09 Feb Leadership Muscles
Even Leadership Muscles Need To Be Flexed.
Christopher Hart here from Transforming Lives Coaching and Consulting, coming to you live from my hotel room herein…somewhere in Maryland, I don’t know. So anyway we’re continuing our Lead Strong series how to build strong leaders in any environment, our businesses, our organizations, our lives, et cetera.
We talk about lead strong, so leading strong has some element of strength to it, but what we’re really going to …what we’re really going to talk about today is how do we build our people to the actions and activities that we want them to conduct on a continuous basis.
So if you remember some videos back if you’ve been watching these videos daily or if you haven’t, you go back and watch some of my earlier videos, we talked about how to get our people into purposeful… or consistent purposeful action. And so when we look at the consistency end of it, what we’re going to understand about consistent and purposeful action is action is behavior, and so what we understand about leadership is…what we understand about leadership is that we have to be masters of behavior because if it’s a matter of getting people to take action, either our action or our people’s action, behavior is a critical element of it. So here’s what I’m going to tell you, there’s elements of learning about behavior that is critical to your ability to lead strong, so you have to one, know about behavior like how does behavior show up, how do you analyze it, how do you expect it. But even outside of that in analyzing and assessing behavior there’s something that we can do at the lowest level with our people, in our organizations and our and our businesses…
Let’s examine what this looks like.
So let’s take a look at this. So we’re looking at behavior, consistent purposeful behavior. Well whatever that behavior is, let’s say we’re talking about a real estate agent, let’s say we talk in our real estate team we hire a buyer agent to come join our team and one of the things that we’re going to hold them accountable to doing is setting appointments and getting buyer agreements and closing homes and that sort of thing; but one of the leading activities to that is lead generating. Well one of the struggles I hear from many of my clients who are in the real estate industry is they say “Well I just can’t get my people to show up and lead generate every day.”
Well we’ve talked about some elements of that but what I want to talk about today is the conditioning process. When we talk about did you know you had leadership muscles, your leadership muscles deal with conditioning process, just like if you’re going to go to the gym and you’re going to correct your body weight or you want to grow the big muscles. Some of you big burly people out there want to grow big muscles for the ladies, what does that look like? What that looks like is a conditioning process, you don’t just go to the gym once or twice, do some arm curls and some chest pressing, walk out looking like Arnold. It doesn’t work that way, that’s a time on task over time, it’s a conditioning process. And knowing the muscles and the biology, or having to know the muscles and biology will tell you what that consistency looks like, what your weight regime and your workout regime is going to look like.
Well it’s the same thing in behavior, if you’re going to hire people… actually let me back up for a second, what we have to understand about behavior and people from a leadership perspective is everybody that’s around you is nothing more than a compilation of their habits and previous conditioning processes. So if someone’s never been conditioned to lead generate every day and you bring them into your organization and you tell them that’s part of the activities there’s a high likelihood that they’re most likely not going to just lead generate, because they’re not conditioned to do so. So if you’re going to bring people into your organization and hold them accountable to daily activities/actions, that’s behavior, understand that where you have to show up as the leader is you have to condition that activity.
So some of you all that are in Keller Williams, you guys understand that there’s a process of what used to be called “Action training,” it’s a training process for when you hire new individuals to your business. And that model is great but I think where a lot of leaders fall short is you’re focusing on skill sets like, “Oh how do I teach this person to…how do I teach them scripts?” Or “How do I teach them how to call expires?” You’re looking more at the skill set where you really need to be focused on is conditioning the activity. Condition the activity before you’ try and hone the skill, because if you try and hone the skill without conditioning the activity the human brain just doesn’t process like that. So when you bring people into your organization what you have to understand is you have to go and condition the activity.
And so Gary Keller and Jay Papasan wrote a great book called The One Thing, and in the book, The One Thing, they did a research on how do we build habits. Habits are a conditioning process, and they talk about it’s a 66 day process. To understand habit formation some people will say “Well I heard it was 21 days; Gary and Jay talk about 66 days,” well it’s kind of both. The 21 day process of conditioning it’s where the habit just starts to lock in. If you do something for 21 straight days you’ve built that foundation, it doesn’t become a full blown habit but you’ve built the foundation. Just like any other foundation it allows you that solid ground to build off of. The remainder, what is that? Forty five days to make it 66 days? So when you do something 66 days straight what you’re doing is you’re fully ingraining that habit and you’re building upon it so it actually becomes a strong solid habit in someone.
