How Do We Lead For The Future?

25 Apr How Do We Lead For The Future?

How do our people show up in an organization?

Christopher Hart here with Transforming Lives Coaching and Consulting. So we’ve been talking about how our people show up in an organization; we’ve talked about talent; talked about the talent code; we also looked at A players, what that looks like, people that have a high emotional need to succeed.  And then we looked at how do we build an organization where people do actively engage in consistent purposeful action, and talked about how one of the key elements of that is conditioning because we talk about action, action is a derivative of behavior, how people behave, it’s be, who they become in order to have what they have.  So I can talk on that all day long but we did a video on that yesterday about conditioning processes.

One of the things I mentioned was building an organization for a future, like who’s the future of your organization.  So I decided to do a post today of how do we build a organization for the future or how do we lead for the future is what today’s post is really titled.  And what I’ve identified over the course the last couple years is there’s two key ingredients that every organization must have in order to succeed for the future, and we’ll cover what that looks like here in a minute.  But some of the elements that are going to be the prelude to what we’re going to talk about today, let me just rehash real quick:

We’ve talked about success is 80% psychology and 20% mechanics; if you believe that to be true, for those that are actually viewing this, let me see a few thumbs up, heart that, or whatever, because I think that’s going to be important whether or not you believe that.  I believe it to be true, many people who have succeeded at a high level believe that saying that success is 80% psychology and 20% mechanics.  And so I’ve talked on that a little bit and I said why do we focus so much on skill sets when 80% of our success is all about psychology?  You see I’ve noticed and seen many people in many… across many different industries to include fitness and athletics, they have the skill set, they have the muscles, it’s the time on task over time, and there’s a bunch of different elements that really skew people’s ability to be consistent but I think psychology is the one element that if you can master then the skill sets are important but the psychology is even more important.  So let’s keep that in mind because we’re going to circle back around to that today in this video, so that’s just laying the foundation.

So another element is about leadership.

So another element is about leadership, and leadership training.  I think one of the most defunct areas of every business, every business… well I can’t say every business, there are some businesses that actually do do this really well and that’s one of the reasons why they’re top in their industry and I’ll reference them here in a minute, but it’s leadership training.  Look across the board, look at your competition, look at your own business, how many organizations are actually engaging in training and growing leaders?  And here’s the thing, if you look at your own organization and you’re going, “Yeah kind of missing that,”  here’s what I can tell you, your organization will always be reliant on you.  It’ll either always be reliant on you, you’ll get sucked back in no matter how great you think you are or how many great systems you think you have, if you are defunct in training and growing leaders your organization will always pull you back in, and if you decide not to get pulled back in there’s a chance for failure in your organization.  And the other part of that too is you’re just going to have high turnover.  You’ll have high turnover of leaders because they’re not succeeding, you’ll have high turnover of your people because they’re not being led, and you’ll just have high frustration, and then you’ll move to the one statement that I hear so frequently, “I’m not sure if I’m cut out for this leadership.”  

You see one of the one of the experiences I had in my life was being in the military and going to become an officer, and what I’ve learned about the military, as great as we are, it’s not the weapons… I mean the weapons are great, I think it’s like the 20% skill set component; but yeah, our technology is superior, our weapons are for the most part superior, but where I think we win as a fighting force in this country is our military has mastered leadership, they teach leadership at a high level.  They can take some young punk kids straight out of college who have just been drinking beer, smoking dope for four years make them an officer, pin a little gold bar on their collar, put them through four to six months of leadership training and then pull the cord and watch and go and watch them lead some of America’s elite fighting forces.  There’s something to be said there, and the reason why they can do that is because their leadership training is superior, it’s top notch.  They can take the most average individual, grown male, grown woman, doesn’t matter, they can be 21, 22, they can be 30, 35, they can teach leadership across the board.

So what are these two elements for every organization to succeed in the future?  So calling it leading for the future is implementing and getting really purposeful and committing to mastering the training of psychology in your organization and the training of leadership.  The training of psychology doesn’t have to derive from a psychology degree, there’s plenty of information out there I mean shoot, read half the self-help books out there, it’s all the same information, just recycled, respun to be someone’s little …their way of doing it.  And I don’t claim to be any great philosopher, I just claim to have studied a lot of what some of these successful people have created in the information sphere.  And so just understand that if you’re not training and conditioning your people psychology then what you’re going to be left with is a group of individuals whose psychology was trained and conditioned by someone else.  And that’s where we get frustrated as leaders is we don’t understand why people do what they do, and the psyche drives everything, there’s a formula PTFAR where programming affects our thoughts, thoughts affect our feelings, feelings affect our actions and our actions affect our results.  Well our programming drives everything, and programming is what lives in your brain and that comes from your experiences, it comes from your environment, it comes from what you self induce into yourself.

