. So the last piece of emotional intelligence is your ability to manage relationships with other, other people. So how are you interacting with other people? Are you provoking a lot of arguments, or are your relationships all going smoothly? You know, we always— I think we all know somebody who has— actually, I just talked to somebody yesterday who reminds me of this mold where something's wrong with everybody else, not him, right? Like, "Oh, all these people have a problem with me, and, you know, it must be all of them, not me," right? So, if you have a lot of friction in your relationships, sometimes you have to do some self-diagnosis and self-awareness of understanding, "Is that friction my cause or is Is it possible that all these 10 people all have issues with everybody they engage with, or is it entirely possible that the, that burden is on me? And I would be willing to bet that as soon as you're willing to take 100% responsibility for your actions, each of those relationships will probably improve drastically. So, emotional intelligence is essentially how smart you are about reading and working with emotions, both yours and those of others. And so, you have to understand we're complex people. Working with people is one of the most challenging things about leading an organization. There's a variety of physical and emotional factors that go into every interaction with a teammate. So here are a few of the keys of key elements of emotional intelligence. So self-awareness, we talked about knowing yourself and your goals, kind of understanding what your needs, your strengths, and weaknesses are. You have to know where your own weaknesses are to be able to improve, right? So people who aren't self-aware, that blame others, it's really challenging to be a great leader in that environment. Next up is motivation. You have the ability to motivate yourself over and over again. If you can always motivate yourself, you'll always have enough strength to continue to lead your team, and you won't get frustrated that easily because you'll be focused on these other pieces and improving them. Communication skills, social skills, we kind of talked about that a little bit already. Your ability to interact with your team in an effective fashion. Empathy, you want to be able to put yourself in someone else's shoes to try to accept and understand their point of view no matter how different it might be from your own. And self-regulation is your ability to control your own emotions. So, There is a lot of different things you can do to control yourself. So, if you are an emotional person like I am, I wear my heart on my sleeve. This is always a big challenge for me. I am the first guy that when things are going bad, I want to throw a chair through the window. When things are going good, I want to jump up and down and ring that bell. So, I have to find a nice steady balance in between and be able to, you know, kind of keep, keep at a keep even keel level for myself and my team so that we can all benefit from that lack of an emotional roller coaster. Although, if they're on here, they might not say that I've entirely mastered that yet. So, I continue to work on it. All right. So, here's our action items from some of the core leadership skills. We talked about integrity, communication, and emotional intelligence. Rate yourself 1 to 5, and hopefully you're all following along on the worksheet that was sent out prior to this class. And if you're watching this online after the fact, you can drop me an email at matt@ergpayroll.com, and I'll be happy to provide that worksheet. And rate yourself 1 to 5. Once again, going back to that self-awareness, you have to be willing to admit where your faults are to be able to have proper change and drive change and grow as a So, what can you do to get yourself to a 5? And if you find yourself at the 3 in communication or a 2 in emotional intelligence, there are tons of resources out there to help you to improve. And integrity, I think we all know, do the right thing there and look at yourself in the mirror and identify what you can do to start making better decisions when times are tough. All right, in the last leg, we're going to talk about leading a team and how we can accomplish more together. The first thing, one of the biggest challenges I see leaders have is that they're too focused on trying to lead everybody the same way. So, there's a great quote, I, you know, I think it's attributed to a lot of different people. Bill Belichick is the one I think about, is that I don't treat everyone the same, but I treat everyone fairly. And, you know, I think we would all agree that Tom Brady and the third-string center are not going to be treated the same. They're just not. And nor would they— nor should they be, quite frankly, based on the contribution they make to the team. And so I'm certain that you would be fair to that third-string center, but you might not treat them the same. So situational leadership is based on that. There's a fantastic book by Kenneth Blanchard called Leadership and the One Minute Manager. That once again, that's Leadership and the One Minute Manager. If you haven't read it, it's a very quick read and it walks through this in more detail. And they've got a ton of fantastic material out there about situational leadership that is just the foundational element for building out your leadership arsenal. So the first, as