EntreLeadership - #294: 5 Unforgettable Moments From EntreLeadership Summit

Episode Date: November 26, 2018

In 2015, EntreLeadership held our first-ever Summit in Orlando with 400 attendees and a dream to empower every single one of them with top-notch content from some of the biggest names in leadership and business. And today, although the venue has changed and our audience has grown tremendously (we’re anticipating over 3,000 attendees in San Diego in 2019!), our dream remains the same. Tune in to hear some extraordinary moments with some of our all-time favorite speakers: Lou Holtz, Simon Sinek, Alan Mulally, Dave Ramsey, Patrick Lencioni, and John C. Maxwell. And get ready to get inspired. entreleadership.com/podcast Hear speakers from Summit 2018 in San Antonio Convince Your Leader email template Learn more about EntreLeadership Summit Free trial from Infusionsoft Want expert help with your business question? Call 844-944-1070 and leave a message or send an email to [e-mail]. You could be featured on a future podcast episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Never allow yourself to get into a state of where you're not learning and growing and expanding and getting better. Helping business leaders grow themselves, their team, and their profits. This is Andre Leadership. Now, here's your host, Ken Coleman. Coming to you from the Music City, this is the broadcast of leaders, by leaders, for leaders. Thank you so much for joining the conversation. Oh boy, we're going back in the time machine to give you some of the best moments from our premier event, the Entree Leadership Summit. A four-day event, some of the finest leaders in the world, listening to some of the finest leaders and communicators in the world.

As I said, we're going to give you the best of the best. Our team got together and said, if we were going to highlight this event and give people a sneak peek into some of the great content, what would we do? So here's what we're doing. Lou Holtz, Simon Seneca, Alan Malawi, Pat Lanchione, and John Maxwell, all of them. Speaking from the Summit stage, and now speaking to you. Let's get it started with the coaching legend himself. Lou Holtz, this guy epitomizes leadership. It doesn't even matter if you're a football fan.

And he's also one of the most delightfully enjoyable communicators on the planet. What a treasure. Here he comes. Lou Holtz. Father Hesberg said to me, in an hour we're going to go into that press conference, and I'm going to announce to the world that Lou Holtz is a head football coach at Notre Dame. He said, what I could not announce, that you're the leader of the Notre Dame football team. He said, I can give you the title because titles come from above.

I can't name you the leader because the players are determined if you're a leader. I said, what makes the leader, father? He said, if you're going to be a leader of an organization, number one, you have to have a vision where you want to take that organization. Number two, you have to have a plan how you're going to get there. Number three, you lead by example. But number four, you hold people accountable for the choices they make. And number five, make sure everybody in that organization understands your core values. Now, I know I'm talking a very, very successful group of people.

There's a real life. You're either growing or you're dying. The tree's either growing or it's dying. So is grass. So's the marriage. So's a business. So's a person. Doesn't have a thing to do with age.

I'm so old now, my birthday candles cost more in the cake. But it has everything to do. Am I trying to get better? Am I trying to maintain? You know, you get on top. We finish second as a country at Notre Dame. And everybody called me an idiot. The guy finishes last medical school, they call him doctor.

If I could say anything more important to you, I'd say in this beautiful environment, sometime in the next 24 hours, sit down and ask yourself, where do I want to be a year from now? Where do I be a year from now professionally? Where do I want to be a year from now in my personal life? Where do I want to be a year from now financially? And then answer these questions honestly. What skills and talents do you have?

have to acquire in order to do that. What sacrifices are you willing to make to get it done? What financial price are you willing to pay in order to get that done? Who do you have to work with the order to get done? What problems and obstacles are you going to have to overcome in order to get it done? And what's your plan to do it? And I say to this, a more successful you are, the more there's a tendency, let's not risk anything, let's not change it, let's maintain. And anytime you try to maintain any phase of your life, you never have any excitement. You have no enthusiasm. You have nothing to get excited about.

See, ladies and gentlemen, and I want to give you a simple plan. See, life is nothing more than making good choices. There are approximately 422,000 words in the English language. And yet the most important word to me by far as a word choice. I do not believe you have to sacrifice your personal life. in order to be successful, professionally, or vice versa. See, ladies gentlemen, I'm not very smart, and I try to simplify things. I don't know why we complicate life.

Remember I told you life, most important words, the word choice? You can choose to act or procrastinate, believe or doubt, prayer, curse, help her heal, succeed or fail. But you also choose whether you're going to have a proper attitude. I think attitude is more important than anything else. What's your attitude when things go wrong? See, ladies gentlemen, the same things and building a team in business

or building a team of coming together is all understanding the obligations you have to other people. Embrace change. We see a lot of changes going on. Embrace them. Make any changes you need to make. As long as you're changing to satisfy

the needs of the customer and to make a profit. I want everybody in this room to envision a huge train wreck. I want you to envision two trains. train's coming out. Wow. I'll guarantee you. Everybody in this room envision that train wreck from a safe distance away. You're saying, wow, is that going to be a bad trade rack? Now I want you to envision a train wreck, but you're on the train. Now you're going to make whatever changes you have to make to avoid the train rack. As long as we sit on the outside, say, well, that isn't going to affect me.

we aren't going to make the changes we need to make. All right, how do you follow up, Lou Holt? How about with one of the great thinkers in the world, Simon Sinek? You know, there are better communicators, but I'm not sure there are better thinkers. This guy has the ability to take something complex and bring great simplicity out of it. You love him, you know him well. He's been with us so many times. Here is the inimitable Simon Seneca.

