Start With A Win - 5 Practices to Become a Stronger Leader

Starting point is 00:00:00 And these five practices are basic strengths that if you have those, it allows you to move people. From a fitness perspective, strength is the ability to exert force and create movement. From a leadership perspective, it's pretty much the same thing. How do you act and get things to move in the direction you need them to move? Welcome to Start With A Win, where we unpack leadership, personal growth and development, and how to build a better business. Let's go. Ever wondered how to supercharge your business while reclaiming more time for what truly matters?

Starting point is 00:00:29 Today, we talk about that on Start With A Win. Coming to you from Area 15 Ventures and Start With A Win headquarters, it's Adam Kantos with Start With A Win. Today, we're sitting down with Christian Muntean, a powerhouse in leadership development and business strategy. As the founder of Vantage Consulting, Christian has helped businesses add over $500 million to their top line revenues and improve their bottom lines. Plus, he's the author of Train to Lead, a practical 90-day guide that uses athletic training principles to elevate leadership performance. If you're ready to take your leadership game to the next level, this conversation is one you can't miss. Christian, welcome to Start With A Win. Yeah, thank you, Adam. It's good to be here.

Starting point is 00:01:13 Awesome. Hey, I love talking about leadership, and that's what we're here to talk about. You're an amazing leadership coach, founder of Vantage Consulting. You help businesses and leaders grow. And you have a new book out here in 2024. So I want to get into all of those things. But take us back. How did you get into leadership development? Where did that come from? Yeah, so I got into leadership many years ago.

Starting point is 00:01:40 I used to be involved in international disaster relief work, community development work. So I worked all over the world in conflict zones and disaster zones. And what I saw was that we could be working in a very secure environment, relatively speaking, that was in a very well-funded or even overfunded projects, if you can believe that happens, and have a very hard time making anything work if our teams were not led well, or if our community partners were not led well. On the other hand, we could be in an active conflict in a very insecure area in an underfunded project with very little resources and achieve amazing things if our team was led well and or our partners were led well and so i just became fascinated with the very clear impact of leadership on efficacy and and

Starting point is 00:02:36 began to study that and began to pursue it wow and and your book came out of this, Train to Lead. And you use an athletic training metaphor in the book. What made you want to create a book that was a kind of a practical way for people to get handles on leadership. The standard leadership development program really is a firehose of concepts and then basically a slap on the back and don't screw up. I mean, that's basically most people's promotion experience, if they even get the leadership development program. And the challenge for most leaders is they don't know of all of the content that I've just been told, assuming you've been told it, or maybe just bought books or listen to podcasts. What of that is applicable to where I'm at right now and what concepts out there are actually dependent on other concepts to be successful and that stuff's not really discussed and so you get leaders that are very very focused on good concepts like you know taking ownership

Starting point is 00:03:55 or being a strategic thinker or being emotionally intelligent all of which is important but some of these have dependencies if you want to execute them well, or they just don't work on their own. And they're often not taught contextually. And so part of my background is also in athletics. And for 12 years, I was a strength and conditioning instructor as kind of a side hobby. And I wondered one day, why is it that we can train athletes? If you're training a marathon runner, if you're training, I train athletes and I would train, I had military folks come to my classes as well. And you could train people to peak out directly before their event or whatever they needed to be ready for. To the day, any good trainer knows how to have their athlete

Starting point is 00:04:46 peek out right before when it's needed. And I thought, why is it with leadership we can't do that? It's a well-studied topic. It's a frequently discussed topic, but it's still always just this idea of we just dump a bunch of ideas out there and hope something sticks. And so I thought, what if I applied some of the macro frameworks for putting together a training program to leadership to actually walk leaders through? These are the core concepts. It's not

Starting point is 00:05:21 everything that a leader will need to know, but these are the core concepts that a leader needs to know to become the kind of person to be effective in any leadership role, whether you're a beginning leader or in the middle of it, or even an experienced leaders, because many of my executive coaching clients have many, often decades of experience and they're often very successful. But the things that we end up talking about are often the very basic foundational elements. That's where a lot of my work with them is still at. So you can see that a lot of that was missed along the way. Okay. And I mean, I'll be the first one to say, you know, I grew up in, I was in the military right out of high school. We were very heavily trained in leadership. I mean, it was

