Start With A Win - Lead Your Team with Accountability, Presence, and Passion

Episode Date: September 29, 2021

In this episode of Start With A Win, Adam and SWAW producer Mark pick up the conversation about Adam's first book, Start With A Win: Tools and Lessons to Create Personal and Business Success. Adam covers takeaways from chapters five, six, and seven. He explains how success takes time and does not occur overnight. Adam elaborates the core differences between managers and leaders—managers tell people how to do things, leaders provide direction and inspiration. Good leaders work to make other people great leaders rather than devote entirely to self-improvement. Adam breaks down the concept of accountability—witnessing without judgment. Accountability is the first step of understanding but is often mistaken for the beginning of condemnation. Accountability enables people to evaluate processes and goals and adjust as needed. Adam addresses fear and overwhelm, revealing a leadership spin-off from the VUCA concept (traditionally an acronym signifying volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity)—vision, understanding, clarity, and action. This concept focuses on creating a plan to overcome overwhelm, accomplished with a concrete action plan. Otherwise, overwhelming feelings will spiral if not addressed and resolved. Leading is about creating teams with a shared vision and direction. Adam emphasizes the importance of presence and passion for people and your work. Implementing this mindset enables better relationships with your employees and customers. Lack of communication is often the leading cause of issues within teams and businesses. Adam recommends connecting with your team and customers at least twice a week face-to-face, if possible, to maintain relationships. Two communication takeaways:Ask yourself: If you are your customer, would you choose you? Don’t center all communication about your business or selling. Pre-order your copy of Start With A Win: Tools and Lessons to Create Personal and Business Success:https://www.amazon.com/Start-Win-Lessons-Personal-Business/dp/1119807077https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/start-with-a-win-adam-contos/1138838681https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/start-with-a-win-tools-and-lessons-to-create-personal-and-business-success_adam-contos/28078881/#edition=58850831&idiq=46017298Connect with Adam:https://www.startwithawin.com/https://www.facebook.com/REMAXAdamContoshttps://twitter.com/REMAXAdamContoshttps://www.instagram.com/REMAXadamcontos/ Leave us a voicemail:888-581-4430

Every day is filled with choices. You're here because you're choosing to start with a win. Get ready to be inspired, learn something new, and connect with the win nation. Coming to you from Denver, Colorado, home of Remax World Headquarters, Adam Cotto, CEO of Remax here with Start With A Win. Mark, see the book? Oh, yeah. I'm stoked about the book. There it is. There's the corner. Let's go. It's just part of it right there. For those of you listening.

That's right. And if you're listening, head over to Amazon or wherever you like buying your books and pre-order the Start With A Win book. We're going to continue our conversation through the different chapters of this book. Today, we're going to talk about chapters five through seven and get an overview and some inspiration. I'm excited. Let's go. Awesome. All right. Well, let's jump into chapter five. This is about leadership learnings. There's a lot that goes on in leadership. I think everybody would, would agree with that. And there are some key tips and tidbits of information to jump into chapter five that I could, I could tell everybody. The first one is actually a sign that hangs behind me. Stay hungry,

stay humble. A great leader's mantra. I mean, we have to always look for opportunities to get better, and then we have to go pursue those in order to be better. And it's all these little things that add up in leadership. You know, it's winning big by a lot of small wins. It's not winning big by one big win. You don't ever meet somebody who played football who's like, yeah, I started in December December and I won the Super Bowl in January. I mean, it just, life doesn't work that way in anything, anything. But that's kind

of like the dream of success is let's make it quick and easy and I can have my lifelong success and I don't have to do anything else. I mean, no, sorry. Life is not that way. So we've got to have this habit of repeating the basics every day. Consistency, consistency is really, you know, that's the stay hungry, stay humble part is go, how can I be better? And how can I try to be better every single day? So we continue to work on those things. And it's interesting because people go, okay, how do I do things each day? What should I do as a leader? You should lead others. Yeah. So Mark, you and I talk a lot about leadership learnings, you know, and I mentioned

be a sponge many times in the past. I mean, it's about trying to get better, right? Yeah. Yeah. I think if you're focusing too, right, it's like, what can I learn today in order to encourage somebody else? Or, uh, you know, I think throughout my day, right. I consume so much motivation stuff or quotes or different things like that, that then inspires me to say, Oh, you know what? I should text, you know, or-so. At our office, we have a Slack channel called Motivation. And I'm always putting in quotes from different people and whatnot in there. But again, I wouldn't have those things to share to encourage somebody if I wasn't first filling my own tank with those things. It's funny you say that because leaders learn, learners lead, but they give back.

You know, they take this information, that hunger that they have, and they take it and carry it on with humility and ask great questions that help them help others. Because your job as a leader is not to make yourself a great leader. Your job as a leader is to make other people great leaders. That kind of takes me to my next point of people make mistakes. People do make mistakes. And so many times leaders, let's call them managers in this particular situation, don't tolerate mistakes because they demand perfection. The reality is perfection is a myth. It is absolutely a myth. And you have to have accountability in your life. You have to have accountability as a leader.