So I've grown a business for a long time since I was in high school. but we've grown very slowly over time. And now we're starting to grow kind of fast. And to be honest, I kind of winged it for a long time. And I'm realizing now we need more structure to get to the next level of what we want to go. But I'm trying to figure out how to do that without breaking the culture. Because we've run a digital agency, so we're very casual, very comfortable. And I want people to be inspired to move towards that next level.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. You are going through something that almost every business will go through at some point, big or small. Right? It's really, really common. I think it's also one of the reasons so many small businesses fail as well. Because when a business has started, business exists on two levels, some sort of metric and time, right? And when you start the business, what you do and why you do it are inextricably linked. You had a big idea.

You suffered or somebody close to you suffered a real problem. You came up with a solution. That solution became the company. And your early employees were your friends. The people who got you, knew you, believed in you, took risks themselves to quit their perfectly good, well-paying jobs to come do something with an overwhelming chance of failure. Seemed like fun at the time. Right?

And what ends up happening is you're running on force of personality. You and maybe the couple people close to you, but often you can be in every meeting, make every decision, make every hire. And it's fun. And the biggest challenge you face is your own success. Because what starts to happen is as what you do grows, you can now no longer be in every meeting. you can now no longer be the salesperson for everything because you're the best sales guy, of course, it's yours. Nobody's as good as you, right?

You can't make every decision, and so now you have to hire somebody who hire somebody who has to make a decision. Based on what? Exactly. And so what starts to happen is the reason, the cause, the purpose, the why of the business starts to become disconnected. This is called the split. Symptoms of the split,

of the split include things like you start becoming more obsessed with your competition than you used to be. In the early days, you didn't even think about your competition. The only thing you thought about was how can we be better than ourselves. Now you're worried how can you be better than your competition? How can we beat our competition? How can we be number one? Based on what metrics, based on what time frames, it's all arbitrary. So the focus went on how do we be better than ourselves? Now we're focused on how to be better than our competition. So you're looking outwards instead of inwards. Symptoms of the split include things like in many companies they start doing focus groups. They start asking other people, what should we do?

You never did a focus group in your life to make a strategic decision. They're wonderful tactically, but not strategically, right? Symptoms of the split include things like the old timers. The guys have been there since the beginning who are making more money than they've ever made, have more power than they've ever had, walking around going, yeah, it's not like the olden days. When you had no money and nothing,

they're reminiscing. They reminisce about the old days because it wasn't about how much you were selling. It was about how they felt and what they felt a part of. And then what starts to happen is the company starts to have performance problems and you hire somebody to fix that stuff, but that's not the problem. It's this. It's why did you go into business in the first place?

We've got to get that back up. It's fixable when you're here. If you wait too long, you become America online and you're some big nothing or you go out of business because literally, you become a dictator because you think it's you and everybody leads you. And then you're alone and it goes bankrupt, right? And not to mention the fact that you might be the inspiring one, you might be the one with the ideas,

but you may not be the one to build the structure. And so you now have to hire people who actually do know more about the structure of a business than you, and I've been there. And it feels like Wiley Coyote falling off a cliff with your claws, sort of like clinging on for dear life. Like, I don't want to let go of this. I don't want to let go of this. But you've got to let go of this.

this and you got to trust that people believe in you, believe in your cause and believe in your vision and they really, really, really do know more and want to help you build it. But you have to be able to put into words your cause, your vision, your purpose, your belief. Remember when I came out here right at the beginning? I said, I have a vision of a world that does not yet exist. A vision is not to be the best because based on what metrics? A vision is not to be number one because nobody's inspired by that than you. No one. Nobody cares about that. A vision is imagining a world that does not yet exist. And if everything you do as a company goes 100% right, you will contribute to the building of this world, but you won't be the only ones. But if people see you trying to build that one,

that world, they will join you. That's what makes you a leader. What is your purpose? What is your cause? What is your belief? Why did you start your business in the first place? What is your why? You've got to get that front and center. That's the thing that inspires people. and that's the thing that will give them their marching orders on how to build the business. And here's the best part. Here's the best part. As soon as I said the why, you knew what decision to make without me having to tell you trusting my gut. That's called scale.

The clearer you can put your why into words, the more easily anyone in your company, assuming they believe what you believe, can make the right decision without you in the room. and the true test of a successful business is the school bus test which is if you got hit by a school bus would the company survive you if you got hit by a school bus would your people want to continue to grow the business

without you or they all go and look for other jobs so you have a unique opportunity to visit a vast amount of organizations be exposed to different staffs cultures wise of those organizations in those visits, in your experience, can you list one mistake you witness leaders do more so than any others in those organizations?

So good or bad? Correct. Yeah, I think the single biggest mistake that most leaders make is they think they have to know all the answers, and if they don't, they think they have to pretend that they do. And there's this weird thing that happens to us when we find ourselves in a leadership position. sometimes we worked our way up through it and sometimes we just said like got dropped into it,

that we think we have to be the leader, we have to act like the leader, whatever that means. It's difficult. You end up with the posturing of the alphas and what if you're that person? And when somebody questions your logic, you get defensive, not because you think that they're being difficult, but you don't want to be found out. The best leaders have this unbelievable humility. John Maxwell talks about this. He talks about when he was junior, he thought he knew everything, and as he gets older,

realizes he knows nothing, right? And there's a beauty in knowing how little you know. And the best leaders I've seen are the ones who will show up and be like, hey, guys, totally new position for me, kind of learning on the job here, I'm going to make a lot of mistakes, please tell me, even if it's harsh criticism and you're worried about my ego, it may hurt. I may get defensive, but understand it's just because I'm hurt, but I want to learn because I want to be the best possible leader I can for you because I want you guys to grow. I also may not understand this industry as well as you. So I'm going to ask you

a ton of questions and I'm sometimes going to defer to you. And if I'm asking you a ton of questions, doesn't mean I'm disagreeing with you necessarily. Sometimes it just means I'm learning. And the best leaders I've ever seen are plunked in a position and are totally open how little they know. There's an unbelievable humility. So the biggest

mistake I've seen is just the facade that leaders put on thinking they have to be the leader, act like the leader, and know everything. There's nothing more incredible then a leader goes, dude, I don't know. If you think you got this, then you got this. Whatever. Go to it. Let me know if you need anything.