Starting point is 00:06:06 Marine Corps really stresses on leadership development. I was in law enforcement. There was quite a bit of leadership development. I got in the private sector that was zero leadership development. And it was fascinating to me to go from a structured leadership development world into just a missing leadership development world. And even getting my MBA, the MBA process at a really good business school, and I teach there now. I actually teach executive presence leadership development there because it was missing. But I mean, it was missing. Why are we missing so much leadership development in society today? Why do you why do you think that is? I think it's that's a great question. I think I think it's because people confuse being skilled in one area with being able to be skilled in another area. So the thing that I see frequently in most businesses is the path to leadership is to be very technically proficient in whatever the business does, or to be very good at sales or business development. So if you can bring in money,

Starting point is 00:07:14 or you can perform well, and you're somewhat responsible, you're going to be promoted to management and eventually you get potentially promoted to an executive level position. That's kind of a typical path. And you get that in medical companies. I do a lot of work with construction and health. That's where a lot of my clients are at. And you see it in those spaces. Someone who's a very good project manager will get elevated to a general manager or president. And it's just not the same skill set.

Starting point is 00:07:42 Yeah, I guess we mistake tactical skill for people's skill or human skills. Yeah. Yeah. And, and even some of the tactical skills, I mean, they're just not the same, you know, what, what you need to do to be effective in the roles. It's just not the same thing. And honestly, on the military side, there is an excellent training material in the military. What I find with a lot of, because I coach not active duty, but I coach a lot of people who've separated and they've got their career elsewhere. And I find a lot of these individuals, I'm coaching actually an officer right now or a former officer. And the thing in the military is you always have a command and control structure behind you. So even though the leadership content is actually really, really good, you don't have to be good at it because

Starting point is 00:08:31 you've got the structure behind you that sort of forces leadership to work to some degree. And that's something that I think confuses some people coming out of those dynamics. Like, why doesn't leadership work? Why don't people respond to me this way? And it's because it's a different dynamic and you don't have this, this kind of background of, if you don't listen to me, there's consequences that you can't do in the civilian world. Right. I mean, here's the reality folks in the military, when you're told to do something, you have to do it. I mean, it's, or, or you can be brought up on some sort of administrative or even, you know, criminal charges for that matter. So, um, I mean, you, you do essentially, I hate to use the analogy, but you do kind of have a gun to your head. Um, it is forced motivation in, in many

Starting point is 00:09:17 aspects. And, um, you know, the, the reality is motivation only lasts as long as the person that is being forced, it's being forced upon wants it to. So you do get the minimum necessary out of a lot of people instead of the maximum possible. And realistically, a lot of military leadership is the fundamentals are taught, but the delivery is not in a lot of that. So this is really interesting. I love what you said about people confused being skilled in one area with being skilled in another as far as why leadership doesn't quite work as well. I think we have a leadership gap in business, frankly, in that we're not creating succession plans. We're not doing them in an organized manner where we're

Starting point is 00:10:03 actually developing layers of leaders in the organizations. And as a result, what we're getting is this gap. We have this very big gap that is going unaddressed in business, particularly right now, because I think we have a generation. I think the millennial generation is missing leadership training. Gen X got some from the baby boomers, and a lot of that was military industrial complex. Millennial did not get as much because it was, and this is, I'll be the first one to say, this is Gen X and boomers' fault. The whole participation trophy where we were okay with not being accountable for things. And we didn't instruct people, which is why we don't see it in high school and college education going on. Millennials, it's not your

Starting point is 00:10:50 fault. You haven't been trained on leadership. You should be. And businesses are responsible for doing that. But what can we do to institute better leadership training in business today? Because it's not like a one-time thing. You don't go to leader class and you're a leader. You have to do it every day, every week. Take me through your mindset on that and Christian, and let me know, how can we change the paradigm moving forward? When you say we, are you referring to like, you know, experts on the outside? Are you talking about like business leaders who might be listening, wanting to think about how they do that within their context? Let's say business leaders. Even if you're a solopreneur, you lead your customers, and that's why they follow you.

Starting point is 00:11:36 But predominantly business leaders themselves. So let's work for just the sake of the answer. Let's respond to someone who's leading a company. And I think in that, the primary and the reason I'm saying that is because there is a difference when you're a solopreneur or you have a role like what I do, which is your leadership is entirely about influence. And so if you want to be successful in that space, it has everything to do with how you set up the relationship and the credibility that you have and knowing how to maintain and build those two things quickly with a client so that you can be successful because you can't control anything.

