Muse

hey welcome everybody to the maxwell leadership podcast and when i say everybody some of you have literally listened to all 400 plus episodes you're you're like a junkie you keep listening hanging in there saying is mark and chris godey gonna ever get good and then others of you are brand new to this or you just start at the beginning of this year no matter where you are on that spectrum of podcast engagement, we're so glad that you're here. In fact, today, I'm so glad you're here because I want you to think not just as a podcast listener, but I want you to think about like a podcast team member. Because today, we're going to talk about what your dream team should look like. And I got to tell you, you're our dream team because we're a podcast that adds value to you with the expectation you'll go multiply value to others. That's the ultimate dream team for a podcast is we add value to you and you go do something with it. I'm so excited. John makes a statement. I can't wait to get to it. John makes a statement that says there's no such thing as a balanced leader. Can somebody say that's right? But he says you can have a balanced team. And then he spends today several minutes talking to us about how to develop, how to create, and how to expect a balanced team. So stay tuned, John is coming. By the way, if you'd like to watch this podcast, if you'd like to download a bonus resource we've created for you to take notes and just kind of capture this, you can find all of that at maxwellpodcast.com forward slash dream team. We'll try to make that worth your while and just something you wanna do by adding stuff in throughout the show today. You can go to maxwellpodcast. Again, maxwellpodcast.com forward slash dream team. Hey, grab the pen.

grab the paper. Here is John Maxwell. There's no such thing as a balanced leader, but there is such a thing as a balanced team. People are asking me about balance all the time. How did I become a balanced leader? And you've heard me talk about the fact that I don't think it's possible to be a balanced leader. Life's not balanced. Every day isn't the same for me. We get surprised every day. Things twist and turn happen. And remember, I talk about seasons in your life. Seasons as a leader. So when we talk about being a balanced leader, I just think that one person can't live a balanced life. But I think when you join a team and get a team together, now you can have balance. Because you even each other out. You follow me? You're sitting beside somebody. Maybe you're having a bad day, but they're having a good day. And maybe you haven't had a good thought today, but they have a good thought. And we begin to kind of complement one another. We begin to complete one another. And all of a sudden, we get a balance with each other that we would not have without each other. So as I was working on this, all of a sudden, I thought about my inner circle. I thought about my dream team and who they are and what they do for me and how they make me balanced. How they balance me out. how in their diversity and in their background difference, it's just how that we make each other better. We complete one another. And I wrote down five things. I'm giving them to you really quickly now. My dream team, your dream team should have five things that will keep you just kind of, I don't know, balanced. My dream team has, number one, skills that compliment me. They can do things better than I can do. so there are a lot of times they lead not me i hand the ball off to them why do i hand the ball to them because they're better at it than me so they have skills that complement me they have a heart that reflects me it's kind of like yes that's that's that's who i am that's how i feel so you know skills that complement me heart you know that reflects me thirdly a passion that inspires me so many times it's their fire it's their passion it's their zeal it's their joy that just kind of sparks me and then they have because we're all growing together they have a growth that enlarges me you know when somebody around you is growing what does it do it keeps you growing isn't that right we get better with each other and and that's what a growth environment is. And then they have also, they just have love. They just have love that just kind of nourishes me. They love me unconditionally. They know my faults and they just, they love me. And so when

we think of balance, I don't think you and I individually, I don't think we are individually balanced, but I do think we collectively get balance. And that's what I want you to

see. So when you say, well, I think as a leader, I'm losing balance. Well, probably you are.

Thank you.

