Growth Mindset: *Leadership* – What is it, and can it be learned?

Audio Transcription

Hello and welcome to another episode of The Contractor Grow Show. My name is Mark. I am your host. And in today’s episode, I want to talk about something that I think is very important here for the new Year, and that is the idea of leadership. So it’s here, it’s Christmas Eve. I felt inspired to get on and share some things that I’ve learned over the years and point some direction of how you may implement some of these things in your remodeling business or your contractor business. So leadership is such a powerful idea. It transcends typical, traditional kind of boundaries. It transcends politics, it transcends religion. Some of the greatest leaders have been religious leaders, and we’re here coming up on the Christmas holiday. I want to talk a little bit about the leadership qualities of Jesus, and I want to refer to a book that is, I think one of the best books out there on leadership called The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John Maxwell, who’s considered one of the greatest leadership experts in the world, started a huge organization educating people all over the world, has now taught millions of people in hundreds of countries, dozens of countries as far as I know about leadership. 

But the idea of leadership, it’s so powerful that when you mentioned the word in a group of people, you may try this head out with your friends, go out to dinner and say, Hey guys, any thoughts on leadership? What do you guys know about leadership? And how much have you studied that idea? And it’s such a stirring, interesting, yet confronting idea that you may notice that some of your friends actually get a little uncomfortable or your family members get a little uncomfortable. And that’s totally fine, but it’s a meta skill. It’s something that transcends sins, typical ideas that are out there, okay? It’s a very powerful top level skill. Now, I’ve heard someone say years ago, everyone is walking around looking for a leader. All of us are walking around all the time looking for the leader. And to some extent, leadership is situational, right? 

And so I may be the leader in my company setting, but when I go to another setting like a hospital, I’m not the leader anymore, it’s the surgeon, or it’s the emergency room tech or whoever I’m dealing with there. It changes around if you’re a leader in one area of your, you may not lead, probably won’t lead every conversation, but we’re talking about leadership as it relates to your company and how to lead your people and how to grow your company, your organization. So leadership’s a really powerful concept, and it’s not something that we’re born understanding. There’s certainly natural leaders that are born. We all show up with different kind of levels of natural leadership ability, but it can be learned and there’s some incredible resources out there around it. Now, when we think about leadership, often we are actually mistaking that from management, and management and leadership are two different things, okay? 

So great to have a good manager in your company. It’s great for you to be a great manager, but that doesn’t make you a leader. And if you’ve learned a lot about management, and maybe you may still be missing a few pieces about leadership, and you may be a great leader, and if you are, I would love to meet you and I would love to talk with you one of these days about that Jesus was a great leader and we’re here in this Christmas holiday. Jesus had all of the hallmarks of leadership. He had persuasiveness and direction and said, this is where we’re all going. And John Maxwell that I’ll show you a summary and some points of his book. He said, leadership is persuasion, nothing more and nothing else. Are you able to persuade in the right ways your people all in the right direction so that you’re in the boat, you are rowing the same direction, right? 

You’re in the right boat, in the right boat of your vision, and you have instilled the values of your company into each member of your team. Do you have your values written? I mean, does anyone know what they are? If I were to show up randomly at your office and we are out in the field and ask some of your team members, what are your values here? Can anybody recite those? Does anybody know what those are? Are they written down? Have they ever been taught to anybody? Now, there’s some group of people that are listening to this that they say, well, yeah, our values are written down, and yes, our team knows it. And I can guarantee you those people that are listening to this and can say that truly honestly, they’ve got an incredible company just across the board, folks that have instilled owners that have instilled their values in their company, it’s going to be a better company. Folks need to know, I mean, decisions come up all day long, decisioned out in the field, and they need to know, well, I could choose this way, or I can choose that way. Which way do I choose? And they need to lean on your values that you as the business owner have established to lead the company. 

I’ve also studied quite a lot what’s called the Hero’s Journey or The Hero’s Tale. Now, all of the great blockbuster movies in Hollywood, they’re all based around a very simple concept. It’s the hero’s tale. Joseph Campbell, a great author, wrote a book. He was a professor at, well, I can’t remember the school, but he was an incredible writer in the mid 20th century, and he wrote a book called The Hero with a Thousand Faces. And what that book is about is that the hero’s tale is sort of imprinted deeply in our soul of every human. And that when we’re told that story, the hero’s story, it really is compelling to us. All of the world’s religions are based around a similar concept. The Bible is very much has these elements to it. It’s the idea of sort of lost and redemption at a certain level of a story arc. 

