5 Deadly Leadership Sins – Part 4

16 Jun 5 Deadly Leadership Sins – Part 4

THE FIVE DEADLIEST SINS OF A LEADER.

This week we’ve been working through a five part video series titled The Five Deadliest Sins of a Leader, and so we’ve worked through the first three deadliest sins, and today we’re on the fourth deadliest sin.  And so what we’ve covered thus far is the first deadliest sin being perfectionism, we’ve done a video on that, it’s in our video library, it’s on our YouTube channel, it’s even on our web site on our blog page, so feel free to check out our previous videos.  But deadliest sin number one, the deadliest of all  sins, perfectionism.  We talked about we can’t hold people accountable to something that they can’t achieve which is perfectionism.  So watch that video, check out why that’s the deadliest of all sins and why we can’t hold people to a level of perfection.

The second one was pride. 

We talked about nobody wants to follow a leader who thinks they’re better than everyone else.  Leadership is about serving other people.  Pride is about serving yourself, your ego and your own achievement and accomplishments.

Then we talked about insecurity.

How if you’re uncomfortable with who you are others will be uncomfortable with you if you lack the confidence, if you operate in fear.  Leaders lead the way, they set the stage, so if you’re insecure your people are going to be insecure about you.

And so today the fourth deadliest sin, you’re ready for this?  Moodiness. 

Maybe not as powerful of a word like perfectionism, pride, insecurity, but moodiness can easily be a reason why people stop following you; can easily be a reason why people don’t want to follow you.  They may respect your abilities, they may respect your accomplishments but if you are a moody leader you risk causing people to make a decision to no longer want to be a part of your world, your mission, your vision, et cetera.  So let’s look at it.

What we understand about moodiness is if people never know what to expect from you they stop expecting anything from you, because what moodiness is is moodiness is the leader who is either irrational, perceived to be unstable emotionally, or one of those leaders, and we’ve all seen them, like you never know what you’re going to get from this guy or gal.  One minute they’re on top of the world, they’re whistling Dixie, they’re high fiving, they’re complimenting people, and the next thing you know they come back in tomorrow morning and they blow up, they just boom!  Their emotions go off, they’re throwing stuff, they’re kicking stuff, they’re yelling at people, and it’s all because someone at Starbucks gave them the wrong drink or misspelled their name on their Starbucks card, or something ridiculous that sets them off.  That’s a moody leader. 

And so what we’re going to look at today is understanding the components that drive what causes someone to be moody, unstable emotionally per se; and then how do we overcome it, like what are some things that as leaders we can be more aware of that can stabilize our emotions through the journey of leadership because leadership is an emotional process driven by logic.  How do we become more logical in a very emotional process?  And we say an emotional process because what we understand about life, the psychology, the brain, human performance, et cetera, logic makes people think, emotions make them act. 

But here’s the reality of that statement, as much as our emotions make us act, the reality behind it, the understanding behind it, it’s not so much emotions make us act it’s the stimuli that drives emotions, so it’s about being more cognitively aware of the stimuli that affects…affects, A-F-F-E-C-T-S, that affects your emotions that determines how you behave.  So I can’t sit here and tell you what exactly drives that stimuli, they are events right, but it’s more about how you processed events in the past and how it shaped your emotions today. So that’s elements of what we focus on in our peak performance and psychology of success coaching and consulting sessions, so if you’re interested in that please feel free to reach out to me, chris@transforminglivescoaching.com.  I can definitely help you out with that.

But here’s what I’ve identified – Emotions drive us, but what really causes leaders to become moody?  I’ve identified two key elements and I’ve previously done a video on some of these topics so we’ll dig those videos up and hopefully post them in the comments.  But here’s what I know:  There’s really two elements that I think affect every leader and why they’re moody.  The first one is disappointment and the second one is their patience, or maybe the lack thereof.

Disappointment, what does it look like? 

We hold people to higher expectations, when we have a higher expectation of people how they perform and how they show up in our world and they don’t meet that expectation so what happens?  Boom!  We become disappointed in them.  And how we handle disappointment determines how our emotions are affected in that moment.  If you’re someone that holds a lot of people to high expectations because of how you show up in their world, like you’ve heard this from leaders, “Oh I’m always the person that’s doing this…I’m always the first person to volunteer and the second I ask for a volunteer no one shows up…”  There’s your moody leader.  And so how people handle their emotions around disappointment is really going to affect the quote/unquote “moodiness” of a leader.

The second one is patience. 

