Start With A Win - Nobody is Born a Leader

Episode Date: August 24, 2022

Leaders are not born, they are built through ongoing leadership development and learning the soft skills of leadership. Adam explores how this looks both in the corporate world as well as entrepreneur leaders. Main TopicsThe evolution of the Mark and Adam’s facial hair (0:30)How the economy boom of 2015-2020 impacted leadership development and how money flow hides the need for leadership (3:39) The definition of a leader and how to develop yourself as a leader (9:55)The three perspectives of leadership—leading yourself, leading others, leading your business—and how Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs influences each of these perspectives (17:00)  Episode Links"3 Key Leadership Secrets to Leading Your Business Like the CEO of a Multimillion-Dollar Corporation”: https://adamcontos.com/leadership Connect with Adam:https://www.startwithawin.com/https://www.facebook.com/AdamContosCEOhttps://twitter.com/AdamContosCEOhttps://www.instagram.com/adamcontosceo/Listen, rate, and subscribe!Apple Podcasts Spotify Google Podcasts

Welcome to Start With A Win, where we give you the tools and lessons you need to create business and personal success. Are you ready? Let's do this. Coming to you from brand Viva Media headquarters here in Denver, Colorado, it's Adam Kantos with Start With A Win. Producer Mark, how you doing, buddy? You know what? I am doing much better now that I fixed my beard. What? You fixed your beard? Have you ever been shaving and the guard protector falls off and then you trim into your beard deeper than you were hoping to trim? Yeah, it's like you're mowing the lawn and you like scalp a part of yes that happened to me this morning i was like no thankfully it was like right in the middle and then i did that trick that the barbers do where they like do shorter

and shorter around it so then it looks less noticeable i can't tell see that's perfect it worked out so then i was like all right now i'm starting starting with a win. That's a big deal to, you know, the beard. Yeah, for us bearded guys. Yeah, totally. It's like, you got to trim your beard, but then if you jack it up, it's like, my wife does not want to see me without a beard. Yeah. I had this conversation with Kelly the other day. I'm like, should I shave my beard? She goes, why would you do that? So I don't know any, we'll have to coordinate one of these days. We'll both just shave it. Yeah. Try it out. We'll both be in the dog house.

Totally. Yeah. I mean, the good thing about me is I look a lot younger, but then it's just like, you know, like engineer James, his dad has had a mustache his whole life. Like James can't even remember him without a mustache. She still has one to this day. Okay. And so, you know, you imagine if he shaves that off, it's like, who is this person?

Right. Yeah, it's interesting because if you grow it or you lose it, you lose some of your identity. Yeah. Bizarre. Yeah, when I was younger, I would, I didn't have a beard. And then I just did a little soul patch, you know, back in

the late 90s, early 2000s. In your rock star days? Yeah, yeah, exactly. That was cool to do, soul patch. And then I just did a little soul patch, you know, back in the late 90s, early 2000s. In your rock star days? Yeah, yeah, exactly. That was cool to do, soul patch. And then, I don't know. Actually, maybe it was when I started working at Remax. I started, you know, doing the light trim. Because then it was like, I don't have to fully shave every single morning. Right.

And then it became kind of fashionable to have this double kind of look. Well, we were a shave every day company for a while. Yeah, clean desk. Yep, clean desk, clean face. That's right. Well-dressed. And then we went to like Jean Fridays. Yeah.

And then we started going goatees. And then we got into beards. And now I think everybody's got... All the guys have beards. I don't... It doesn't matter to you because you no longer. Right. I don't work there anymore.

Exactly. But it was funny because I grew the beard when I became CEO. That was like the milestone. That was. I'm like, I'm going to be a bearded CEO. Yeah, because when we first started the show, it was like you were kind of co-CEO. And then you got the full job. And yeah, when we first started, you were like naked face.

If you go back to earlier episodes, you see his little baby face, Adam. Yeah. That's funny. It's been a lot of leadership change. A lot of leadership change. A lot of leadership growth. I guess the beard was part of it. Yeah. Growth. Yeah. Oh, wow. Good analogy. But you don't have to have a beard to be a leader, right? No, you don't. You got to have some training though, right?

