The content of this recording is copyrighted by Sandler Systems, LLC. All rights reserved.
Glenn Mattson
Are you running a business, are you part of a team, or are you wondering what makes the difference between someone that you'll want to follow as a leader and those you can't wait to run away from? In this episode, today, we're going to be talking about the shadow of a leader. Come join us for another episode of Building Blocks of Success.
Glenn Mattson
Here we are season four, episode three, today, we're going to be taking a look at the shadow of a leader. I've spent over 30 years working with well over 15,000 entrepreneurs, training well over 200,000 individuals, and spending a lot of time obviously with entrepreneurs, managers, leaders, divisional heads, territory managers, etc. Lots of them, and like anything else that you do with tenure time, you're just going to start to see patterns, patterns of individuals, that are characteristics that lead to success and characteristics and behaviors and beliefs that lead to disaster, or lack of success.
Glenn Mattson
A lot of times people have the desire and the commitment to be a good leader and get the business to the next level or the team, but many of them don't have a GPS or an actual list of things that you really have to take a look at as a leader. Being a player on the team and being the leader of the team are two different things. You have certain responsibilities, certain actions, and certain behaviors and values that the leader is going to have to embrace to make sure that the people that are on the team will want to follow. Let me tell you what I mean.
Glenn Mattson
When you look at a leader, a leader, an entrepreneur, or a manager of a team, whatever it is, but for right now, we're just going to call you an entrepreneur or a leader. Have you ever had supervision, have you ever had a trainer, a coach, a mentor, a seller, a sales hat, a recruiter, a developer, or an on-border? You also have compliance, CFO, etc. All these roles are based on relationships, and only one is based on authority. The one that's based on authority is supervision, and supervision is making sure that the individual is performing the tasks at hand. They fit within the context of the group. It’s two pieces, right? They measure, they monitor, but that's based on authority. A trainer and a coach, a coach for sure. Mentors, and recruiters, are based on a relationship. So, what I wanted to do was put together a short order of things that I have found really to be critical with those who have that gravitational pull of the team.
Glenn Mattson
We've all been there before when we've had a team leader that would tell us to do something and honestly, you didn't want to follow him for various reasons. Then some will say we're going up that hill, we're going in that door, we're going wherever, and you would run as fast as you can, right behind them. Because you believed it. So, I want to share with you, you know me I’m kind of a number guy and a list person, and not all lists always fit with everybody. If you can pull one thing off the list, and it helps you, I think it's going to be monumental. So, let's take a look at just a few things that we have.
Glenn Mattson
Now, the first thing I'd like you to do is kind of a Mattson ism. It basically says this; think about it for a second. The team can only be as strong and as large as the shadow of its leader. Think about that for a second. Whoever the leader is, if they're tiny, they aren't very tall and not very strong, they have a very small shadow. But if you do have a strong leader, a powerful leader regarding respect, they present a very large shadow. So, always remember, the team can only be as big and strong as the shadow of its leader. Are you casting a good shadow? Or is your shadow small? See, the average person is okay following others. That's the average person. Not saying they're sheep, not saying that their followers and their aimless little robots by any means. What I am saying is, the average person would prefer to be part of a group, be part of a team, to be part of a unity, than to be the leader. Being in front of the parade is a very lonely place to be, you have to make all the hard decisions to make most decisions that are never going to make you popular. That's tough, but that's the choice that you made. So, if you're going to make that choice, and be the best at it, you can. Now, I'm going to go through this list, it's only seven, and I am sure there's more. Absolutely. I'm sure that I would love to hear from you about what some others would be. I'll add to the list as we go, but I have these seven because out of meetings that I was in in the last three or four days, with roughly about 280 to 300, different size leaders of different-sized businesses. It was glaring to me, what made them respected and wanted to be followed and I want to share that list with you now.
Glenn Mattson
First of all, the list is not in any order. The first one is not more important than the third one. Again, this is my list. The first is respect. If you want respect, you have to give respect. Respect doesn't mean you're a pushover. Respect doesn't mean that you don't confront people and don't deal with issues. Like congratulating, right? Giving people strokes. Respect is respect. Well, know what that means. Right now, what I want to do is spend our time on time. What I mean by that is respect time. You must start every meeting on time. If you have a meeting at one o'clock, you don't turn on your Zoom at 1:05. If you have a staff meeting, and it's at one o'clock, you don't show up at 1:15 and expect everyone to be sitting there waiting for you as if you're the Grand Poohbah. You better not use an excuse by saying, oh, I was busy, I was late. What that is saying is that you're busier than they are, you're more important than they are. So, the respect piece is I respect your time. I respect what you have to do and how you have to get it done. So, start every meeting that you have on time, sales meetings, staff meetings, and one-on-one meetings, start on time, and if need be, you end on time. Okay. So, if it's a 30-minute meeting, you start on time and you end on time. You'll start to notice that your team will automatically expect you to start on time and end on time. They will also prepare themselves to start and end on time. So, when we look at respect right now, I want you to take a look at how you respect your time and that of others. Do you believe since you own the business, and your name is on the front door that your time is more valuable than somebody else's? Is that what you're trying to convey as a leader that they're not as valuable as you and your time is more valuable than theirs? Man, respect, respect time. That's number one.
