How to Be a Better Leader (And Develop a Leadership Team)

One of the most important aspects of sustainable growth in any company is having a solid leadership team. But before you can develop great leaders, you have to be a great leader yourself. In this episode, Chris explains the two things you need to consistently work on to become a better leader. He also shares the hidden reality of great leadership and the secret to aligning leaders with your company goals. Turn up the volume, get ready to take notes, and accept Chris’s 30-day challenge to take your leadership to the next level.

Leadership boils down to the two things: it’s confidence, and it’s framing.

In this Episode:

• The four things you need to focus on to create sustainable growth in your business
• The hidden truth of great leadership
• How to build your confidence as a leader, and why it matters
• One of the best tools to use you can use to psych yourself up
• Why framing your message correctly is a vital part of being a great leader
• Try this 30-day challenge to become more influential
• How to align your leadership team and employees with your company goals

Find out exactly what aspect of your company is the current weak link that, if fixed, will help you scale faster and more successfully.

Go to BuiltToGrowReview.com and see insights on how to fix everything that might be out of whack and holding your back — for free.

Enjoy the show? Check out the most popular episodes of Built to Grow!

• Acquisitions Made Easy
• 8 Mistakes I Made Scaling My First Business
• How to Develop a Strong Business Culture

Transcript:

We get questions sent in, not just in YouTube but also on our website and on Facebook and pretty much on every other platform that we’re on, on a regular basis, that is asking us how we have been able to build so many seven and eight-figure companies.

It really breaks down to leaders. There’s no secret sauce to building seven and eight-figure companies. There’s no magic wand. There’s no, “Hey, if you just, you know, do this one thing. If you just read this one book, if you just go to this one seminar, you’re going to be able to know exactly what it takes to build a, a good, strong company.” 

But there are four things that I look for, whether I’m a partner, I’m an investor, I’m an advisor, I’m the owner of the company. Whatever it is, there are four things that I look to focus on that really are the levers that grow that company. When we pull those levers, the companies grow.

Four Levers to Grow Your Company

Number one is developing the leadership team. 

The other one is using proven systems. Why would you ever try to grow a company without using proven systems? There are proven systems for every single thing that you could go through in business growth. There are proven systems for every department inside your company and for onboarding the right people. There are proven systems for how to acquire, sell, and grow a company. There are even proven systems for every single thing that you’re going to do inside a business. So why would you ever do anything without proven system? You want to develop a good strong leadership team. You want to use proven systems. 

The third thing is you want to know what to measure. You have to know what to measure.

The great majority of companies measure the wrong things. So when you understand what’s to measure and you measure the right things, things just go significantly smoother.

Seek the Right Guidance

And then you want the right guidance because being able to have somebody who you could reach out to and ask a question to could literally cut years off of your efforts. It collapses timeframes in the way we talk about it when I’m speaking on stage. So I wanted to share one thing with you because all these questions wrap-around, “Am I a good leader? Do I have the right people leading my company?”

I want to share something with you on my drive back to the office, about how to know number one, if you’re a great leader. Number two, if you have the right leaders inside your organization to help you scale. Because that’ll be able to just shave so much effort off of everything that you’re doing right now. Because we all know, at least anybody who has built a business in the past, we know that when you have a virus inside your company, someone inside your company that is not living your values, that is not aimed in the right direction, that is not following the right metrics, it literally destroys so much stuff until you get them out. 

After working with literally dozens of some of the best leaders in the world inside of my companies over the years, and working with hundreds of the best leaders, whether it’s in business or in politics who have come to me and asked me for support and advice, I can tell you that there’s a hidden truth behind leadership.

The Hidden Truth

It’s kind of a weird hidden truth. And that’s the great majority of leaders secretly don’t believe that they are great leaders and they have to either get themselves psyched up every single day before they go in front of their team, or they have to constantly keep themselves inspired. That’s not a bad thing. There are great tools to use to do that.

However, that is inherent inside of almost every great leader. So if you’re struggling to know whether or not you’re a good leader, that might give you a little bit of solace. It might give you a little bit of comfort knowing that you’re not alone because every great leader struggles with that. It’s the hidden truth behind the great majority of leaders that I’ve met.

When I say “leadership and business”, I’m talking about with your team. I’m talking about with your partners, customers and your prospect. I’m talking about leadership in your sales position, customer support position, in whatever position you have inside of your organization. 

Confidence and Framing

Leadership boils down to two things, confidence and it’s framing. We’ll go over both of those and I’ll give you some tools to figure out how to best use this. So that you can know whether, you know, when you’re questioning yourself, “Am I a great leader?” You could go back to these two things and you can say, “Well, am I doing these two things?” And if you are, then either you’re a great leader already or you’re turning yourself into a great leader. 

The great majority of people who try to be confident leaders go out there and they get books and they watch videos and they go to seminars. They try to absorb all this leadership, these words and these sentences and these tactics that leaders use. And they believe that that makes them a good leader and that gives them confidence to know what other great leaders are doing.

