Ready to Lead

Hiring a new person is serious business, and there are some really important questions to ask yourself as a leader before you take that step.

In this episode, hosts Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask walk through some really vital steps we need to take before we bring someone else on our team. In Richard’s company, they have a saying that reflects an important value: 

We take the social responsibility of hiring very seriously.

What does that mean? It means that, when they make the decision to hire someone, it’s more than an exchange of time for money. It’s not a pair of jeans at Nordstrom’s. It’s a human. They have other humans relying on them. And hiring should only be done after much care and consideration.

Listen in for some great advice on making these key hiring decisions as a leader.

Taking the Social Responsibility of Hiring Very Seriously

When Richard’s company is considering hiring someone new, they do what they call “work journaling” for a bit first. They ask questions like: What are we doing? How are we spending our time? Is the leader hoarding something that should be passed down? What percentage of my day is spent on things I should be doing? What percentage of my day is spent on things I should be delegating?

And they follow these three basic rules of thumb:

1. We don’t throw people at inefficiencies
2. We don’t throw people at “we’ve always done it that way” 
3. We don’t throw people at seasonality

Each of these things leads to unnecessary hires. That’s bad for the leader, the company, and the person you hired. Why don’t they throw people at these things? Because they take the social responsibility of hiring very seriously. When we’re in the most pain we’re most likely to throw a warm body at a problem. Don’t hire people in your emotional state. Step back and assess first. 

You Can Never Make Enough Lists

If someone requests additional help doing their job, make some lists. What the leader is doing, what everyone on the team is doing, what the person requesting additional help is doing. Go back to that critical task list—Do, Defer, Delegate, Delete. For the person asking for another hire, ask: Do you have the time to do all of this? Are we following a documented process? Is it efficient? What can we automate?

When you ask those questions (about how you’re spending your time, etc.), you can figure out if you actually need to hire someone, or if you just need to make some other changes. What if you get really efficient with your time two weeks after you hire a new person? Don’t hire for seasonal work unless you’re advertising for a short-term, temporary, seasonal hire. If people don’t know they’re being hired temporarily, don’t hire them temporarily.

These are the processes you have to go through so you can be socially responsible when you hire. We as leaders can get frustrated and impatient. Once again, all problems are leadership problems. We have to take this responsibility very seriously.

Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself

There are a few things Richard and Jeff encourage you to be aware of and think about as you’re considering hiring.

There are people who are empire builders who like to build a large team of people underneath them. You need to look in the mirror to know yourself. Are you an empire builder? Does success for you look like the number of employees you have? Do you have a ton of employees but your company isn’t profitable?

Vanity metrics are things that look and feel great but ultimately don’t drive to the end result we’re looking for. A million subscribers but no...

As leaders, alignment, clarity, and trust among your team are great, but sometimes the bridge to get there is the dreaded awkward conversation.

Every leader can relate to the sense of dread that comes with knowing you need to have a difficult conversation you’ve been avoiding. How do we lead into this? How do we request an awkward conversation and then how do we handle it? In today’s episode, co-hosts Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask share some practical advice for dealing with awkward conversations and then hopefully eliminating the need for them.

Turn Awkward Conversations Into Fierce Conversations

Jeff says the most important thing you can do is practice a conversation before you have it—especially that opening sentence. The first five seconds are always the most difficult—it’s awkward, then onward. He starts conversations with “I want to talk with you about…” not “I need to talk to you about…” Replace need and to with want and with. Then fill in the space after about with a clear statement of the issue.

Rehearse that first sentence more than anything. Memorize the facial expression, tone, and pacing so you set the stage for a productive, constructive conversation.

Jeff highly recommends Susan Scott’s book, Fierce Conversations, where she gives six steps to an opening statement, then #7 is an invitation for them to respond.

2. Name the issue
3. 
   
5. Give a specific example
6. 
   
8. Describe your emotion
9. 
   
11. Clarify what’s at stake
12. 
    
14. Own your part
15. 
    
17. Indicate your wish to solve the problem
18. 
    
20. Invite them to respond

Here’s an example. 1. Name the issue (how you respond to certain members of the team). 2. Give a specific example (when Stacy talks, you talk over her and don’t let her finish). 3. Describe your emotion (it’s frustrating but I don’t want to embarrass you). 4. Clarify what’s at stake (but I’m afraid if we don’t talk about it, we won’t gel as a team) 5. Own your part (I should have addressed this earlier) and 6. Indicate your wish to solve the problem (I really want to work this out.) 7. Invite them to respond.

