Why Can’t They Be Good Leaders?

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Why can't they be good leaders?

Why can't these people be good leaders?

Why?

Let's go over some of these things.

I think the first step is possibly because they're not good followers.

To me, one of the first steps, if I could look at the first two things, if I had to identify

this topic would be, number one, you got to be able to lead yourself well in order to

lead other people well, leading yourself well is always the hardest thing to do.

But number two is typically because they're not good followers.

If you're going to be a great leader, like the best leaders that I've seen, they were

a student of the game.

They humbled themselves to somebody and they had an opportunity to learn from other

people and take wisdom from other people.

And it's difficult to be a good leader if you haven't become a great follower.

So to me, leadership starts with followership.

Leadership starts with being somebody that's humble enough to be coachable, humble enough

to follow somebody that has wisdom and to learn and to grow from that stuff.

No one follows a leader who never learned to follow.

I mean, people will but over time it usually doesn't work.

Like the people that haven't learned to ever follow, to me have egos.

They're not humble.

They're not strong enough to be humble.

They have egos to where they won't allow themselves to be coached and won't allow themselves

to learn from other people enough.

And so I think to me, I remember one of the questions I used to get all the time from young

people in our business is how do you get respect from older people when you're giving a sales

presentation to older people?

How do you get the respect?

You know, one of them is to know your stuff, you know, to be a master at your craft,

to have knowledge, to where they respect how much that you know in your education on yourself

and the products and all that stuff.

But I think the second major one that applies to this is you earn respect by giving respect.

First, so you earn respect by first showing respect.

And I think if you're looking at yourself, you know, I think we always have to self audit

ourselves.

We have to have good self awareness.

It's easy to point the finger at other people.

But every time you point the finger at other people, they got three fingers pointing back

at you.

That's the hard part.

The internal focus of like, what can I do better?

Where did I err?

What part of this can I own?

I think a big step for you to grow as a leader is to ask yourself, would you follow you?

Would you follow yourself?

Because to me, leadership requires self awareness and personal accountability.

Personal accountability is tough.

It's easy for me to hold you accountable.

It's easy for me to critique you until you, which you need to be doing.

But it's hard to turn around and look at myself and say, what can I do better?

What areas of my failing in?

What areas of my struggle in?

Where should I be holding myself accountable more to things and do that self assessment

of yourself?

Because I think this goes simultaneously of like leading yourself well and then being

a good follower before it's your turn to be a great leader.

To be that leader, some people you got to lead from the front.

You also have to learn to have been coached and learned from where you're at.

Nearly all the best leaders that I've witnessed were once the best listeners, the best observers,

the best learners.

It's crazy.

Sometimes I'll give these leadership meetings.

And if you ask some of the people having the most amount of success in that meeting, hey,

let's see your notes.

The people that are making the most money that are having the most amount of success, oftentimes,

those are the people that have the best notes that are paying the most attention.

And it's not the ones that are already or killing it.

It's the ones that are not having the most success.

Those are the ones that typically got the worst notes that are not taking notes, that are

not paying as much attention.

And so in order to be a great leader developing yourself, you got to first lead yourself well

and inspect and then you got to learn how to be a good follower.

Respect isn't given to your title, is given to your actions.

I'm well aware it is.

You know, I remember it first being taught and learned from the book.

You know, you guys know I like John Maxwell for leadership.

The five levels of leadership, where level one is positional leadership.

That's people follow you because they have to because that's your title.

Level two is permission.

Now people start to follow you because of your relationship with them because they want

to.

Level three is production.

People follow you because of the results that you get.

Level four, people want to follow you.

It's called people development.

People want to follow you because you've developed them and you've made them better.

You've made an impact on their life.

And then that leads you to level five.

That's called the ultimate respect level pinnacle, all the peas.

So if we go back over it again, it's position level one.

That's the weakest level to lead from do this because I told you to because I'm the boss.

Although sometimes it does take position to lead.

It helps to have a title and a position to lead.

