Start With A Win - 5 Leadership Lessons I Learned in 2024

Episode Date: December 25, 2024

This episode of Start With a Win dives into the top leadership lessons of 2024, host Adam Contos welcomes wife, Kelly Contos, they blend humor, personal anecdotes, and professional observations to explore what makes leaders, leaders. Packed with relatable stories and actionable advice, this holiday-themed discussion delivers an engaging and thought-provoking take on leadership that will leave you eager for more.00:00 Intro – Five Leadership topics of 202401:59 Almost half of employees say Leaders are not this!04:45 As a Leader there is nothing worse than this…09:14 Topic two: everyone wants/needs this!11:50 If you don’t have this, how can you do this…number three… 21:05 Topic four: This helps all things and solves all things!26:15 Number five!32:45 Wrapping up, if anything listen to the last two minutes!⚡️FREE RESOURCE: 𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵'𝘴 𝘞𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘨 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘠𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘓𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘩𝘪𝘱?  ➡︎ https://adamcontos.com/myleadershipWant weekly leadership content? Go here ➡︎ https://adamcontos.com===========================Subscribe and Listen to the Start With a Win Podcast HERE:📱 ===========================YT ➡︎ https://www.youtube.com/@AdamContosCEOApple ➡︎ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/start-with-a-win/id1438598347Spotify ➡︎ https://open.spotify.com/show/4w1qmb90KZOKoisbwj6cqT===========================Connect with Adam:===========================Website ➡︎ https://adamcontos.com/Facebook  ➡︎ https://facebook.com/AdamContosCEOTwitter  ➡︎ https://twitter.com/AdamContosCEOInstagram  ➡︎ https://instagram.com/adamcontosceo/#adamcontos #startwithawin #leadershipfactory

What are the top leadership lessons for 2024? Today on our holiday episode, we dive deep into that topic on Start With A Win. Welcome to Start With A Win, where we unpack leadership, personal growth and development, and how to build a better business. Let's go. Coming to you from Area 15 Ventures

and Start With A Win headquarters, it's Kelly Contos with Start With A Win. Wait a second. What? This is my podcast. No, it's fine. You're going to get to participate. You're fine.

Thanks. Great. All right, go ahead. Today, we talked to Adam Kontos about the biggest leadership lessons of 2024, his observations, opinions, because we know he has them, and what we can all take away from this past year.

Great. Do you like my elf hat here? Your bell is a little... It's jingly. Over the top. Sorry, everybody, for the jingly bell. I heard it was a holiday podcast. You're wearing your reindeer... Cayman spirit.

Your reindeer jammies. It's actually perfect. It's hiding my hair. Your jam jams. It's a bad hair day. All right. Well, I mean, there have been a lot of leadership lessons this year. I know you and I have talked about a lot of those at the dinner table, just in casual conversation, because, hey, what do leaders talk about? Leadership, you know, good or bad.

So let's think. I also think it's not something that you turn on and you turn off, right? So it's always there. So it makes sense that it's kind of an evolving conversation that we continue to have. It's always there. I think that might be woven into some of these lessons. Oh, good for me. Yeah, good for you.

Well done, leader. All right. Well, I don't know. This is your podcast, I guess. Okay. Well, let's start with number one. What's number one? Okay.

Well, number one, I think we saw this, number one, evolve over the past few years, but it was extraordinarily important, particularly during the election cycle. And I'm not trying to get political here, but there are some political observations here of what people did right and what people did wrong. And I would say number one was certainly presence. The reality is, and I saw statistics, something like 48% of employees said that their leader is not present. That's bigger than I would have expected. It's way bigger. And think about it, though. If you need a leader in an organization, what do you have to do? You got to go look for them, right? Or call them or make an appointment with their executive assistant or something like that. But what, what's wrong with being present as a leader and why aren't leaders present,

I guess, is the question. And I think it's because they're afraid of facing criticism, right? Yeah, I would. Yes. The hiding. Probably. I would, I would add the word I would add to that would be approachable. Okay. Because I think that was something that you've always demonstrated in all of your leadership roles is that you were approachable. If anybody needed something, had a question, they knew they could come to you and there wasn't, you know, sometimes there's that fear in having to approach your leader about something. It's like going to your dad. Yeah, it really is. But I feel like you did a

good job kind of washing that away and letting people approach you without that fear, whatever it was that they needed to talk to you about. So what causes approachability though? Well, I mean, I think it's, it, it is, I think presence and approachability kind of go hand in hand. You have to, you have to build that presence and you have to put yourself out there. And because you have to, you have to demonstrate your leadership style and your personality to people. That's the only way that they know that you're approachable and that you can be approached without being fearful. If they get a good sense of who you are and how you operate. And nobody knows that if you're sitting in an office with your door closed all day.