You probably are a little edgy, but you've got people around you. They come in and they compliment you. They complete you. So have a balanced team. You're not going to be a balanced person all your life. And I'm not even sure you're supposed to be, but have a balanced team around you. Does that make sense? Huh? It just works. Okay. The greatest hindrance to great communication is assumption. Assumption is the mother of all mess-ups. And let me tell you why. Assumption is the lowest form of understanding other people. When I assume I know what you want, when I assume I know what you think, it's the lowest form of of knowing you it's the lowest form of understanding you that i can ever have in my life that what do i teach you all the time you got to find your people before you can lead your people leading people without finding people is assumption i think i know what you want so i'm going to provide what i think you want well it's a miss but the moment that that i walk slowly through the crowd. What do I teach all the time? What do leaders do? Leaders listen, learn, and then they lead. That's what leaders do. So I would encourage you as you build people on your teams and that whole area to just listen well and learn from them and want to know about them and and uh and and don't don't live in that assumption world that's it's just that's that's just not going to get us that's not going to get us where we want to go i i think one of the most important books i ever wrote you know books surprise you when i write a book there i'll say okay this is going to be really good and help a lot of people and hopefully they're all good and help a lot of people but i sometimes can't pick what the best sellers are going to be at all i i get surprised and when i wrote the good leaders ask great questions i thought this is a book i need to write because it's a truth that leaders need to know but I thought I don't think the book will do well I mean I think that I think because most leaders don't think they need to ask great questions they just kind of think they need to give great direction and that book has just been one of the big surprises that book just keeps selling and leaders come up to me all the time and say when I learned to ask questions I became so much better leader why did they become a better leader when they learned to ask questions because they got rid of assumptions asking questions gets rid of assumptions. Not asking questions makes you assumptive in your leadership. And so it's so healthy, instead of being so directional as a leader, be interactional as a leader.

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maxwellpodcast.com forward slash ROF. Hey, Chris, I love what John said there about you could try being less directional and more interactive. And so many times we as leaders, and we're going to get into this here, so many times we as leaders think we have to have all the answers, all the skill sets have to be all the best. And John's saying, no, no, no, be invitational, get people around. Be interactive. Make it about other people's perspective, too, as a leader, and you will begin the journey of a balanced team. I love it. Leaders around the world that we have met,

and I've been in this phase myself. We don't like to say these three words. I don't know, because we think we should have all the answers. And I've had teams that have all been like me, and we've not produced. And I think he's on to something here. It's a very simple principle about having that well-rounded team that you all, and it's not just them helping the leader, it's the leader helping them in the areas that they may be deficient as well. As we dive in today, I thought about leaving this to the end, but I wanna start because I think when we talk about this and you and John, and I've watched you do this for years.

so intentionally. And I think, um, pray for leaders, pray for people on the team. And I want to start before we get into the, the how, and some of the details behind this. Um, I think a lot of leaders, they initially, they get the team that they get, but you get the team that you deserve over time. Right. Oh, that's good. And you specifically, I've seen you, um, not hire people out of availability, you've hired them intentionally because you and John are always looking for leaders. Talk to us about the importance of having that lens as a leader, as we're talking about what a dream team. I want to start with this because this is what you guys

do all the time. Yeah. John and I both would say, and I think the more visionary or responsible for casting vision I become, I relate to the statement that John makes even more. And the statement is, I don't think John and I, either one, are great at hiring. Here's why. What we look for is attitude, which is super important, and we look for people with potential, which is equally important. But often, if you hire off of attitude and potential and you don't do a little deeper dive, you get a whole lot of feel good, a whole lot of hopeful, but you may not get so much production. And so you have to get, you have to get a level of scrutiny. John calls them the, the, the people that come in and just want to say no to everything. You got to get some scrutiny in the hiring process and the, the, the older I get, the more mature I get in my leadership, the more I'm realizing that to have a balanced team, you need more than just my perspective when recruiting somebody on the team. But now that I've said that, it is a very spiritual matter for us. We pray for winners every single day. I got up this morning, I thank God for the winners I already have, and I prayed for new winners that I don't have. It's a daily, daily discipline for me that I learned from John. Therefore, my radar's on all the time. Yeah. Because I prayed for you this morning. Oh, you're the one I was praying for this morning. I've said that hundreds of times. Oh, it was you that I was praying for this morning before I met you. Now, so I think what good recruiters, good visionaries do is they're constantly looking, even in the most unlikely places, for people that should be a teammate. You have stories. I have stories. We all have stories of sitting in a restaurant being served by somebody going, your next assignment is to join my team. And I think we all need to be looking for things like that. I totally agree. I think the second thing that I would say to this, Chris, about intentionality on this is I think you do need to have a hiring policy, a hiring process. One of the great things that you're doing now at Maxwell Leadership among working with corporations, leading a team that works with corporations, instilling five levels and other intellectual property to make their leaders more productive, more effective, is you also serve as our culture lead here at Maxwell Leadership. And one of the things that I would challenge everyone, and I hope you're constantly looking to up-level hours, is to get a hiring policy, a process, a procedure that works for you. For us, for years, it has worked as character, competence, and culture. Are they a character fit? And that's not morals and ethics. That's more, can they relate to the people that are going to be on the team? And the only people that answer that is the people that's on the team. The leader can't answer it. That's right. The chief culture officer can't answer it.

