Start With A Win - The Five C's of Leadership: Unlock Your Potential Today with Adam Contos

Starting point is 00:00:00 How can you be a better leader today? Today, we share five ways to be a better leader right now on Start With A Win. Welcome to Start With A Win, where we unpack franchising, leadership, and business growth. Let's go. And coming to you from Start With A Win headquarters at Area 15 Ventures, it's Adam Kantos with Start With A Win. I get this question a lot. I've run public companies.

Starting point is 00:00:23 I've been in charge of a lot of people before. I've been in very difficult life or death situations as a leader. These five things continue to come up, and they're all valid right now, today, to your leadership. Now, a lot of people think leadership takes a long time to learn, and they're right. It does. Because you need some experience. You need experience making decisions,

Starting point is 00:00:45 moving things forward, leading people, influencing them to improve themselves in order to be a great leader. But these things you can talk about, think about, use today to build your leadership. I call this the five C's of leadership. Let's start with the first one. This is really important. You got to know what you're talking about. You got to know what you're doing. Competence. Nobody likes working for an incompetent leader. There's nothing worse than going, my boss has no idea what they're doing and thinking they're going to lead you through what you're supposed to be doing. That doesn't work. You have to have competence. You have to know your job, know what's going on in your business. You don't have to know everybody else's job and the details of that, but you have to be your job, know what's going on in your business. You don't have to know everybody

Starting point is 00:01:25 else's job and the details of that, but you have to be competent in understanding the strategy and the direction of the organization. How to get there? What do you need? What do you have that you don't need? What's getting in the way? How do you develop your people? They all want to know that you have competence. Competence is knowing the direction and being able to deliver because you understand the space, you understand the challenge and how to pursue opportunities, really, because challenges are opportunities. You're competent. You're not incompetent. We hear that word a lot now. That person's incompetent. Yeah, we've seen a lot of people end up in leadership roles that are incompetent. I'm sorry, but that doesn't work for me. You've got to have competence, the first C of leadership.

Starting point is 00:02:08 This means you have to be learning all the time. While you're learning, you're also giving. So you're developing your competence all the time and you're developing the competence of those that you lead all the time. You help those that you lead get better because what you want is all these different eyeballs looking all these different directions with this competence in their brain and in their hearts going,

Starting point is 00:02:30 ooh, I see opportunities here. Let's all work together to achieve those. So that's the first one, competence. Competence. You got to know what you're doing and be learning. It's okay to not know, but it's not okay to stay that way. So go learn. The second one, communication. Communication. People want to know that you're delivering knowledge and you're delivering direction to them. Hey, communication, we have to communicate regularly. Now, what are the ways we can communicate? Let me go into this a little bit. Nobody wants an email from their boss once a week going, here's what we're doing, because that does not inspire anybody. What they want to do is they want to hear it from your mouth, see it from your face, feel it from your heart, your body, your presence as a leader. action. Not just makes people wonder, oh, is this what I need to be doing? For crying out loud, we got to be that competent communicator. And people will go, whoa, that person knows what

Starting point is 00:03:32 they're doing and they're here for me all the time. I have a saying, presence creates trust. Presence creates trust. So the more we are present, the more we communicate to the people that we lead, that we aspire to lead, the more trust we build. That trust allows us to transact with those people because trust leads to transactions. Now, those transactions might not just be a monetary transaction like we're selling them a service or a product. That transaction might be us offering a suggestion, them accepting it and pursuing it. That's a relationship transaction. Maybe it's us just giving into a relationship, but we have to have trust in order to give

Starting point is 00:04:12 into the relationship. So we have to communicate in order to accomplish those things. There's such thing as over-communicating, but that's only if you're not delivering value. If you're delivering value and not just trying to make noise, a lot of people just want to talk. Unfortunately, they just become noise. They blend in with the background. That's not communication. All that is is them nervous in their ways, trying to fill in the space with sound, them just talking. And you'll recognize that with people. They're space fillers. That's not communicating. That's, again, filling space, using up some oxygen in the room, and frankly,

Starting point is 00:04:51 kind of ruining the trust of the people that they're delivering their message to because the message is so convoluted. Typically, they don't know what they're talking about. So first one's competence. Second one is communication. Third one, okay, we know what we're talking about. We're delivering it regularly. How do we need to deliver this? We need to deliver this with the third C, confidence. Confidence. So have you ever seen a confident leader?