But what is accountability? That's a good question, right? What's the definition of accountability? It's funny. I sat in a room of leaders not long ago, like true leaders. They are their title, their pay. They have people that they lead. And I said, what's accountability? And everybody just kind of looks at each other. They're all sitting on their hands going, I ain't going to answer

that. Who's going to answer that? Because nobody knows. Nobody knows what accountability is. You know what accountability really is? It is witnessing without judgment. Witnessing without judgment. It's kind of funny because when you witness something, I mean, let's say you have a goal of 10 of whatever it might be. Let's say it's 10 podcasts. Well, let's witness what you did. You did nine or eight or whatever, or you did 10 or you did 12, but what did you witness? Life is that simple. What did you witness? And you talk to your kids instead of what did you do? What are we witnessing here? Is really the question you can ask because kids expect

condemnation. So everybody feels accountability is the beginning of condemnation. It's not. It's the beginning of understanding. Okay. It's just understanding. We either did what we're supposed to, or we didn't. One or the other. And that's okay to admit if you did not make it. But why? Was it because we got distracted, didn't do the right thing, or maybe we gave it our all? Is it okay not to reach your goals if your goal was set too high and you gave it your all and you actually outperformed where you normally would have? Absolutely. Because sometimes we're not realistic with our goals, but maybe we raise the bar in the process. So anyhow, it's interesting when we look at it that way.

So one of the other things I want to talk about in chapter five, should you as a leader provide verbatim instruction on something? Should you go in and tell somebody, here's what I need to do. Here's how I want you to do it. Step one, step two, step three, step four. Or should you not? What do you think, Mark? Well, you know, I feel like if you're a good leader, the people who you're leading, you should allow to do what they're supposed to do in the way that, um, that they maybe do it best or, you know, maybe they solve a problem in a different way that you do. And so I feel like

if you're trying to micromanage or tell them exactly how to do these certain things a certain way that, uh, I don't know if that's really good leadership because you're not really leading. You're just telling them, you know, to do X, Y, and Z. Yeah, you're managing people. You're 100% correct in the answer, Mark. I'm glad you got that. I've been listening, Adam. You're 100% correct there, Mark.

And frankly, it doesn't surprise me because you're a great leader. But the reality here is managers are those that come in and tell people how to do things. Leaders are those that give them the direction and the inspiration and say, go do it. Because pretty much every time, people will outperform your expectations if you don't tell them what your expectations are. Right, right. So how do we lead through inspiration instead of managing through steps? Here's what I would love to see done. How you get there?

Surprise me. And the interesting part is even the leaders learn on that. So it's fascinating when you look at it that way with some vulnerability, some humility, back to stay hungry, stay humble, you can get so much done. So that's chapter five. Love it. All right. 10 minutes, chapters six and seven. Let's go. All right. All right. So chapter six, from chaos to calm, build your action plans. So the reality is we all function in a world of fear and overwhelm, fear and overwhelm, the beast.

I talked about the beast, party with the beast, remember? It's always there. So really what we need to understand is how do you overcome some of these fear situations when you're leading people in order to accomplish things? So people stop doing things when fear and overwhelm creeps in. Fear and overwhelm creeps in. So there's chaos. There's chaos. So how do we build our action plan? Truly, what does an action plan do?

Because ultimately, when we have this, let's take the pandemic, for instance, and everything that happened in 2020. There's a term that I have listed in the book that was from the Army War College during the Cold War. It's called VUCA, V-U-C-A. VUCA. VUCA. Love VUCA.

Yes. So it means volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. It's about the fog of war. When you have so many overwhelming aspects that are against you coming at you at the same time, everything from the enemy themselves to unknown situations that are scary, to some sort of a propaganda effort where they're trying to turn other people against you, to this self-doubt, to your home life, and all these other different aspects that impact you in some way, shape, or form that create this

doubt in your mind and make you overwhelmed so you can't really function. There's something called VUCA Prime, which is the antithesis of VUCA, which is how should we look at this volatile situation? The VUCA situation is so horrible with us. And the reality of this is you just need to, let's go through it. V-U-C-A, the V stands for vision. Vision. And the U stands for understanding. The C stands for clarity. And the A stands for agility. Although I like to replace that with action. So vision, understanding, clarity, and action to overcome this overwhelm. So simply put, when we get afraid and we run into problems, make a plan. Make a plan. Don't let it overwhelm you because you know what happens when overwhelm starts happening more overwhelmed. Overwhelm is like a bad high school party. More people get