Consistent doesn’t mean a few times.
But here’s the thing to understand, that component is it has to be 66 straight days, that’s the consistent element. The second you break that chain you now just go back to basically square one. So you could be 45 days into it, you skip a day and you’re back to really where the brain was at Day 21. So you just have to recondition those 45 straight days. So just remember something about a habit, it’s 66 straight days, not 66 workdays like Monday through Friday is five and then five times 12 is 60, so maybe I’ll do 13 weeks of it. No, it’s 66 calendar days okay.
So here’s the thing, it’s not like it’s rocket science when it comes to behaviors, it’s just conditioning. If you want your people to do something consistently and purposely, condition it. So what does that look like for people in our organization? Well if you have a team, you have an organization, whatever, and there’s things that you need them to do consistently that you’re going to hold them accountable for, that you’re going to identify to be hire-fire metrics which that’s a prelude to tomorrow’s video, hire-fire metrics, then you have to condition it. And if you haven’t conditioned it in your people then you as a leader, listen to me, you cannot hold them accountable to that because all you’re doing is bringing in someone’s previous conditioning, whether it’s their own or maybe they work for someone else, so if you have someone that worked at a completely different industry and has never worked in sales or who’s never worked in real estate then you can’t expect that lead generation is conditioned into them. The only thing you can expect from them is what’s been conditioned into them, so go back and condition them. What does that look like? Creating… conditioning model, create a training model, you get to determine how long but it has to be minimum 66 days, and go back and create a model, an action training model or a conditioning model, whatever you want to call it, you can put your label on it, no one cares, it’s more about understanding that in order to get people to be what you want them to be, to do what you want them to do so they can have what they want to have, and in turn so can you, it’s about conditioning. So that’s a process of conditioning your leadership muscles, it’s more about conditioning your people’s muscles but your muscle as a leader is being that person that understands behavior.
And I can talk about behavior all day long, and we’re not trying to get into the complex or the complexities of behavior, we’re getting into the basic foundations. I don’t care about assertiveness, interpersonalness, steadiness, compliance, or anything of that nature, this is just about how to build those habits and consistent action into someone, because you can truly build it into anyone if they’re willing to do it, but understand something, you cannot get someone to do something they’re not willing to do. So if you’re to be hiring sales agents that you know you’re going to be holding them accountable, talk about lead generation on a daily basis on the front end, make sure that they know that that’s going to be part of their hire-fire metrics, what keeps them hired, what gets them fired; and as soon as you bring them into the organization quit being lazy and condition it into them.
Guys hiring people, building organizations is not finding what you think to be the talent or the best possible person to fill the role so you can go back and do what it is you need or want to do, take responsibility for it. It’s like having a kid and just saying, “Oh yeah, go do whatever you want.” And then when they’re 13 wreaking havoc in school and in your neighborhoods and in society you go, “Whoa I don’t know what happened; I don’t know why my kid… maybe God gave me a bad kid.” God didn’t give anybody a bad kid, it’s just bad environments and bad conditioning. So leaders step up, be accountable, take charge, condition your environments. Your environment is critical to how people perform; and if people aren’t performing… it’s one of these…take accountability. You’re not the victim; be the victor and then get over it.
So hopefully this brings some value to your business and your life, and hey how does this apply to your life? We’re all parents or many of us are parents; same thing with our kids. Understand something, we have to condition our kids, parenting is a conditioning process. Either you’re conditioning them or school is, or their friends are, et cetera. So understand, all people are nothing more than a process of conditioning.
And oh by the way, that old can’t-teach-an-old-dog-a-new-tricks, it’s a lie. You can teach any dog any trick, you’ve just got to learn how to teach the dog that’s all. Woof woof.
Thanks for joining me today. Hopefully we brought some value to your business and your life. Shout out to those in K W Maryland for bringing me up, I had a blast yesterday.
So guys have a great rest of your day. Hey, just remembered something, you’re a child of God, God loves you, so do I. Be blessed, lead 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
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