Leadership and smart business strategy are essential elements of success. I think we all know that, but sometimes we forget. That’s why it’s good to keep learning. Sometimes we need to hear the same idea many times and from different sources before we truly “get it”. Here’s some other folks doing a great job:
https://rokketscience.com/from-finance-to-landscaping/

And that also that hero’s tale is one of a leader, right? It’s often a tale of someone learning leadership. And so when you think about Star Wars, like the quintessential example of this hero’s journey, someone that started Luke Skywalker, he wanted to stay back with his uncle and aunt and hang out in a land of innocence. He couldn’t do that. His uncle and aunt were killed. And then he began this journey that was a calling, and he met friends along the way and he ultimately sort of collected the great truth and brought that back to his people. And that’s the end of the story. And of course, what a beautiful story that was. 

Leadership is imbued in that story. It’s a part of it, and it would be useful for us to learn about this. Okay? So one thing that John Maxwell talks about in his book is that he called, it’s actually the beginning of the book. It’s called The Law of the Lid. And basically your success and your ability to persuade is contingent upon your ability to lead. So he has an example of sort of take your left hand and within a scale of one to 10, 10 being say at the top of your head and one being on the ground, if you rate your own ability to lead, if it would be say an eight out of 10, then you can never get above an eight out of 10 in sort of success with leading your team. And so if I was to take my left hand and put it up to say an eight out of 10 around here, then my right hand would be my ability to succeed. It’s going to be at a seven. And if my ability to lead is down at a four, then my ability to succeed and to persuade to lead my family in the direction that we all want to go. It’s going to be at a three, right? My leadership’s at a four. My ability to succeed ultimately is at a three. So the first principle of the 21 Irrefutable laws of leadership is the law of the lid. And that is that your ability to succeed is directly contingent on your ability to lead. 

And I want to talk about one piece, and I found this quite a lot, is that in leadership roles, as I’ve led different companies, as I’ve led people in different ways, one of the most difficult parts of leadership is that sometimes it can be kind of lonely. So when you’re leading a company and you have the ability to fire people, you have the ability to tell them contractors on your team or subs or members of your team that are working on your remodeling crew, your contracting crew, you have got a lot of power over them. And when you’re leading, that’ll never not be the case. 

You can be a part of the fund at certain levels, but there’s a separation there. And if you come in to the office complaining about, ah, money’s tight this month, or you want to come in and say, I got car troubles, or talk about the regular old stuff that we all kind of deal with, your team may not really totally buy that as far as they’re concerned. You’re the leader. You are the person who has got all of this power. And being a great leader sometimes means not being right there in with the crew. Okay? Now, there’s a lot of different ways to talk about this. I’m not talking about being separate, and I’m certainly not talking about being condescending in any way, but I’m talking about that there’s a separation. And a lot of times when we have companies and family, we want to make everybody happy all the time and we want to sort of be right in part of the party, but it’s not exactly like that.

You’re a part of another party and that is you are a part of something else. And if you’re not tapped into that, then maybe you should be. And this is like associations, groups of entrepreneurs. I had Hans Freeze, a great guest earlier that talked about the Grow group that he’s a part of. That is a group of landscapers and landscape architects that meet around the country and they open up their books and they share their successes and their troubles in their business. That is the party that you want to be a part of. And if you’re not there, if it’s just you leading your organization, then think about if you’re a roofer and you want to be a part of something like this, then consider looking around for roofing, peer groups, roofing masterminds, they’re definitely there for every sub industry for remodeling, for every different part of it. Of course, there’s the associations, national Association of Home Builders. There’s these parts, but within those, there’s often kind of spinoff groups. 

There’s also you as the leadership of your family or as the leader of your family. I mean, you know that there’s a separation obviously, between you and your kids, however, between you and your wife or you and your, that’s the group that you can really share with and that you can, or even potentially your parents are still here or your aunts or uncles, other people in your family, but that are at that higher level. So we leadership can be lonely in a way, and we have to understand that we’re not a part of the group in the same way if we’re truly leading. 