You know? And especially when we do that, when we give away authority, ah, it's amazing. Because in most companies, this is David Marquez's work, most companies, all the authorities at the top, all the information's at the bottom. And the opportunity is not to push the information up, it's to push the authority down.

And so when we say to somebody, I remember, like if you have a few people who work for you, I've seen somebody make this mistake where she wanted to be a good boss so instead of making her people work late she'd send them all home and she would work till 11 o'clock at night. That's martyrdom. That's not good leadership. And then what ended up happening is they just stopped working

because she did it for them. As opposed to, now if it's things like licking envelopes and stuffing envelopes, then you stay there with them and work hard with them and the menial stuff. But if it's something significant, like you're doing something, it has to go out to a client, you leave early and you say, okay, guys, you got this.

you want us to send it to you before it goes to the client? Nope. I trust that you know when it's right to go to the client. I trust you guys. Have a good night. And giving someone authority over their work, accountability over their work, people rise to the occasion. It's amazingly powerful as opposed to thinking that you have to make every decision.

In fact, I can promise you. I know how things work in here. How many of you in the breaks are on your phones, checking your emails, checking in? There's no quicker way to undermine trust of your team than thinking that you have to double-check and recheck everything that's going on at work today. I like blue. Go with, you know, seven, you know. So they're making decisions and you're interrupting them with random emails.

Or worse, you're demanding that they tell you. As opposed to saying, hey, guys, I'm going to a three-day off-site to learn how to be a better leader. Okay? Let's hope I learn something. I trust you guys got everything. If there's an emergency, I trust that you'll fix it too. Don't send me anything. Right?

There's no quick way to undermine trust on your team than to demand or expect that they have to check in with you while you're away. Let them make decisions. Let them own it. All right, folks. Hope you are enjoying the content from Summit. Speaking of Summit, the events sold out faster than it ever had before, but people were still saying we want to come. So the leadership of Entree leadership said, all right, let's do something to help these folks. And so we created another experience called the Grand Hall Experience.

What is the Grand Hall experience? Well, it's just a gigantic ballroom right next door to the main room where everybody else will be. Now you're thinking, well, I want to be where everybody else is. Well, I told you it's sold out. But what if I told you that you're going to be able to see all the content that's right next door to you? Gigantic screen. You're not going to miss anything. And the speakers are going to come over into that room during breaks to do live broadcast.

We call it live from Summit. Yours truly hosts that. So you're going to get to be in the room with them as they answer my questions and some of yours. You get everything else that everybody else gets, too. So it really is a fantastic experience. April 28 through May 1, 2019 at the Manchester Grand Hyatt in lovely San Diego, Dave Ramsey, Sarah Blakely of Spanx, Jesse Itzler, a multi-time guest on the Entree leadership program. Simon Seneca, Peyton Manning, Carrie Lawrence, Pat Lynch, Yoni, Marcus Buckingham,

Dr. Henry Cloud, Chris Hogan, and yours truly. That's right. Brand new talk coming out. to you on the intentional interview. How do you interview people to join your team and do it the way I do it with all the people you hear me interview? I'm going to give away the secret sauce. How do I prepare? How do I conduct interviews? And then how does that help you hire people better? Because you do a good job in the interview. Let's be honest. Most of you don't prepare at all. You look at a resume and you do it from the hip and you're awful and it shows. So I'm going to help you with

that. It's going to be great fun. So there you go. Entreeleadership.com slash summit. Entreeleadership.com slash summit. Back to the summit stage. How about a titan of industry? Former CEO Ford Motor Company, Alan Mulali. Here is his talk from the summit stage. My business question is, if I understand correctly, that you went to school for engineering.

Yes. So I'm a medical practitioner that's working to move into more CEO positions and responsibilities and stuff like that. So I'm interested to know how you went from an. aeronautical engineer and moved up to a CEO position and what challenges, struggles, or successes you had through that process? Oh, fantastic. So I've never shared this before, this story, but I feel like I need to to answer your question. So I did start out as an engineer, and I wanted to be the best engineer that I possibly could be.

And I loved engineering. I loved airplanes. I loved design. They said I was doing a really good job, and I was on all these design teams. And then they called me in one day. They said, we'd like you to be a supervisor. And I said, well, what does a supervisor do? And they said, well, we'll assign you really smart, bright engineers

and we'd like you to help them get their work done. And I thought, well, God, that's great. I just have to just create them in my image, and it'll be great. And so at the time, when you did engineering work, you did your work, you had documented it. And at the time, we didn't have word processing. So you had these multiple carbon copies, and you have to grovel in front of the assistant that is typing at the front of the room for all the engineers. And so making a change is a big deal.

So he'd bring in a change. And, of course, I had suggestions for improvement. So I'd give it to him. And 14 revisions later of his documentation is my first employee. You know how many millions of employees I've had to instead? This is my first employee. He walks in, he puts the coordination sheet down in front of me. He said, now, Alan, before you give me your suggestion for improvement,

which I'm sure are going to be good. I'd like you to know that I'm quitting. And I go, you're quitting? Why are you quitting? He said, well, the first two or three suggestions were great, but we've really kind of passed the point of diminishing returns on this. It's just driving me nuts. I said, so do you really have to quit?