You do have to have some understanding of where to start. You know, it's fascinating. And I guess that was a segue we just built there. Yeah, look at that. Build a bridge. But here's what I want to talk about today, Mark. I want to talk about building leaders. Building leaders.

Because that's really what I consider myself is I build leaders. And it's something that I'm very passionate about. And we've been working on a project together called the Leadership Factory, which is coming out here very soon. Coming out very soon. Yeah, I'm excited about it. And what we found over time in the corporate environment, in leadership, and to take everybody back, I've been involved in some form or fashion of leadership at Remax for probably a good 15 years. Then before that, I was a SWAT team commander. So did a great deal of leadership, high stress leadership, very dynamic situations where it's like you're playing a chess game on a timer, but the person across from you is holding a gun on you or something like that. And you're like, OK, I got to do this, got to think through that. But ultimately, what

it comes down to is leadership is a function of continuous mind growth and deployment of those philosophies, which is how we built Leadership Factory. We put a lot of those key aspects together. Now, when you back up in time, when you look at the economy and how business was flowing through the late 20-teens, late 20-teens, so between 2015 and 2020, for instance. 2020, essentially beginning when the pandemic struck. So let's go back to that five-year chunk. Businesses started accelerating. They started getting better. Productivity was increasing massively. We were making our numbers one after another. You saw all these IPOs and SPACs and private equity money, and it turned into really kind of

stupid money being invested pretty much anywhere. And it turned into really kind of stupid money being invested pretty much anywhere. And everybody's like, hey, we just got a billion dollar valuation. You're like, how much cash flow do you have? Well, none. But we got a billion dollar valuation. You're like, well, where are you getting this money? People are investing it in us. For what? I hope you're a good leader. So there was this demand for leadership, but we didn't get into leadership because we had money flowing. We had money flowing. And money flow really kind of hides the need for leadership. Productivity in a productive environment, because we have these productive cycles where just people are buying stuff left and right or services or things like

that, that hides leadership challenges and lack of leadership. 2017 hits, and everybody's like, bam, we're on fire, top of the world. People were buying and selling companies for billions of dollars. Salespeople were just making killer bank, buying big houses and fast cars and whatever else fun stuff they wanted. And people started realizing, well, wait a sec. Are we lacking leaders? And we started to see this gap form in leadership, this leadership gap. And we saw this after the Great Recession also in, call it, 9, 10, 11, where everybody had doubled down on focusing on survival. And we didn't grow leadership. It's a cycle.

It's part of the cycle of business is stop growing your leadership because you're either too busy or you're too scared. But that's when you need it is in those times. Right. Because you need to scale that growth

and you need to scale that, you know, reduce that fear and scale the continued application of business principles. So 2017, everybody started noticing we are lacking professional development, but nobody was saying anything about it because they're too busy making money. 2019, the studies are out. Two-thirds of businesses are saying, we need leadership development. We need professional development. We need to grow our leaders. And I was part of the C-suite at that point. I became co-CEO in 2017, CEO in 2018.

I was the chief operating officer in like 2016. So I've been in a C-suite since the beginning of this process here that we've been examining and got my MBA before that. And I mean, so it's been constant for me and I recognized it clear as day. This gap is widening. It's widening because we're failing to develop new leaders, and we're creating a succession problem. By the way, what is succession? Succession is building future leaders in your company to take over for the current leaders. Right. Okay?

So every current leader should have three successors. Three. Wow. Why? Because one might not choose to take the path when you pick from that three. One maybe decides it's not for them anymore, or maybe it decides it's not for them currently. And then the third hopefully ends up getting that. You have to have a backup plan for your backup plan.