we look at these 4 different ways of leading, they're going to apply to different people in your organization at different times. You may have one employee who needs to fall into the telling and directing category. If you don't tell them and direct them exactly what to do, almost micromanage them, then they're not going to get the job done. And that's only going to make your life more difficult and their life more difficult. And they expect that direction. And that's okay. Some people, that's their style of work. And so, it's a very top-down approach. The employees simply do exactly what they're told. But some people work that way. And I know we can probably all visualize somebody that this is where they excel. Selling and coaching, it's a different style of leadership. This is where it's very involved in day-to-day activities. Some decisions still ultimately lie with the leader; however, you're requesting input from the employees before the decision is implemented. So, employees are still supervised, but it's more of a coaching manner rather than a management manner. Once again, this can be one individual or several on your team. Everybody's going to kind of fall into a different bucket here. The participating and supporting style passes more responsibility to the followers or to the employees. And so leaders still provide some direction. The decision ultimately lies with the follower, and you're going to be there to support their decisions. It's a little bit more sort of the servant leadership type of mentality, right, where I'm going to lead from behind, and I'm going to be there to participate and support, but I ultimately trust your decisions. I'm going to help. Give you all the tools and resources you need to get there. And then finally, delegating is just the style where we're going to lead— we're going to be involved the least with how the employee actually gets things done. I sort of picture somebody in the back of the kitchen working between the window where the cooks have all the food and where the waitresses are coming in. I'm just grabbing those plates on the expediter, I'm handing them to the servers, and I'm saying, okay, here you go, here's yours, here's yours, here's yours. I'm delegating tasks and I'm handing them out to my team. And so we know what the finished product's going to be, the employee knows their role, and they perform it with really little supervision. They know what to do with that food once they get it, right? So the development level of the follower is really going to determine your situational leadership style. There's, there's a lot of different things that varies by employee, and you know, there's a ton of great resources online. I would start with that book. It's a very quick read. And once again, I do just want to hammer home this point of that you want to treat everybody fairly, but not the same. So, I thought this was a fantastic visualization of this where if I treat everybody equally, then, you know, maybe that means one person is going to have a leg up and one person is not even going to be able to see the ball game. Whereas if I treat people fairly, then I've given everybody what they need to be successful. Let's talk about motivating and engaging our team. So, the first thing you have to do to be able to motivate and engage your team is learn about your team. So, what matters to them? Where do they fall on that scale of situational leadership? And then what is their why? So, if you don't know your employees' why, equally as important as them knowing your why, is you knowing their why. Because if you don't know what makes them tick, why they work, what, what it is they want to be compensated for, where they want to go in their career, how they want to spend their free time, then you're never going to be able to perfectly cater your leadership style to them because you're going to be trying to motivate them with things that just don't matter. So this is the first step in motivating and engaging your team is understanding what motivates and engages them. We'll talk about some of the questions you can ask to get to that in just a moment. Second, you're going to want to communicate to your team why what they're doing matters. For us at ERG, it's quite simple. We give 3% of all revenue to local nonprofits. We serve local nonprofits. What we do, the more clients we get, the more we're able to grow, the better service we provide to our clients allows us to do more of that. And we enjoy that. We have people around here that love it. We just left serving lunch at Transition here in Columbia. Highly recommend you check out that charity if you're local to us here in Columbia. So, your why needs to be communicated to the teammates, and they need to understand why what they're doing matters. They're not going to get engaged to increase shareholder value or drive bottom-line growth. Nobody cares about that. And finally, you need to develop your people. If you want them motivated and engaged, you need to be committed to making them better. And this is a challenge for a lot of leaders in that they're scared to challenge the growth of their team members. I see this oftentimes when we have multi-levels within an organization where if I incentivize this individual to grow, well, they might take my job. There's some, there's some fear around that. Or what's really in it for me if Jimmy gets better at his job? Well, I can