6 steps to better leadership

Summary

In this episode, Jerred outlines a six-step framework for effective leadership, emphasizing the critical role leadership plays in various aspects of life, from family to business. Drawing from his extensive experience as a military officer and entrepreneur, Jerred highlights the importance of listening, planning, humility, decision-making, communication, and relationship-building. He argues that leadership is about leveraging these skills to guide teams and individuals toward shared goals, ultimately fostering a culture of trust, care, and respect.

Key takeaways:

• Listening is crucial for leaders to understand team dynamics and issues, and it should take precedence over speaking.
• Leaders must have a clear plan and vision, even if they are not entirely confident, to guide their teams effectively.
• Humility is essential in leadership, as it fosters authenticity and prevents blame-shifting when plans go awry.
• Decision-making and execution are vital, and leaders should avoid letting indecision linger, as it can undermine team confidence.
• Communicating the “why” behind actions and decisions helps gain team buy-in and ensures alignment with broader goals.
• Building relationships based on trust, care, and respect is fundamental to maintaining a strong, cohesive team.

Transcript

leadership is the leverage you’re missing

If you want to be a good father, you need to lead. If you want to be a good husband, you need to lead. If you want to grow business, you need to lead. Leadership is leverage. Leadership is the missing element most people have right now. Look, I want all of those things. I’ve been an entrepreneur for 15 years.

I have sizable teams. I’ve been married for 15 years. I have three kids. I was a military officer for 10 years. I have learned a lot about leadership in that time, but I know leadership is at the center of everything. If I am not good at leading, nothing else I want in life is really happening. So the first thing that you need to realize is that you need to listen.

I cannot stress this enough. Listening to your team, listening to your people, listening to people in your life is very, very important. Sometimes we think as a leader, we need to stand up at the front and we need to bark orders and we just need to show everyone we’re in charge. Nobody cares. We need to find out what the problems are.

why listening is the most underrated skill

We need to know everything, and you do that by listening, taking feedback and giving feedback and hearing what the issues are. You need to listen. If you’re sitting in a team meeting and you’re doing all the talking, you are doing it wrong. You need to get feedback. Sometimes it’s okay to just open a conversation and then shut up, even if there’s awkward silence.

Again, your job as a leader is not to make sure that there’s no gaps in the conversation. Your job as a leader is to listen. Listen first more than you speak. Next, have the plan. Employees, family members, everyone, they can do just about anything and there are a lot of awesome ones out there, but if you are the leader, you are expected to have the plan.

You shouldn’t be like, oh yeah, go map out the plan and figure it out. This is the one thing that you should have. Your team can be autonomous. They can do things on their own, but ultimately it’s on you to have the plan. You need to have the big vision. You need to have the plan for the quarter, for the month.

you must have the plan

You need to let people know the direction they’re going and how to accomplish it. They can do all the work, but you need to have the plan. So don’t sit there and act like you don’t know what to do next. That is such a weak sign of leadership. You can be real with people and you can say, hey, I’m not sure what the next steps are, but this is my best guess and we’re going to move forward in that direction.

You don’t have to pretend like you know everything, but you have to come up with a plan even if you’re not 100% confident in it and be like, hey, this is the direction we’re going. This is what we’re going to do. The third thing, be humble. I can’t stress this enough either. You need to be humble. Again, just because you’re in charge, just because you’re the leader doesn’t mean that you’re anything special, right?

It just means you have been given an opportunity to move people down a path towards your goal if you’re an entrepreneur and you need to be humble in that process. You’re not better than anyone and to be honest, I don’t struggle or I don’t work with a lot of people who struggle with being humble, but if you find yourself in this boat, as I have seen many people over the years, more in like my military career, they’re just not humble people sometimes.

humility makes you more trustworthy

I’ve seen that over and over again. Nobody wants to follow that person. No one wants to follow the cocky person who thinks that they have it all figured out and then when the plan goes sideways, they blame other people. You don’t want to be that person. Be humble, be real with people and you don’t have to act like you, again, you don’t know what’s going on.

You can admit, hey, I don’t know the next steps here in this difficult situation, but this is what I want to do and then you move forward with that plan. Be humble throughout the entire process of leadership. The next thing that you are responsible for as a leader is making decisions and executing on those decisions.

There are a lot of decisions that need to be made as a leader, especially in business. We have so many things pinging around in our head, things that we have to do and you cannot sit there and let indecision sit around for long periods of time. It is on you to make the decision and your team knows.

decisions must be made quickly

Your team will not call you out on a lot of things, to be honest. Sometimes they’re a little bit scared if you haven’t set up a culture in which feedback is okay. They might not want to say something, but they know when you’re not doing something, so you need to make sure that you’re making the decisions and you’re executing quickly.

The next one, one of the biggest things that you can do in leadership is making sure that you’re communicating the why to your team. If people don’t know why they’re doing something, they will not get bought in and they will not agree with the plan. They might do it, but they’ll do it half-heartedly and it won’t be good.

So if you can communicate the why, hey, here’s exactly why we’re doing this. We are going to implement this marketing strategy. It’s a little bit different than what we have been doing, but what I think we’re gonna end up doing is nurturing our prospects, educating them, building a relationship with them, and I think if we go down this path, more people are gonna be bought in.

always explain the why

We can help more people, we can impact more people, but I know this is a different approach than what we have been doing. That’s the kind of explanation, the why behind taking on a new marketing initiative, or just why do we do any of this? Explaining those things to employees goes a long way. When you’re early on in entrepreneurship, specifically, you might be like, we just need to make money.

You can’t just say that to an employee without some sort of bigger mission or vision. Yes, we need to make money. Yes, you can communicate that, but ultimately, what are we doing in the process of making money? Because more money is more impact, right? Some people are like, yeah, we wanna make more impact.

Well, the only way you can make more impact is more income, so you need that coming in. You can explain that to your employees. Like, hey, we wanna help people. I wanna help as many people as possible in this business, but in order to do that, we need capital. I need more funds to scale the team, to be able to help more people, so we gotta go make more money.

how to build real relationships that drive results

So even if it’s all about making money, you still need to explain why you need more money, and it’s not just, oh, we need more money because I wanna get a new car, right? That’s poor leadership. You need to explain the why. Now, lastly, don’t ever forget that in leadership, you are building relationships.

Building relationships is often overlooked because to have a really strong, solid team, there has to be a relationship, and a relationship, in my opinion, consists of three things, trust, care, and respect. You have to learn to trust the other person, and they have to learn to trust you. It goes both ways.

You have to show that you care for your employees or your staff or the people underneath you, and they care for you. That goes both ways. And then, lastly, with respect, you need to show that you respect them. You respect their time. You respect boundaries. You respect who they are as a human being and the value that they bring to the team, but you expect that same respect back, but you need to earn that through all of these actions.

If you’re listening, you have the plan, you’re humble, you communicate the why, you make decisions and execute, you show that you trust and care about the other person, you will earn their respect. All of these things have to be earned, and it goes back and forth, and it’s never a checkbox, it’s done.

It’s not like, okay, I built a relationship, we trust each other, we care, we respect. That’s an ongoing thing, just like you would in a marriage, just like you would in a friendship. You have to continually have trust, respect, and you have to care for one another. It’s the same in leadership. If you’re constantly showing that you trust, care, and respect one another, your team will support you, and you will be on your path to having a good leadership model for people to follow.