So if you can as a leader, if you can create an organization that’s really conditioning people’s psychology, a positive one, because there’s only two psychologies you can live in, a positive psychology and negative psychology, and what we know is each one will manifest itself.  If you wake up today and go, “Oh man today’s Tuesday, we got to vote… the world’s going to come to an end if this one wins…” guess what?  You’re not going to a good day.  You can’t plug that into your psychology and then walk around to go, “Why didn’t I have a good day today?  Oh it’s Monday, boo hoo!  Poor me… I hate Mondays… it’s raining …it’s cold…it’s the winter…” and then expect to have a good day or even expect to have a good week, or crap, expect to have a good life.  If you’re always looking at the negative and finding something wrong with someone or something, guess what?  Your life is going to suck, it’s just the way it is.  So as leaders how do we condition our environments?  How do we condition our environments to be positive environments?  

Are you as a leader, are you the one that shows up every day boo-hooing and your people get de-energized when you even walk in the room, or are you the one that’s setting the stage for people’s psyche?  So when you look at them you’re like, “Hey how’s it going guys?”  And they’re like, “Oh it’s good…I haven’t had my coffee yet.”

What do you do as a leader?

What do you do as a leader to get them energized to make sure that you establish the foundation for them to have a positive and energized day that may even set the tone for the week, that sets the tone for the month, that sets the tone for their year, that sets the tone for their life?

What are you going to do on a daily basis?  What are you conditioning within your organization that should you step out for a week and go to, I don’t know, National Association of Realtors event, or some event or maybe even just take a couple of days off and go on vacation?  And you come back in these people’s psyche is still driving because you’ve condition that, you set the stage, your environment is driving that positive psychology day in and day out.  See when you do that people get attracted to that, they want to become a part of that.  And it’s not just posting a bunch of great sayings on the wall and saying “Hey here’s our wall of positivity…here’s our company laws.”  It’s about understanding what they mean and what they mean to people.

Like when someone runs around and says “What you focus on manifest in your life,” what the hell does that mean for people?  Ask half the people that can recite that day in and day out, they don’t even know what that means.  What that means is whatever positive or negative state you are focusing on that’s what’s going to expand in your life, that’s what’s going to manifest.  See building an organization for the future is about driving that because you can be positive, but the second you unplug from your organization, the second an opportunity presents itself for you to go add another organization, start another organization, go travel to give back to the world, the second you unplug from what you grew, falls apart, that’s why your people fall apart when you leave, you’re not conditioning their psyche.

So the first thing is how do we create an organization where we’re growing the psychology of our people, because it’s 80% of their success.  Some of you guys agree with me, give me knuckles, give me thumbs up, you give me whatever the heck you give me on these things.  But part of the matter is if you believe in that you need to participate in it.

Second one is leadership training.  Some of the best organizations that dominate their industry …thanks for the thumbs up guys … some of the best organizations that dominate their industry are ones that don’t dominate because they have a superior product because they have superior people, and superior people come from superior leaders.  

Let’s look at one, IBM. IBM has been literally raped of its people over the last couple of decades, why?  Because they have leadership training.  IBM has created more CEOs for other companies than any other company across the world because they’re committed.   Actually I would probably say the number one that’s created more CEOs for companies is the military.  The military dominates in creating leaders in business industries today; second is IBM.

Now there’s another company called Keller Williams, they do a great job with their leadership training as well, they’re leading and growing leaders which is why they’re dominating in the real estate industry.   I don’t say that because I associate to them; I don’t say that because I was part of it; I say because it’s true.  They’ve grown an organization that’s dominating at some level of attracting agents at a very high level, I mean 33% percent of the National Association of Realtors growth in 2016 came from one company.  And I believe it’s predicated on the fact that they are committed to growing leaders.

What does your organization look like?

Are you growing leaders or are you the head honcho leader that you want all the significance and everyone says “Oh congratulations you’re such a great leader,” and everyone else is just a little minion follower?  

See here’s the thing, if you have any vision of a life outside of your business you must… listen to me, you must commit to growing leaders because absence of growing subordinate leaders that business is always going to be reliant on your leadership and the second you decide to unplug from leading people in that organization is the second it starts going backwards.  That’s why you come back from these events and vacations and your organization falls apart, and when I say fall apart it means you had six people and they didn’t even show up and do a damn thing.  Well you haven’t grown leaders, they’re followers and when the leader disappears they go “What do we do?”  They don’t know. You would think well they’re grown adults why don’t they just do what they know they’re supposed to do?  Because they’ve just always taken orders from you, you haven’t grown them to think for themselves.  See that’s what leaders are, leaders have the capability of thinking for themselves.