tell you what, the best leaders that you'll ever know are always the people that get the most out of others. That is the desired end result is to ultimately be the point guard, sort of the person who's not scoring the most points on the team, but the person who dishes the ball to everybody else and puts them in a situation to score, succeed, and be all-stars. And those are the best leaders, the people that make everybody else around them better. And so you need to be focused on developing teammates so that you can continue to grow in your role as a leader and lead from behind the team. All right. Now, one more thing we'll talk about, and that's modeling other leaders. So, I keep wanting to ask everybody questions that's on the phone because that's— I'm used to speaking more face-to-face. But, you know, I'm certain that everybody on the phone has worked for a great leader at some point in their career, or even some of you while you're in the military, you've worked or been around great leaders. So, steal from them. What did they do when they were put in a situation like you are currently in or like you face on a daily or weekly basis? What are some of the things that they've done that you want to model in your career? I think particularly back to a leader I used to work for all the time. Whenever I'm confronted with a difficult situation, I think, "What would he have done in this situation that I am not savvy enough to do at this point in my career?" And I try to model that behavior. And then, you know what I'll do afterwards if I'm not sure if I did it right? I'll pick up the phone and call them and ask, "Hey, here's what happened. Here's how I handled it. What do you think about that?" And steal great ideas from other great leaders around you, whether they're people you used to work with, people at other organizations that you want to reach out to for mentorship type of organization— or mentorship type of relationships. But just make sure that you're getting great ideas. You're immersing yourself in other people's fantastic work that they've already done. All right, action item. This action item, you're going to want to ask each member of your team 3 questions to learn about their why. So, you can ask them, you know, things like, "What kind of work environment makes you feel most engaged?" "What do you think are your strengths?" How can we further advance your strengths? What would you identify as some of your weaknesses or areas for growth? What motivates you professionally and personally? Tell me about your passions. What are your short- and long-term career goals? There's 100 different questions you could ask. And— but the challenge is very simple. Ask everybody on your team 3 questions to get to learn more about what their why is, what drives them. Why do they do what they do, and what is important to them. And I can tell you that the conversations, it's going to be really easy to want to interject after. You're going to ask a question, they're going to say something, and then you're going to want to follow up with your thoughts. Don't do it. Either nod your head in agreement, ask another question, a follow-on question, but just take the information, stock it away, and understand that you're sort of building out your profile of your team and where you can help each of these people reach their goals. All right. So, you've got 3 separate action items when you walk away from here. First of all, make sure you fill out the worksheet that you have alongside this. Schedule time to lead and to focus on leadership-type activities. Sometimes outside your doors even would be most helpful. Rate yourself and your current skills that we talked about earlier, and then ask those questions of your team. You might identify opportunities for growth. So finally, we talk about this a lot, a rising tide lifts all boats. What impact does it make if you're going to become a better leader? Well, we just talked about it. Your team is going to get better. Your organization is going to get better. You're going to create more leaders. You're going to help to create a better economic environment for the people around you. You're going to help to potentially have a positive impact on the families and the lives of the community of the people that you help to coach through their career. A rising tide lifts all boats. The ripple effect can be tremendous. So, don't ever underestimate your ability as a leader. But most importantly, make sure that you understand and that you truly believe that 95% of your assets will drive out the gate every night. You've got to maintain a work environment that keeps those people coming back every single day, and they're more engaged and more thought-provoked than they were the day before. And that lands on you. It's a big responsibility, but that's what you signed up for. So, once again, I appreciate everybody taking the time to join this call today. My name is Matt Beatty. I'm going to close off the recording now and open it up for Q&A if anybody has anything that they want to discuss. I will unmute you in just a second here. All right. You're unmuted if anybody wants to ask any questions. If not, I appreciate you jumping on, and you can drop off. Going twice. Well, hey everybody, I appreciate it a lot. You know where to find me if you need anything. I hope that you all have a blessed rest of your day, and I'm sure we'll talk soon. Thank you.