How to Build Leaders on Your Team
Hi! My name is Coach Jimmy and I am coming to you live from Dallas, Texas and today we are talking about leadership, specifically building up leaders. In my nearly 9 years of business, this has been something that’s been very interesting to me as far as what makes a good leader? Are good leaders born? Are good leaders built? Are they a victim or a production of their circumstances? For somebody in a business like I’m in, so I had no business experience before I got into business.
Before I got into business over 9 years ago, I was a 3 time college dropout, struggling out of work actor who had previously been morbidly obese, 100 pounds overweight.
So, I didn’t have a lot of experience in success.
I didn’t have a lot of business experience and man, God knows I didn’t know how to build leaders. I wasn’t even sure I knew how to be a leader first and in my industry, so I work in a home business where my success really relies on building up a team. So maybe you are in a industry like me, maybe you have a more traditional job where team building is just as important, an office, maybe you work in something, maybe you are an entrepreneur and you are building a team of assistants right now. So maybe you’re the front person. You are the front person creating the content, but you have a virtual assistant or you have somebody…you’re having to create a team of people to execute what it is that you are doing, maybe creating a coaching program or a podcast and you have an editor.
It’s about team building and really creating leaders and when I think of leaders, I think of people that are very self-reliant. When I think of leaders, I think of people that are self-motivated. It doesn’t mean that…and you can have leaders that are employees. It doesn’t mean that only leaders come out of an entrepreneurial situation or whoever is the boss.
I have a lot of people that I work with…I mean my team, my people that are either my assistant or a part my team, each of them are tremendous leaders even though I have hired them to do a job or what not, I mean amazing leaders. The thing I find really interesting is as a leader wanting to build other leaders, here is my conundrum and follow me and see if this sounds familiar to you. I am going to use my business as an example.
Somebody comes to me wanting to start an online business. That’s what I do. I coach people and teach them how to start an online business and how to start making money really quickly. So somebody comes to you and says, “I want to learn how to build a business.” Okay, check.
Give them the tools they need to succeed
You want to plug them in…so you want to make sure…like you honor that fact that they have trusted you to be their mentor, to be their guide. They are like, “Okay. I want to do what you do. Can you teach me how to do that?” And you say, “Yes, I have steps.”
So in the past, I used to really super hold everybody’s hands at the beginning. I was available 24/7, you could ask many question anytime, and that got to wearing on me super quick. Answering the same questions over and over and over and again. Basically I feel like I was just like an on call ER doctor, right? It was a little nuts and the fact that it was interrupting family time, I had no personal time. You immediately tell people how to respect your time and if you are available all the time. Sadly, most people don’t respect your time because they know, “Oh, I can get a hold of him or her when every I want,” and so they start taking advantage of your time.
So then you are like, “Okay, well this is what I am going to do. I am going to create those boundaries and I still want them to have support,” because coming from my background, when I got involved in my business there wasn’t really any corporate training. The people that I got involved with were also brand new so they didn’t know a lot to teach from experience. They didn’t have years of experience ahead of me to get that going. So I had to really figure a lot of things out on my own.
Here is the conundrum I fall into. I want to really support the people that come in and trust me. I want to hand them tools. So what I started doing was creating playlist and making videos of like, “Great, go through this thing,” instead of me teaching each individual person and exhausting myself doing that. I was like, “Great, here are the tools to go learn, to go build.”
You are going to have a couple type of people. You are going to have those that say, “Great!” They use the tools and there is going to be some, for whatever reason, that still feel like you aren’t helping them because you are not physically spoon feeding them all the time or answering every question when you go, “Well, did you look at the video?” “Well yeah but…” And I don’t even mind when somebody watches the video and then needs a clarification answer, I am okay with that.
Know when to take a step back
What I have found over and over again is as I look at other top performers and top achievers, specifically in my business, man the same story happens over and over again.
The person that brought them into the business, either didn’t support them or just wasn’t super involved. Maybe they weren’t into the business as much as somebody else was. This person made a decision earlier on that they were going to be successful, regardless if they were being spoon fed or not.
So I am like, “Okay, I get that. So how do you instill that potential into every person that comes in?” And one of the things that I’ve learned midway through 2015 and going into this year is just setting the expectations. If somebody comes in and says, “Great, I want you to succeed. Know that I am cheering for you to succeed, but I can’t do it for you,” because I tried to do it for everybody early.
That’s like somebody saying…that’s like somebody getting P90X and you give them the system, “Here. Start following this and I am going to check in and just see how things are going.” And they don’t ever do it and they’re like, “Oh, yeah. Well I didn’t open the book,” or “I didn’t look at the nutrition thing.” So you are like…but you want them to succeed so badly, that you decided to come to their house and do the workout for them or to eat the meals for them. Well, great. Congratulations that you really want to help somebody so much, but who is getting fitter, if I am coming over and doing push-ups and pull-ups for this person? Me, not that person.
And so you know and it’s funny because people want to point a finger and say, “Well, you didn’t support me,” or “I didn’t get this and that from you,” when I can have somebody else take advantage of the exact same training or the exact same playlist or tools or whatever I set up and really take ownership for it and go figure it out on their own.
I want you to succeed. Know that I am cheering for you to succeed, but I can’t do it for you.
It was…I made this joke, there was a group of people that had all…in my business, there are what they call Super Star Diamond. It’s the top rank that you can make in this business and I got put into a Facebook Group with a bunch of other people that had hit this rank and they were asking who had a lot of support from their people above and who had helped building their team from the people that had come in before them and over and over and over again it was like, “Well, not really. It’s kind of stuck in a dead spot. I really had to figure this out on my own,” and so I made the joke half jokingly, I was like, “Well, that’s it! Everybody that comes into my business, I am going to sponsor them, put them in a dead spot, and never talk to them and watch a bunch of leaders like pop up.”