Some Practical Advice for Before and During the Conversation

You want to start from a good place, which means getting the raw emotion out of the way and getting to logic. Share your thoughts and feelings with someone else. Write it all out in an email you’ll never send. Create a plan to move forward. Establish your desired outcome. 

When we get to that step 7 and ask for their feedback, how do we invite honest feedback and not a defensive reply? Facial expressions and body language while listening are so important. Make them feel safe. Resist the temptation to build a stronger case. Don’t get defensive. Listen. The goal is to help them feel understood—seen, heard, and valued. Don’t be on your phone. Don’t check something. Don’t lose eye contact. Not intense staring, but don’t lose focus or get distracted. Listen with your ears, eyes, and heart.

What if you mess up that feedback invitation at any point? Own it immediately. Think of a brick wall between the two of you....

If you’re experiencing burnout and/or impostor syndrome, there are some practical things you can do to get your energy back so you can lead powerfully.

Burnout is a pattern that’s happening globally right now. People are stressed, tired, anxious, and it feels like the marathon has no end. In this episode, co-hosts Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask validate this burnout you’re experiencing, explain how it causes impostor syndrome to rear its ugly head, and share some exercises you can do to refresh and re-engage.

Three Levels of Burnout

Leaders have to deal with burnout. Period. First, there’s internal burnout. You’re feeling it as a leader. Richard says impostor syndrome always builds when he’s burned out. “I’m not capable, I don’t have the skills to handle this.” He’s been feeling some of that embarrassment, shame, and fear lately, and he thinks this is a great time to talk about it.

Then there’s burnout in the people you’re in charge of leading. How do you know when to push them to do their best and when/how to give them a break?

Then what about when your leader/manager is experiencing burnout? If the person at the top doesn’t deal with it effectively, they push it down on everyone else. It’s cascading.

At least one of those levels is relevant to every leader on the planet right now, especially in these times.

Two Things You Have to Do

We’re in a season of funkiness and ambiguity right now. The more we label it as weird/difficult, the more we’ll flounder. We have to accept it, learn to be cool with it. It’s not going back to “normal.” We have a choice of how we’ll respond to it. This isn’t about putting a happy face on it; it’s about changing your mindset.

2. Acknowledge it
3. 
   
5. Change your mindset

What opportunities are available now that wouldn’t have been available before? New, unique, and trying times are where character is truly developed, where our best selves can show up. 

Dig deeper into changing your mindset. Get a piece of paper, draw a line down the middle, and make two columns. On the left side, write down everything that’s frustrating you right now. There’s power getting it out of your head. Write down the crap, get it out, no filters. Let it sit, look at it, meditate on it, accept it. Then prioritize it. Weight it. Which things are affecting/frustrating you the most right now?

On the right side of the paper, flip it. Ask yourself these questions: 

• Is there any good in this situation? 
• 
  
• Am I learning anything? 
• 
  
• Growing? 
• 
  
• Getting stronger? 
• 
  
• Increasing in humility? 
• 
  
• What can I be grateful for in that crap list?

Then look at those two columns, and ask yourself, “How am I going to choose to respond?” We totally have a choice how we respond to any situation, regardless of how difficult it is.

Richard says this exercise works, that Jeff has walked him through it before. Getting it out of our head and onto paper is so powerful. “Embrace the suck,” he says. Acknowledge it. Feel your feelings. How you react to that emotion is where the positive/negative comes in. We get to choose. But it takes reps.

Go...

As a manager, how do you have those awkward and difficult conversations with your employees about salaries and raises and promotions? Richard and Jeff have some answers.

More people are leaving their companies right now than at any time in history. We entered the first relief period a few months ago. People left, companies made adjustments, now what are we left with? The people we absolutely need. You start making emotional decisions. How do I keep this person and make sure they don’t leave? 

Because of Covid, a lot of these conversations have been postponed and avoided, and now they’ve ballooned. In today’s episode, co-hosts Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask walk listeners through some anecdotal stories and a process for having these conversations effectively to benefit both the employee and the company.

Listen in for some practical, actionable steps you can take to resolve these complicated issues.

What to Do When Someone Asks For an Inappropriate Raise

If a team member comes to you asking for a raise or promotion, and it’s inappropriate to their situation, how do you say no? Jeff says we all have horror stories as leaders, where we had good intentions but unintended consequences. People want a raise, just because they need the money, not because they’ve earned it. The company isn’t growing, or the person isn’t growing, or hasn’t delivered more value. So what do you do?

