Breakthrough Leadership Team
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Building a Great Company
The goal is to build a Sustainably Great Company
Consistent Top and Bottom-line Growth:
A Growing Fulfilling Work Environment
Adding Real Value to Society
What is a Leadership Team?
Any leader who is leading other leaders. Is part of a leadership team.
Six Pillars of a Breakthrough Leadership Team
Pillar 1: Mastering Self-Leadership
You cannot lead others. Unless. You're kicking butt at leading yourself.
Follow the Following 3 Step Checklist
Focus: If you change your focus, you change your life. Within mastering Self-Leadership is the idea of Mastering your Focus.
“Grant me the serenity to accept the things I can’t change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the Difference.”
2. Fire: How do you keep that fire in your belly? What motivates you to move forward, even when it's difficult? It could be a greater purpose in your life or in your business.
3. Coachability: Knowing the difference between a Fixed Mindset and a Growth Mindset. Coachability is about asking for feedback and having the vulnerability to ask for feedback. It's about taking action on that feedback. It's about holding yourself accountable for that feedback.
Pillar 2: Proactively Structuring Your Leadership Team
Accountability vs. Responsibility
Responsibility is who is rolling up their sleeves to get the job done. It could be one person, could be a thousand people.
Accountability is always and only one person.
Do I have the right structure for the team?
Am I proactively structuring the team?
Is there an agreement between you and your team on the different functions of your team, and who is that one person accountable for that function?
When we talk about proactively structuring the team, it is understanding accountability and creating a 12-quarter Leadership Team Plan.
Pillar 3: Finding the Right People
One A player equals the productivity of three mediocre performers.
Fire fast, Hire slow.
Do you have a repeatable process to find, hire and onboard A players within your organization?
Pillar 4: Executing with Discipline
Three disciplines to Executing with Discipline
Aligning Around Priorities
Do you have a small number of annual priorities?
Do you have a small number of, quarterly priorities for the company, for the team, and for an individual?
2. How to measure success
Are you measuring those things that matter?
Do you know, How to measure success for each position?
How are you measuring success for the company and by function?
3. Having a Consistent Planning and Communication Rhythm
What is your planning and communication rhythm look like?
Does it allow you to agree on a set of priorities, cascade those down through the organization, and adjust as you need to?
Pillar 5: Building a Resilient Culture
There are three V's to culture
Values
Vision
Vulnerability
Pillar 6: Developing and Improving the Team Continuously
How often are you assessing the talent on your team?
How good a coach are you?
How good a coach is your team?
Is there a coaching process that you have in place for development?
Lastly, Do you have the Courage to Hire Slow and Fire Fast
Thanks for listening!
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[00:00:00] Intro
Wow. Welcome to the first better leadership team show; this is exciting for me. It's not exciting for you. You've, I'm sure, listened to thousands of podcasts, but it's my first one. So, it's pretty exciting. We're going to do two different types of better leadership team shows; One, which is what you're getting in this episode, is called a Mike on the Mic episode.
Clever. Right. And that's me ranting or talking about something solo. And then the other half of the episodes are going to be me interviewing guests about how to create a great leadership team. CEOs, authors thought leaders, and speakers, and anybody I can find that's going to help us figure out how to build a great leadership team.
[00:00:51] What I do and Why I do it - Building a Great Leadership Team
But let me start this first episode. Talking about the epiphany that I had a few years ago, I've been a coach and consultant for about 35 years. And, for the last 15 or so worked exclusively with leadership teams, helping them with strategy, people, culture and execution, making sure they've got the right profitability and cash flow; I've been doing that for a while.
And the epiphany I had about four years ago now, Is the idea that I wasn't just helping companies grow or helping companies be more profitable. That's the way I always talked about what I did. I help companies grow; I help, companies realize their potential. But what I realized is what I'm really doing is helping create a great leadership team.