I want to open up my screen here and share a little bit about the irrefutable laws of leadership. Now, I’m not going to go through all of these. I suggest that you get the book. It’s a great book to read. John Maxwell himself is a devout Christian and he interweaves a lot of stories of Christ and the Bible into his work. It’s just another example that true leadership transcends all borders right across all communities. We already talked about the law of the lid. There’s a lid or a limit to your potential that’s determined by our leadership ability. So I’m going to move on. I want to talk about the Law of Addition. The Law of Addition focuses on advancing others, not ourselves. Okay? So leadership is an act of service to others, and the true leader focuses on creating value for others. The best place to serve is where we can add the most value to others. Leaders add value to others by valuing others and relating to what they value. True leaders ask, how can I serve key part of leadership here? 

Next is the law of the Inner Circle. It states that those closest to us will determine our potential as a leader. They should be people who have our best interests at heart, want to see us succeed and able to hold us accountable. Accountability is an absolutely critical piece of leadership. Guys, if you can’t hold yourself accountable and you don’t have a way to hold yourself accountable from some external sources, your ability to lead and hence your ability to succeed is going to be highly limited by that a shrink. As leaders come only partially from what we know, it’s also dependent on the skills of our inner circle and how closely connected our inner circle is to each other, not just to you, but to each other. An example of the law of Inner Circle comes to us from Mother Teresa who said, you can do what I can’t do. I can do what you can’t do. Together, we can do great things. This also kind of harkens back to the hero’s journey that I talked about. A part of the hero’s journey is always that the hero brings or meets friends along the way and teachers. So Luke Skywalker, he had Han Solo, that’s an archetype type personality, the kind of wild, unpredictable friend. He had Yoda, he had Chewbacca, R2D two. 

So these people are the inner circle. We have people in the inner circle that are wise. We have people on the inner circle that are wonderful, funny, oftentimes are very simple. We have great teachers like Yoda, which is the short little 800 year old man that had great powers of foresight. So we want to have our inner circle. We want to build them, and we want to support them and help them be a part of our team easily. Number 17, in the law of the 21 Irrefutable Laws of leadership is the law of priorities. So many people are so busy that they can’t get anything important done. They’re unfocused, and this can only lead to failure. Focusing on what is important is so much more effective than being busy. Being laser focused on a clear vision leads to more success, faster, even when what has to be done is difficult or even painful. 

We’ve all heard of the 80 20 rule. It says 80% of our activities will lead to 20% of the results and vice versa. The key is to identify the 20% of our activities that bring us the highest return on our investment and get rid of or delegate the rest of the activities. Once we understand our focus, we can prioritize our to-do list and make things happen faster. If you can’t prioritize, you can’t succeed. Alright? We’ve all got a million things running at us and even more every day. And so there’s so many ways to communicate. There’s so much social media, there’s so much news, news coming out from every place, which is often relatively negative that news. I’ve taken numerous kind of news fasts take off a couple of weeks or a month of the news, but we need to prioritize what we do on a daily basis. 

Learn how Innovolt Electric focused on Leadership to build their electrical shop.

And that happens by looking at your values, looking at your goals. Ideally, you have goals set up for each year that are written. I’ve spent years writing my goals every single day, and sure enough, those goals came true. And when I haven’t done that, I haven’t had nearly as much success during that time. So if you are looking for a great book to set direction for your next year and to teach you about these leadership qualities, then I would love for you to pick up a copy of the 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John Maxwell. Easy to find. He’s written a lot of great books. This is a great one to start. You can find that over on Amazon. I like reading a lot of audio books. Put that audible app on your phone and makes it really easy to keep your place and get it done. 

So I really hope that you have a lot of success in this next year. I would love to see you grow your company 20% if that’s your goal or more. I rarely talk to a builder contractor that doesn’t want to grow their business. So if you want to grow, consider, maybe take an audit of where you’re at right now in terms of your leadership abilities, and if there’s some lacking pieces, go check out this book. It’s a few hours to read it, it’s 16 bucks or whatever. And it’s some of the best money I’ve ever spent. I’ve read several of John Maxwell’s books and now I’m actually going through the 21 Laws, irrefutable Laws of Leadership again and finding it just as amazing as I have each other time that I’ve read it. So I really wish the best for you and your family here in this holiday season. It’s Christmas season, and hope to talk to you here in the New Year.