“I want to back up and say why I think this is a broken conversation,” Jeff says. He believes that,  when it comes to career progression paths, we’ve let it creep in that the path lies on the shoulders of the company/manager. He believes leaders need to train their employees to see what progression can look like, and tell them it’s a choose your own adventure path. 

Step #1: Flip the script. Help them see it’s theirs to declare. Step #2: Create different options with them, but let them own it. 

In the past, there was a manual. This is what you did. This was the progression. Now people change careers multiple times and much later in their working life. What you as a leader have to figure out is what do they want? Where do they want to go? 

Where Does Your Employee Want to Go?

As a leader, before we get to “I want more money,” try to figure out what they really want. Most of them don’t know or can’t articulate it. Ideally, you’ll ask these questions from the very beginning. 

• Where do you want to be in 5 years? 
• 
  
• What do you want your day-to-day to look like in 10 years? 
• 
  
• What makes you happy? 
• 
  
• What energizes you? 
• 
  
• What income level are you looking at? 
• 
  
• What positions are here that would check the boxes of fulfillment for you?

Your job as a leader is to identify skill gaps between where they are and what they want. A conversation about raises is easier if you’ve already talked about skill gaps. It has to be “no and here’s why.” Or, better yet, “no, and here’s what it will take to get it to a yes.”

The no is so much easier if you’ve already built a foundation of clarity of what growth looks like. When it’s not discussed initially, the employee blames the company and feels stuck. Call out what you want, then figure out a plan. What skills do I need to develop? Then it becomes a really cool process. If you...

What does it look like to lead your team through external forces and distractions in a powerful way?

This is another one of those universal things that everyone is feeling right now. In this episode, co-hosts Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask share some personal examples from their own lives and work. 

Richard just got back from one of his first business trips in a long time. He gathered with 150  leaders/founders/executives for the War Room Mastermind, and all of them are feeling the strain of external forces wreaking havoc in their own lives and their employees’. Jeff says it’s a recurring theme with his coaching clients as well. Just as quickly as leaders feel like they’ve gotten a handle on it, a new distraction rears its head.

Listen in as they offer some grounding practices and habits that will enable you to be the leader of your life and the owner of your circumstances. 

How Can You Lead Well In Spite of What’s Going On?

There are a billion external forces, scenarios, you could be dealing with at any given time. Then each person who reports to you could be dealing with one of a billion of their own. 

In the past 10 days, Richard had every refrigerator in his home go out, multiple A/C units broke, his back fence fell down, one of his kids had multiple Covid tests, his car broke down, his wife’s car broke down, and he had to cancel a trip. And that was just at home. He still had to show up at work every day, lead at work, lead at home, and lead and serve at War Room.

How does he show up and maintain his energy with all these external forces at play? He has to be very careful not to bring his money problems from home to work and inappropriately generate revenue for himself as quickly as humanly possible in ways that might not be in line with the company. Or push his people because he’s worried about money going out the door. Or complain about money going out the door to people who make less of it than he does. 

So, what’s Richard’s solution? A change in mindset. Instead of “here’s what’s happening to me,” he challenges himself to flip those things into opportunities to succeed. “One of the ways I am my best self,” he says, “is when I’m up against a worthy adversary, a worthy competitor. So I have to be challenged.”

He acknowledges that he needs to be careful not to compete with anyone who works for him though, anyone he’s charged with growing or leading. He’s failed there in the past, and it was costly.

For him, he looks at external forces and challenges as his competition. He can use hard stuff to help him get to his optimal performance level by leveraging what he knows about himself and competition. 

Know Yourself Inside and Out

You have to know yourself really well. You have to know what it takes to be your best self and how you show up as your worst self (and what triggers it). 

What do you need personally and professionally to be able to show up as your best self? And when that starts to go away, what happens? The more self-aware we can be, the better we can lead. The first thing you have to control is you, because you’ll never be able to control the external forces. 

Recognize where you’re off, replace those thoughts, recite the words out loud. Own your own emotion, your thinking, your process. Remember, as Jack Sparrow says so eloquently, “The problem isn’t the problem. It’s our mindset around the problem.” The one problem that’s unsolvable is the...

You’re not alone if you’re facing anxiety, concerns, and difficult situations in your workplace 18 months into the pandemic—it’s a pattern across the globe.

A lot of people thought (hoped) we’d be back to normal by this point, or at least adjusting really well to our “new” normal. But it turns out there are just a lot of new problems and questions, fears and insecurities.