The person that's going to be working alongside of them. Then we hire on competence. The only real person that can answer that is the person that has the greatest clarity of what we're asking them to do. That's right. The leader. That's right. And so we let them be the balls and strikes, the final decision maker on that. We then go to the culture question. Do they get us in all of our dysfunction? Every family has dysfunction. The question is, can you put fun in the dysfunction? Yeah. We're dysfunction. We've got challenges. We've got things that really make us unique. But in that is also the things that make us unique. And so we really work hard on hiring that, on communicating that, on making sure that's clear and making sure that our culture will awaken the greatness in the person that we're hiring to.

And I wanted you to share that because that's at the beginning. Before you have that process for them to go through, you know, us as leaders here at Maxwell Leadership, we've known that for a long time. You and John do that, and we just try to model that. I was with a business leader earlier this week, and it was so fascinating. We were talking about building teams and revenue and whatnot, and we were going over some numbers. And he said, hey, in my business, this number, this line item right here of revenue, this is going to come from people I haven't. even met yet love that i got chills i was like yes like i see and he's all you know recruiting process and everything he's doing and so i wanted you to share that because i think it's important now let me ask you this question because i have no doubt that you and i have done this through our years and and sometimes we may fall back into our old ways we need to ask for forgiveness um why is it because i know you consult with leaders you're around leaders all the time and we see it at every level why is it so dangerous for a leader to try to be so well-rounded like we we talked about a little little while ago versus having a well-rounded team what are the what are the results of that that we need to make sure that we're not hiring a bunch of marks or

hiring a bunch of chris's yeah so uh warning um podcast listeners viewers warning jake Wade. Chris, ask a question. I told him to stay away from before we started recording because I'm right in the middle of it, Chris. For five years, seven years ago, John said, Mark, I want you to take a new role in the organization. This is an organization that I have grown up in. I learned business in this organization. I recovered my life. I restored my life. This organization has given me everything. I am a true product of our deliverable. I am. And so I know it I know it inside and out I communicate on John's behalf sometimes That's not a joke I really have to It is a joke to think I really do it So let's start there But I am learning something right now After seven years Six years Seven years of knowing I had the role Of carrying John's legacy To the next level of believability And I've had the physical responsibility of owning and making the P&L make sense from my own personal worth, my own personal assets, bootstrapping at times. So I own it. I own it with all the things that it means. But over the last three months, I have to own it at a different level because John has transitioned how he's mentoring me, how he's interacting me. He's changed the rules of engagement of how he and I are working together. And it is a stark change. In that change, I realized that for six years, I've been trying to control this organization. Now, I'm getting to the question of what do we as leaders sometimes do when we think we have to be the best at everything? And this is a deep question. It's a very learning question. It's a question that all you counselors out there, paid professional counselors, and I know you're out there because you tell me you listen, you would love to be in studio with me on a couch right now. That's the setting. And I'm learning that for five to six years, and this is going to be an aha moment for you. You haven't even heard some of this. This is stuff just this weekend and mentoring that John's doing. I've determined that to try to keep myself as believable in the organization in this new role, I've limited some people around me in their expression of their strengths so that it could feel like I was still in control of that. I've deviated from my own personal mission statement of motivating and inspiring people to reach their full potential. I have limited them to stay at the potential that I could control.

