Love – The greatest leadership tool – PART 7

“I can live for two months on a good compliment.” – Mark Twain

Everyone is fighting a great battle within themselves. 

It’s easy to see people who show up showered and dressed and ready to work as having normal put-together, well-adjusted lives and being here, centered, and willing to serve us. But the reality is that almost everybody, at some point, is fighting a great battle within themselves or at home.

Maybe they’re lonely or sick. Maybe a loved one has turned to drugs. Maybe they’re getting divorced. Maybe they are a single mother. Maybe they suffer from low self-esteem inflicted by struggling parents who didn’t know any better. Maybe they can’t pay their bills. Maybe they have to support a disabled child. Maybe they are looking for meaning, or just attention of any kind.

The reality is that you have the power to make work the best part of someone’s life. We have said entrepreneurship is the power to create oneself, but it’s also the power to impact others’ lives for half of their waking hours. That is an awesome power.

Empathy is the ability to understand another’s feelings. It’s different than sympathy, which is agreeing or supporting one’s feelings. Great leaders understand people and life and how they respond or react emotionally to events and challenges, whether those responses are the same as the ones the leader would choose or not. They understand that you can never understand another person unless they ARE them and have lived the same life. Showing empathy is the first step. Helping people believe in themselves, being the best version of themselves and being a bright spot in their day follows.

When people feel like their leader cares about them, it matters more than you can know. When a leader cares, they build trust and caring in their team members, and amongst each other. Over time, an ecosystem of caring emerges among all team members.

Love – The greatest leadership tool – PART 6

“I will not let you fail”

A leader brings out the best in other people while accomplishing the goals of the organization. If you have the attitude “I will not let you fail”, they know it. You have high expectations and encourage them, recognizing even small steps of progress.

You do not give up on anyone. If you decide a team member is not right here, you excuse them from your company with dignity and care. Otherwise, you understand that it’s your job to see that everyone that’s here will succeed.

You trust them. You give them what they need to succeed – training, tools, support. You have high expectations for them because you believe in them, not just because you want the fruits of their successful labors. You have their back. You support them when they make a mistake. You give them credit. You don’t let them down.

People Crave Recognition

“The deepest principle of human nature is to be appreciated.” – William James

The owner of Brown Roofing, Eddie Griffin, tells a story. When he was 14 years old, things were not going well at home with his family. He ran away and wound up at a friend’s house. His friend’s dad, Gary Brown, found him in the garage and asked what he was doing there. The 14-year-old Eddie told Mr. Brown that he was wondering if he could stay there. Gary Brown stared down at the young Eddie, and paused for a long while. “Why don’t you come to work with me and pick up around the jobsite?”

Gary Brown was a roofer and perhaps he saw that Eddie could be some cheap or even free labor, and perhaps he had a soft spot and was helping Eddie out. Not long after, Mr. Brown told Eddie to work on taking down a three-story-high chimney with just a sledgehammer. He left Eddie at the job.

Later that afternoon he came back and found Eddie, black with soot, and a three-story chimney that had been single-handedly taken down to the ground. A pile of bricks and blackened clay tile sections remained. Gary was amazed and praised young Eddie.

Eddie said he would have done anything for that man, and for that recognition again. And he did. He never left the company. Today he owns it.

Love – The greatest leadership tool – PART 5

Building a great team is job number one for a leader.

Who you are has everything to do with it. You are the common denominator in your relationships with Daniel, Suzanne, Rocky, Javier and the (28) other people on your team.

Love and intention behind your actions

There’s what you do, and there’s how you do it. An organization can do everything “right” but have a hollow culture. When leaders really care about the team, and the team really cares about each other, magic can happen – relatively speaking. It can be the difference between –

Being successful and happy……………………. Being unsuccessful and unhappy

People being authentic……………………………. People being guarded

People smiling………………………………………….. People being miserable

People giving their all ……………………………… People giving just enough

People staying and getting even better….. People leaving

Growth …………………………………………………….. Stagnation

Success ………………………………………………….. Failure

Intention matters. You can show that people are most important by showing a limit to what you’re willing to do in pursuit of getting tasks completed and goals achieved.