Right. I always, and I think you're right. I think it comes down to trust and safety. Safety is a good word. Where it's, you know, if people aren't trustworthy of their leader and feel safe to approach them, the leader is never going to get their opinion or their input on things. speak truth to power or provide feedback or provide positive input for that matter. If you really like something, when's the last time people went up to their leader and said, wow, that worked out really well. I think we should do more of that. Yeah. Because they're even afraid to do that.

Well, and I think they also have to not be afraid to share their true opinions or ideas with you. I mean, when you've got a leader who's not approachable, you're going to end up getting a lot of lip service from your employees. Right. And that's not a productive work environment if people are just coming in and telling you what they think you want to hear instead of being able to be honest with you so you can address the real issues. It's funny you say that. I mean, there's really, as a leader, there's nothing worse than sitting there and have somebody just feed you the lip service. And you're like, you're just saying that in order to kiss up or, you know, just try and make yourself look good. And you don't have something else to say, because you don't trust that I'm not going to accept it properly or with safety. So it's, it's interesting. How

about, how about this thing? Presence creates trust. Remember I used to, I've said that a million times. So, because I also think as a leader, you have to, you have to have that, that presence and that approachability that also allows people to be vulnerable with you. Right. And so if, if they need help with something or they don't maybe know the answer, um, it's okay to not know the answer. It's worse, obviously to make up something that makes you think somebody thinks, you know, the answer, but, um, I don't believe in that really fake it till you make it when you're in those higher roles, but you have to be able to admit

when you don't know something and when you need help. Right. You don't like excuses from leaders. No, not really. It's not on the top of my list. Not on your list. That's it. What was the, um, the three things that leaders cannot say? It wasn't my fault. It wasn't my fault. Nobody told me. Nobody told me. I don't, I didn't know about it. I didn't know. Okay. So it's okay to say I don't know and I'll find out. Always. But I didn't know is not an excuse for something going the way that it went.

That's 100%. So once again, nobody told me. It wasn't my fault. I didn't know. And I didn't know. So interesting. Yeah. And I mean, we, we circled around presence, but I think, but we, but we hit presence because all of those things are the fear factors around what leaders carry into, which causes them

to run and not be present. Yes. Now let me tie another one to presence. And that is consistency. Yes. Now let me tie another one to presence. Um, and that is consistency. Yes. You can't just be present like at the Christmas party. No, no, no. It's almost, and this is one thing that I, um, noticed, you know, in the, in the political arena is you had, um, you had a great deal of criticism and this is, you know, I don't care who you voted for, what side of the aisle you're on, whatever. You can't deny this. You had the, um, the Republican side was extraordinarily present. I mean, you look at

like when Trump was president, the first time he was on video or doing a press conference every freaking day every day and then you had president biden who um you know who's is president right now i mean you're like where is he and people are like what what's going on so i mean presence creates trust and being there is necessary in order to demonstrate your leadership. I don't care who you are. Take it for what it's worth. I mean, if you're tuning out of the podcast for this, then you got a bigger problem of, you know, not realizing that that's true as a leader. But I think consistency creates trust, too.

Because you're not going to trust somebody because you've witnessed them do something one time. Right. You're going to trust them because you've seen them do that repeatedly. And what does that do? It demonstrates that that's truly what they're about. Yes. That's truly who they are and what they're about. Whether or not you like it, you get to know it. And, and we all, and you're not going to like everything about your leader, but the reality is if you know what the leader's traits and habits are, then you can work with that because we don't like everything about everybody. That's human beings. We're all different. We all have different perspectives. We have different ideas. We have

different opinions on things. But the reality is if you actually know how somebody stands on something, then you can accept it that they have a variation of opinion from yours, but it's consistent. So you can trust that, okay, that's truly who they are, what they're about. So presence and consistency. Presence and consistency. Okay. That's good. Number one. What's number two? Wow. I love this one because this is incredibly important. Growing up in school, you know, in our formative years, things like that, as well as in business, it's clarity, clarity. Wouldn't you like to know what's expected of you? Yeah, of course. Right. I mean, it's why do we, why do we fight that? How do you know what you're working towards? If you don't know what the expectations are