That's the focus. And when I realized I had that focus and wait a minute, that's what I do. It's not really just about growth, It's about building a great leadership team, and everything cascades from there. I said if that's what I do, I probably ought to read some books about it. And, for those that know me, one of the things I say is if I go 90 minutes without recommending a book to you, dial 911 because something may be desperately wrong with me. So I read a lot, and I don't remember reading any books specifically about structuring a leadership team executing as a leadership team and building culture as a leadership team, and finding the right people for a leadership team; thousands of books on leadership, of course. Dozens or more books on team building. But I started looking for that book about building a great leadership team. And I couldn't find one, which was really interesting to me. And I said, If I can't find it, maybe I need to create it. So I did that. And it's called Breakthrough Leadership Team. It's out on Amazon. If you want to go buy it.
But. Let's talk a little bit about why I think focus on leadership teams is so important and hopefully, sell you on why listening to this show is going to be so important for you. And then, I want to talk about what I call the six pillars of building a great leadership team. And that's really going to be the focus of this first show. And I'm also, if you stick around to the end, once I take you through the six pillars at a fairly high level, I have more shows that will go more in-depth, but. I'll give you enough that It should provide a kind of checklist of what you need to do to make sure you're building a powerful leadership team, a better leadership team. What I call a breakthrough leadership team, and at the end, I'm going to give you a link, to somewhere you can go to actually assess your current team.
As to how well you're doing against those things. And. Where you might need to improve. Where do you have strengths to leverage? And where do you have places where you've just missed it, and you've got to do some work there?
[00:04:13] Why Focus on Leadership Teams?
But let's talk about why the focus is on leadership teams and why I've been coaching and consulting for 35 years. And what I found is.
That if you want a great company, and let me be specific what I mean by a great company. A great company is not In six months, we're going to sell to, Google for billions of dollars. I'm not saying that's not great. I would want that money too, but that's just not what our focus is here. It's not what my focus is here; building something to make a quick buck, with some amazing idea, by selling it to Google or Apple or Amazon or Metta or whoever.
The goal is to build a sustainably great company and what I mean by a great company is really a few things. Number one, Its top and bottom line growth is consistent. Top and bottom line growth, It's not all about money, but man, for those that think, I just want to do some good for the world. That's wonderful.
But if you don't have the right cash flow, You don't have the fuel in the engine to make it happen. You can't pay people, great people, what they need to get paid to come and work for you to add that value you want to add. So it's not the only thing, but man, it absolutely starts with consistent top and bottom line growth. So you need that to be a great company.
Number two, I believe you need a growing fulfilling work environment for your people. When I talked to potential clients, and for me, those potential clients are typically CEOs. And then, I work with the CEO and the leadership team. But when I talk to prospective clients, If I have a sense that, that entrepreneur and that CEO is looking to build their business on the backs of their employees. And all they're doing is complaining about their employees, and the reason they're doing it is to have a bigger boat or a bigger house. Those phone calls go really quickly because that's not who I focus on.
To me, in addition to top and bottom line growth, it's that a growing, fulfilling environment needed to create a great environment for your folks so you can attract more great folks. So you can. Impact those people, having that environment I think is necessary to be a great company. So number one, it's top and bottom line growth. Number two, it's a growing fulfilling environment.
And number three, it's that you're adding real value to society. Now society for you could be your clients, and it could be your vendors. It could be your community. It could be the world, depending on what the purpose of your organization is. But if you want a great company, and all of those things. You need a Great Leadership Team. I have never seen an organization that had a mediocre leadership team, but as you went down through the organization, things got better. If you have an example of that, I'd love to hear it. There may be pockets of great people and great departments, but the company doesn't get better. As you cascade down through the organization, it gets worse. It gets fuzzier and fuzzier like that old game of telephone we used to play when we were kids.
if you want a great company, it's got to start with having a great leadership team. I could remember a client I had, this was six or seven years ago. Walked into the room and the leadership team's about nine people on the leadership team. All they were doing was complaining about their people.