He said, yep. And I said, do you have any suggestions for me going forward and said, well, you might want to think about what Boeing is asking you to do. Are they asking you to do this, or are they asking you to connect me with the bigger picture, sure what the vision is, what the strategy is, who the players are that I need to network with, do I have the right tools, in addition to make sure that I continue to improve technically. Now, do you know what a gem that was?

It was a godsend to have your first employee, not quit, that looks really bad on your resume. But to find that out and have to think about that, have to deal with it from the very start. And so my thought to you is every step of the way I had no idea. planned out a career where I was going to do this and that and that. All I know is do the very best you can do at what you've been asked to do. Network with everybody, constantly ask everybody how you're doing and what you can do to do better, and it's all going to work out because people will do anything to have people like that on their team. Yes. Practically speaking, what steps did you take it forward to help change the culture so that team

members wanted to help each other succeed? That's a fantastic question. Well stated, I know this is going to sound maybe not very complicated, but this business plan review is powerful, and very few people do it, where you have the entire team, remember everybody's represented on that team, and you meet once a week. And every team member, starting with the CEO, summarizes where the company is and the areas need special attention. And the CEO is vulnerable to be able to share what the real situation is, which makes it all okay for everybody else to share with it. And so when you go around a room and every member presents the plan and the status and they're being supported by doing that and they consider the reds to be gems and besides that you're going to be

back together next week you don't have to take action items anymore all your other meetings are going to go away because people just have all these meetings they go to but they never have a meeting around the business once a week so you'll reduce the meetings by half and the most important thing that the CEO does is to hold themselves and the team accountable for following that process and following and agreeing to the expected behaviors, just like I have up here, and there's zero tolerance or violate neither one. And the culture change will just accelerate.

It doesn't make any sense. You have five people on your team or 20 members on your team. Everybody in the company will know what's going on because it will flow up and down to your finance system, what the status is. And so now everybody knows what the plan, and now they're focused on that instead of the politics and all the things that are disruptive.

Make sense? So, Alan, you come into Ford, it's obviously in trouble. You knew that walking in. And then the economy really turned, so it may have even got worse since you came in. It did. Obviously, the employee morale had to be bad. Employees had to be discouraged. There was obviously a disconnect between the executive team and the employees in the factories.

How much time did you spend focused on the mindset and the motivations of the team versus the X's and O's? I'm curious in a turnaround situation how you expend your energy there versus culture versus the X's and O's. Absolutely. the most important thing, the most important contribution of a leader of any organization, small or bigger or large, is to hold themselves and their team accountable for a profitable growth plan. Because no one and the process for doing that, the business plan review, for example, and the culture, those expected behaviors.

Because that process that we've used, when you do that week in and week out, then it just creates the high-performance culture and the safe one in addition to a healthy and a smart one. But the leader has to hold the team accountable for that. Because if they don't, who's going to do it? Either the behaviors or the process or the results. And I would propose to you that when you commit your organization, your company, you're the CEO, and you commit that you're going to lead over and over again a profitable growth plan this year, next year. That's why go out a couple of years.

It's going to happen to you fast. Just draw the bars up. Just draw the profits. Here's the forecast. And what's our plan on the revenue side to support that? What's our plan on the efficiency side? And you'll put your actual on there, and it'll be the above or below the plan. Well, that's a gym.

Don't beat anybody up. The fact that we aren't meeting the plan. And you'll make the decisions for the long term. See, now you can't cheat for this quarter or this year because you have to look further out. So I'll give you a good example. So for the first time, we could actually use aluminum in the F-series truck. The most popular vehicle in the world for 47 years.

It's always been made out of steel. But the volume is such that we could get the cost to be very competitive, but we could get an 800-pound savings in weight. The customers would kill for that. I mean, the fuel economy goes with it. Well, when you shut down a production line on the F-150, like what happened when they had their fire recently, it's the most popular vehicle and most profitable vehicle in the whole stable?

Well, that's a big deal, right? So we took a hit for that year. We had to tell everybody we're going to make $2 billion less, but here's why we're doing it. Well, we didn't take one hit on the stock price. Because what the analysts will want to know, when they say, when you listen to an analyst call and they say, so, Mr. CEO, could you get us a little color on why you're doing what you're doing? That's code for what is it going to happen in the out years. They don't care about right now.

They want to know what you're doing. Is it going to create value in the out years? So when we told them they didn't trash our stock, matter of fact, stock went up because we told them what we're doing now to create value for the long term. Is that cool? And now, to your point, everybody knows that. They're not wondering how it's going to go, but they actually know it. That's why you have to share everything. It's a leap of faith to follow those principles. You can think it is. The alternative is that you're managing a secret. And that means everybody else is managing a secret. So tell them. Tell them what the plan is. Thank you. Yes. Hi, Alan. My name is Marcus. I'm actually from Digital Marketer in Austin, Texas.

And we are kind of going through a really, on the executive team, kind of an experientially young executive team going through a growth season. And so with our maybe minimum complexity compared to Ford, I'd love to know what numbers you looked at on an everyday basis as an executive. Because there's so many, I mean, if you read all these books, it's lag measures and lead measures, all these different things. On measures? Correct. There's only five or six. Okay, well, that's what I wanted to know. That's what you want to have.

Five or six, yeah, but thank you. Okay, so let's think about that. So if your goal is PGA, profitable growth for all, meaning all the stakeholders, what would be the measures you'd look at? Are you asking me? This is a little working together thing. Okay, yeah, yeah, that's good. All right. Money, profit, revenue.