So, hold on. Yeah, take that one. Hold on. You asked for it. Yeah. I want to stop for a minute. So a byproduct, right, of what we're talking about, of you trying to stay well-rounded, to stay on the top as a leader, you're realizing that the results of that has been the team around you, has been stifled or at times, and has not produced at that level. has not allowed that well-roundedness to really truly act as a unified team to raise the lid because of your leadership.

100%. That's exactly what I'm saying, and I don't even know how deep this is yet because it's such a new thought for me. And now I can even tell you, which is another show for another day, I can tell you why that is, which originates back to something I never reconciled as a child. We can heal childhood wounds and all that kind of stuff. Early in life leadership tendencies has manifested or shown itself in the last few days of my last five or six years of leadership. Blind as blind can be. You ever heard of blind spots? Blind spots. Now, here's the question, leaders, so that this doesn't become a therapy session but a helpful session. what are you doing that is limiting the people around you because you have put an expectation on yourself that you need to be the best person in the room right that's the question I was just last this week I was with Drew Brees Now, you're a football guy. Your son played football. You played football at every level. Drew Brees is the only—he's getting in the Hall of Fame this year. Did you know that? I did not know that. He is. That's amazing. Drew Brees is the only quarterback in NFL history that has five years of over 5,000 yards of passing yards. Now, we talk about the greats of Tom Brady. He had two years. We talk about the greats of Patrick Mahomes. He had two years. there's many greats that never got to 5,000. He had them for five years. And we unpacked that at this event that I was doing with him and John Maxwell and others. Here is the point. He never could say, he said, man, those years I had some of the best linemen in the world. They gave me more time than those other guys have. He never made it about his accomplishment. He always made it about the skills that were around him that got it. Now, is he right or is he modest? I don't know. Here's what I do know. All of us leaders that think we have to be good at everything to set records, you will not set records. You're not balanced. You can only be a balanced team when you completely take the lids off of the great linemen on your team and let them give you a little bit more time than the next guy. Then the receivers who are all-stars that can catch unbelievable catches that gives you those 5,000 yards. What are we doing as leaders that is limiting the balance of our team, but all the raw ingredients are there, but our own ego won't get out of the way and let them lead to make you balanced? And I'm just going to tell you that I could talk about that forever, but most of the time, I would tell you great leaders are not better than what they already are because they have not learned the art of letting others be better than them.

Yeah, there's a whole podcast behind our intro here. We're still in the intro. And that's hard to hear sometimes as leaders. You may be sitting there and you may already be deflecting it. And we're going to challenge you to go back and listen again.

Can I say something? Absolutely. You are deflecting it. I've deflected it for years and years and years. Even from my most trusted advisors, I deflected it. You can't see it. It's blind spot.

Yeah.

It took almost a light from heaven. I mean, it took this woo for me to see it, and then to be able to see what was paralyzing me, the actual source, was a whole other discovery that we will not have time for today, that I'm loving leading right now. It is so fun for me.

His word of the year, right, is being lived out. Yeah, it's so joyful. I'm loving it. The blind spot, you know, we say and we define it as it's an overused strength. And I think why what you just said just hit so hard for me personally is going, maybe naturally God has given you some talents that you are well-rounded. That's right. I'm just going to stop. You can finish where I'm going with this thought. Because that blind spot is a limiter to not only your leadership, but also the people around you and what you can do. Now, I'm going to change direction so that you and I just don't keep talking about this. But you're talking about this skill set real quick. And John talks about in the first one, skills that complement you. One of the things I want you to address and talk about is how do leaders, how have you handled, this doesn't happen often here because of the process that you have in place and how we go about bringing on people, but how have you handled highly skilled leaders or people that you have brought in and then you realize they don't necessarily align with other parts of your organization?