that are required of you? Yeah. It it's you're working towards if you don't know what the expectations are that are required of you? Yeah. It's like if you're trying to get everywhere, you're going to get nowhere. And you have no clarity of direction, no clarity of where your end result is going to be. But if we have clarity, hey, let's go to the store and buy this. You're like, oh, okay, great. I have clarity. I know exactly what I need to do. Let's get into this meeting and let's accomplish these three things. Yes. It's, you know, and I guess one of the issues I see with, you know, lack of clarity is nobody gets anything

done. For sure. Well, because they don't know what their boundaries are that they can work within. And then you have all these blurred lines on job descriptions and you've got all kinds of people with a hand in something that maybe is only one or two people's responsibility, but people don't know what they're doing. So when they don't know what their direction is, I feel like they kind of flounder a little bit and they end up trying to just find ways to look busy, but they're not really productive. Right. Right. Like the only way to be truly productive is to have clarity and what you're supposed to accomplish. Busy versus productive.

So somebody smart said that once. Somebody smart said that, yeah. She's wearing a reindeer pajamas right now, I guess. Yeah, it's incredibly important. Think about it. If all you're doing is confusing your employees, then what are they going to get done? Nothing. And it's in, what is it, Gallup's Q12 survey about employee engagement. One of the lack of engagement principles is they don't have clarity in what their specific job tasks are. So they don't feel like they're accomplishing anything. So they really become disengaged as a result. That's a big red flag. Well, I think because that leads to kind of uncertainty. If you don't have clarity and you don't know what you're doing, how can you measure anything you've accomplished? Whoa.

I think that might lead into our next one. Oh, all right. Well, let's go to there. Number three. I love that. Accountability. Okay. What's accountability?

Accountability is knowing what your job is and delivering on that. And measuring what you've accomplished. And measuring what you've accomplished. That's it. It's okay. So we have accountability, which is witnessing the results. It's the root of the word is account. Like accounting. So what is accounting? It's counting things. Yes. So what are we measuring? We're measuring our results and we're witnessing those results compared to what we were trying to accomplish, right? Sure. So a lot of people actually take accountability as judgment. Like somebody is criticizing them. They're using emotional leverage against that person for what they accomplished or didn't accomplish. So we have witnessing and we have

judging. Nobody wants to be judged, right? They want to be witnessed. They're willing to accept, hopefully, the outcomes that they've created and admit to those and be honest with themselves and others and say, here's what I accomplished. I'm accountable for these numbers, but don't judge me on those. Let's either improve them, accept them or decrease them, whatever it might be. But let's notice those numbers. Let's be accountable for those numbers and let's determine where we want to go from here. So accountability is weird. You, you hear the word accountability, but I think it's used wrong a lot because we have to hold somebody accountable for this. Right. Like, like almost interchangeable with punishment. Like who's going to be punished for this disaster. Exactly.

But accountability is, it's really just a measure of your goals and you can't get there without clarity. It's like, how do you do an employee review at the end of the year and hold anybody accountable for their goals? If they've never been given a job description at the beginning of the year or told, you know, you can't just sit down in a review with somebody and be like, thanks for showing up every day. You know, it's weird. Everybody loves you in the office. You have a great personality. Yeah. How many times have you heard, oh, she's a great, great person or he's a great guy or whatever it is.

And then your review score becomes completely subjective to whatever your employer thinks of you, as opposed to whether or not you actually hit any of the goals that were laid out for you at the beginning of the year. Right. So should we just do reviews based on, it should just be like a piece of paper that says you're great or, or, you know, something like that. Or are we actually going after what our key performance indicators are or metrics that have numbers assigned to them or task accomplished. Well, I mean, that's what it should be.

Totally. I don't think that's what happens all the time, but that's 100% what it should be. Right. And you don't get me wrong. You do have the values piece of an organization. Are you living within the values of that organization? Do you have work ethic? Are you treating other people with kindness?

Are you accepting of feedback? Things like that. You know, those different aspects of creating maximum performance. But the reality is when it comes down to the performance of the company, the numbers are what speak the truth. And we have to have accountability. And if you have accountability, if you have the clarity of your job description and your goals and what you're going to be measured on, then you can have your own accountability throughout the year. It's not going to be a surprise to you when you get called in for your review or you get called in for a meeting. You always know throughout the year where you stand and whether you're doing enough and in the right lane. It was funny. I love dashboards of, okay, here's the rolling results.