Okay, now, you can even back up a little bit and say, so that measure, we're, we're going to, everything you were describing would be what the investors would look at, right? So that's good. So you'd look at maybe a measure or two for the investors. They actually are investing in your company. All they want is a reasonable return. And so how do they feel? How they feel how's going?

So who's another stakeholder you might want to have a measure for? Say it loudly. Give you him a hand. I mean, you don't have to care what they think, but I would propose to you that it's really important what they think. and they need to know what the proper growth is that. So who's another stakeholder? The customer.

What do you think? Okay. Who else? Those are the three I had. Maybe you're suppliers. Suppliers, maybe, yeah. Not in our business, but I get, yes, absolutely. But what if you pull everybody in?

It's profitable growth for all. So just include all the stakeholders and how they think it's going. And when you can, because you can, use data. every one of those things that you described, there's data that says how that's going. Is that cool? That's great. Okay, thank you.

Yes, ma'am. Can you tell us about personal stress and how you've managed it? Well, I don't do stress. So I can't really tell you about stress, but I'll tell you why I probably don't have stress. And that's because of these working together principles and practices. Can you imagine that if everybody knows everything

about our business, and everyone knows the status in the areas of new special attention, then you've done as a leader, you've done everything, everything you can do for this company, right? So what should you do at night? Stress or worry about it? No, you should go to sleep and get some sleep and come back and help.

Just keep helping. All these things are going to happen. When we made that breakthrough at Ford, I knew we're going to be okay no matter what happened to us. If we wouldn't have made that breakthrough, we're never going to get forward, save for it. And so whether there were tsunamis in Asia Pacific where 70% of our production was underwater, whether it was GM and Chrysler going bankrupt, whether it was a U.S. economy and going to the worst recession that Ben Bernacki and Hank Paulson thought it could be worse than the Depression in 1929,

we had done everything we possibly could do, right? So wake up the next day, get to the business plan and review, see what the environment is, and then deal with it in a positive way. Not the way you wish it could be or want it to be, but this is the way it is and it feels so good that you know that. That's why the reds are such gems, and then work together to turn the reds, yellows, and green and keep adapting to this rapidly changing world.

And it's fun. My God, it's so much fun. Does that make sense? Okay. The last thing I just wanted to share with you, and it's where we started. I grew up with Dave and having limited resources. I was following the seven simple steps, baby steps,

but I didn't know what they were. And then when I found Dave, who was writing about it, that was like fantastic. But what he really did, and I shared with him this morning, is when he moved from the financial advice and counsel to the leadership. And I think that's where he's going to continue

to make an unbelievable difference. And it's the foundation of everything associated with the business. And so to be invited to be with fellow CEOs and leaders that are here to create value by profitly growing is absolutely a thrill for me. And I wish you the very best. It's not going to be the government to save us. It's going to be the people in this room that manage and lead businesses that create value. So thank you very much.

Interesting note, by the way, Alan Malala, who you just heard from, was recommended to us by Pat Linsioni, who got to know Alan by doing some consulting for Alan when he was the CEO of Ford Motor Company. And so with no further ado, honestly, he's my favorite all-time. Entree leadership guest because he's become a dear friend. I love him. Great communicator. He's golden. He is.

Pat Lynch. Hi, my name is Christine. And thank you. I feel so blessed to be here and I feel so fed in so many ways from you guys and from everyone in this room. Along with that feeling of fullness comes the problem and the question is that whenever I come back from these events, my team is like, oh, my God, here she comes, you know. You can't go to any more events.

Right. And so pretty much, right? So how do you, my question is, how do I go back and start to weave these elements into the team and decide what's important and not lose the momentum and the energy, you know? What we teach folks to do and what we all do is the same thing. I would take an hour or two of quiet sometime between now and as quick as you can and write out 10 to 20 things that you took away when you, go back through your notes. Might only take an hour, you know, and just go, okay, here's these 10 things. I would look down that list of things and go, okay, which of these is going to give me the most lift?

What's the best one on here that? I'm like, I can't wait to get started on that one. And then let's do that all the way down the list. Prioritize the list of most lift to least lift, most important to least important, however you want to prioritize, that kind of a thing. And then just this is how you eat an elephant, a bite at a time. Don't come in Monday morning and try to do all 20, you know? and go, I'm going to take one a month or one every two months. Dave talked about a no gossip policy.

I want to institute that. And I'm going to drop the hammer on that. Okay, you do that and six other things. The whole place is going to blow up on you. So don't try to do all that. It's not the team doesn't want that. You don't want that. Unless the house is burning down, you don't have to go that crazy.

So just pick out the ones that give you the most lift of some kind, whether it's financial lift or relief on a stress point or why. do I, you know, whatever it is. It's just this one's really cool and I want to do it first. Whatever, I don't care. Do one a month or one every two months to where by the end of the year you've knocked out 12 and you will have made a huge, you would transform your whole organization, but it's incremental. You win death by a thousand cuts.

You don't win by events. What do you got? I just, as you were saying this, because I know how what this is like, you're overwhelmed. Here's the thing to think about. when you write down that list of like 12 things first of all go sit down with your people and go and anticipate their objections go I know you're thinking like I wonder what kind of Kooli

did she drink this year so when they go oh so you know we think that oh yeah I know that takes the air out of the balloon and then go here's 12 concepts that I learned at this thing I'm going to let you guys ask me do any of these sound interesting to you because if if a bunch of your people in the office go what's this one now it's it's actually them asking you questions.

And that's going to be a lot easier to go down that stream. That's even better. You know, because really, any of them are, they're all good. So maybe find out which one's there. And then suddenly it's a pull, not a push methodology. Very good. Thank you for your question. Hey, guys, I'm Jay Owen.