I've handled them differently than I will going forward. Oh, okay. Okay. How I've handled them. I need everybody at Podcast Land to go away. You need to go away. Mark and I need to have a meeting. You want to have a leadership conversation. And I got to get off of it because I'm learning it so much, and I'm so passionate about what I'm learning that it will overtake our subject if I'm not careful, and our whole subject will be about it. But let me first say that because that's a reflection of how I have been leading. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But let me tell you what leaders have a temptation to do. I've been living out this temptation. The way we deal with people as leaders that are different than us is one of two ways, in my opinion. And it should be a third way. Most of the time, the leaders in us, we hire them because we think we can fix them. We can change them. Give me time and I'll get them to see my way. We're the leader. Our way is right. I have a good friend. He's a friend of yours as well. His favorite quote of me, Mark Cole, is, Mark Cole, rarely wrong, which I like that, right? Rarely wrong. I really like that. But then he finishes the rest of the sentence, and it is not a compliment. He says, rarely wrong, never in doubt. Right? I love it. That's my friend and your friend, David Hoyt.

And I love that quote because it's almost like a compliment, rarely wrong, and then never in doubt, which I'm going, no, I'm really not. And he's going, that's not a good thing. Because we're, as leaders, rarely wrong and never in doubt, we look at people that think different than us and just say, they haven't been enlightened. I'm sent to you to enlighten you. We're God for them. We're going to show them the right way, right? The second reason that we do it is we tolerate their differences. We try to change them or we tolerate it. Very rarely does a leader learn how to celebrate the differences. We don't learn that in politics.

No.

You either got to be this side of the aisle or that side of the aisle. We don't learn that in churches. You either got to believe this way or no way. We don't learn that in education. You got to do it this way. And all these educators somewhere don't allow the educational system to tailor toward the child. They try to tailor the child toward the education. In society, we teach one side to the left side, zeros or ones. We teach this binary way, and it's the great leaders that learn not how to change people to their ideologies or tolerate people to keep their own ideologies. It's the people that celebrate them and find a way to integrate their genius into the team that really has the balance team.

Yeah, I love that. Now, I think my takeaway from this is we talk all the time about leading self and the emotional intelligence part of leaders, the EQ side of things. It's not only yourself, which that's where it starts, but then it's also the awareness of others. I think that the higher and the more we can develop our EQ, the better the team quality that we have in what John, coming all the way back to what John talked about, being collectively balanced. And so I think as leaders, we need to, again, man, look into ourselves first in order to get to this point to where we have this dream team. I want to also talk about, because this is so you, this statement where John says, a heart that reflects me. Like, there's many of these that you align with, passion, growth, but I know when it comes to the heart of what we're doing, it's so important to you. How do you, through an interview process, through an according process of someone, how do you assess the heart of somebody that is coming on to the team that you want to make sure is in agreement and alignment of what you want in the culture and the DNA of Maxwell Leadership?

I want to see their response to the things that's important to me. I'm not trying to get their approval. It's my responsibility. I'm not even necessarily trying to get their buy-in. I'm trying to get their understanding. Do they understand? One of our values around here, obviously, podcast community, is our faith. We have a strong faith, but I don't want people with the same faith or any faith around me. Wow, is my stuff only good if everybody thinks and believes just like me? Boy, that's not much salt and light. Right. I love the diversity of thinking around me. John has really had to push that in because I grew up in a world that everybody needs to look like me, act like me, think like me,

believe like me, or you couldn't be me. I think you've called it, we're faith friendly. That's right. Right. I've heard you say that before. And we're faith confident,