Here's what's going on this week. Here's what's going on. It went on week before, things like that, where people can actually look at it because they know what the scoreboard says. And what is it? The disciplines of execution, four or five disciplines of execution. I don't remember.

But one of which is let the people set the scoreboard. Because if we set our own scoreboard and say, I'm going to get this many widgets built or sales closed or cold calls made or whatever it might be, I'm going to set my accountability metrics myself. Two things happen. First of all, usually people will set them higher than the company will. And then two people will try harder to achieve those when they set them themselves, as opposed to somebody just blindly feeding you a metric that you have to accomplish. Yes. Go ahead. We push ourselves more than we allow other people to

push us. But I would also say that the thing about a dashboard that I like is public accountability. Oh yeah. When everybody knows what your goals are and what you're trying to achieve and whether you're reaching them or not, I think that spurs a different kind of passion and maybe a little competition, a little healthy competition to know that other people are watching. But also, if you can create the right environment, going back to all of the leadership traits, if you can create the right environment, then I think people can push each other and help each other. I like that. So that they can kind of, you know, this might be your goal and this might be my goal, but maybe collectively we can push each other to accomplish all of those things. It takes a little pressure off also when it's a team environment. Sure. But at the same time, you gotta, you gotta contribute to the team that way.

We give other people in the office, the chance to celebrate each other throughout the year by just looking at, Oh, we're going to get to that one. I'm so good at this. Awesome. Hey, before we move on to the next to number four, um, uh, to close up accountability, self-accountability, how you live your personal life. I think this one's important. You've called me out on this before, and I've mentioned it on the podcast, the difference between exercising and training. And I found this interesting statistic the other day because with the workout app that I've been using, I was researching some of the outcomes that they record. And they have, I don't know, hundreds of thousands of people. They have 250,000 five-star reviews on this app. It's called FitBot if you want to look it up. But ultimately what

they've done is they've said that less or roughly 9%, I'll say roughly 9% of the people that do this actually complete a hundred workouts on their program. A hundred workouts. So the five days a week, that's 20 weeks. Okay. So call it five months. Okay. 20 weeks, five days a week, less than 10%. So call it 9%. People actually accomplish this. I find it so hard to believe that they have 250 five-star reviews, 250,000 five-star reviews, if less than 10% of the people do this thing five months. It's wild, but it tells you something. Can you be accountable for five months on something? So, I mean, just think about a work week, five days a week, a work week. What can you do five days a week for your job to create massive results for you? Because you know, with that accountability, if as an employee,

you buckled down every single day and did, call it an hour or two of productivity. One day a week or one hour a day, one to two hours a day, five days a week or 20 weeks, you would probably be the highest performer in your business. Seems strange, but it's true. Because people are inconsistent. Well, I mean, yeah, it's really all, it comes down to consistency and it's, whether it's your job going back to the, the workout piece, it's, you know, there's motivation. Isn't what gets you into the gym every morning. I mean, do you ever, when we wake up at five o'clock in the

morning, are you super motivated to jump up? No, it's not motivation that gets you in it's it's consistency, right? Right. And so it's just, it's, it's getting in there and the dedication and doing it, doing it day after day. And not every day is going to be a great day. You know, some days, some days you're in there, you're just pushing around weights and some days you're working really hard, but the consistency, it's the same as the compound effect. You do it every day. You're going to build on it little by little, by little, by little, and you're going to have better results. Shout out to Darren on the compound effect. Right on. Okay. If you haven't checked it out, check out Darren Hardy's book, the compound effect. Hey Darren. Hey Darren.

All right. Let's go on to number four. I think this one's really important because this both helps all things and solves all things. And that's communication. Communication, if you look at any problem that has started in the business, that has perpetuated, that hasn't been addressed or like a relationship, you know, the whole what's wrong, nothing. How you doing? Fine. You know, there's no communication. I'm not pointing my finger at her. What happens, what happens though, when there's a lack of communication, like what's, and it could be in a relationship. It could be business. Let's say you just, you don't hear from your boss. You don't hear from your partner. Let's say for 48 hours, we tell ourselves stories, fear. Yeah. Right. It's your first response is immediately

fear. Yeah. It's, it's not, you know, Oh, this makes me so happy or, or I'm going to just keep going through my life. And you know, someday I'll get some answers. It's fear is the first response that you get. And then you start thinking the worst and then you start building. Why haven't I heard from them? I must be doing something wrong. What was our last interaction? Like, did I say the wrong thing? Did I do the wrong thing?