You got it. And then it's interesting because each of those three people need to have three successors. Why? Because you don't want a gap in the leadership in your business at any level when people leave. Yeah. So it's almost like that idea of, you know, we talk about, you know, working on your businesses that have always in your business. Totally. And so many times it's easy, right? When times are good, it was, we're making money. We don't need to do anything. Things are great. We got no problems, right? I don't have to worry about anything. And then when times are hard, it's like, we're just trying to survive, just trying to make things happen. And you never can sit back and stop and think about, all right, what do I need to do in order to

make sure that my business can last and grow healthily? Exactly. And to pause on corporate leadership development or team leadership development, let's talk about the entrepreneur, the solopreneur for a second. I mean, you run a small business. You've been working on developing your team. And really, you end up looking at it going, OK, I'm kind of the manager, and then I have four or five contractors or employees or something like that. So I don't have leaders below me. I have other operators below me. But truly, what are you trying to do? You're trying to get them to make decisions for the business and the best interest of the business and the customers so that you,

as the leader, can observe that leadership occurring, and you can focus on growing the business instead of making those decisions yourself. So we're empowering people to get better and maximize their position in their job. Now, what we need to think about both on the corporate level as well as on the solopreneur level is how are we making ourselves better? Because ultimately, consumers follow leaders. The consumer wants to know that the CEO is a leader in a major corporation. The consumer also wants to know that the solopreneur is a leader. So let's say, I mean, we have a lot of audience that are real estate agents or in the mortgage business. Do you have to be a leader? Well, the answer is yes. You have to be a leader. And you have to think about your business separate from you.

Because ultimately, the consumer sees you and they see your business as two different entities. And then they combine the two together based upon your leadership and the trust and valuation of your business that the industry has given that, the other consumers, your ratings and stuff like that. When they read ratings, they're not going, Mark's a great guy. Even though it might say Mark's a great guy, they're going, is Brand Viva a good company? Do I want to do business with you? Or is Joe Smith Real Estate? Joe Smith Real Estate's a great company. Joe did a great job for me. It's still Joe Smith Real

Estate, and they're looking at Joe Smith as the individual comparatively in his leadership to run his business. So it's fascinating when you look at this, how do you develop these things? Now, I talked about the gap that was going on. 2019 hits, and everybody is screaming, we need leadership and professional development. Everybody's saying that massively. Why? Because we haven't had it for a few years. Everybody realizes, okay, something's going to change. I want to be ready for it. Well, what changed? Bam, March 2020, pandemic hits. Everybody shuts down. What happens? Those without leadership, even the solopreneurs, what do I do? I'm not prepared to make decisions in

tough times. Now, leadership is recognizing your emotions, understanding that process of taking and turning an emotion and a trigger of some sort, the pandemic, into logical action steps in order to achieve forward movement. Say that again. So it's recognizing that emotion and that trigger and turning them into action steps in order to achieve forward movement. Okay. That's like the definition of a leader.

It seems like it does. Yeah. And the definition of a leader changes for anybody who tries to define it. Somebody who can influence others to do something they normally wouldn't want to do. Stuff like that. I mean, really, it all comes back to the same point. You have a problem. You have to overcome the

interpersonal parts of that problem to find the opportunity. You make logical steps in order to achieve that opportunity. You take those actions in order to accomplish it. We don't like to move from the emotion to the action part in life. But if we have the training to do so, it's like being on the battlefield. Stuff's blowing up, people are dying, stuff's shooting, it's dangerous, whatever it might be. You have to make a life or death decision. And typically that decision is contrary to what you would really emotionally think. In a terrible situation, you want to kind of curl up in a ball in the corner

and cry it out or something like that. It's okay to process your emotions. It's not okay to ignore the actions that need to be taken, and that's what leaders point people to. That's great. And what I love about that too is because I feel like a lot of people will look at themselves and say, well, I'm not a leader. Like that's just not my personality type. I'm not a leader, but really when it comes down to it,

like anybody can be a leader and we all have that ability within us to rise to an occasion, right. And lead a situation. Well, thanks for bringing that up, Mark, because a lot of people say I wasn't born a leader. You know what? Nobody was. We were all born the same way, naked, scared, and alone. In the dark. Okay? Yeah, and hungry. And we're like, you know, just nobody was born a leader. Right.