If you're only leading up do this because I said to because I'm the boss, that's weaker

leadership.

The second level up from that is people start to follow you because your relationship

with them.

You got to build relationships.

But if you got relationships without any results sooner or later, they're not going

to want to follow you.

So level three is results.

People want to follow you because you got a good relationship with them and you get results.

Level four, people want to follow you.

This is where you start really having high levels of leadership where you can multiply

things as people want to follow you because of the relationship that you develop because

of the results that you get.

And now because of the results they get in their life from what you've poured into them

in the amount of development that you've done for them, that leads you to level five pinnacle

which is the ultimate respect level.

And I think if you have all four of those down then you can come close to qualifying for

level five, the ultimate respect level which is where people say I would follow that person

anywhere.

And that I think has to do with not just how you live your life in your work in business

but the respect level that they have for you outside of work, outside of business.

How are you overall as a person, even though no one's perfect, right?

And so you got to shoot for level five to be a great leader.

And a lot of that is internal.

And if you want to be able to develop others you got to be able to develop yourself.

If you want to be able to develop others, someone would have had to develop you.

Being in charge that you got some specific title doesn't automatically make you a leader

worth following the people just because you got a title.

These are the worst leaders is the people that only lead because they got a title.

They just can't wait to get the next title because they can sit on the throne and say

that they got some form of title.

Authority does not equal leadership.

I think it helps if you've been a part of a team, don't even need to necessarily be

a sports team.

But it helps if you've been a part of a team to understand team dynamics.

If you want to be a hero, you want to be the one that everybody follows.

You want to be the greatest in leadership.

It's humble, humble yourself first and be a hero later.

Because if you don't take that and you want to be a hero now, then what happens in my

experiences that you get humbled down the road?

But it's your choice.

So either walk in with humility and you get to be a hero down the road or you walk in with

this arrogance of I'm a hero right now and then you walk out with humility.

And what I've learned is like, man, if I can humble myself, it's a softer landing than

when the world got to humble us.

When God has to humble us, it's a tougher landing.

There's no pads down there.

It's a rough landing.

It's a tough lesson to learn.

So learning and following to me takes humility.

That's the root of it all.

Because you got to be humble enough to learn.

You got to be humble enough to follow somebody else.

And that's how you become the greatest.

We got to learn to, you know, leaders that talk the most, that do mostly the talking.

Those are the ones that still need to develop the most in my experience.

And I used to be like that.

I still got to develop.

I still got to get better.

I don't got it all down.

But I'm just talking about in my earlier and younger years of leadership.

But what I've learned is that over time, I think the greater leader you want to be, the

more that you listen.

You know, they say if you listen to the whispers, you don't have to hear the screams.

Also known as what we call W-A-Y-T.

What are you thinking?

And so I want to listen well enough that I can understand what it is that you're thinking.

I want to listen to where you're at, to what are your challenges?

What do you think we should do?

Let me get your opinions.

Let me get buy-in from the leadership team.

And part of being, part of listening is it shows that you care about the other person's

opinion.

And if you walk our hallways, one of the quotes that we have above one of the doors is

it says, people don't care how much you know and today know how much you care.

Did followers develop that EQ, that emotional intelligence, that emotional quotient, that

real leaders need?

You can't build trust if you've never had to trust somebody else first.

It's hard to build trust with somebody in a relationship if you've never had the opportunity

to trust in others.

And you're going to be vulnerable, right?

It's like just the way it works.

As anytime you love, you're at your vulnerable to where, oh, what if I get hurt, right?

You can get hurt.

That's what happens sometimes.

But to not open up enough means that it's going to be difficult to ever love, right?

And so the same thing with trust.

Anybody that is trusted over time has been burned and has been hurt by the trust that you've

given to somebody.

That's how you learn from that experience and continue to move forward.

You know, I think, you know, when we talk about the five levels of leadership, there comes

a point where people think that they could talk their way through without producing other

people and helping them be successful or without being successful themselves doing the

work, doing the production.