which means our faith has to work for us. Well, if my faith has to work for me in this setting, then I need to see if people are going to understand that, not embrace it, not even agree with it, but are they going to understand that that's a part of what you're signing up for? Another thing, which is much less, well, no, it's probably as confrontational or contentious at times, and that is an appetite for growth. My dear friends, if you don't have a commitment to grow at Maxwell Leadership, you are not going to be comfortable here for long because we expect it. We demand it. We compensate to it. So, and again, I'm talking to our culture champion right here sitting across from me. Don't ever let this change. We hire based on people's ability to answer this question. What are you currently leading? Excuse me. Where are you currently growing and how is it bearing fruit? That's a question I haven't interviewed in a long time. There may be a reason. I'm not very... There is a reason. Yeah, there you go. But when I interview, that's always one of my prevailing questions. What are you learning right now and how are you applying it? And man, the people that pause on that, that slow on that, that don't give me anything on that, it is not a yellow flag. It is a red flag. Get that resolved. Because if we don't, this culture is going to be uncomfortable. Secondly, how can you sell a product designed to helps somebody else grow if you don't consume it. That's right. So the next question I ask is, who's your mentor? Who influences you? If John doesn't fit in that answer at some point, I go, okay, well, who does? And if they're better than John, I'm looking for them. Bring them to me. If it's not John, do they even have a passion for mentorship? Because we sell that. And if you don't have a passion for it, you're not going to be able to sell it back to an episode we did a couple of weeks ago. If you don't value something, you won't sell it for long because it's just a transaction to you.

That's good. And John says, then, a growth that enlarges me. This is where leaders get a little bit scared, too, when it comes from surrounding themselves with a team that challenges them to grow. That, well, first of all, a lot of leaders don't even open that door and allow the team to be able to do that. from your seat, leading leadership teams for a long time, what does it look, what does it feel like to be led or grown at times through your leadership team? Meaning this, hey, so I wasn't as good in that area when I came into this meeting as I was when I left. I appreciate you and just the transparency of where you're at or what you're learning. Now, back to David Hoyt's comment you always have an opinion and you come in and you have the data and you have the philosophy and knowledge in your back pocket yeah but there are times it's like john saying to us hey i'm going to come in with an idea and if we don't up level that idea and you're not adding to it i'm not inviting you back to that meeting right it's john's ability to sit back and i know that you do that too because some of the conversations that we've had over the last couple of years with our leadership team why is that so important to leaders to understand to surround no matter what your size the team is, your inner circle, as John's talking about, to be able to do that for you

personally. You know, there's a cute phrase out now. John said it in the podcast today. And so I'm going to answer a little bit of this, but I'm going to deflect something back to you. So just get ready. Okay. Serving your own notice that I'm getting ready to try to pull something out of you. There's a cute statement that the first time we started saying, I can remember, we said it during COVID. Everybody was somewhere and nobody knew where anybody was, not just because we were quarantined. It was because we lost the way to read people. Everybody's fear started manifesting themselves and people silently quit and we didn't know why and we couldn't find people. They got so disoriented. And so I can remember when John first started saying, you need to listen, learn, and lead. I remember when he first started saying it and I went, oh, wow, I do that. But I learned that I listened to check it off the list so I could hurry up and lead. And I figured out that most of the time when I'm listening to somebody that should be following my direction, I wouldn't listen to learn. I was listening to direct. And I found that as cute as that was, when it's really lived out, it looks very different than the way most people lead. They lead, then they listen to see if people get it. They learn who's not with me, who's for me. It's a loyalty thing. It's not a true hunger to lead better thing. And so when John first started saying it, it really struck me. So that is the answer to that. But here's where I want to go with this part of our conversation. That's your tagline on your email signature. And when I heard John say that today in the podcast, I went, I'm going to come back and I'm going to ask you, why do you put that as your tagline to every email that goes out from your office? Yeah, I remember when John started using it,

It just really spoke to me and made a lot of sense. If I was to sum it up and say, collectively, that statement for me, it's about curiosity. Right? Because the reason is that I want to be curious when I'm listening to my team or a partner or a vendor, a client, doesn't matter. Because I don't want to just listen to hear them. I want to be curious.