There are some personality traits, if you study DISC, D-I-S-C and the four identifiers of an analogy to understand the awareness of personality within individuals, D is dominant, and in the dominant personality traits they typically lack patience, or better yet I don’t think anybody really lacks patience, they lack the control of patience in very different situations.  Why?  Because dominant people they are assertive, they move quick, their pace is fast, they’re driven towards results, they’re no BS. And when people don’t move as fast as them, when people BS them, when people get in their way, when people waste their time, boom!  Their lack of patience drives them to become moody, they become emotionally unstable. 

So if you notice kind of the common denominator word here that we’re talking about today is emotions.  Emotions are a big deal in leadership.  I’ve done a previous video on the three quotients of a leader, there is IQ, EQ and XQ – Intelligent quotient, emotional quotient, and execution quotient.  And so EQ as a leader is a big deal. like you can be a great producer, you can wake up in the morning, you can be that high…driven towards results, assertive, “I’m going to blow up the phones, I’m going to make stuff happen today… results results results results results!”  You’re an amazing achiever but if you can’t manage your emotions and you have a low emotional quotient… and we’re going to do a future video coming up on the five different affecters of emotional intelligence that affects your emotional quotient, so stay tuned to our channel… but understand something leaders, you must have, you must possess the ability to control and manage your emotions; you must possess a high emotional quotient. 

I’ll tell you this, I think there’s a lot of leaders out there that fear leadership because they think their intelligence quotient is low, and yet there’s plenty of leaders that I know that may not score high on an SAT, they may have been the C student in high school but they’ve got that straight A student working for them.  Why?  Because their execution quotient was high, their emotional quotient is high, it counterbalances maybe a lower intelligence quotient, but I promise you this, your ability to manage and control your emotions in leadership scenarios, because remember what we’ve talked about… Good morning Carol, always great to see you…leadership is a process of failure, it’s a journey of failing forward and in failure is when we become disappointed in ourselves, in our own failures and in our people.  And remember, the two things that affect your emotions, your quote/unquote “moodiness” tend to be disappointment and patience and lack thereof.

So what can we do leaders?  What are the things that we can focus on that can make us a more stable emotional leader, increase our emotional quotient to increase our leadership capacity, increase our leadership lid that way we can have more influence on people, create a greater impact and be a stronger leader?  And here’s what it is: 

I’ve identified two critical disciplines of success that I believe are universal to every goal you’re looking to achieve, and most definitely in leadership.  You’re ready?  Discipline your disappointment and discipline your patience.  And some of you guys may be like “Well duh!  Okay that makes sense, you talked about disappointment, you talked about patience. I get it Chris.  But where’s the kind of sexiness behind that?” 

The sexiness is understanding that there’s two ends of the spectrum to these two disciplines. 

I’m not sitting here telling you wild childs out there that are ” Go, go, go, go, go,” to always slow down.  Slow down and discipline that patience when the environments and the situations that it requires you to be patient.  But understand something, that patience  or lack thereof, that drive that you want to get stuff done, that’s a God-given trait, I cannot sit here and tell you to discipline that all the time.  Why?  Because God gave it to you, it might be the very reason why you have achieved in the areas that you’ve achieved in your life; but what it means guys is there’s times that we must be patient, and there’s times where we should not be patient.

If you hired someone that’s maybe new to real estate, new to your industry, new, it may be straight out of college, you understand there’s a growth process that needs to happen, and in that growth and training process you need to be patient with them.  If you hire a new leader this is maybe their first journey in leadership, understand if leadership is a journey of failing forward you need to be patient with their growth and their failure.  But we understand that there should come a time where they reach that critical mass point, that point of no return like “Okay you’ve been trained, you have all the information you failed forward, now my expectations of you is you start creating opportunities where you’re producing, you’re succeeding, you’re making an impact, you’re influencing people, et cetera.” 

And what we ask of people are commitments; and commitment is defined as an action or an obligation that restricts freedom of action.  If you’re not hitting your results and you’re not operating within your commitments then as leaders I believe we should be impatient with people’s poor decisions to not take action on their commitments. So that’s disciplining your patience on both ends of the spectrum.  Be patient when you need to be patient and be impatient when people make commitments and said “I commit to this result… I commit to these activities,” and if they choose not to do them then it’s time to be impatient, and you communicate that. “I’m not going to be patient with your lack of action on your commitments.”

Brian says “When your relationship grows so does your patience.” Absolutely, because when we talk about relationships we’re bought into the heart-to-heart thing.  When you’re bought into really improving someone and influencing them at a high level and being the person that cares enough about their success your patience is going to grow on both ends of the spectrum, you’re going to be more patient with them in the growth process than in the failure process but you’re going to love them so much that you want them to achieve because you are the vehicle to their success that you’re not going to be patient with them too, Brian.  So both ends of the spectrum.