And typically, you know, I learned that like the first step to earning everybody's respect

is that you get out there and do the work that you're talking about.

Your influence is weak because your example is weaker.

So what is your example saying?

Leadership is earned through consistency and integrity, aligning up with what you're talking

about doing.

I'm doing what you're talking about doing we got to do.

And so the more consistent that you are with that leadership message and with the action

of which you walk the more respect that I think you're going to have.

So take it, take it as we close out, take a quick assessment of yourself or help other

people take this assessment and ask myself, you know, number one, how good of a follower

in my being?

Am I being a good enough follower?

Number two, am I looking internally at myself at some of the things that I can prove upon

and coming up with a game plan and self accountability and self awareness of, you know

what?

I can't get better at that.

Are people around you, do they have enough confidence in you in your relationship

that they can tell you?

Are you asking people around you?

Where do they think you can get better?

And they're not afraid to tell you the truth so you can grow.

The next thing I would do action step is I would look at the five levels of leadership

that we mentioned and look in there and say, all right, what level am I on and where can

I improve?

As a whole and more so individually because here's a mistake I see people making leadership

as they think because they got a level five with this person that they necessarily got

a level five with somebody else.

I may have a level five.

with you but I may not have a level five with your people. It's impossible to have a level five with

everybody. So the best way to go about accountability or tough conversations in a team setting is go to the

person that you have a level five with and see if that person could have the accountability conversation with the

person that you would have wanted to hold accountable that they have a level five with. So for example, if you got a hundred people in your

organization and you got a level five with ten people, you don't have it with the other 90. In the lower level, you have on that

level of five that they have the lower level of leadership you're probably going to be able to take with these people. So what I would want to do is those ten. If those ten had a level five with five people each.

Now my ten got a level five with fifty people. So now we got a level five with sixty people. Now if those fifty people,

if they each had a level five with two people because of how much they've walked through those those levels. Now we can have a level five with the group.

And so if I want to talk to that bottom level hard core and get some things done, I may need to depending on how hard that conversation needs to be. Maybe I need to go to that.

My level five person and have that level five person tell their person until their person to tell that person versus me going direct because sometimes what happens is if you go direct only to hold people accountable all the time.

Then it's like the only time this person reaches out to me is when they got something negative to say.

When they got something bad to say. And that's tough in a high-paced environment. Sometimes you might need to cut the line and be real direct.

But the best way to go about it in my experience is that. And while we're on that subject, you know, I think this is a whole nother topic. But I would say to like deposits in withdrawals.

Look at how many deposits you're making with people deposits is the energy you put into them the kindness that you show to them the words that you build them up with the time that you give to these people like the deposits that you make into their life.

It allows you to make withdrawals which is kicking them into butts sometimes or having a hard conversation or asking for a favor or whatever it is because I think to move the line.

To take it to the next level. You're going to have to get people to push beyond what they would have been able to push themselves to do because you're pushing them to do it.

But they got to want to do it because you're telling them to do it. And the only way they're going to want to do it because you're telling them to do it is if you have enough change in the bank.

If you want to make change, you got to have enough change in the bank with that person. So now I could push you. You want to be pushed. You want to listen to me because I got enough money in the bank with you that I can make a withdrawal.

Even though it's for your own benefit and it's for your own good, it's still a withdrawal. If I got to kick you in the butt.

And so pay attention to the deposits and withdrawals. Look at your bank account balance with the people and make sure that you haven't just been making a bunch of withdrawals recently to people.

Because sooner or later you bankrupt the relationship if you're not putting anything back into it but you make a bunch of withdrawals.

So the more withdrawals that you want to make the more deposits that you got to make and to go and to really grow people and push to the next level.

If you want to challenge them, those could be looked as as withdrawals a lot of times. So that means if I'm going to make a lot of withdrawals from you to push you, I got to put in a bunch of deposits.

So I don't go bankrupt. So I hope that helps some people out there. If it did help anybody out there.

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