Yep.

then if I get to that, what I'm going to do is I'm going to learn from that curiosity about a different perspective that I don't see. It's the old beach ball thing, right? They're sitting in the same, we're sitting in the same room. You just have a different lens. And so if I want to always be growing and I want to always be curious and I want to always try to lift the lid of myself and team around us, then I have to, I got to listen for out of curiosity. And then I got to take what I'm hearing and learn from it, from that conversation, from the listening, and then I can lead that situation. Most of the time, my conversations are very intentional about either leading a person or a project somewhere. Well, what better way to get buy-in from your team and to get the best overall result for the team, for the organization, is to go through this process. And when he said it, I just have not let go of it. Like it. It's just part of my leadership style. And so it's driven with questions, which is part of our DNA, and it's with listening. And then what am I learning? How am I growing? And now let me lead. And it could be in the moment, or it could be taking a little bit of time, taking a couple days because I tend to process things, and then coming back. So that's where that came from when I put it on my tagline because I want to see it every day. I want to do this and I don't want to, I don't want to push my thoughts or my logic onto somebody

else. So what, I've got two action points for all of us listening based on what Chris just said. So hang with me right here. I've got two. How has that impacted the way that you lead because it's on your signature? So in other words, it's a daily thing that you read, which is going to come to my action item, how has that impacted your leadership in the listening, the learning, or the leading, or all the above? Well, what it's done is, because I publicly

profess it, it's an accountability tool. Let me give you an example. That's beautiful. A couple weeks ago, you, on our monthly vision, you brought in one of our team members that happens to be on my team and uh she shared a situation with you and if i would not have listened to the core of why it was so important to her because i could have said no i could have said where are the funds there's no government right not only did i listen but then i learned a lot about the system about the process about the number of people we could impact and mark you don't even know this but she said it you didn't know until she said it but i took almost 20 grand of your money and i invested in it before we even saw a dollar and it's now returned over a half a million in case anybody's asking growing and counting then she and i together were able to lead through the thing where it's going and it's just been ever since he said that to me i was like so that identifies with my style tangible result that identifies with my style now i could have easily just yeah that's not going to work okay thanks and missed out now is it been as it did that one work out sure it's not about the profit and the return it's about the amount of people that are being impacted because we had a team member that had a different perspective for me of a tribe of people that we could make a difference in and i would have never never known that and so that's that's how i live that out and people now so it's there people hold me

accountable too. Yeah. The accountability piece was brilliant. And then the example was brilliant. So I'm turning in my chair to all of you that's viewing the podcast and I'm asking you the question, out of listening, learning, and leading, which one do you think needs the most help in your leadership? Which one? And let's go dig into it for the next seven days and let's come back next podcast. And I want you to leave me a comment wherever you listen to the podcast. I want you leave me a comment that says, hey, this week I listened better, and this is the result. This week I learned more of what I listened to, and this is the result. Or this year, I just stepped up and started leading because of what I'd learned and listened to. I want to see it. Give us comments. Shoot us an email. I want to see that in the next seven days. And then the last question I have for you that I hope is the convicting to you as it was to me when Chris just told me that. What's in your tagline, either stated or unstated. What are you wanting people to take away from you every single day? Going back to accountability. What Chris is wanting his team to take away in any of our clients and anyone that he hears, that he listens, learns before he leads. What is your tagline? Now, that's a penetrating question. I don't always do that, but I just felt really convicted with that. Two things. If you would like to take a step in addition to the homework I just gave you and really invest in yourself this week. I'm really passionate about giving you some things over the course of the next few weeks of the podcast to give you something to take a next step of investing in yourself. This week, we want you to invest in the 21 Laws of Leadership. We have a digital product. It'll make you better, and it'll make your leadership and therefore those around you better. We have a special in there. I think it's literally over $1,000 usually. We've deducted it down this week in the spirit of wanting to give you a tangible next step down to $199. You'll find that in the show notes. We did an episode some time ago on how to attract leaders. And so we'll put that podcast in there for you, just for you to go back and take advantage of that. Very thankful for Karen this week. Karen's one of our long times. She listens to the podcast often. She listened to the podcast, The Qualities of an authentic leader. And this is what Karen said. She says, what I wish people knew about my leadership is that I love them and I want them to become their best selves. And I want them to know they are capable of far more than they believe.

karen goes on and says i am learning a lot about myself by listening to you guys i've had the opportunity to put some of what i've learned into practice already karen thank you that's the point of the podcast we want to bring you powerful positive change because everyone deserves to be led well.