Starting point is 00:12:18 All you can do is influence your client. When you're in a business, you do have some level of hierarchy and ability to make things happen. And that's not a negative or a bad thing, but there's that mix. And you do have this question of building your leadership bench and the need to have people who can step into management and or leadership roles, which is different than if you're like, I don't have a personal need for that in my business as a solopreneur. I think the primary thing that a leader can do in that space is personally be a student of leadership and applied leadership specifically.

Starting point is 00:12:56 Not just, I meet executives who are great readers, which is, I think is fantastic, but they don't always do the internal personal work. And what I talk about in my book is that leadership development is personal development. And that's a theme, not so much a theme that I talk about a lot, but it's a lot of the conceptual framework of the book is that you lead out of who you are. And if you don't do your own personal internal work yourself, then it's very difficult to be effective in applying any leadership skill or approach or tactic or strategy that you might learn. However, if you do really good personal internal work, then what comes out of you is more likely to be effective leadership, even if you aren't sure exactly what it is you're doing, if that makes sense. The most senior leaders in the company need to be bought into this idea that, oh, this is about me growing as a person so that I can impact other people. And then after that, it's good to have mentoring programs or internal

Starting point is 00:13:56 coaching programs. It's good to have access to leadership development opportunities. There's various ways to do that. And I think those are all important and valuable, but I think none of that works well if the senior leaders don't get it, so to speak. And it's all intellectual for them or they think it's a skill and they don't understand that it really has to be about personal change. I love that. And this takes me back to something that one of my personal mentors told me probably three decades ago or 25 years ago, let's call it, where I asked for some leadership mentoring. And I said, what's one of the best things that a leader can do? And he said, you have to be a sponge. And I said, oh, I have to learn a lot about leadership? He said, no, it's not about learning leadership. That's only half the story. He said,

Starting point is 00:14:50 a sponge soaks things up and then gives things back. So when you think about it, a sponge will soak up a liquid and you squeeze it and that liquid comes back out. That's the learning that you just had as a leader. And now you're giving it back out to all those that you lead. So ultimately, I mean, Christian was spot on with this. So many leaders make this mistake of going, oh, I'm going to do some leadership development. I'm going to read a book. I'm going to take a class. I'm going to get a coach, whatever. And there's like this wall between where they learn and what they give. And the giving is not reflective of the learning.

Starting point is 00:15:29 It just doesn't. And really what we end up doing is we continue this churn of our daily habits. And you could be the hungriest person and read the best books. But if you don't do something to teach people what you just learned about leadership, you're worthless as a leader. And let me say that again, folks, you're worthless as a leader. And you might go, that's offensive. But the reality is it's true. Our job as leaders is to build leaders, simply put. So Christian, that was incredible. I want to jump into your book a little bit.

Starting point is 00:15:59 You talked about core concepts. What are some of these core concepts you talk about and why should we be focused on those? Build us a little bit of a foundation here on this show that somebody can, you know, learn and walk away and be that sponge and help some others. Yeah. So the core concepts that I, the field of leadership is massive. It's just huge. And so I wanted to identify what were the core issues. And part of this just came from, I've been coaching and consulting for 20 years. And so I've got some experience with that. And what were the repeated issues that keep coming

Starting point is 00:16:37 up with my clients that I just see over and over and over again, every single year, there's certain things. So I wanted to look at that. And then I also looked at research because my part of my background, my graduate work was in leadership. And so I wanted to know what was the research, what are evidence-based practices that actually will work as opposed to, this is just a cool sounding idea or kind of the buzzword of the moment. And so that's where I pulled that from originally. And the way I structured the book as it relates to fitness, and hopefully this helps, you know, with providing your listeners with something they can hold on to, is the way I structured it is the way you would structure a training program in the sense that if you really want to be effective as an athlete, or you just

Starting point is 00:17:19 want to get in shape, wherever you're at on that spectrum, it begins in the kitchen, so to speak. So athletes need to eat well, they need to sleep well, they need to have good personal habits, because you can't out train poor personal habits, you can't out train bad sleep, you can't out train being under hydrated, you can't out train eating badly, you just can't. Same thing with leaders, if the inputs in your life, the people that you hang around, the podcasts that you listen to, the things that you read, the media that you expose yourself to, all of that, if it doesn't somehow build you and encourage you and feed a perspective, which is constructive, then it's either of no value, then it's a waste, or it's actually toxic

Starting point is 00:18:06 in some way. And it's making you cynical or making you pessimistic, or it's giving you a narrower worldview that provides less options for leading within. Any of those kinds of things can happen. So I start with that, with really insisting that leaders curate the influences that come into their life. And any very high performer, maybe not any, but I would say the majority of very high performers are usually very alert to those influences and curate them carefully. It's a fairly common trait of exceptional performers. So that's the starting point. And then I move on to what I compare with conditioning. And most fitness programs at most gyms are really just conditioning programs. They're not really teaching you a skill. They're just about moving your body. And conditioning classically is

