Leadership Is Learned, Not Inherited

Great Leaders, Teams & Why People Follow

Developing your influence is your core leadership competency. That's you "standing on the chair", right? That's looking at things from a different perspective; getting on the other side of the bridge.

That's the higher ground. There's a book out that's wonderful to read, called Strengths Based Leadership. There's all kinds of stuff about playing to your strengths by Marcus Buckingham. I devour his stuff. As leaders in this room, we've got to play to our strengths.

Four keys, and again I'm going to move fast because I've got to watch our time here. Number one is about executing, and then leave some space. Number two, write the word influencing. Number three, relationship building, and number four, strategic thinking.

Executing

Let me just quickly unpack a few bullet points on each of these. On the first one, executing. Part A of executing: focus on your wildly important goals. Wildly important goals. I got that from a book called, The Four Disciplines of Execution. Focus on your wildly important goals. Less is more. Less is more. Say less is more. We all get so distracted. Less truly is more as it relates to executing a high level.

B: Act on lead measures. When I say act on lead measures, what do you think I mean by that? "It's the things your team can control on a daily basis." That's right: your sphere of control. High impact activities are going to lead to you reaching your goals. That's all it is, and there's no silver bullet. There's no rocket science there, right? But it's acting on your lead measures.

C: Keep a compelling scoreboard. I love this one. When I got with Lars, I was sharing that about having a scoreboard. You know, in the office Lars is so great. It's like, "Well, let's just go buy two big monitors and drop them in the conference room." I love it, he's just a man of action. Your scoreboard. It doesn't matter what it looks like, there are those high tech scorecards or you can have it on a whiteboard, whatever. The fact that you've got a compelling scoreboard, compelling means creative. Get your team's buy-in around it. Go spend a bunch of money on it, go spend a little bit of money on it, but make a compelling scoreboard in your office that brings a high level of accountability and vision.

Fourth thing under executing: cadence of accountability. A cadence of accountability. You guys have the how's on how to create the cadence of accountability. But the key to it from a leadership perspective is your consistency, so write that word, please: consistency. It's your consistency around that cadence of accountability that will lead to phenomenal execution.

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Influencing

The second thing I had you write down on your paper was influencing. And A under influencing is results through others.

A: Results Through Others.

Notice I didn't say results through you, but now it's results through others. Lars has asked Chari and me to generate results on his behalf. Whether you've got one person on your team, an admin person, or you've got a team of four or five, or ten plus people, it's about your leadership challenge.

My challenge to you guys today: Stepping up your game, seeing things from a different perspective, influencing your people. It's about the results that you can generate through other people. You can get stuck on the bridge if you keep coming back to going on listing appointments. You can get stuck on the bridge if you keep going meet with buyers. The way you get across the bridge is through other people. It's through your influence on other people.

B: The Power of Your Why. Has your team bought into your "why?" Like for me, I shared that our vision is to motivate, to inspire people to create a better life through real estate. I didn't author that, that was our vision. Lars came up with that. But guess what? I'm bought into that. I'm in. I want to motivate. I want to inspire other people to better their lives through real estate. I think my life is better because of real estate. I think my life is better through this opportunity. I bought in. For you guys, what's your why? But that the question asked is, do you have buy in?

I could be fired up about it, but if the team's not fired up about our vision, then there's problems and issues, so it comes back to your influence.