7 Questions Every Agency Leader Should be Asking

The most important question you'll ever ask as an agency leader are those questions you ask yourself. On today's Agent Leader podcast, I'm going to go through the seven questions you must ask as an agency leader to lead yourself, your team, and your clients with excellence. The Agent Leader Podcast is brought to you by the Sitkins Network. Sell more, retain more, and earn more. You can learn more about the sitkins network@sitkins.com that's S I T K I N S. Foreign. Hello again, everyone. This is Brent Kelly, host of the Agent Leader Podcast. I'm so glad you joined me today. And as I said on the intro, the best questions that we ask as agency leaders, whether you are a agency principal, whether you manage a team, whether you lead your clients as a producer, anybody who has influence as a leader, the most important questions that you're ever going to ask are those questions that you ask yourself. You know, the. The quality of your answers is determined by the quality of your questions. In fact, my most recent podcast, I talk a lot about questions, questions that you want to ask, in particular your future ideal clients and your clients. And while asking great questions to our team members, to our clients, to other centers of influence is certainly critical, the most important questions, again, are those ones that we will ask ourselves. Now, I'm sure as a leader of any kind, you have undoubtedly learned that experience is an effective teacher, right? Just by living each day, by showing up, by playing the game, you're going to have some lessons that you're going to learn. Experience can be a very effective teacher. However, I want to ask you as the listener a question. Do you believe that experience is the best teacher? And here's why I asked this question. Have you ever met someone who said they had? I don't care if it's five years, 10 years, 15, 20, 30 years of experience. I've got 30 years of experience doing this. And you have a conversation and get to know them a little bit, and you quickly begin to realize that maybe what they really have is one year of experience doing the same thing for a number of years. They've never really grown much. It's, you know, I've been part of some different organizations that you're like, you know, it's time to maybe we adapt and change and ask ourselves as an organization and a leadership team, are there better ways of doing things? Are there new ways? Are there ways that we can improve on things, that even though they've been pretty good, we can make them better? And that's why I believe that Experience is indeed a good teacher, but only evaluated experience creates greater awareness and positive change. Now personally, I'm an optimist. You know, I know people that are pessimists and realists. I'm definitely an optimist. I always try to find the good in things. And I believe that, you know, that the future has got positive things ahead of us. And in many ways these tendencies serve me well. It helps me with vision and looking at some of the big picture. However, I will admit that being an optimist and a risk taker can also cause me to sometimes stop to reflect and really think about what it is them doing and the real results that are happening to make necessary improvements. And that's why I believe asking great questions is so important. One of my favorite books on asking questions and specifically asking yourself great questions comes from John Maxwell wrote a book called Good Leaders Ask Great Questions. It's a terrific book in many aspects of leadership. And one of the sections focused specifically on asking yourself great questions to help you think deeper, to gain greater self awareness, how to serve others more effectively. And there were seven questions that John had mentioned in the book and I've kind of tailored them and put it in my own words and thought about this and again made some changes from the lens of an insurance agency leader and how you can tailor this. Now, as I go through these seven questions that I believe every agency leader must ask themselves, you could use them all, certainly write them all down. I'd love for you to take notes on this and say, okay, this is a question I want to ask myself and be honest and answer. Maybe you want to take just a few, or maybe you want to add some of your own. The most important point, whether you use all seven, you add your own or you just use a couple, is that you begin to start to think about those most important questions that you do need to ask yourself to make yourself a better leader. Alright, so let's go to the seven. Number one, the first question that every agency leader must ask themselves is this. Am I investing in myself? Am I investing in myself? Have you ever tried to pour an empty glass into another glass to fill it up? Right. It's a stupid question, right? It's a silly question. Of course not. You can't pour an empty glass and turn the glass and fill it up. The reason why I ask that is that I see this often with agency leaders. They are trying to pour into their team to their agency team. They're trying to pour into their insurance carrier partners. They're trying to Pour more information and help into their clients. And they've never spent the time pouring into themselves. They don't. My favorite quotes that I heard several years ago was this is that you can't give what you don't have. You may want to write that down. You can't give what you don't have. In fact, when I go back about 15 years ago, I heard a quote from the late, great Jim Rohn. I mentioned Jim all the time. He's just, again, my favorite business philosophers and mentors ever. And he said something that was really profound in my life. And when I first heard it, I didn't quite grasp it. And then as I began to kind of chew on a little bit. And you think about it as you grow and develop. And if I've grown and developed, I thought, you know, this makes a lot of sense. And here's what Jim said. He said, work hard on your job, Make a living. Work hard on yourself, Make a fortune. Personal development isn't a fad. Oh, personal development, professional development. Now, it's not something you just think about when you have time. Your personal and professional growth as a leader will be the difference between you reaching your potential to wondering why you didn't accomplish more at the end of the day. So the main question is this. Am I investing in myself? But here's some things to think about within that question. In what areas do you want to grow personally and professionally? What are some of the skills that you need to develop? Where are some areas that you need to grow in your life and your business to get you where you want to go? And here's the