5 Things Every Leader Should Do.

Hey guys, what's going on? It's Tommy with Leanfast. And today we're going to talk about the five practical things that you as a leader can do every day to ensure success. So let's get to it. Today we're going to talk about the five practical things that every leader does. I've got some notes over here. So if you see me looking away, I want to make sure that I go through this in order and it's really important. So here's the deal. The first thing that every good leader does every day, and this is really what I focus on, this is what I want you guys to focus on every day, is tell your story. If you don't have a story, if you haven't developed a story, the whole like, why we're here as a company, and if it's not something besides increase a bottom line or get better margins, if it's not just tied to dol, something's wrong. You've got to be able for your employees to really have buy in for them to really understand what you do and why you do it and really be willing to give their lives for it, because that's what you're asking them. Trading time for money is really great, but that trade off has got to be worth it for someone to give their life, their time to organization, to be a volunteer, to be an employee. Show up every day with a great attitude and not like start really doing the math every day of is this worth my time? Is the trade off I'm getting worth it? And not having to always negotiate with your employees for better results or better performance. You've got to tell your story as an organization. It's the most powerful thing you can do. It's the critical thing that everyone has to be aware of. You've got to tell your story. One of the best storytellers ever was this guy named Walt Disney. Everybody knows Walt Disney well. He said this quote, this quote says that's what storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope again and again. I love that we instill order with imagination. Storytelling gets you aligned. That's what order is. It gets your organization better aligned to move forward. And so you can't have dominance without alignment. That's just. I don't believe that to be true. Someone proved me wrong in the comments. Tell me about one organization you know that just is scattered to the wind and is dominating their market. Doesn't happen. You have to have alignment vertically and horizontally. Everybody's got to be on the same Page, you got to move forward. That's what storytelling does. It aligns everybody with the mission of what you're doing. And that's why it's so radically important. It's the one thing that you can do every day to crush being a leader. So here's the second thing. Second thing is really awesome, too. There's this guy named Deming is his last name W. Edward Deming. And he's sort of the father of modern engineering techniques and plant management and stuff like that. He said is this. It's not enough to do your best. You must first know what to do and then do your best. And really, that comes down to tell your story, but then set clear goals, have people know what they're achieving, what they're trying to do. Like, that's so crucial to them being fulfilled as an employee because they know they hit their marks. It's so crucial to them being fulfilled as a person because they have clear understandings of what the win is. So you've been able to define the win for someone like, set really clear goals. That. That's so crucial in winning. The other thing he said, and that's number two, but the number three thing that he said that I love so much, he says, you can't expect what you don't inspect. So not only should you be telling your stories, not only should you be setting clear goals, but you should be tracking your progress. You should be creating an environment where people know that they're going from step to step to step to step. I belong still to an organization that acquired my last software company. And we have these things called okrs. And essentially it's objectives and key results. So I get to say, here's my objective for the next whatever time period, and here's the key results. Here's how, you know, I hit my objective. And I take key results from my supervisors and say, here's where. Here's how I need you to do, and here's how I know you're gonna. You got there. And that for me, has been phenomenal as a person and as a leader to see that. So tell your story, set clear goals, and then track your progress. Now, everybody knows this guy named Steve Jobs, right Now, Steve's past, and he's left us this legacy. And I'm not trying to get you to be a Steve Jobs leader, because that didn't work real great. People hated working for him. But he was also so good at telling his story that people would still show up. That whole, we're going to put a Dent in the universe. They were so good at the propaganda at Apple internally about their story and what they're doing. So even if you're a bad leader, those first couple of things, telling your stories and tracking your results and setting clear goals, those things will really help you even overcome you kind of being an ass. But here's the deal. The other thing is that you can innovate to success. This is what Steve said about leadership. He said innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower. When I hit a wall, when I was doing my objective, when I didn't have the opportunity to get to my key result because I hit a barrier, I hit a hurdle, did I innovate around it? And so innovate to your success is a huge thing. Being able to say, I'm not tied to the method, what I am tied to. You can't deviate from your story and you can't deviate from your goals, right? You can't deviate from your story, you can't deviate from your goals, and you always need to be tracking your progress. But what you can deviate always is methodology. When you get tied to a methodology, that is the kiss of death for any business. It just is. It may not be immediate death, but it is definitely. It can be a slow, painful death. Because if you get tied to a methodology, as time changes, you don't. And as your consumer changes, you don't. And as systems change and people change and employees change and their strengths and weaknesses change and you don't, well, if the world's changing and you're not, that's a problem, right? So let's talk about the last thing. We always focus on trying to reward the win. When someone does something great, we want to celebrate it. When our company wins, we want to celebrate. Here's why we do that. Because when you reward the win, right, people get this dopamine drip, like, it's great to celebrate. So we try to create a culture of celebration because you can physically, physically addict people to winning like you can. And it's way better than the fear of losing. Like, you might lose your job and you might. We might lose the ability to hire new people. We might lose the ability. The fear of losing is so powerful, you can't get addicted to losing. I can get you addicted to winning. I want to win so often and so much that and win so quantitatively and qualitatively. I want to win so often that our people become expectant of the win. They expect winning as a natural outcome of all their hard work. Because every time we win, it reinforces the process, it reinforces the goals, it reinforces the story. And when you can celebrate the wins in relationship to the story, man, magic happens. And so, hey, listen, if you're a leader out there today, I just want you to focus on those five things. Like you can win with five tactics. That's it. Like, you can win and it's going to look different for everybody. But you can absolutely go out there and win. If you'll like, literally just tell your story, find it out. If you haven't, if you have never done that, do the exercise, sit down and write down, why are we here? And it can't be about dollars. Let me just take that off the table. It can't be about providing jobs for like, you have to have a substantive social lie. Like, why are we here? What good do we do in the universe? Why are we here? Set clear goals to help you achieve that. Track your progress. Because everyone wants to know that they're making progress. Innovate. When you get to barriers, that's what every leader does. Every leader sees every barrier as an opportunity to innovate. Because what that does, it's refining your methodology. Oh, we got here and our methods took us this far, but they didn't take us around. So now we have to change the methods to get around and then celebrate the win. When you get over that barrier, when you cross that hurdle, don't celebrate the final win. Celebrate wins every day. Invent wins. Hey, listen. Invent wins. Go in and say, hey today. If we can get here, this is great. This is my goal for this afternoon. Let's do something special before lunch and then celebrate that. Buy everybody lunch, sending donuts to the office. You've got to do some sort of like physical celebration so that everybody knows that you're happy. They should be happy too. We're celebrating wins and create a culture of winning where winning is expected. Winning is expected. You can do it. I believe in you. Hey, if you got any questions, you want to talk about this in depth, hit us up in the comments below. We'd love to talk to you about that. If you want some one on one, hit us up in the go to contact. You can get directly to me through the contact form. Would love to talk with you, coach you through anything that you've got going on. I just really so appreciate your time, the fact that you would clue into this with me. So, man, I hope that was helpful and we'll talk to you later. Bye.