But we take all these influences around us. But our job as adults, our mission as human beings genetically is how can we make ourselves better in order to along our, or along, in order to lengthen our lives and our careers and our potential. And some people are like, I'm fine where I'm at. Great. You're going to get worse if you don't get better. Pick one.

Yeah. But the reality is, yes, leaders are made. They're not born. Now, you might have been put in different environments by your family, your upbringing, your experiences, things like that, that give you other leadership exposure. But the reality is, you can consciously make yourself into a leader if you understand these concepts of leadership, the soft skills of leadership or leadership skills, if you want to call them, which to take us back a few minutes, we stopped developing in the late 20 teens. That's why the leadership factory exists.

We build leaders because they can be built. Yeah. And it's not difficult. It's a function of understanding these principles, putting them into play and having systems around them so that we activate those actions on a regular basis instead of, I need to go cry it out in the corner. Which it's okay to have emotions, but as a leader, if we learn how to deal with those emotions, we can still have that emotional challenge. We can still cry it out, if you will, have a realization of, I need to expel these emotions somehow and a system for doing so.

But ultimately, we can't get things done until we control our actions as a leader and we influence others around us, which means no jerks. It means systems and processes. It means understanding what's best for the company versus just me, myself, and I. And how do we gather people to follow us in that direction in life so that we can accomplish those things? and SWAT command leader, and then into the corporate world, all the way through the ranks of starting off as a sales guy and working your way up to customer management, all these other kind of things, and then MO, COO, and CEO. So the knowledge that you have and the experience that you have is just amazing. And I'm excited for the Leadership Factory and all the different courses and the different things that will be in there that I think will benefit people and

help them grow as leaders. Oh, thank you, Mark. And thank you for the compliments. It's very nice of you. I know you've been right alongside me for so much of this journey. You and I have been working together in creating Start With A Win. I had a book come out that was a lot about all the different things that you and I have talked about in here. And we've also done branding. I mean, we've built a big component of leadership, which is executive presence. And that's a key aspect of building a leader. So to really kind of wrap up this episode, but also kind of give people some value, we want you to think about three perspectives on leadership. Because leadership truly is leading yourself is the first perspective. Leading others is the next one, and then leading your business to create those

business results that you're looking for. That's the third one. So leading yourself, leading others, leading the business. And all of that really, it does a couple of things. One, it creates business results, obviously. Two, it helps other people. I guess you could say that should be ranked as number one. It helps other people. It creates business results, but it makes you happy and fulfilled. Remember Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And I talk about Maslow's hierarchy of needs quite a bit in the programs. Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a triangle and it starts at the bottom with safety. This is how we psychologically think and feel about ourselves, others, our situations,

our job, you name it. It all ties back to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. At the bottom is safety. Then you get up a little higher and you get into belonging and caring and things like that. You go from, all right, I have to have a job to, okay, I have a job, but do I have a team? Do I have a best friend at work? Do I have somebody I can rely on back and forth with to accomplish this? And then eventually at the top, and there are several different stages to this, but ultimately at the top is self-actualization. And that's what we're looking for in leadership. Leadership is an effort every single day that ends up culminating in self-actualization for yourself and for others where you're like,

wow, that was fantastic. And it might've been a loss for the day. You might've lost the game. Your team lost that day. Something didn't work. You had to throw it in the trash and start over again. But if you are a great leader, you recognize what you gained from it. And likely it was an expensive education if it was a loss, but it was an education. And what do you do with that education? If you do nothing with it, yep, you wasted your money. If you do something with it, how do you make that money well spent? So ultimately the leadership factory is to build you and it's to build others and it's to create results. Love it. I look forward to digging deeper into this. Totally.

In some future episodes. Well, hey, if you are interested in finding out more about the Leadership Factory, you can head over to adamcontos.com. And we actually have put together a PDF with three of the keys that Adam's found that generate a lot of success for leaders. And so if you want to head over there and download that free PDF and get more information, then you'll get on our list and then we'll kind of keep you updated as things continue to develop. And yeah. So until next time, remember, start with a win.