And Dave, you're really great, but your team is amazing. They've done a great job this week. Thank you. My question for you. They are. I know that faith and family are both important to you guys, and I'd love to just hear some personal stories about, especially when your kids were younger, I have five under the age of 12, and grow in a business. I'd just love to hear things that either worked really well for you or didn't work really well for you, because sometimes I feel like the work-life balance is more like a blender, and I just love to hear your stories. It is a blender, and I frankly think the blender works better.

The work-life balance, that whole idea of this versus that, I kind of think it all goes together. So what I try to do is be the same person I am when I'm at home and when I'm at work. I don't try to have these neat boxes. But again, that's my personality. But here's what I would tell you. A guy said to me years ago, before I had children, I was married. He was this well-known executive in the Silicon Valley. And I was having a meeting with him.

He didn't know me that well. And he said, hey, Pat, do you have kids? And I said, no. He goes, not yet. And he goes, well, when you do, spend time with him because I have a 16-year-old and I don't know him. Okay, so let's get the meeting started. And I was just like, oh, wow. I never forgot that.

And I have never regretted making a decision that was in the long-term best interest of my family and not my company. So I don't have a specific answer for you. All I know is never feel like that's a bad decision. Okay. And the other thing I would say is involve your family in those things. You know, I haven't done that enough. I have worked my butt off for 30 years and my family's stronger right now than it's probably ever been. So this idea that somehow you can't get your work done because you're nurturing is complete BS.

It's wuss. It's the wussification of America. And so, you know, here's an idea. When you're with your family, try being with your family. Turn off the stupid television, put the phone down. My kids talk about being on the boat, being on the boat, being on the boat. You know why they like being on the boat? Because you couldn't be interrupted by something else.

there was nothing more important than them when you're there because it's that focus. And so wherever you are, be there. But while you're at work, try being at work. And so we would go through seasons and we'd sit down and talk to kids and go, hey, you know, first time it happened. I remember when Financial Peace came out in the late 90s, first book tour was, I was gone 63 days. You know, I had a week off in the middle of it. And we're like, we're doing this.

And they gave us a lot of money for this book. and we're going to make this book successful, and it's going to affect our family from this point forward. When dad gets back from this, we're going to go to Disney or wherever we went. I don't remember. We went somewhere after that. But you guys, there's a carrot for you at the end of this.

But in the meantime, you've got to help mom out because I don't want to hear a bunch of crap where you're misbehaving from the road, because dad's out here harvesting the corn, so you better take your part. And that's how you involve them in it. So they don't grow up thinking dad was gone all the time, or mom was gone all the time.

They're like, oh, this is what he's doing. It's like, because when are you there, you're like, you're there, you know, all in. And, you know, so, but we, we put on the calendar proms, and we booked live events around proms. We put, you know, ice hockey, Daniel played ice hockey tournament on the calendar. And there was not a live event booked against that. When they were in college, you know, we have University of Tennessee home football tickets, and we'd be down there to watch the games.

I still want to go. They're not even there. So there's still, we still book our events around those, just because by God, I want a life, you know. But you have to schedule it and then try being. wherever you are. I don't sit at the UT football game and check my phone and see what's happening on Twitter. You know, I'm watching the football game. So try being where you are and doing that wide open. And it's just an intentionality about that. I remember Gary Smalley and John Trent used to do marriage conferences when the kids were little. And John said, when you get home, you need to take the

sword off that you're using at work like they did in olden days and put it above the mantle. so you don't use that sword on your family. In other words, you've got to leave the stuff at the door that happened at the office because you use different tool set with your family than you used at the office. But you're coming in wearing this Conan sword, you know, you need to take that thing off.

Don't use that on your wife or on your husband, right? Put that thing above the mantle. The morning, when you get ready to go back to work, you take it off, strap in, and let's go. You know, but we're not using that weapon on my family. So some things like that over the years have helped me, but I resist this idea that you know you somehow can't get your work done because I've done it and I've met other people that do it and my kids don't resent our business. They don't hate their father because he worked hard and you know that's just a bunch of crap.

It's just the wussification of this culture. Hi, my name's Caitlin Lockett. I wanted to know what the best advice would be for someone who's 24 years old stepping into a leadership role for the very first time. Ooh. Just flashback to your 20s. You know, the first thing that comes to mind is get very comfortable being vulnerable. Like, it is so liberating. I talked to a guy, was it here?

Yeah, there was a wonderful guy here last night I talked to, and he said, I'm becoming a manager and all the people I manage are way smarter than I am, and I'm afraid they're not going to listen to me. What should I do? And it said, get really comfortable with them being smarter than you, and make sure they know that you know, that they know that you're smarter than them. And so the worst thing you can do as a leader is feel like, I have to prove something.

Humility is the most attractive quality. People will follow you and let you lead them if you know who you are. So whatever weaknesses you have, work on them, but let people know you're aware of them. You have nothing to hide, and leadership gets so much easier. And most of us wait until we're in our 40s or 50s to realize that. So do it now. If you flipped it and you were on the other side of this and you had a 24-year-old walk in to lead you, what would you want from them?

you'd want that. You'd want to say, hey, there's an elephant in the room. You got a 24-year-old leader. Let's just call it. That's weird. That's just weird. And I'm a little uncomfortable. You're probably a little uncomfortable.

And you just go, this is what's going on. We're going to do it anyway. And we've got to figure it out together. And I don't have it all figured out. I'm going to have some opinions. You're going to have some opinions. Let's just work together. and that humility and authenticity and just saying what it is out loud.