We do and do for these people. And they're not thankful. All they do is complain morale is horrible. What else could we do? You know, these damn millennials are these damn gen Y whatever it is, blame, blame, blame. And what I said to them is, look, let's do a little experiment.
And in this conference room of nine executives. I gave them what's called an employee net promoter score. And very simply, if you don't know what that is and look up net promoter score or net promoter system, it's a wonderful tool to use internally or use with your clients. It basically is a measure of how engaged folks are within your organization.
And I asked them the net promoter score question, which is on a scale of one to 10. How likely are you to refer working here to someone else? now, these are the executives, the—top leaders of the organization.
And when they gave me the scores, and it was anonymous, the average score was a three. Three out of 10, and these are the executives. And here they are complaining about everybody—else's morale. And what I told them is that. We are not, and I am not going to work with them on trying to solve the problem out there. Until they solve the problem in here, we needed to work on that leadership team culture, that leadership team morale, that leadership team passion and engagement. We needed to work on that first.
And that's why leadership teams are so important. Now, let me also, before I get into the six pillars of creating a great leadership team,
[00:09:35] What is a Leadership Team?
Let me talk a little bit about what a leadership team is.
I may have a tendency when I talk about a leadership team, to talk about the CEO and his, or her direct reports. Those are my typical clients, but if you're listening to this and you're saying, whoa, wait a minute, I'm a COO, and I've got a team of folks within my operations function; I guess I shouldn't listen to this, that's not a leadership team, or I'm a VP of sales, or I am a director of customer service. This applies to you as well. So I'll say two things about what a leadership team means. And let me; I'll use a COO as an example.
There are two reasons why as someone who's not the CEO of an organization you need to hear what it is we talk about on the better leadership team show. And number one is as CEO you are a member, probably a member of your leadership team. Now, by the way, I've also seen organizations, not mom and pops, 50, 60 million in revenue who don't really have a leadership team. They've got a CEO that runs around just telling their direct reports what to do. So it may not feel like you're part of the team.
but as COO, you are part of a leadership team. So number one, that becomes important and number two. The way I define it is, any leader who is leading other leaders. Is part of a leadership team. So if you are a director of customer service and you're not even on the executive leadership team, you don't report to the CEO, but you've got folks reporting to you who lead other people. All of this better leadership team stuff applies to you as well. That being said, let me give you a little overview of what I call the six pillars of a breakthrough leadership team.
And then again, we'll talk about how you can assess yourself against those things. As I dive into the details here, it's important to. Address the elephant in the room.
You are probably overwhelmed right now. Overwhelmed as a leader of leaders. Overwhelmed by the sheer number of issues and opportunities. You've got to grapple with it every single day. Overwhelmed by every coach consultant. Accountant attorney advisor. Giving you advice that sometimes conflicts with each other.
Overwhelmed by friends and family, trying to tell you what to do, overwhelmed by the books that you read. And I hope you read a lot, overwhelmed by just the pressures of having to make payroll and grow a business and provide for so many other people. It's overwhelming.
Part of what I want us to do on this show through the knowledge that I have, but more importantly, the knowledge of the dozens of guests that, that I'll be bringing on the show. I'm going to learn a ton as well. This is part of the reason I'm doing it, I want to get better. So I want really smart guests to talk to me. About what they're doing and, man, having a podcast, there's no better way of doing that. But I don't want to just give you more advice. I don't want to just get more advice. That's going to overwhelm me, and I don't want to overwhelm you. And that's why when I talk about the six pillars, Of a better leadership team, of what I call a breakthrough leadership team. I want to give us a framework that simplifies things. It doesn't make it more complicated. we could think we've got six major areas to cover. And not 127. So I want to give you that framework to just simplify. And the next bunch of Mike on the Mic episodes, the solo episodes. And again, as I mentioned earlier, my goal is we will switch off from week to week. You'll well, I'll do a Mike on the mic episode for you, and then we'll do a guest episode and then a Mike on the mic episode. And then a guest episode, you get the idea. The first bunch of Mike on the mic episodes are going to focus on drilling down on each of these six pillars. So we'll stay fairly high-level today, but then we'll drill down.