Same thing with disappointment. You know you have to discipline your disappointment.  In this process of achievement everybody works through failures.  We have to embrace failure, we have to encourage it because that’s where the most stretching, that’s where the most growth, that’s where the most learning comes from.  And so naturally we’re going to be disappointed in how people tend to show up in this journey of achievement and success, and we need to discipline that disappointment in those stages. So what we understand is if someone disappoints us…if they’re trying hard, if they’re doing all their activities and still don’t get the result then we need to understand that we need discipline that disappointment. 

But again if they’re making decisions not to take action, if they’re choosing freedom of action over their commitments, if they’re choosing easy over hard then we need to communicate with them, “Hey I’m disappointed in your choices,”  not to make them feel bad but to make them understand that we need to set the line, the boundaries of what is good and what is bad.  When we do that for people as leaders through our conversations and letting them know “Hey this action, this behavior leads to disappointment… this behavior leads to results, I’m not going to be patient with the lack of execution. I will be patient with your execution through failure.”

So I believe those two disciplines, disappointment and patience, as leaders if we can hone both ends of the spectrum we then have the ability to start shaping our emotional quotient of how we handle situations where we could easily be disappointed that affects our moodiness, how we can be patient when we need to be patient and impatient when we need to be impatient.  You see when you show up patient in the times you’re supposed to be patient and you show up impatient communicating you’re not going to be patient people don’t perceive you as moody, they understand what your expectations are, they appreciate the conversations that should cause them to take action when they’re not.

Rebecca says, “Don’t let disappointment control your life.”  Rebecca I’d love to hear why you believe that because I agree with you but I’d love for you to share with our community as to why that’s an important statement to make.

So leaders two things, discipline your disappointment and discipline your patience. 

If you can hone those two critical skills I promise you your emotional quotient will raise and when you raise your emotional quotient you’re raising a critical quotient of leadership that’s going to increase your capacity,  raise your leadership lid, allow you to influence more people, allow you to impact people, environments, businesses and outcomes that’ll make you a greater leader, more people will want to follow you when they know you can achieve, when your quotients, your lid of quotients, emotional execution and intelligence are honed and the impact that you’re making in other people’s lives, I guarantee you people are going to attract to that, and when you attract them to it you’re going to attract a higher quality of match to the roles and organization.  More people like you… will want to be like you so they’ll attract to you, and when they attract to you and you can lead them through the emotional quotient, intelligent quotient and execution quotient, by really honing that stability and emotion and not being that moody leader, you’re going to keep that talent around, that A-player, whatever label you associate it to.  You’ll keep them longer and the impact that you’ll make in your organizations and in your environments and in your family and in the world as a whole will be massive. 

And guys I do these videos to serve you; I do them because one of the things I see in the world today is we lack leadership.  We must, it’s imperative, if ever before our society is thirsting for leaders to show up, and this is the one aspect that I think could really massively increase our ability to impact the world through our leadership.  If we can make sure we hone that sin of perfectionism, that we take control of our pride, we move past our own insecurities and we can control our emotions appropriately, leaders you will massively massively increase your ability to influence and impact and be a much stronger leader for yourself, for your families, for your environments, for your churches, for your organizations, everything, anything, anytime.

Guys I hope this information is improving your lives.  I’d love to hear your ahas and comments.  If you’re watching live on Facebook feel free to tell us what you’re taking away from this video today.  If you’re watching it on replay either on our Facebook channel or our YouTube channel, share your comments, share your questions, share whatever you want to share that we can continue the coaching process for you and those that continue to follow us through these videos.

So thank you for joining me today. God loves you, so do I.  Lead strong and have a powerful rest of your day.  Make an impact on the world.

Take care, God bless you.

About the author:

Over the course of 8 years, Christopher Hart went from an enlisted Private First Class to a Commissioned Officer-Captain. In 2005, Christopher chose to move on from his military career to focus on starting a family and embarking in the world of entrepreneurship. Christopher’s passion is now working to help others be the BEST version of themselves and helping them Lead others to the same!

To learn more about Christopher Hart or to get in touch with him regarding a coaching program you can email him at Chris@TransformingLivesCoaching.com

If you want to get yourself or your team on track and really dive into some Talent Management best practices checkout one of these online video workshops click here now: Lead Strong Video Program | Accountability Video Program