What happens is when you shine a light on the obvious stress points, it just runs the demons out. They don't hide in the light. All the confusion and all the egos and all that kind of stuff. And if there's some old mean guy and he's like, I don't know if I could fall a 24-year-old. I don't know if you can either. We'll just have to work this out together.

We'll just figure it out. You know, I hope you can because it would be bad for you if you can't. But we're just going to have to figure this out together. And maybe you can show me some stuff. and help me as we go along. But I can tell you this, the one thing you need to do is you need to stand up after you've done all that and go, we're going to do it. You need to make a declarative statement that has some strength under that humility that just not I'm weak and humble, but I'm strong and humble. Warren Wiersby says meekness is not weakness.

It's power under control. So you want to be meek. It's power under control. And it's just like, it's obvious there's a problem. I mean, this is a weird situation, but we're doing it. So let's all strap in and figure this out. I don't know how we're going to fix it, but we're going to do it. You'll get there.

You'll get there. I know you'll get there because you're smart enough to have even asked the question in the first place. Yes. Yeah. And what Dave and Pat just spoke to is going to be huge for you and your posture. They gave you some great stuff, but be okay to ask, what do you think? I think you'll earn a lot of respect with older people on your team that you are now leading. If you look at them

and be okay not knowing the answer and look at them and say, what do you think? And get some collaboration. And then, as Dave said, be clear, make your decision. But I think it's okay to ask, what do you think? I think they'll respect you for that. Always hand out the credit and keep the blame. All right, folks, we can do something we've never done before. I've long said that I'm a man of the people.

And so our team is a team of the people. And the team has come to me with a great idea, and I just get to be the mouthpiece. This is so cool. How many of you out there right now want to come to summit, but you can't personally afford it, or the situation is you'd have to get your boss's approval. There's a lot of you. I know this.

Who doesn't want to come to summit? In fact, if you're listening to this and you don't want to come to summit, I'm going to politely ask you to stop listening to our program, okay? Because it just makes no sense at all. All right, I kid. But here's a deal. If you want to come to summit, but you need the boss's approval, listen to this. We've got an email template designed for you to send you. to your boss to get your boss to approve the trip. Are you ready for this? I don't think you're

hearing what I'm saying. The team has written an email that is going to just convince your leader that you need to come. Or here's the deal. If it doesn't work, what do you have to lose? Blame it on us, say that we actually wrote it and that we talked you into it. Like, it's just a perfect situation. All right? So you've got to convince the leader. It's a weird conversation. We're going to help you do that because they're spending companies. money, we get that. You're trying to figure out how to like communicate the value. And so in this email template, we help you communicate the value and start the conversation on why they need to spend their money to get you to this amazing event. So takes out all the pressure, all the tension,

and you got the extra failsafe of blaming it on us that I said it was a good idea. You could just blame it all on me. Okay. So there you go. Here's how you get the template. Click on the link in the show notes. It's in the show notes of this episode. Click on the link. And if you end up getting the go-ahead because of the email template, I would like to meet you at Summit. That will be big fun. We'll see you in San Diego. All right, we're going to close out with one of my mentors, John Maxwell, the dean of leadership training. The guy is one of a kind. Here is John Maxwell from the summit stage. Well, I want to start by say that if you came and said, John, what's the best advice you could give me. I would look at you and I would say the best advice I could give you

is for you to every day intentionally grow and never allow yourself to get into a state of where you're not learning and growing and expanding and getting better. I know I'm known for leadership, but I'm more passionate about personal growth because all the things I've been able to learn and expand and the books I've been able to write have all been a result of my commitment to personally grow and develop myself. In my 20s, I sat down with a guy named Kurt Kampmeyer, and he just asked me what my plan for growth was. I didn't have one. And I was embarrassed. I was young, and in fact, I didn't even know I was supposed to have one. And I remember I began talking to him about how hard I worked, and I was just kind of faking it, trying to, you know,

act as if I had a plan. And I probably talked for five or eight minutes as soon as I did that and shut up. He looked at me, he said, you don't have a plan, do you? And I said, no, I don't have a plan. He said to me the words that just changed my life. I still in my 20s. I'm so glad I heard him when I was young. He said, John, growth is not automatic. You don't automatically get better. If you're going to get better, you're going to have to do it intentionally. And those words changed my life. Because to be honest with you, I assumed that if I went to work and I just went through the daily schedule, what I assumed was that I would automatically grow, that I would just automatically get better. I had no clue that the only way you and I get better is to be intentional.

The only thing automatic in life is death. But just because you get older doesn't mean you get better. What I'm going to talk about will get you better because, you see, the only guarantee, the only guarantee that you have that tomorrow is going to be better than today is that you're growing today. It's the only guarantee. So when I hear people, they talk about, boy, I hope my business will do better next year. I hope my family will do better next year. I hope, you know, boy, I hope for a good year coming up.

Whenever they do that, first of all, I want to tell them, hope's not a strategy. And if you really want tomorrow to get better, I can tell you exactly how to get better. It's just a fact. You grow today, you set up tomorrow for success. If you don't grow today, you set up not tomorrow. See, every day, you're either preparing or repairing. And most people spend their days repairing. And then they wonder what happened.

You see, if you and I could just have a conversation, which would just be wonderful, like a one-on-one conversation? I would ask you two questions, and those two questions are going to determine the success of your organization, your business, your team, more than the other two questions, and they're going to determine your personal success. Two questions I would ask you is, what is your plan for personal growth in your life? I mean, what kind of plan do you have right now that's going to help you get better for tomorrow? What's your plan? And the second question I'd ask you is what's your plan for your team to get them better for tomorrow. And I can tell you I'm in the best time of my life.