Let them figure it out themselves
I know that’s not actually like the case. That isn’t actually what to do is to bring people into something and then abandon them, but I did find it really interesting that these kind of abandoned people all figured it out on their own. I do feel like there have been seasons in my business where I have babied people too much. I think it’s because I felt like I didn’t really have the training or the support or whatever that I overcompensated.
It’s like that parent…so let’s say you had a really really strict upbringing and you vow that you are never going to be as hard and as strict has your parent was because they were just so mean. So you go and overcompensate the other way. You do too much for your kids and you are just too lenient with them and there is really a happy medium somewhere.
I think that mystery in building leaders is giving them assignments saying, “Here is…here is the tool. Go do that and come back and let me know what you still need clarification on or how you need help.”
The person that comes and tell me that they have an objection, they are going to get my time too because they had to go take action on something in order to get the objection or to fail.
Because what just gets frustrating to me is when somebody doesn’t even use…it’s never been easier to learn stuff than it is right now. I tell my team this, as much as I want everything to run through me, and as much as I really do feel like I am a really good leader, I am a really good teacher, if they wanted to go to YouTube and search our business, they probably could learn everything they needed to know to build this business. I mean information and how to has never been more readily available.
Now the quality of that is going to be different. You are going to be able to get some free training via stuff like Google and YouTube and then somewhere along the way it actually get higher level training, you probably going to have to pay for it which is exactly what I did from the beginning. So instead of using my circumstances in an excuse for why I couldn’t succeed, I started seeking out wisdom and knowledge from people in and outside of my industry.
I think what’s been a strength of mine is going and seeking other online marketers and people online that did things and then putting my unique…they weren’t necessarily home business trainers or network marketing trainers. They were email marketing trainers and blog trainers and video trainers and speaking trainers and then what I did is like took that training and figured out how to apply it to my specific industry.
So I say all that to say, so what is it? What’s the mystery of building a leader?
I really think it’s a happy medium between the two extremes and this is what I do now. Somebody comes in and I say, “Great, here is this playlist. Here is some of the best videos I know to learn the basics of our business. Here is a Facebook group where you can come and ask question anytime. Let’s go.”
If that person disappears and I never see a question from them in the group, if I never have them come in and share their goals, or check in maybe once a day, it kind of answers my question for me. My tendency is to want to go chase after those people, and if you follow me for any length of time for any of my trainings, you probably heard my talk about the Magic of the Huddle. I talk about the huddle and I use football as an analogy about you go run the play and then you come back to the huddle. For my team, I provide a playbook and a huddle and they don’t read the playbook and they don’t come back to the huddle to ask for help or say, “Well, this is what I went to activate,” it just tells me a whole lot.
Nurture those willing to do the work
Even early on, and I know that there is a whole lot of fear in starting a new thing and getting it started whether it’s a health and fitness regime or business or tying to do both an the same time, but I found that’s what I got to do. I have to show them the tools and then…you know who gets most of time? It’s those that I see out there taking initiative.
Because I sit and watch silently a lot. I will hover around and when I see those people, you know maybe I scroll by their Facebook page and I see that they are doing the things. I am like, “Ah, they watched the video,” or if they are coming back to the group and saying, “Hey, I tried to find new customers and new clients and I am getting these objections or this is what’s happening.” Well, you can’t get an objection unless you’re applying the steps in order to build the business.
So the person that comes and tell me they have an objection, they are going to get my time too because they had to go take action on something in order to get the objection or to fail and that’s what I tell people all the time they go through my trainings. I said, “The people that are going to have the most success are the ones willing to go mess this up the fastest.”
So that’s really it in a nutshell, how do you build leaders? You give him tools and you say…one of my mentors that have thought me the most is Chalene Johnson and if you are not following Chalene Johnson you should. Chalene always talks about, “As long as you are taking baby steps, I can help you. It’s when you stop taking steps and just say, ‘I don’t know what to do,’ you’re not taking steps with me, I can’t help you anymore.”
My buddy Dave Ward also puts it a great way, he says, “The minute we have the same conversation twice, we have an issue.” And what does he mean by that? He means, “If you have a problem and I say, ‘Okay, cool. Then you need to do this,’ and the next time we talk, you haven’t done that and you’re still having the same problem, well we’re stuck.”
Because leadership’s only going to be sparked out of action, so that’s my key to you. It’s give people the playbook, have them have to take action to earn more of your time, and then eventually…because what you want, what you want to do is have these people that are self-sustain. Specifically in my business. For years and years and years, if anything was going to happen through my team it had to run through me. While we had a level of success, it is exhausting as a leader and then I never get to take any time away to work on other projects, to do other things.
I am really excited about 2016 because I don’t know that I have ever been has excited about going into a year knowing that literally if I got hit by a bus today, these people’s business will continue to flourish. I don’t know that I could have said that in the past. That’s something to ask yourself as you are growing as a leader. If your mentor or who brought you in your business, or whatever you are doing, if that person went away today or quit the business today, where would your business go? Would it affect your business? Would your business just be fine because you’re self-reliant?
That’s a big heavy question. So I have to ask myself the people that…I am in three masterminds this year of people that I paid a lot of money to to help me get better this year, but I can confidently say if any of those three individual went away, I could still be successful from what I have already learned from them and what I have already put into action. I just started with all three and we are only in February right now as I look at my calendar, that was why I was looking away.
So be a leader, grow leaders, give assignments, and give your extra time to those that actually go and take action.
Thank you for your time. Leave in the comments. Let me know what you are taking action on today, I forward to talking to you next time. Go take action and we will talk really soon.