let in and more people get let in and more people get let in. And you're like, mom and dad are going to be pissed. Dang it. I just invited four people. But it's in your head. The reality is when you break it down into some steps and a vision and understanding and clarity and taking action, we can overcome anything. That's how we get through that chaos and turn it into calm. Yeah. I think too, I think I feel like a lot of my, um, you know, friends who are also, you know, business owners or entrepreneurs, I think a big thing that bogs them down to is keeping everything in their head, you know? And I've found that a lot of times if I just write things down or, you know, put them on a whiteboard and I kind of like visually see these things,

it brings a lot of like calm to where it's like in my head, things are very overwhelming. There's a lot of stuff going on and I got a lot of things doing all this stuff. And then when I kind of map it all out, it's like, oh, okay, okay. We can, we can do this. You know, Mark, when you see your plan, you can execute your plan. That's it. If you can see the roadmap, you can get there simply put. So that's a great example. In fact, right there off camera, I have my whiteboard with all of my stuff on it. You know, if you can visualize it, it helps so much. You know, let's, let's talk about chapter seven though. Let's talk about chapter seven. Cause we talked about some of these things that, you know, some of the hardships, the emotional hardships, things like that, but ultimately leading is about creating teams, right? It's

about creating teams that have a shared vision and a shared direction and influencing and enrolling those people and accomplishing those things. So chapter seven is about presence and passion for your people and work. So how do we, how do we have this amazing group of people that work together? I mean, first of all, we have to accept responsibility. I feel responsible for 140,000 agents around the world. I'm 140,000 agents in REMAX. I'm responsible for those families and the families of my 600 employees. I have passion for everything going on with them and really have this desire to do what's best for them. So if you look at things that way

and you look at your customers that way, here's a question I have for you. Based on your passion and how much effort you're putting into this, if you were your customer, if you were your customer, would you choose you? Or would you go somewhere else? It's a good question. It's like the whole idea of a lot of times we are suspicious of other people

and the way they do things because we know our own selves will be that way or do that thing or not be honest or whatever in a situation. And so we're always suspicious of somebody else when in reality, they probably aren't doing whatever we think they are. It's just that it's our own like, oh, we're being lazy. And so we think that, oh, someone else is being lazy because I'd be lazy if I was them, you know, kind of thing. Exactly. And you know what the majority of the problem is? Lack of communication. If you have a present, if you have a passion for something and you have customers or

employees, almost every time the problem that is created in your business is created because of lack of communication almost every single time. And I mean that, that comes both as visibility, as well as, you know, other forms of presence. I'm not saying text messages or an email. Let's put those aside. So let's take, for instance, because I have written in my book, visibility makes a difference. Let's say you have a troubled, a challenged customer or an employee, okay? Or just somebody on your team, a customer or on the team, and there's a problem, challenge, disconnect between you, put them on a great communication plan. And I would suggest, you know, if you're not face-to-face with that employee, at least have two face-to-face conversations, personal conversations a week. How are you, Mark?

I just want to stop by and see how you're doing. Don't talk about business. Same thing with your customer. Don't talk about business. Don't sell. Care. Call them twice a week or sit down in front of them twice a week or video them twice a week. Video is better than just a phone call. Okay. Phone calls are better than a text message and video is better than all that. In person. But, um, ultimately put them on a communication plan at some point that twice a week, it's going to go to once a week, and then it'll probably go to twice a month, but you'll have such an amazing relationship. And I've had, I, this is a strategy of mine in order to maintain relationships. If I've waned from a relationship and I'm be honest with yourself, We all have. Yeah. You want to reinstitute that

relationship? Twice a week. And then work backwards from there. So, you know, when you think about this, you think about employees, you think about customers, things like that. The reality is like, take COVID, for instance. You know, a lot of companies lost customers during COVID, right? The reality is those customers continue to want to buy that product or service. They just weren't buying it from you. They were going somewhere else. So if you look at your customers that way and go, well, they're still buying this, you know, they still have this desire to have this product or service, where are they going to get it? Why am I not there? So connect, connect. That's a key part of this book. It's about connecting with people. So I want to end this chapter with one more statement. Ultimately, this is about, you know, caring and connecting with people. Top of mind is first in line. Okay. Top of mind is first in line for anything, for employees

who want help, who want comfort, who want coaching to maximize and optimize their potential or the customers who want a place to do business. Top of mind is first in line. What is top of mind? Top of mind is what's in the front of your brain. I've seen it recently. Don't be in the back, in the long-term memory. Be in the front, in the short-term memory, repeatedly, and you will always be there because you're always in front of them. So a lot of interesting thoughts in these chapters, but ultimately, it's about overcoming challenges and being present for people. Tools for your toolbox to be a better leader. Fantastic. All right. Well, I look forward to the next conversation where we wrap up the chapters in the book. And listen, if this has

been great content for you, make sure that you subscribe to the podcast as well as go to startwithwin.com and pre-order your book. We got a lot of great perks where if you buy a certain amount of books for maybe you, a friend, maybe you have a team that you're looking to inspire and motivate, you get some perks. So go to the website, check out what those are. And until next time, start with a win. you