So how do you grow a leader… how do you grow an organization for the future?  You grow an organization, one, by establishing and conditioning psychology that creates a positive psychology that helps people know what to plug into when they’re having tough times because life is going to show up whether you want it or not.  I mean shoot, some people just wake up and because it’s raining outside or because it’s a little chilly where the leaves are falling off, or it’s Tuesday, they find a reason to be miserable.  How do you change that, or do those miserable people come into work and make your people miserable?  Do they make you miserable?  I know they do because some of you guys show up on my coaching calls going, “Oh I don’t want to be around derail this person, when they’re in the office like I go back in my car.  I go home to lead generate.”

See you need to establish an organization that’s setting the tone and foundation and growing and conditioning people psychology and establish a leadership training regime.  Because even if … here’s the other piece of this, if you want to grow…if you want to grow a empire, I hear a lot of people talk about “Oh my empire.”   Okay empire means that you have probably more than one business, more than one organization, you’re involved in a bunch of different stuff.  If you’re not mastering leadership and then teaching it and growing other subordinate leaders, let me be clear about something, you have no empire.  It won’t grow because you can’t do everything.  Every one individual, as great as they are, has that ceiling of achievement.  

So if you want to grow an organization for the future I believe it’s really about committing to those two things, establishing an organization that’s teaching and growing leaders.  Here’s what I’ll challenge you, look at your own office, look at your family, who’s the next man up, because I can promise you one thing life is going to show up whether you like it or not.  Look, people get presented with opportunities, people have to relocate, people get hit by buses, it sounds pretty creepy but it’s true.  You wake up one day they’re there, you wake up the next day they’re not for whatever reason or another, and if you’re the leader what happens to your family?  What happens to their future if the whole business is predicated on you?  Who’s the next man up, your spouse?  No, they’ve got to take care of what you left behind.  That buyer agent that doesn’t even lead generate when you take a day or two off, no that’s not the future.  Your business just crumbles and your family’s left with whatever you left behind.  Hopefully you have some estate planning to take care of them.

See growing a organization of growing leaders is your future plan, it’s the plan that exists without you.  See if you have leaders in your organization and they turn around and they go, “I just got a better offer. IBM just called me up. I got a dream job.”  And they leave you, what are you stuck with?  If you don’t have the next man up, guess what?  You get pulled right back in.  You get right back into that role, and whatever you were going off to attempt to go achieve because you replaced yourself and you’re going to do something else, guess what?  That’s no longer reality for you because you got sucked back into being that lead buyer specialist or leading the buyer division, or whatever organization you’re running these days.  

Guys, leadership, you must commit to it, you must commit to it in yourself, you see when we talk about Level Five leadership of leading leaders, that’s what it looks like, you must commit to that in your organization if you desire to have any future of an organization that exists without you, because you cannot control life, life is going to happen to you and to other people.  Happens positively, happens negatively, meaning like I said, people win lotteries, they get offered other jobs, whatever.  They’ll move on because something more positive in their life showed up and that’s what we hope for our people.  But then there’s some also negative things where for whatever reason or another they can’t participate in your organization any longer.  What your plan for that?   

See if you’re growing leaders… see Bill Belichick I believe is probably one of the greatest coaches of all time, and that’s hard for me to say  cause I don’t like the Patriots, but the reason why he succeeds, it doesn’t matter if the star quarterback goes down, Matt Cassel pops up and takes them to the playoffs.  See Matt Cassel will go off to another team and not do much of what he did for the Patriots.  And then 2016 the quarterback can go down for four games because of deflategate and the next quarterback… the second string quarterback steps up and he wins a couple games.  He goes down, the third string quarterback steps up and wins a game.  Like come on guys, they get it, do you?

So two things:  One – You must grow an organization that’s committed to conditioning people psychology that is going to allow them to succeed at a high level.   And the second thing is growing an organization that grows leaders.  See Tony Robbins talks about, he asks you what business are you in, and if you’re in the real estate industry and you say “I’m in the real estate business,” you’ve already lost I can promise you that.  

See ask yourself two questions and they are the two great questions ever learned from Tony Robbins, what business are you in?  And what business are you really in?  And I believe for myself I’m in the influence business, I’m in the leadership business, because if you can influence and lead people you can grow any organization you want, doesn’t matter what product, what industry, whatever.  If you’re still in the business of selling homes yourself and you’ve got people there you’re not in the real estate business, you’re in the leading business, you’re in the influence business.  Commit to that and watch where your organization takes you and watch how the opportunities become abundant in your life.

Hey I’d love to hear what any ahas you had from this, please feel free to put them in the comments.  If you have any questions feel free to hit me up, chris@transforminglivescoaching.com.  

Thank you for joining me today, I hope we brought some value to your business and your life.  And just remember one thing, you are a child of God, God loves you, so do I.  Lead strong.  Have an amazing day.  Stay strong.

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