Like you, it starts to fill you with fear and self doubt and all the scary thoughts. And then what happens to your productivity as a result of that? It tanks. It tanks because you, you just become consumed with all of the what ifs and what did I do's. Yeah, that's absolutely correct. I mean, the, the question I would have for everybody in this, I mean, this leadership trait is clearly incredibly important and that's communication. Have you communicated effectively with everyone that you need to? And what's the first thing that break off in a relationship? You know, when we stop communicating, when the number of days in between communication increases.

The longer it goes, the harder it is to crawl back and start that up again. Totally. the longer it goes, the harder it is to, to crawl back and start that up again. Totally. And it's, I, you know, you, you were in real estate for many, many years. How do you keep a customer ready to go is continue to communicate with them, right? So it's, you know, it's funny. I think the majority of people really loved working with a real estate agent, but they can't remember their name. Right. Because there hasn't been communication. There hasn't been regular contact between these people. Well, think about that with your friendships, with your relationships. You just, you have to always stay top of mind because you never know. You could have a client who just moved into a home who, you know, just purchased and went through the wholesale cycle and is, is truly happy, but you don't know if something happens to them a month later, two months later, where all of a sudden they need to, you know, make

some kind of a real estate change, whether it's in their current house, another house, whatever the situation is. But so you never know when your customers are going to need you. So you have to have that constant communication so that when the time comes, since you can't predict when that is for them, when they reach that point, you're top of mind and they'll reach out to you. Because I mean, especially with realtors, you know, they're a dime a dozen out there. There's a hundred that they can call and probably half of their neighbors have a real estate license. So if you're not constantly communicating with them, then you're not going to get that call.

Right. And I think it goes, you know, real estate is a great example. It obviously goes with pretty much any business model. You have your key customers. I don't care if you run a restaurant, who's that key customer? Who is the number one customer that you have walking the door? Communicate with them. Who are the local business leaders? If you're not in real estate, who is your top real estate agent in the area? Communicate with them because frankly, they know more people than you do, probably. And they're a great networking source. So. I mean, any business, any customer based business, those customers are going to have an option of who they can do business with, right? Like there's probably very, very few circumstances where there's only one person

that they can go to, but most customers have an option of who they want to go to, to get their business done. So if you're not communicating with them, you're not going to get their business. Right. And I think communication goes above and beyond just like being on social media or whatever. It also means outreach. It means directly messaging people via a phone call, text message, email. A video text message works great. I've seen a lot of strategies lately about sending video text messages, just one a month to customers. I mean, it literally takes 30 seconds. Yes. But I would also say too, if you're a leader, your customers and this process is going to be more for your direct reports, right? So you have to treat your direct reports

like customers because in the end they have more than one choice, right? If they don't like the way you're communicating with them, there's other leaders out there that they can go work for. Totally. So as a leader, you have to keep that communication open. And that brings me to number five. I'm so good. You are so good at this. You should have me on more often. I have lots of costumes too. We could do all kinds of things. We could have costume parties. Start with the wind. So number five. Okay. Number five. Appreciation and recognition. Oh, look at that. What a good segue.

Communicate with your employees as a leader. And how about love bombing them with a little appreciation and recognition? Wow. I mean, that's everybody's love language. It's interesting. This year, there was a statistic put out that it was like 57% of people don't want a raise. They want a new boss. And the reason they want a new boss, more than anything, is because they're not appreciated and recognized for the job that they do. And I know you say this all the time, but I'll repeat it. What are the two things you can't give yourself? Personal attention and appreciation.

And that's from Dale Carnegie, how to win friends and influence people. It's the two things we can't give ourself. Like you just said, personal attention and appreciation for crying out loud, go up to somebody and recognize them for something. And I've, I've experimented with this because you can tell when people are proud of something like, you know, they're, they're sporting a pair of Jordans or they have a nice, you know, a handbag or they just got their hair done. I mean, it's pretty clear when somebody is, is proud of something. Well, what if you went up and said, Hey, sweet shoes, man. And I did that one day, this, this kid was in the elevator where I was at a hotel someplace. And this kid had some,