second question. How are you investing in that? Are you scheduling time with yourself to invest in. In yourself? It's the most important person you can ever invest on. Invest in. So number, number one is, am I investing myself? Question number two, As a leader, am I genuinely interested in others? Am I genuinely interested in others? See, true leadership is not how far we advance ourselves, but how far we advance others. Think about that for a second. It's an analogy. Think about, you know, as a. As a person who may have done a solo sport in your life, let's just say track and field, for example. It's one thing if your job is to be the fastest on the track, and great sales producers are great examples of this. But when you're leading your team, it becomes not just how fast you can run, but how well and efficiently you can bring others with you. There's a different skill. So the main question here is, am I genuinely Interested in others, see people. If I ask most organizations, I ask agency leaders, what's your most important asset, your most important resource? Most good agency leaders would say, well, it's our people. It's people in general, certainly it's our team members. The most important people are our clients. They're the influencers that help us in the community. They are our partner insurance carriers, all the people that are around that are our most important asset. Yet sometimes, and sometimes maybe I could even say oftentimes, in our day to day lives, it can be easy to take these precious assets, the people, for granted. One of the common questions I often get asked from agency leaders, whether it's in a sales program or anything else, is, well, how do we add more value to others? You know, value add, value add. And the first and most simple answer is simply this. Just genuinely value people. You can't add value to people when you don't genuinely value them. And unfortunately, maybe it's not intentional in some cases, is that we don't really treat people the way that they should be treated. We don't really genuinely value them. So what are your true motives? Because if you're focused on chasing dollars, and I've been there before, it becomes frustrating and exhausting. We got to grow this, we got to do this. But when you really focus on serving others, it just seems somehow the dollars begin to follow. The greatest purpose of leadership is to serve others. And that starts by genuinely valuing others. To serve is to lead. To lead is to serve. So how are you serving others? So question two, am I genuinely interested in others? Ask yourself that question, how you're approaching that Question number three. Am I practicing humility? Am I practicing humility? I learned humility at a very early age in my life. I can remember this very well. It's a, a vivid memory in my life. In seventh grade, junior high, I thought I was pretty good in basketball. From a small town, I, I started on the team and I played, you know, a lot of minutes and all that, scored a lot of points. And one summer I got invited to play in a larger tournament. Bigger cities and higher competition, obviously. And I remember very distinctly I was shooting a three point shot as a seventh grader. I was a pretty good shooter. And out of nowhere this kid comes out, blocks my shot, spikes the ball on the floor, takes it down to the other end and dunks it. This is in junior high. I wasn't around people that dunked the ball in junior high. And I realized very quickly at that moment it hit me very Quickly that there were a lot of people that were bigger and faster and better basketball players than me. It doesn't mean I wasn't good. It means that there's a lot of really great competition out there. It was a lesson in humility. And I share this story because the same is true in business. Regardless of how big your agency is or how great your agency is, or if you're a producer, how much you produce, there's always going to be a person. There's always going to be an agency that's bigger, faster and stronger than you. That's just a fact. And just when you feel that you have the tiger by the tail, someone else comes out. Now another tiger comes out to bite you. Rick Warren says this author, he says, humility is not denying your strengths. Humility is being honest about your weaknesses. Every one of you listening this has strengths, and you should leverage those strengths. You should be proud of those strengths. Dan Sullivan calls them your unique abilities. But you also need to be very aware that you have weaknesses. Every one of us has weaknesses. As leaders, we have weaknesses. And so you've got to be aware of those and be humble to your weaknesses. I've seen many leaders who, you know, they've got weaknesses, they've got strengths, but they try to play off the weaknesses like they don't have them. And people can see them. We know them. You can't hide them. So ask yourself the question, where do you need to practice humility? Am I practicing humility? What areas do you need to. And how can you do that better? People will. People again, people will. They like. When you share the fact that you struggle in areas as a leader, it doesn't show weakness. It doesn't make you extremely vulnerable. It makes you authentic. So think about that number four, Am I consistently adding value to others? So I've said this many times in trainings I love. In the book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey talks about this. But you're either making emotional deposits or emotional withdrawals from those around you every day, every interaction that you have. Think about this. Whether it's in person, whether it's on the phone, even if it's an email, you're either depositing something, right, you're helping them, you're adding value, or you're taking something away. And you know that if you make enough deposits, you will become rich in your relationships. If you make too many withdrawals, you will soon become relationally bankrupt. The key phrase to challenge yourself every day is this. Who can I add value to? Today, who can add value today? If you're an agency principal, leads your team, where can you add value to your team? Maybe it's a simple, how are things going? You know, and having an authentic conversation for five minutes, instead of running into your office as a producer who leads, who leads your team and your clients, can you just pick up the phone and say, how can we help you today? What's the one thing we could do to serve you better? There's a lot of things that you can do that are very simple. And going back to the great Zig Ziglar who said this, if you want to, if you help enough people get what they want, you can have everything you want. And that's a mindset shift. So the question number four is, am