When you ask them to do better, you should show that how they feel is more important. You are not willing to overtly make them feel bad about themselves just to improve their performance and make you feel better about yourself. Your criticism is very subtle. People know what and how they are doing. It doesn’t take much from you to let them know they could do better. You carefully let them know what you are thinking about their performance and quickly move to how much you believe in them and what you’ll do to help them be better. You ask questions of them and listen. You give them a way out of feeling substandard, and never lock them into it. You make them believe they can do more even if they have never done it before.

People will forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel.

Love – The greatest leadership tool – PART 4

Different measures of the same thing.

These are all gradations of the same thing – love for other people.

A hug.

Sharing some time.

A habit of positive feedback.

Recognizing a good job.

Encouraging words.

Being sure they have what they need.

A sincere interest in them personally.

Asking questions.

Acknowledging they are there.

A smile.

And…you never know what this leads to:

People stand with you in YOUR time of difficulty.

Getting invited to a party, picnic, or wedding.

Crying at funerals.

We’re not prescribing anything here. We’re just opening a dialogue that I suspect may strike at your heart.

To give it, you must have it.

Some of us are naturally open and caring. But I am an introverted disciplined Director, with a soft caring inside that’s not hard to access. We’re all different. Some are open, and some are self-contained. Some are direct, and some are indirect.

No matter what your style, you have to love yourself to love others. You have to be happy with you to be happy with others. You can’t give away what you don’t have. If you need to work on you, and get help doing so, do it. Your own self-acceptance, accepting your past, and loving who you are is important not only to this subject, but to the very meaning of life – to be happy.

Some would say this is irrelevant to being an entrepreneur or leader. But it’s not. Life and business are inseparable if your heart beats at work. You can’t be one kind of person and another kind of leader. People are always trying to figure out your true intention, especially your intention for them. If your intention is to “Do your job and you get paid” and that’s it – well that works for a while when people need a paycheck. But the best (and most) won’t stay just for a paycheck.

Love – The greatest leadership tool – PART 3

Now let’s ask a few more questions.

If we had money but lots of people felt like we were cold, uncaring, and mistreated them, enough so that they were angry at us, could we really be happy?

On our deathbed, will we wish we had more money?

Will we think of all the friends we had and people we love?

If we were in trouble and few showed up to help us, how would we feel?

There are no hard answers here. We’re just exploring. Our answers, and the strength of those answers, will vary. I know that with age my answers have crystalized into a clear direction that informs my daily interactions with people. The answers matter and they are put into practice.

What does it mean to use love in leadership?

It means that you genuinely care about the people on your team. Yes, some more than others based on how long you’ve known them, their contribution and their openness and reciprocation to you. Your default being is to care for the people, and their success, at your company. You show it with your voice, your actions, your encouragement, your example, your body language, your dedication, your behavior when things don’t go well, your generosity, and combinations of these and other behaviors.

It means you know how to encourage great performance. It means you know the differences in people’s style and abilities. It means you know when to put people in front of tasks.

This is a distinction that makes all the difference.

It means you accept people how they are, and work to help them get better. This is different from not accepting people how they are and trying to change them because they are flawed.

Love – The greatest leadership tool – PART 2

The Purpose of Life

We have talked about this before in the SOE. As entrepreneurs we can lose our way and become someone we did not want to be if we lose sight of the purpose.

If you ask someone why they’re doing what they’re doing, and keep asking, you’ll eventually get to the same answer. Let’s try it.

So in this case, this person is planning a meeting with their people because it’s ultimately part of feeling worthwhile and being happy.

Let us not lose sight of being happy as our goal. Our daily activities are part of being happy, which is our ultimate goal.

Love – The greatest leadership tool

As many of you know, I created a School of Entrepreneurship for business owners, primarily tailored to home service contractors, but most of the material can be used by any business leader and their teams.  I wrote all the material myself and delivered it in live classes.  We recorded some of the classes and created a total of 1134 videos.  The School is online at thesoe.com now.  I deliver 98% of the classes to you via video.  There are written versions of the material – PDF’s to download.  

Starting today and in the upcoming Think Daily for Businesspeople posts, I want to give you a free exercise in it’s entirety.  It’s the very last exercise of the School, until I wrote another class 8 years later called “Building Wealth, How your money can make more money that you do”.