In today’s episode, co-hosts Jeff Mask and Richard Lindner want you to know you’re not alone. It’s not just a hot topic; it’s the anxiety everyone is feeling, whether or not they realize it. They want to help you understand what’s going on and give you actionable steps to make things better, to give more clarity, to help you realign and reunite your company. 

This is how the episode will go:

1. Validate what you’re feeling.
2. Live in that feeling a little bit.
3. Go through some of the causes/effects.
4. Give some hope.

Your Experience/Feelings Are Valid

We’ve all been through a lot in the past 18 months, and then we saw some signs that things were getting a little better. Then other things started to creep in. Things like:

• Tension being a little bit higher 
• Friction being deeper and hotter
• Pockets in the business that don’t feel as engaged/dialed in
• Resentment
• Entitlement
• Inconsistent sales
• Overall dysfunction within leadership teams
• More easily frustrated with people

Richard shares their company’s story. On Friday, April 13th, 2020, they sent everybody home from their headquarters for a couple weeks, which turned into a month, then a quarter. Then they made the decision to be a virtual first company. They knew they couldn’t go back. They still don’t know if today is a new normal or a temporary normal. They’re in limbo.

A couple weeks ago, things seemed to start getting better-ish, but people started leaving. Everyone wanted to know, what are we doing now? People seemed way more disconnected, out of touch, accusatory in tone. It was harder to get people on the same page. Everything seemed forced. They’re not in a rhythm, not in alignment.

Then people start leaving. 

Why Are People Leaving Your Company?

Richard can’t help but think, “Uh oh. Did we make it this far, then we’re going to fall apart? The world is going to get better, and we’re going to crumble? That’s what it felt like.” 

“Our thoughts go to dark places,” Jeff says. “Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m a horrible leader. Maybe the company isn’t as good as I thought it was. Now that things are more stable, people are going where they want to go. Before, they felt imprisoned in this company, but at least it was a place of security. And your ego goes all over the place.”

Richard says yes to the ego. They stepped up and supported their people during the bulk of the last year. They cut other things before people. When the first few people put in their resignation, he had to fight his ego. “How dare you leave us when we didn’t leave you? Do you know how easy it would have been to just cut this, but we didn’t, but now you are? That’s my own brokenness and humanity popping up, but I felt it.”

Why are people leaving now? For a lot of reasons. First of all, it felt like a lot, because no one left for 18 months. People were exploring new...

When you have clarity in the role, clarity as a whole, and clarity of goals, the team you’re leading will absolutely be winning.

Today’s episode is a micro-session around three simple, but powerful, principles to help your team win. Too often, as leaders, we overlook fundamentals. We get distracted. We get going too quickly. People get hired and they’re excited, but when days and weeks go by, and they’re not quite sure what winning looks like in their role, they start questioning: Am I adding value? Am I succeeding? I don’t know.

If there’s ever a question in your team member’s mind about whether or not they’re succeeding, that’s the beginning of a difficult path. So let’s change that. 

Think about this for a minute: What’s a role you once held in a company where you just didn’t know if you were doing a good job or not? You didn’t know what success looked like. You didn’t know exactly what was expected of you. Sometimes we’ll get a job description at the beginning, but we never revisit it, and we don’t really know if that’s still what our job is. 

The 3 Keys to Winning

2. Clarity in the role 
3. 
   
5. Clarity as a whole 
6. 
   
8. Clarity of goals

When those are all clear, our chances of winning are significantly greater. Let’s break it down.

#1: Clarity in the Role

Why does the role exist? What did the job description say again? And are you actually doing that? What are the three key metrics, the big things you’re measured on? What are the reasons why the company is investing money in you to get that job done? Are you clear on what that job looks like? Are you clear for the person you’re hiring of what their job looks like?

Second, what does success look like? Can you define success as a leader? And can your team members define the same success? Too often, we have different definitions. The employee may feel like they’re doing great, but you are frustrated with their work, because you haven’t articulated what success looks like.

And don’t forget this important third point: the timeframe of that success. 

Jeff was leading a director one time. They sat down and got clear on his role and the key metrics, what success would look like, and he was good to go. A couple months went by, and Jeff had this feeling something was wrong, but the guy seemed to think things were great. Jeff pulled him aside and asked about the role. The director was on fire. He loved it.

“You know,” Jeff said, “I’m just concerned that we’ve only got a little less than a month to go to nail these milestones.”

“What do you mean?” the director said, puzzled. “I thought we had until the end of the year.”