[00:13:54] Six Pillars of a Breakthrough Leadership Team
So let's do that. And here's an overview of each of the six pillars. Pillar number one, I call mastering self-leadership.
[00:14:07] Pillar 1: Mastering Self-Leadership
You cannot lead others. Unless. You're kicking butt at leading yourself. You just can't. You're not going to get home every night, drink, kick the dog, or yell at the kids and your spouse. And. wake up in the morning and be a great leader. And you're also not going to have a stressful, horrible time at work yelling at your pain in the neck employees and your horrible clients and playing the blame game. You're not going to do all those things and then come home and be a great spouse and a great parent and, or a great owner of a pet or a great son or daughter, it's just not going to happen. Life and business blend together.
And when you're doing well at both, that's a beautiful thing; when you're having a struggle, that's a really difficult thing. So within mastering self-leadership. There are three things to add to your checklist of things to think about. And again, in future episodes, I'll dive deeper on all those things, but I call them focus, fire, and coachability.
[00:15:09] 1. Focus
For focus, the idea is if you change your focus, you change your life, if you're feeling overwhelmed if you're feeling frustrated if you're feeling angry. If you're feeling joyful, good feelings, empowering feelings or disempowering feelings. It's not because of what's happening around you. It's all about how you focus on it.
It's that, you know, serenity prayer, right? Grant me this; I've got it up on my wall over my desk. Grant me the serenity to accept the things I can’t, change the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. What are you doing to work on your focus?
Every single day in the morning, what are you doing? is it meditation? Is it prayer? is it an exercise? What are you doing at the end of the day? What are you doing in the middle of the day? If your head starts to explode? How do you shift your focus from a disempowering focus to an empowering focus? On-demand. So within mastering self-leadership. Is the idea of mastering your focus? That's number one.
[00:16:22] 2. Fire
Number two within mastering self-leadership. I call fire. Fire, is that fire In your belly, we've got an episode coming up. with a great, great friend of mine, Kate Donovan, who's going to talk about burnout.
And to me, fire is the opposite of burnout. Burnout says that fire is out. That's what burnout means. How do you keep that fire in your belly? To move forward, even when it's difficult, what is motivating you? It could be a greater purpose in your life or in your business. It could be any number of things.
But that's what fire is all about keeping that fire in your belly. So do you have that fire right now? What could you do to fuel that fire? And again, through Mike on the mic episodes and some guests we'll be having, we'll talk more about that—the third thing. So we talked about focus fire. The third thing within mastering self-leadership is coachability.
[00:17:20] 3. Coachability
Coachability is about having that growth mindset if you've read Carol Dweck growth mindset. If you have read a great book, If you read it, you understand the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. And a fixed mindset says. I guess this is who I am. And I guess this is what I know. And I guess this is how good I'm going to be. You feel that way about others as well.
And a growth mindset says we can always grow. I felt like the more I know, the more I realized I don't know. So coachability is about asking for feedback, and having the vulnerability to ask for feedback. It's about taking action on that feedback. It's about holding yourself accountable for that feedback.
How coachable are you, and if really quickly you say, oh, I'm incredibly coachable. It's probably a sign, you're not as coachable as you think, because if you're not thinking about it, you guys jump to that answer. You're probably not as self-aware as you need to be. So pillar number one is mastering self-leadership.
[00:18:18] Pillar 2: Proactively Structuring Your Leadership Team
Pillar number two is proactively structuring your leadership team. What do I mean by that? number one, what I mean is understanding the word accountability. There's a difference between accountability and responsibility. Responsibility is who is rolling up their sleeves to get the job done. It could be one person, could be a thousand people. Accountability is always and only one person.