I'm learning more than I've ever learned. I'm experiencing more than I've ever experienced. I'm still absolutely growing. And I'm just loving what's happening to me. And I want it to happen to you. And it can't happen to you, but it won't happen to you unless you're very intentional. And the moment growth began to change me, I stopped and have never asked the question since then. How long will it take?

The question changed from how long will it take to how far can I go? And the moment the question changes to how far can I go, you are on a personal development and growth track that's going to serve you better than anything else that you can possibly do in your life. And that's a fact. So my growth goal, my own personal growth goal when I was very young, was asking myself, how far can I go? And then as I began to look at my team, I began to ask myself, well, how far can they go? And let me tell you the answer to that question, how far can you go? You can you go? You can. go as far as you can grow and you can't go any further. There's another law called the law of trade-offs, which basically says you have to give up to go up. That every time you go further and go higher, it's because you trade it off something. That there's no such thing as a free ride and there's no such thing as an easy ride. But the way it works is very simple. The higher you go, the bigger the trade-offs. So when you start off in the beginning, your trade-off isn't very much. And the reason it's not very much is because you don't have anything. And so when you

have nothing, you know. I love these people. So, well, you know, we just started off and we just had nothing and we just gave it all up. And I said, well, that was good. I'm not sure what you gave up, but it was good, you know what I mean, whatever you gave up. But I can tell you right, when you get successful and you begin to get stuff in your life and you begin to get reputation in your life, I mean, the higher you go. But at every major decision point, you got to make a tradeoff. You've got to give up something to take this next road and this next path. And what happens is when people stop making tradeoffs, they stop growing. It's a fact. People stop growing when the price gets too high. It's an absolute fact. I can guarantee you 95% of all growth stops when the price gets too high.

I'm not talking about financial price. Maybe it's time price. It can be many things, but trust me, growth always extracts a price from us. There's always a tradeoff. You can't take people any further than you've gone yourself. So understand this. When I teach leadership, the reason I'm so passionate about getting to the leaders is because the leaders are going to set the table and they're going to set the limit for everybody that's on their team. From a one to a five, if you're an average leader, you're a five, let me tell you what you're going to do. You're going to have a ceiling of four for your people. And they can't go any more than four.

I mean, they may have seven potential, but it doesn't matter. You're the leader. You're the ceiling. As the leader goes, so goes to people. You've got to keep growing. You've got to keep learning. You've got to keep expanding yourself so that you can constantly grow and expand your others. So when you become a leader, all of a sudden, you begin to understand this incredible multiplication,

but also this incredible responsibility that you and I have of what we can do for others once we develop and we grow ourselves. Everything I'm going to give you is uphill. There's no downhill stuff here, folks. If you want downhill stuff, you can go home right now. It's all uphill. And the only way you go uphill is being intentional. The only way you go uphill is being consistent.

It's all uphill. There's nothing easy about it. It's simple, but there's nothing easy. You see why consistency we don't care for very much is we don't get rewarded for it immediately. I mean, nobody ever got a consistency award for three days showing up at work. See, there are no awards and rewards for consistency in the beginning. So therefore, people don't, they say, it really doesn't matter. What they don't understand, it's like investing money.

I mean, Ramsey will tell you, it's like putting money in the bank or money investment. The whole investment stuff doesn't pay off until on the end. But remember this, every day it's working, every day it's working, every day it's working, every day it's working, every day it's working. Every day it's compounding little, little, little, little, little, little. little, little, little, oh my gosh, look what I got. I'm a working process. What I love about being 70 is I've got this experience that I've evaluated all my life. And what happens out of evaluating experience comes wisdom. And all of a sudden, you can get better and you can get older. And what's really fun is I'm getting older and I'm getting better. I got a small window.

And I know I got a small window. You ask my team, I'm more persistent and I'm more consistent and I'm more consistent and I'm more focused than I ever have before because I don't have a long window. And I got a whole bunch of stuff that I want to share and I want to teach. But the best sharing, the best teaching isn't from things I knew 20 years ago. It's from things I'm learning today. If you see me again in a year or two, I'll be as excited to teach as I am today. Because of the next year or two, I'm going to learn some stuff. I don't know.

And it's going to make me a better person. It's going to help me make you better. And that's my life. Every day. Every day I learn. Every day I reflect. Every day I write. Every day I apply.

Every day I share. Kind of a wonderful, boring, bountiful life. Oh my gosh. My friends, Inofus Soft, still giving away the 14-day free trial. Even if you can't afford Infusion Soft right now, and by the way, you need to make amends on that. Because I'm telling you, they are worth every nickel. you spend on them. The ROI is huge. But what if you just use them for 14 days? They're allowing you to use their product for 14 days. Why wouldn't you do that? We've been giving this trial away.

I can't believe you're still giving it away. So let's do this. Atfusionsoft.com, there it is. 14-day free trial. Go try it right now. And if you don't like it, guess what? You didn't pay a dime. I don't want to hear you complain about it. All right, folks, that's going to do it. On behalf of the entire Entree leadership team, thank you for listening. We'll talk with you again very soon. Hey, folks, I want to make you aware that we have other great podcasts from Ramsey Solutions. Here's a sample of Christy Wright's Business Boutique podcast. Hey, I'm Christy Wright, and I help women all over the country take their ideas and passions and hobbies and turn them into profitable businesses.

If you have an idea in your head or a dream in your heart, and you've ever wondered if you could make money doing it, I'm here to help. Join us on the Business Boutique Podcast where we are equipping women to make money doing what they love. If you'd like to hear full episodes, just search Business Boutique in iTunes or go to businessboutique.com.