Starting point is 00:18:59 intended to prepare your body for stress. So in the military, you go to boot camp and you go through what's now very much a conditioning program, mostly to help prepare people for stress, to be able to handle 100-pound packs, to be able to handle getting knocked around and all those kinds of things. And you have to build into it. You can't just jump straight into it

Starting point is 00:19:19 or you'll hurt somebody. And so I talk about corollaries for that in leadership. What are the basic preparations for stress, so to speak, that you need to have in your life? And that really has to do with being able to follow through on things regularly, that has to do with knowing how to be patient, knowing how to wait for the right timing on things and for things to not push on things when that's going to hurt it, and so on. So there's some core elements of self-management practices that when leaders have them in place, it's so much easier for them to do anything else. And when they don't have them in place, it's so much easier for them to do anything else. And when they don't have them in place, they're perpetually working against themselves. It's like they create their own headwinds. And I find this to be very, very common. Is this helpful,

Starting point is 00:20:16 the way I'm framing this? Yeah, this is great. Keep going. This is fantastic. What I've got so far is, you know, it begins in the kitchen. So, you know, you've, you're building this foundation, diet, sleep, what you expose yourself to, and then we're in conditioning. So, um, now it seems like we're starting to get that repetition of building upon growth, if you will. Yeah. And so if you're going to actually now, if someone's eating well, sleeping well as an athlete, they've got a basic conditioning framework as a leader. If you've curated the influences that you have in your life and you've got positive

Starting point is 00:20:52 influences and you've reduced or eliminated toxic ones, and you've got good self-management practices, the next phase or topics to pay attention to are strengths. As an athlete, strength is the foundation for anything else you do. Even if you're a marathon runner, if you don't build some level of strength, then you're only enduring in a state of weakness. You really have to have a foundation of strength. And so the core leadership strengths, I identify five, and these are very heavily research-based that come from Kuzas and Posner wrote a book called The Leadership Challenge. And they identify five leadership practices that's really well known.

Starting point is 00:21:32 So I kind of extrapolated from those that has to do with the ability. And these are classic leadership skills, the ability to inspire shared vision, the ability to model the way that we were talking about that earlier, the ability to challenge processes effectively, to enable others to act, to help them grow and become more able people. And then the last is to encourage the heart. And these five practices are basic strengths that if you have those, it allows you to move people. From a fitness perspective, strength is the ability to exert force and create movement. From a leadership perspective, it's pretty much the same thing. How do you act and get things to move in the direction you need them to move? And what I find with leaders is that they have difficulty getting things to move. Almost always, at least one of

Starting point is 00:22:28 those strengths or maybe two are deficient in some way. And what they tend to do is focus on one or two might be more natural to them, or it was what they really responded to in training, but there'll be one or two that are gone. So maybe someone is a very great visionary and they're good at challenging the process, but they're not a very good encourager. And that's the soft skill. And oftentimes we underestimate the importance of being an encourager.

Starting point is 00:22:56 And the way I frame encouraging, being an encourager is not slapping someone on the back and saying you did a good job. It's being able to, going back to the root word, is being able to put courage into somebody to make somebody feel confident that they can take on a challenge, that they can take on a bigger battle than what they faced before. That's the real concept of encouragement.

Starting point is 00:23:23 Then after that, to apply strength quickly, decisively to change direction in something is power. So you layer power on strength after you've built a foundation of strength. You do this when you're training athletes and for leaders, if they built these foundations, then when they get to power moves where you need to be more decisive, where you might need to use your hierarchy or your command and control structure, then you're not going to be damaging people along the way. And what you do will be sustainable. So I identify just three areas, conflict, crisis, and change, where sometimes you need to exercise power to change the course of how things are moving right now. Then I move on from that to looking at endurance. So after you've got a foundation of strength, power, you can begin to looking at training