you could tell they were like crisp new Jordans. And he's like, they're, you know, the, they're tied perfectly and the tongue's a certain way on them. And he's like, they're, you know, the, they're tied perfectly and the tongue's a certain way on them. And he's just like, stand there. He looks down at him and stuff. And I'm like, nice Jordans. Those are sweet shoes. He's just as huge smiles. Like, thanks. I go, are those new? He's like, yeah, yeah. I go, you're pretty proud of those, huh? And he's like, yeah. I mean, I made that kid's day by saying that. And it doesn't have to be some kid. It could be somebody down the hall in your business, walking up to them and going, I just want to say thanks for all the hard work you're doing. It doesn't have to be something specific. Sure. If there

is something specific, even better because they know you noticed. Yeah. But the reality is we as leaders take everybody for granted way too much. I'll just be the first one to say that. Yeah. And paying a bonus once a year is super nice. Everybody really appreciates it. But they want to know that somebody cares about their productivity and their outcomes.

Absolutely. And I would say I have an appreciation recognition don't. What's that? because I know people like this. I'm sure, you know, people like this too. The people that only hand out appreciation and recognition when they need something, right? Like they lead with, Oh my gosh, you were doing such a great job with that. I need you to do something for me. Right. Like they only give that out to like lessen the blow of a big ask. Prepayment. Yeah. Yeah. It's,

but like the asks wouldn't feel so big if you were always consistent with your appreciation and your recognition, then that's going to be people because by default, people are going to be more willing to do things for you, right? If you're always recognizing and appreciating them, then those asks aren't going to be so big. So here's an interesting psychological factor in that. There's a factor of reciprocity. Dr. Robert Cialdini talks about this in his book Influence and his other book, Persu Um, so the factor of reciprocity is people want to reciprocate kindness and giving after they've received it ahead of time.

And Gary Vaynerchuk wrote that book, jab, jab, jab, right hook where it's like, give, give, give ass. And you're not, first of all, and I totally agree with you, you're not giving appreciation or recognition so you can ask for something. But what you are doing is you're paying into this relationship account by giving appreciation or recognition. How valuable does that account become is the question. And the value of that account increases with the compound effect incrementally over time and sometimes massively because of certain payments into that account. But ultimately, here's the thing. You get to withdraw from that account every now and then. And that withdrawal might be employee productivity. You don't have to ask for it. Maybe the employee's like, I love working here. So I want to work harder for this company, boss, you know, leader, whoever it is, whatever they might be, because I feel like I'm

special. I feel like I'm important. I have personal fulfillment for doing this. And it's huge. It makes a big difference. They'll seek ways to contribute that are above and beyond their own job description. Totally. And what they're responsible for. And that in itself may eliminate the ask. Totally. From the leader in the first place. Yeah.

You're right. Yeah. Usually it's interesting because you get to that point nine times out of 10, they're just bringing stuff to you going, hey, I did this or I want to do this because I think it'd be great for the business or great for our customers. Like, whoa, OK, you're more invested in the company. Totally. Right. You, you've companies invested in you. Yeah. But you're more invested in the company. So that, you know, creates a whole snowball effect of, you know, wanting to work harder, wanting to succeed, wanting to help other people succeed.

Um, you know, job stability, less turnover, all of those things. Totally good stuff. Yeah. Are you going to wrap this up since it's your podcast? No, that part's for you. Thanks. Well, you make it look so easy. Oh, well, thank you.

I appreciate that. And thank you to Kelly for taking over or starting with a win today. That was fun. Having a good conversation, wearing your reindeer jam jams and letting me wear my jingly elf hat on our 2024 holiday episode. Here's my wrap up for everybody. These are all gifts. these are gifts of leadership gifts that you as a leader can give to the people that you lead that are touched by your leadership in any way shape or form including yourself gifts that you can give to yourself and you know granted it's

appreciation and recognition isn't exactly something we give to ourselves, but try hard to be a good leader so that that means you gain by giving those things. But the reality is these, these five things I think are my biggest leadership lessons for 2024, which is presence and obviously consistency and all these things,arity, accountability, communication, and appreciation and recognition. These are super important things. Huge leadership lessons here. A lot of examples.

If you go back and look at the year, go back and look at yourself. Say, where did I excel at these? Where could I have done better, frankly? And remember, leadership is not a sometimes thing. It's an all the times thing. And that's why we're here on Start With A Win. Thanks a lot for all you do. Have a wonderful new year, amazing holidays in 2024 and a prosperous 2025.

Thank you again to my amazing wife, Kelly, for holding me accountable to all these things. Thanks for letting me crash your podcast. I love you. I love you. I love you. All right. And we'll see you next time on Start With A Win.