Glenn Mattson
Number two, be prepared. I can't tell you how embarrassing or haphazard it is when you have a meeting, and the leader or the owner shows up five minutes late, papers are not ready, and stuff is everywhere. They can't find what they're looking for. What do you think that shadow is creating? Do you think that's creating a large shadow or do you think that's creating a small team? All right.
So, when we look at someone who is not prepared, they don't have an agenda. They don't have action items after each meeting. They aren't driving those action items in between the meetings. There's nothing worse than having a meeting to figure out that we should have another meeting. So be prepared, be prepared for your calls. Be prepared for your one-on-ones. Be prepared for your follow-ups. Be prepared for your sales calls. Being prepared is part of a cultural issue within a team. Same thing with respect to time. By showing your teams that no matter what meeting you have, you are very prepared. You can use websites for that you can have different functions for that, but for every meeting, you should have a pad. What I mean by pad is what's the purpose of the meeting? What's the agenda of the meeting? Lastly, what's the decision that has to be made at the end of the meeting? So, you have to learn how to be prepared. If you teach them how to be prepared because you're prepared, they will follow suit. So, make sure that we take a look at preparation, that's number two.
Glenn Mattson
Number three is equally important in my mind if not even more, and honestly, it is more important. Time is important. So is preparation. The next one on top of that is excuses. One of the most frustrating things that I have found for leaders is cultures, they always say we want accountability, we want more responsibility from our teams, you want more accountability from the teams want to have fewer excuses on why people are not getting certain things done. Sure, we all want that. The number one reason that most goals don't get accomplished inside an organization is because excuses are made. It's by far one of the most rapid negative things that are happening inside companies, organizations, individuals and groups is excuses. There's nothing worse than having your leader make an excuse, and why they didn't do something. Then they turn around and hold you accountable or drag you up and down for not doing something that you should have been doing. You’ve got to remember, being a leader is not about telling people what to do. Being a leader is doing what you expect them to do but in your role. You don't want your team to make excuses how the heck do you expect you can make excuses, that doesn't make any sense. So as a leader, my gosh, you’ve got to make sure you have the capability and the timing, to make sure that we cannot make excuses from where we sit. If we stop making excuses, we will start to recognize excuses in others. Then the next step is to recognize the excuses in others and that we won't accept them. Part of the issue is, is you're accepting excuses because you subconsciously make them. Well, the best thing to do is stop making excuses as an owner and you make way more than you may think you do. That's number three, that's a monster.
Glenn Mattson
Number four. As a leader, you have to demonstrate how to deal with challenges. I've never been in any situation, 30 years of running my business, helping again, tons of people in the sales arena, well over 15,000, and building their businesses. I've never found anyone to be successful who couldn't deal with challenges. You're going to have roadblocks, you're going to have challenges, you’re going to have setbacks. Some are small, some are enormous. When you hit a challenge, you have to ask yourself, man, what pops into your head? Is it oh my god, here we go again? I was almost successful. Or are you saying to yourself every problem has a solution, every problem has a solution? Are you sitting and asking, why me? So, your ability mentally, and how your scripts deal with challenges, absolutely bleeds through your organization. If your team sees that you go off on the deep end, if your team sees that when a challenge happens, you get all emotional and you start walking around the office, the world is going to come to an end, and it's your fault. You should have done this, why don't we do this? You're demonstrating to them exactly what you expect them to do that when something doesn't go, right, it's okay to go crazy. So, dealing with challenges, it’s that initial hit in the head, when you get a good challenge and good roadblock and good knocked off the horse. How do you deal with it right then and there? Do you pause and say, look, now's not the time to plant the blame on anybody, now's the time to fix the situation, then we can come back and do some diagnostics. So, are you showing your team what you're expecting them to do? Again, you have to remember the rule is that your team will only listen to what you say, with one ear, but they watch everything you do with two eyes.