Starting point is 00:24:16 in endurance, being able to stay in it over the long haul. And I look at endurance as well as mobility, kind of put these concepts together. And really, it's looking at what are practices that leaders who have been in leadership for a while need to have in place so they don't burn out. Because many leaders just cry, get tired, they of yourself, how to be resilient over the long haul, because you're going to face mistakes, you're going to face disappointments, setbacks. How do you keep going? And so that's pretty much the arc of the book. So I guess to your readers, if there was a takeaway, it would partially be to identify where you feel like you have developed so far. Make sure you haven't missed some of these foundational elements, because if you're struggling to create change, for example, it's possible that some of your – it's actually very likely that some of your strengths have not been fully developed. Or maybe even some of this conditioning, self-management has not been put into place. And so that was partially what I wanted to communicate in the book was that there are dependencies on these things. Like you can't

Starting point is 00:25:36 actually be effective in resolving conflict in your workplace if you haven't done the work to build personal credibility early on. If you yourself have a pessimistic view about conflict, if you're also a poor self-manager and so you don't have, maybe you've contributed in some way and you're not owning it. And you find that those things sort of contribute, make it harder to do other leadership tasks later on down the trail. Interesting. Well, it seems to me like this is fundamentally what you're talking about here in Train to Lead is a lot of the key aspects that we as leaders are missing internally. And then we go to the field and try and play in the leadership space. And because we're missing these fundamentals to begin with, or these core concepts, as you talk about, we're not effective as a leader. So, you know, I can't stress this enough to leaders. It begins with you. You know, you just, you don't put on your leader hat and become a leader. You have to train to become a leader. And it's fascinating

Starting point is 00:26:39 when you think about that word train, or, you know, I would take you to a story that my wife actually told me. My wife has trained for fitness competitions and she and I train together every single day. And it was funny because we were in the gym and I was wandering around. I was moving a little bit of weight around here and there, but I really didn't have a system to what I was doing. And she looked at me, she goes, what are you doing? And I said, I'm working out. She goes, no, you're not. I was like, well, I'm at the gym and I'm lifting some weight. She goes, you're just exercising, which isn't making you any better. She said, if you don't have a program, you're really not training and you have to train to get better. And I, when I, you know, saw this opportunity to have this conversation with you, I'm like, oh my gosh,

Starting point is 00:27:31 this is exactly what I need to hear as, as do so many other leaders out there. What happened was I got back on a training program in, in like, it probably less than three months, I saw massive explosive growth. And it was fascinating. And it's testament to exactly what you're talking to in a physical realm. But ultimately, it's so simplistic, folks, that we live in that same realm, in our leadership, in our business, in our fitness, in our health. These fundamentals are the same. So I would encourage you to check out Christian in his book. Christian, where can we find Train to Lead at and where can we find you online? Yeah, you can find me at christianmuntean.com and you can get links to a lot of different content

Starting point is 00:28:23 related to the book. You mentioned succession planning. So there's content on that. Tons of free content there. The you can get the book anywhere you can get it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, anywhere you buy books, you should be able to get a copy of Train to Lead. Awesome. And I train to lead just came out in June, I think, of this year, June of twenty twenty four. So congratulations on your book launch. I know that's always a big mountain to climb, having put a book out. The reality, folks, is we don't have enough leadership training going on.

Starting point is 00:28:55 And this is a great foundational aspect. It actually takes you into the advanced aspects of leadership as well. So without what Christian talks about in his book, you don't have leadership. I'll just put it simply out there that way. Make sure you check out Christian online and also get yourself a copy of Train to Lead and also buy your colleagues one because this type of education is something that peers can share and we can talk to as a group within the organizations. A lot of organizations that Christian has coached by the book for a lot of people in there. So I encourage you to do that.

Starting point is 00:29:29 Christian, I have a question I ask all the great leaders on our program, and I'm sure you have a good one being a professional trainer here. How do you start your day with a win? So my first big win of the day is an accumulation of little wins. My first big win is getting my kids to school on time. So it's pretty basic. Getting to school on time requires that I get up on time, that I get my workout in on time, that I move myself through my routine in the morning so that I can get them to school on time.

Starting point is 00:30:02 So that's that. If I do that, I feel like I've started my day off correctly. many people find a way or a reason to skip it. Getting it in first thing, you didn't skip it. You got it in. And believe me, folks, those of us that hit the gym first thing, we want to sleep in just like you do. But we push ourselves out of that and we go and accomplish that because it makes a big difference in your day. Getting those kids to school on time, so important. And being part of that morning with your kids. You cannot give that up for anything, folks. So please, please concentrate on that. Christian Muntean, trained to lead the unstoppable leaders plan for peak performance. This has been a great conversation. I appreciate your time. I appreciate all you do for leadership. And thank you for being on the show. And thanks for starting with a win. Yeah, thank you for having me.

Start With A Win - 5 Practices to Become a Stronger Leader

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