It was a palm-to-forehead moment when Jeff realized he had never told him the time frame. Jeff was thinking a quarter. The director was thinking a year. It was totally Jeff’s fault.

#2: Clarity As a Whole

How do the players work together? Who does what and when and why? If everybody does everything, it’s hard to know who owns it. Balls get dropped, batons get dropped.

Think of a 4x4 relay team. Each runner knows what their particular role is. They know what to do. They know what it needs to look like when they pass off the baton. They know what time they want to beat. And they know they want that gold medal. That’s...

The absolute foundation of leadership is a powerful positive mindset, and it needs to start on day one. 

What comes to mind when you hear the word “mindset?” If you feel like mindset isn’t important, and you’re impatient to get to the tactics, the “good stuff,” then this episode is for you. 

Co-hosts Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask reflect back on the days when they first started working together. Jeff introduced an exercise called “positive focus” and Richard wanted to skip it and move right to the solution to his problem. He quickly learned that, if you don’t start by fixing the problem of mindset, then every solution is a temporary band-aid.

In this episode, we’ll walk through mindset and positive focus, then move into some tactical suggestions for your first day, week, and months leading a new team. 

Why Mindset and Positive Focus Are So Important

At the start of Richard’s first coaching session with Jeff, Jeff said, “Let’s start out with your positive focus.” Richard remembers thinking, “Better yet, why don’t you help me?” He really wanted to skip all the woowoo juju stuff and didn’t understand why Jeff was making him do it.

Richard said, “I don’t know, man. I got nothing.” And Jeff said, “Well, I guess we’re just going to sit here then. There’s something good, and we’re going to find it.”

Fast forward to today when they start off every weekly leadership meeting with positive focus, and Richard believes in it wholeheartedly. Jeff knows a lot of people can relate to Richard’s initial skepticism. Mindset can seem touchy-feely and unnecessary when there are difficult business problems to solve. 

Jeff takes people back to the second Back to the Future movie when Doc Brown creates the time space continuum on the chalkboard and says “this is where we’ve been, and this is where we are.” He tells Marty that, when he went back in time, he changed something, and now there’s a new time space continuum, another 1985.

When we don’t start our meetings, our thoughts, from a place of positivity, we’re on a time space continuum that isn’t healthy because we’re thinking what we’re fearful and frustrated about. The highest part of our brain isn’t functioning. We’re in the bad 1985. When you reframe and refocus your brain on the positive, you start to exercise the higher-level functioning of your brain, the aspects that enable you to problem solve, learn, and create. 

We’re wired as humans to be thinking more in the survival state, which is owned by the brain stem, the oldest part of our brain. When we try to solve problems from that part of our brain, we don’t get great outcomes. 

Contrast that with the prefrontal lobes, the part that’s responsible for learning, adapting, creating, problem-solving, leadership. When we use that part of our brain, we hack ourselves to a higher level to get to a much deeper, better outcome. Jeff says at the beginning of every meeting, “Let’s hack our brains.”

A Simple Exercise to Realign Your Team’s Mindset

Leadership is not about protecting yourself. It’s about growing others, aligning others, and building a cohesive team. If you put yourself first, none of that works. If we understand the science behind it, understand the need for mindset, what is a simple exercise we can go through to realign our mindset?

Jeff recommends starting with a level one exercise. The question is simple: What are you grateful for in your life today? At the beginning of a meeting, you just go around the room and give everyone a chance to answer that question. 

The level two question is this: What is something in your business that you’re excited about or grateful for? Encourage people to get super specific, add detail, paint a visual image. This starts to...

Leading from a place of empathy and accountability isn’t easy, but it’s the only way to get the results you want.

How the heck do I hold my team accountable? It’s literally the number one question leaders ask. And it often comes with a tone of frustration and annoyance with the team. When leaders ask that question, they’re pointing fingers, but they need to shift the mirror a little bit and take a deeper look. 

In today’s episode of the Ready to Lead Podcast, co-hosts Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask turn the mirror on themselves as leaders and ask: Have I created an environment where clear accountability is the norm? Or are there ambiguities, inconsistencies, and miscommunications between me and my team? In Jeff’s experience, 90% of accountability issues go away when we apply the following model.

3 Keys to Winning

The three keys to winning are easy to remember because they all start with the same word, and they all rhyme.

1. Clarity of role
2. Clarity as a whole
3. Clarity of goals

Let’s start with clarity of role. Is each person’s role super clear? Do they know their responsibilities? Do they know what success looks like and by when? It seems elementary, but so often we hire someone and never have that foundational conversation about their responsibilities, what success looks like, and the timeframe.