Or they use affirmations. Like I was saying before, they stand in front of the mirror, I know some of the best political leaders in and they literally stand in front of the mirror before they go out in front of the podium and they psych themselves up. I know some of the greatest business leaders of our time right now who do the exact same thing. They get themselves psyched up before they go out there by using these affirmations.

I have a friend who’s a CEO of a very large organization. He stands in front of his executive assistants and he literally professes three affirmations before he goes into any big talk. And that gets him psyched up. It reinforces inside of him that he’s a great leader. 

Display Your Mementos

But one of the best tools that you could use to remind yourself of how great of a leader you are is to keep pictures and to keep awards and to keep mementos of the great things that you’ve done as a leader around you, inside of your environment.

If you ever come into my office, you’ll see I’ve got pictures of me with some of the great leaders of our time right on my desk and those pictures are not there just to stoke my ego. Those pictures are there to remind me that heck, I’ve done some good things to put me in these positions where these leaders have come to me for advice. I sit back and I watched some of the leaders inside of our organizations host meetings and the fact that they’re able to host these great meetings with their teams, that is inspirational to me. It reminds me that I have developed really amazing leaders and that’s been a big push for me in keeping me confident a developer of leaders. 

But the second thing that I had mentioned was framing and this is where I want to spend the majority of our time cause this is just so vital. The message that you give to your team, the way you frame your message to your team or to your investors or to your prospects or to anybody is really the difference between a conversation that goes your way and a conversation that kind of falls on deaf ears.

Frame Your Message Properly

So leaders understand that they need to frame their message properly for the audience who’s hearing it right then and there because framing it properly builds trust, it builds immediate trust between you and whomever you’re talking to, whether it’s an individual or if it’s a group of people.

Here’s a really great way to become a better leader: set a challenge with yourself for the next 30 days. We do this inside of our organization on a regular basis. I swear, a minimum of once a quarter, we have at least one or two or three people who are committing to this inside of our leadership team meetings. But I promise you almost every leader who works for me does this every single day. But this is the challenge. I want you to do this. I want you to challenge yourself to become more influential. And here’s how you do that.

You become more influential by striving to understand each person that you talk to. I mean, really focus 100% on every conversation that you’re having and try to see it from their point of view. Try to understand the words that they’re using, the feelings that they may be having, the impact that your words are having on them, the impact that your gestures are having on them. Try to really understand that person and see it from their point of view.

When when you’re talking to them, try to frame your message in a way that they see value. I want them to see it as valuable. I want you to frame your message in a way that they see as valuable to helping them reach their goals. We have a client in Built to Grow who’s the VP of a multibillion-dollar company and we have a call once a week, and he literally spends almost our entire time going over the emails and the texts and the correspondences that he has to have with his team or with his investors. Because he wants to make sure that he’s framing his message properly for that audience.

Where You Need to Focus

So that’s what we focus on. We focus on making sure that he’s framing his messages properly. He pays a whole boatload of money to me just so that I could go through all of his correspondences really quickly in that quick email and phone conversation.

I dictate some ideas to him between him and me. We go back and forth and we make sure that it’s framed the best way possible. And that has meant millions upon millions of dollars for this guy because one bad email, one bad correspondence, one bad conversation with somebody. One bad text with somebody or with the wrong person could ruin a relationship. But one really great worded message to them, one message that connects with them will build trust between you and them and it will accelerate pretty much everything that you’re trying to do with them.

Find A Big Reason Why

I want to go over how to align them with your company. It’s how to make sure that they are not just great leaders but they’re great leaders for your company. And here is the secret: They have to have a big reason why.

We all know that in marketing and in sales, every promotion we have have big reason why inside of our marketing material. You guys, if we’re running a sale, we got to tell our prospects why are we running that sale? If we are going out there and we’re doing something with our team, we don’t just hand the money. We give them a big reason why we’re giving them money. 

That’s just human nature that it makes it believable. If we give them a big reason why it makes them believable for whoever we’re talking to, but it’s the exact same inside of ourselves, inside of our own minds, we will do more when we have a big reason why for doing that. I mean I’ll do more for my kids than almost anything else in the world.

So my big reason why I enjoy building companies is because I want to be able to lead by example for my kids. I want to be able to set them up for a great future. We will do more as human beings for our big reason why than anything else. And leaders understand that. So what we do as developers of leaders is we get them to marry their big reason why with our company targets.

What Leaders Do

And great leaders will get their team to do the exact same thing. They’ll figure out, learn, and will become influential by trying to learn about that person. How to communicate with them, how to build trust with them. And they will figure out what their big reason why. Why did you show up for the office today? Why do you want to work for us? We want to know what their big reason why is in life. And then marry that big reason why with our company targets. And when you do that, and I promise you this, listen carefully. I promise you, when you can do that, people become self-driven and they find new ways to reach company goals. 

So listen, developing seven- and eight-figure companies is not rocket science. This is just a few foundational things that you need to do.

But one of the most important things is to build a great leadership team. Whether that’s employees or vendors. I don’t care. You could build a leadership team with people who are just independent contractors. If they are devoted, and if you treat them the right way, they will grow your company for you.