I consistently adding value to others? Am I waking up every day saying, how can I add value to other people in this world? How can I give back? So who are you adding value to today? Question number five for agency leaders. Am I staying in my strength zone? I've already talked about being humble in your weaknesses, but am I staying in my strength zone? A couple years ago, I remember I spent an entire day working on formatting a landing page part of a website for a new program that I was offering at that time. And I remember I was all excited. I was going to put this together and for eight hours I tried, I toiled, I was frustrated, I was doing something that I realized I wasn't very good at. And at the end of the day I walked away. I was irritated, I was emotionally drained and, and I hadn't even finished it. It was, I was, still had more work to do. It was a bad choice, you know. Instead what I could have done is realize that my strength is in content creation delivery, not all the back end programming stuff for the landing page. And I could have hired someone very, you know, probably very inexpensively to do some of this stuff, which by the way, they were equipped to do and really good at it and can do it in a much shorter amount of time. And I could focus on what I was really needing to do, which is deliver great content to my audience. I share this because I see too many leaders oftentimes spend time in their weaknesses, which leads to frustration and inefficiency instead of being very focused on their strengths. And so understand this. You've been equipped with natural God given talents. You have stuff hardwired into you and maybe you're still learning, you're tapping into it. As we grow and change, we, we kind of get better at Understanding what that is. The key is when you understand what you're truly great at and what you're hardwired to do. What lifts you up, where you add the most value to the world? Are you spending enough time there? Are you focused on those activities that provide you the greatest return and the greatest reward? Because when you love what you do and you're in that strength zone, people can see it and people get more value from you. And by the way, there are people who would love to handle some of the weaknesses that you're not good at. We think, oh, no one would like to do that. Yes, they would. Yes, they would. So the question to ask yourself is, am I staying in my strength zone? And I would follow up by this. Are you leveraging your strengths? Are you in that strength zone? Question number six that leaders should be asking themselves. Am I taking care of today? Am I taking care of today? There's an old proverb that states this. I love this. When is the best time to plant a tree? Well, 20 years ago. When is the next best time? That would be today? Have you ever been so focused on what happened yesterday or what might happen tomorrow that you lose sight of the day right in front of you? I know I sure have. And that's why this question is so valuable for leaders. Am I taking care of today? See, while your past may be filled with problems and your future may be filled with possibilities, today is really the only day that counts. My favorite quotes comes from John Wooden, who said this. Make every day your masterpiece. Make every day your masterpiece. Isn't that a great quote? See, today is truly all that matters. So what are the most important things that you need to accomplish today? How are you taking care of today? It's question number six. Last question number seven. Am I investing time with the right people? Am I investing time with the right people? Charlie Tremendous Jones. Love that name. Love his books and information, too. He said this. You will be the same person in five years, except for the books that you read and the people that you meet. So who are the people that you're spending most of your time with? Are you investing time with those people who inspire you? Those people who make you think, who will challenge you, who raise your level of effectiveness, who you can learn from, who can be part of your mentorship team? This also includes the content that you put in your mind as well. What books are you reading? What podcasts are you listening to? What videos are you watching? Just like what you feed your body determines your physical health, what you feed your mind through the people that you meet and you hang out with and the books and the podcast and the information that you listen to and read determines your professional health. It's been said that this is called bread for the head. What bread are you putting in your head? Is the famous saying. And you sure you've heard this before? Garbage in, garbage out. Who you surround yourself with the people and the information. It really matters day in, day out. So who are your greatest influencers? What is the greatest influence on your life? Is it trivial things that won't get you to where you want to go? Or is it the important things? Are you surrounding yourself with people who like to talk about what happened 10 years ago? Are people who dream and talk about ideas that will change things in the next 10 years? Am I investing time with the right people? Those are my seven questions that every agency leader should be asking themselves. Number one, Am I investing in myself? Number two, Am I genuinely interested in others? Number three, Am I practicing humility? Number four, Am I consistently adding value to others others? Number five, Am I staying in my strength zone? Number six, am I taking care of today? And number seven, am I investing time with the right people? Like I said, I would love for you to write those out and actually spend some time and think about where you're at today and how you can begin to improve in those areas. But even if you take one or two of them, you're making big steps. And what other questions did I miss? Comment on the on the podcast subscription or just email me@brentitkins.com what are some other questions should be asked? I always like to learn from the audience as well. Now here's the bottom line. The quality of your answers is determined by the quality of your question. So what questions are you asking yourself to be a better leader? Well, I hope that this episode and prior episodes have added value to your day, to your week, to your month, and of course to your entire insurance agency. My name is Brent Kelly. I am the vice president of the Sitkins Group. And if you'd like to reach out to me for anything, please contact me here. My email is brentitkins.com that's S I T K-I-N S.com also go to our website to learn about our various programs for independent insurance agencies to help you sell more, retain more and earn more. You can Visit us@sitkins.com.