Then we move on to clarity as a whole. As a team, how do we work together? How do we pass the baton back and forth, both intra- and inter-departmentally? When people know who’s doing what, it’s much more clear how we operate together, in our own department and cross-functionally. When we don’t define things clearly—who owns what and when—then there are a lot of gray areas and finger-pointing.

The final key to winning is clarity of goals. This is all about clear milestones, rewards if necessary, and ultimately what success looks like. When we have all that clarity, then accountability conversations are easy to have. They get difficult when we haven’t done the groundwork to create clarity, and we’re all on different pages with different interpretations of what things mean.

Think of a 4x4 relay team. Each runner knows what their particular role is. They know what to do. They know what it needs to look like when they pass off the baton. They know what time they want to beat. And they know they want that gold medal. That’s clarity. 

Each Team Member Has to Understand the Why

When Richard starts a new company as an entrepreneur, it’s just one or two people, then a handful more, and it’s easy to be on the same page. You’re literally in the same room doing everything together. But then, as the team grows, it’s easy to assume everyone knows the why as your team widens, deepens, grows. But that’s a logical lie. 

People need to understand what you do, who you serve, the business model, and value creation as a whole. If they don’t understand that, they can’t possibly understand how they contribute to that value, individually or as a team.

If they know what they’re supposed to do, but they don’t know why, you might as well hire robots. A robot will continue to do that one thing even after it stops working. So will the employee who doesn’t understand why in the hell they’re doing what you asked them to do.

If they understand the why, they can come to you and say, “This isn’t working, and I researched it, and I think we should try this instead.”

Understanding the Kindness Counterfeit

What commonly happens is that leaders try too hard to be nice and slack off on accountability. What they’re really trying to do is maintain likeability. But ambiguity isn’t kindness; clarity is. Dancing around the truth,...

There’s no perfect way to lead, but there’s a good way, and these four foundational principles lay the groundwork for long-term success as a leader. 

The Ready to Lead Podcast is the show that gives you—the leader—the tools, tips, and insights you need to grow your team, your company, and yourself. In this second episode, hosts Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask dive into their philosophy of leadership. 

“As we start on this journey together,” Richard says, “we can’t move forward until we break down what leadership means to us. What is the lens through which we’ll view every conversation we have?”

Leaders have different leadership styles; Jeff and Richard are classic examples of that. There’s no one right way to lead. But no matter your personality, there are foundational principles that should undergird your leadership if you want to lead well and sustain results. 

Four Foundational Principles of Leadership

These are the foundational principles every leader needs to be aware of and cultivate—and in this particular order.

1. Mindset
2. Culture
3. Communication
4. Trust

Mindset is how we think, how we process the world, how we look in the mirror, how we talk to ourselves, our motives. Culture is there whether you like it or not, whether it’s toxic culture or accidental culture or an intentional culture. Communication that’s consistent and clear is how we help our team see the vision of the company the way we see it. And trust is the foundation that holds everything together. If there’s no trust between a leader and the team members, everything falls apart.

On top of that foundation, we build leadership pillars: creating clarity, growing people, managing constraints, and driving results. These things don’t get done if we don’t lay that foundational framework from the beginning. 

Why Mindset Has to Go First

It all starts with mindset. Peter Drucker, one of the greatest leadership and business minds of all time, has a book called Managing Oneself. You have to know what your strengths and weaknesses are and have the EQ to acknowledge those, make peace with those, and build teams around those. 

You may be thinking, if it starts with mindset, how do I know if my mindset is strong? Jeff likes to focus on the motive. When it comes to leadership, what’s your motive for leading? He has a lot of people coming to him saying they want to lead. He asks them, “Are you sure? Why? Before you answer, I want you to think about it, process it for a couple days. Get really clear. Why do you want to lead?”

Very often people want to lead because they want more power, more money. They want to move up, climb the ladder, feel the progress and achievement. Those can be fine, but if your deepest motive isn’t developing, growing, and serving people, leadership will be very draining and difficult for you. 

When our motives are more about others and less about ourselves, then our mindset can be way more powerful and sustain us through the growth that inevitably comes when we lead. Be clear on your motive for leading, and your mindset will be in a solid place. 

From Mindset to Culture to Communication to Trust

Mindset—and your awareness of it—creates culture, then enables communication and trust. If we miss mindset, we’re in trouble, because it controls everything else. We can’t skip over it. Oftentimes we create toxic cultures because of our...