So the question I want you to ask yourself when you think, am I, do I have the right structure for the team? Am I proactively structuring the team? Is there an agreement between you and your team as to what the different functions are on your team, and who is that one person accountable for that function?
Where you have multiple people accountable, nobody's really accountable where you have a function and no one's there. And then, no one is accountable for a while then, you might have some things slipping through the cracks where you have somebody stretched too thin, which might be you as the leader where you have somebody stretched too thin, and they're accountable for five, six different functions.
That might be a problem. So when we talk about proactively structuring the team, it's understanding accountability, understanding who is accountable for each of the functions, and then creating what I call a 12-quarter leadership team plan. Understanding who's accountable for each function. It's a very static, Where are we now? Kind of exercise.
What I want you to think about and what I'll dive deeper into in future episodes. Is creating a 12-quarter plan for that accountability.
What are your different growth metrics? What are your different success metrics over the next 4, 8, 12 quarters. 1, 2, 3 years? And how does that impact your different functions. And who's accountable for those functions. So you can be proactive about your team and say, Hey, I don't need a VP of sales right now as the business owner, I can handle that right now, but given our growth trajectory, that's a tough word, given our growth trajectory. You know what? in Four quarters I'm going to need that VP of sales. So maybe I ought to start looking now or grooming now for that position. So pillar number one was the mastering self-leadership pillar. Number two was proactively structuring the team pillar. Number three is finding the right people.
[00:20:54] Pillar 3: Finding the Right People
You're not gonna have a great leadership team with a bunch of Folks performing at a B level on your leadership team. You need A players on your team, Kip Tindell, the founder and I think might still be CEO of the container store, has this great philosophy called one equals three, one equals three, says one superstar.
One A player equals the productivity of three mediocre performers. What are you doing to go out there and find the right people? The philosophy I adhere to, which sounds heartless, but it's not. Is fire fast, hire slow. Most companies do the opposite. They wait until they just can't take any more to get rid of someone who's toxic for the team that's been toxic for the last 12 months. And then they rush to hire someone and make the same damn mistake all over again. We need to do the opposite.
Do you have a repeatable process to find, hire and onboard A players within your organization? Future episodes. We're going to talk about a methodology called top-grading. I'm going to talk about that. I've got it. I've got a guest coming up. That's going to talk about that methodology. there's a great book called Who, the A Method for Hiring, another book I suggest you read.
Do you have a process to consistently find, hire, onboard A players? We've also got a guest coming up, Brad Giles, Who's going to talk about onboarding. So that's pillar number three, finding the right people.
[00:22:27] Pillar 4: Executing with Discipline
Pillar number four is executing with discipline.
Ask yourself, how much drama you have in your day-to-day of people committing to things and not achieving them? of people, not even knowing what they've committed to? if I asked five people in your organization, 10 people in your organization. What are the top three priorities over the next 90 days for the company? How does what you do align with that? Would they know?
Do folks know how to measure success?
So within executing with discipline, there are three disciplines that I want you to think about. Number one is aligning around priorities. As I said, do you have a small number of annual priorities? Do you have a small number of, quarterly priorities for the company, for the team, or and for an individual?
So are you aligned around priorities? number two. Are you measuring those things that matter? Do you know, How to measure success for each position? Does your head of marketing, or if you are the head of marketing, How do you measure success? Is it a beautiful website? Is it? Wow. Your social media looks really good. Or is it a specific number of weekly marketing-qualified leads? How are you measuring success for the company and by function? And the third discipline lining around priorities was number one. Measuring what matters was number two, the third discipline is having a consistent planning and communication rhythm.
Everything from annual planning sessions to quarterly planning and learning sessions to, monthly check-ins to, weekly accountability sessions, to daily huddles. What is your planning and communication rhythm look like? And does it allow you to agree on a set of priorities, cascade those down through the organization, and adjust as you need to.