Anyway, there are so many very powerful lessons in the School of E, but this one is very special to me.  It’s called “Love, the greatest leadership tool.”

As many of you know, I have been in business for 44 years, and I own or have partners in about 35 businesses with about 3000 employees.  People ask “How do you do that?”  “Good people who stay for a long time” is the answer.  I hope you enjoy the following exercise from the Contractor Nation School of Entrepreneurship.  And if you want to join this school, and go through it online from where you are, I’d love for you to do that.  thesoe.com

We will do a piece of this class each day until we are done.  (I wish I could deliver this in the pretty format with all the graphics and pictures in the SOE exercise, but my Think Daily tool does not allow me to do that so it will have to be text only.)  Here we go – 

Love – the greatest leadership tool

Love – “a strong positive emotion or regard.  Have great affection for.”

Human beings are first and foremost emotional beings. 

That means you, and everyone around you. We are all searching for meaning, and a place where we are genuinely appreciated and cared about. We reciprocate these emotions because we feel loyalty – we bind ourselves to a course of action or a team that is looking out for us.

Leadership and management can be systematic, robotic, and mechanical. That’s a start. But understanding what truly drives people and causes them to fully commit, is a precious art that any leader should aspire to understand, and use for the right reasons in the construction of a team.

Love is a soft art.

It’s participation in any organization is a matter of opinion. It’s an alchemy; an inexact science. It is our opinion that love being present between the hearts of team leaders and front-line team members is the highest order of influence one can attain.

It’s not talked about often, at least not in this way. Perhaps because it’s seen as a theme that doesn’t align with traditional business methods. Perhaps because it can’t be measured and quantified on a chart. Perhaps because the idea of love and money are often seen as opposing ideas, or at least ones that have nothing to do with each other.

We’re going to put it out there in this SOE exercise. We will leave it to you to determine its usefulness.

What’s easier – How or Who?

You can either learn how to do something really well, or you can find someone who already knows how to do that thing really well to do it for you/on behalf of your company.

If you are a one-person show, you have to learn how to do a lot of things.  That takes time, it’s slow, and exhausting.  There are so many things to learn.

If you can get leads and sell things and make a margin on what you sell, you can have some money to hire people – employees or subcontractors/vendors who know how to do specific things really well.  You can divide the duties and allocate them to specialists who are great at it.

Today, the WHO could be AI.

Who is often the way to go.  By focusing on WHO, you can scale.

The key is getting the right WHO’s working on the right things.

WHO not HOW.

Wit from a leader

In your own company you may feel comfortable making jokes.  People will listen and they will laugh.

Humor used at the right time in the right measure, can lighten things up and be a workplace lubricant.

But be careful.  Don’t go over the line, and it is so easy to do.

Cracking jokes is one thing, but jokes are not what people need from a leader. And there are many subjects now you have to steer clear from in a workplace.

Wit is another.  Wit can be used to shed light on a serious thing using humor.  But use it sparingly and don’t cross the line.  

When you do cross the line, you look awkward, foolish, or worse.

“Wit is a dangerous weapon, even to the possessor, if he does not know how to use it discreetly.” – Michel de Montaigne

I can be witty.  Sometimes I am in a mood and on a roll.  And I think it helps in certain situations.  But I have learned, if I am not sure I should say it, in that company or in that moment, just don’t.  You lose nothing by what you do not say.  But you could make everyone uncomfortable if your words or timing are off the mark.

“Wit is a treacherous dart.  It is perhaps the only weapon with which it is possible to stab oneself in one’s own back.” – Geoffrey Bocca

Enough of these, but not too much

Having the right qualities in the right amounts (at the right times) to be a good business leader can be a tricky thing.

You will ride up on your leadership, or pay for your mistakes.

You need confidence – but too much and it is arrogance.

Confidence comes from preparation – but too much preparation and you delay.

You need persistence, but not stubbornness.

You need to be firm, but not rigid.

You need a positive outlook, without being in denial.

There is what works long-term, and what doesn’t.

Self-awareness, and the willingness and ability to adjust are rare things.

Can you see yourself?