Glenn Mattson
So, number five is emotional involvement. That goes hand in hand with dealing with challenges. So, when something doesn't go right, emotional involvement means that you get emotionally involved. That's panicking, anger, frustration, sadness, despair. An email comes in and doesn't look right. Someone said something, someone didn't send something out on time, and you get emotional, you start yelling, you slam doors, throw stuff around your office a little bit, say out loud a couple of words. So, I'm going to hear you, right? If you're emotional, and you're all over the place, again, your team is watching what you do. So, if something comes bad, and you don't deal with the challenges, and then all of a sudden, you get super emotional about it. Then you come out and you're all over the place, and you're angry, and you're throwing stuff, right, or just putting stuff down loudly, and all of a sudden you start making excuses about what happened. Then you sit back and can't understand why when something doesn't go right with your team, they don't own it, they don't take responsibility. I don't know why you're so shocked. So, respect time, be prepared, have a purpose for a meeting, make sure you have decisions, and make sure to take notes so that meaning connects to another meeting. Also, make sure that you realize that excuses are only excuses if they're accepted. So, it's enormous. We talked about dealing with challenges. Also, the thing with dealing with challenges is taking a look at how we handle emotion. Especially when things don't go well, and those are big stuff. So, those are the first five I want to share with you. Now, you got to realize too, when we talked about being prepared, I think it was in the Journal of Applied Psychology, a great, great publication the Journal of Applied Psychology, inside there, they said that businesses lose 31,000,000,030 $1 billion a year due to unproductive meetings. Due to unproductive meetings, it's insane. It's such a huge, huge amount of money. Okay. Now, Harvard did a review that most executives, and then this is something you may want to look at. Right? Most business owners and executives spend an average of 23 hours a week in meetings. 23 hours. 71% will tell you that those meetings 71% will tell you, that of the meetings they went on in an average week, which is about 23 hours, okay? Were unproductive and useless. So, make sure that you're prepared. Make sure you have an agenda, and you're prepared to drive execution at the end of each meeting. That leads me to number six.
Glenn Mattson
Number six is all about getting handling criticism. Now, when I talk about criticism, I want to make sure that we're on the same page. Criticism is an area for improvement. So, criticism is about things that you could do better, differently, start to do, or stop doing. Sure, people may say it a certain way, they may be hurtful, and they may be condescending or derogatory, but at the end of the day, criticism is the ability to give people advice on what to do better or differently. If you can't accept criticism, or advice from your team, if you can’t accept how to get better from them. It doesn't make any sense, by the way. So, you expect them to listen, you expect them to get better you expect them to? Yeah, you don't make any sense.
Glenn Mattson
The last one I want to share with you is probably by far, I think one of the most impactful as a leader. Remember the ones I'm giving you are huge by the way; I'm just telling you to take a look at them as you're running your own business. Take stock. Do you respect time? Do you show up on time? Do you demand that you show up on time? Are you prepared? Are you prepared for the meetings? Are you prepared for a follow-up? Are you prepared to make sure that you drive execution? Are you accepting excuses? Are you giving excuses? How are you when you deal with challenges? How are you when you when things go sideways? How are you from an emotional standpoint? When people give you feedback that you don’t like, and when people give you input that maybe you don't like, it's called criticism. How do you deal with it?
Glenn Mattson
Here's the last one. Dealing with failure. When you have a challenge and get knocked down, or failure happens, what do you do? Do you analyze it? To get emotional? Be stoic about it. Do you debrief yourself and say, we got an outcome that was not what we were expecting? Let's take a quick diagnostic here and do the best we can to keep our emotions out. Let's ask ourselves a handful of questions to figure out if we have the wrong strategy, the wrong tactic, or just what happens so we can learn from it because if we don't learn from it, it is just a double negative. We’ve got to have the capacity to learn. So, we look at today all the roles that managers have. I hope that this list of seven will give you some insights, that even if you just work on one of them, and then two and then three, right? But again, take a look at respect, preparation, excuses, challenges, emotional balance, handling feedback and criticism, along with dealing with failure. Hopefully, these are going to give you some insights and ideas for either running your own shop, being in charge of your own shop, or running a team. I don't even care if it's an athletic team doesn't make a difference. Running a team running a company running a group of individuals, the same characteristics we just talked about. So, stay tuned for more insights and strategies to elevate your personal and professional life. Until then, you know, Glenn Mattson signing off. I'll talk to you next time. Enjoy
Glenn Mattson
This is the Building Blocks of Success with Glenn Mattson.
S1E12 with Glenn Mattson: Emotional Risk-Taking