If you're setting priorities once a year. 2, 3, and 5 months after the year starts, those priorities are already outdated. So it's no wonder you're not holding people accountable for it.
[00:24:38] Pillar 5: Building a Resilient Culture
Pillar number five, Building a Resilient Culture, so critical within a leadership team. If you build that culture on the leadership team, that culture will cascade down.
Through the rest of the organization. There are three V's to culture. I want you to think about number one is Values. Do you have a small number of non-negotiable behaviors that anchors your culture? that anchor the personality of your organization. Not a set of core values, hat's a plaque on the wall or a page on the website because it looks good. Something that internally anchors your culture that you actually hold people accountable. For, so the first V values.
The second V is vision. Do you have an almost never changing purpose for your organization, That's your north star. Do you have a 10 to 15-year big, hairy, audacious goal? That's a flag on top of the mountain to drive people. A man on the moon kind of goal for the organization. Do you have a three-year vision for the organization? Not just numbers, but what's the organization going to look like, feel smell like.
What are people saying about the organization? What are you known for? Do you have a clear vision, and is every member of your team an evangelist of that vision? that's so important for your culture. And then the third V is vulnerability.
Vulnerability is about a level of honesty,, sometimes brutal honesty, on your team, vulnerability to give and receive feedback, to say those things that are difficult and to know. That the folks on your team are coming from a place of positive intent, is there that level of vulnerability-based trust on the team? So those are the three V's of building a resilient culture.
[00:26:39] Pillar 6: Developing and Improving the Team Continuously
And then the last pillar we'll talk about. Is developing and improving the team continuously. Developing and improving the team.
How often are you assessing the talent on your team?
I suggest and work with my clients to do a quarterly talent assessment. Where we're assessing one level down who is performing at an, A level, a B level, a C level, and what we call a toxic C level. And there are two ways, we look at performance, that come together to figure all that out.
One is how productive are they. Two is how well are they living the core values. Are they adding to the culture or subtracting from the culture? When was the last time you worked with your team to assess talent? and I'm not talking about an annual performance review. I'm talking about getting together as a team and discussing one level down your talent. And understanding actions that need to be taken with that talent.
Number one action is coaching. How good a coach are you? how good a coach is your team? Is there a coaching process that you have in place for development? What are you doing to learn and grow every day, every week, every month, and every quarter? Do you have a plan for you? Is there a plan for your team? To develop, add new skills, and build old skills.
And then, lastly, How courageous are you? To cut the cord on those people that aren't fit within your organization. Are you letting under-performers toxic performers stick around for 6, 9, 12, or 18 months? Or do you have the courage to memorize said fire fast, hire slow?
Do you have the courage to fire fast? And it got, I don't mean that in a heartless way because if someone's performing at a C level in your organization and you're finding, they're not coachable. I believe everybody could be an, A player somewhere. So I think you're being heartless by keeping them around.
So again, those six pillars as we wrap up this first episode, those six pillars are mastering self-leadership number one. Number two is proactively structuring the team. Number three, finding the right people. Number four, executing with discipline. Number five, building a resilient culture. Number six, developing and improving the team.
Now, those are in no specific order. You need to work on all of those incrementally forever more. It's not step one, Step two, step three. It's working them in parallel. Last thing I'll say, as we wrap up this first episode, and if you've lasted. I shouldn't say if you have lasted this long or you wouldn't be hearing my voice; it's a dumb question said to say, have you lasted this long? Lasting this long. Thank you for lasting this long. And what I want to offer you is a way to assess your team. In all these areas, it's an online 30-question assessment that you should take as well as your team if you go to Mike-goldman.com/BLT as in better leadership team or breakthrough leadership team. mike-goldman.com/bltassessment. You will find the assessment there. It's a great start to. getting an idea of where you need some work. Where do you have strengths to leverage, and where do you need some work?
I hope you enjoyed this first episode. I love doing it.
Have a great rest of your day.