Starting point is 00:05:19 That person with the gravitas. By the way, gravitas is one of the key aspects of being an executive. When you walk into a room, you want that gravitas, that stature, that appearance, that ability to confidently communicate to people. That's what creates leaders. Confidence. People want to hear from you and believe in you and trust in you because of these things together. And when you communicate with competence and you're very confident, you can feel it in

Starting point is 00:05:52 your heart. You can smile while you're saying it because you understand, I got this. I'm going to do this. I'm going to help you move forward with it. Things are going to go well. That is confidence. Or maybe they're not going to go well, but you're confident we're going to help you move forward with it. Things are going to go well. That is confidence. Or maybe they're not going to go well, but you're confident we're going to make it through this. People just want to know that you're giving them that confidence because confidence is contagious.

Starting point is 00:06:17 It certainly is. So when we're leading somebody, when we're leading a group, and I always think of this, you know, in World War II, there was this George Patton speech where he walked around, he talked about the coming D-Day. He was confident as can be. Another confident person I always think of is Judge Judy. Did you ever see Judge Judy in her courtroom? That lady, even though she's like 4'11", teeny little thing, super confident, had a ton of gravitas, a ton of this personal presence that made you just believe in what she was saying. Think of a leader that's confident and think of somebody in a leadership position. Maybe they're, who knows why they're there, that's not confident, that you wonder about, who can't concisely give you that particular direction with a smile on their face and you know, oh, I believe in this person because they're confident and I'm confident in them and I trust them because they're communicating

Starting point is 00:07:19 well with me and they're competent. So that's the third C is confidence. So what's the fourth C? Well, clarity. Clarity. We need somebody who can break things down for us in a very clear manner so it's easy to understand so that we know what direction we're going. If somebody just says, go over there, you're like, which direction is that? There's no clarity there. You know they want you to move, but you don't know where or why. So what if they said, I want you to go directly up this road about 100 yards. That's where we're going to meet. That's pretty clear. They've given you a clear direction. Or maybe it's in the business. We need to make 300 sales this quarter. We're going to do that by executing on our marketing strategy, which is this, and our sales strategy, which means we call this many people a day this often. That's clarity. That's specific clarity. When people have clarity, they go do a job. They go execute on this because clarity takes away doubt. It takes away misunderstanding. It takes away fear of the unknown. Because when we have fear of the unknown, we have lack of direction, lack of execution. Clarity gives us all of those things. And it breaks it

Starting point is 00:08:45 down to be specific to what we need to do, how we need to do it. So that's the fourth C, clarity. The fifth C, concise. Concise. Focus. When we are super concise and we are hyper-focused on what we need to do, we get it done. That's why when you take this beam of light and combine it into like a laser beam, you can burn a hole through just about anything with it, because it's super concise. And that's what we want to do is focus our direction, our leadership on specifically influencing a certain pattern of activities with the people that we're leading or attempting to lead. That is being concise. People want to know, do you know it? Are you confident in it? Do you know the direction? Are you stimulating my desire to do this? Are we clear on where we're going? And are we concise?

Starting point is 00:09:42 Are we hyper-focused on what we need to do? So think about that. You want to implement leadership today, right now, in what's going on, and you feel kind of confused? Pick one of these five Cs and implement it right now in your business. Competence. Learn something. Go give something back. Communication. Be regular with it. By the way, be in person with it, either on video, voice, or obviously in person. Their written communication, text messages, emails are not great communication. They should at least see you and feel that communication and that confidence and that clarity and that communication all together. Confidence, clarity, and concise. There's your five C's of leadership. Adam Contos here with Start With A Win. Let's make this a great day. Go exercise some leadership and then do it again

Starting point is 00:10:35 tomorrow and then do it again the next day. Hey, we're being pretty clear and concise here. Let's go do this with confidence and competence and watch the people follow you. Have a great day. Exercise that leadership.

Start With A Win - The Five C's of Leadership: Unlock Your Potential Today with Adam Contos

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