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Welcome to Leading With Force — a podcast where seasoned entrepreneur Brian Force shares the invaluable lessons he's learned on his journey through this crazy, wonderful life. Having built several multimillion-dollar companies, Brian dives into the nuts and bolts of building successful teams, scaling businesses, and leading with passion and purpose.
Each episode offers practical tools to effectively cast your vision, build your team, boost productivity, and become the leader you were meant to be. Brian's mission is to inspire you to unlock the incredible power within yourself, achieve your goals, and make a meaningful impact on the world. Join us as we explore how to find your inner leader, empower others, and embrace your journey.
Let's talk about one of the key leadership mistakes that I see business owners make all the time. And I really love talking about this topic because this is relevant whether you are a business owner, an aspiring business owner, a manager, or just it's relevant even in your day [00:01:00] job. If you're just looking to grow and expand your career, be more valuable, and come from a place of contribution and earn that next promotion, this is a very, very valuable lesson to learn.
And it's Near and dear to my heart because I love doing podcasts about things that are super relevant in my world because they're happening all around me all the time. One of the great things about this show and my ability to bring value and contribute is that I am heavily involved in the day to day of my businesses.
Most of the things that you're hearing from me are things that are going on in my world and tools that I'm using to work through them.
So this is a topic that is very relevant in my world right now. In one of our organizations, I had a sit down with one of our managing partners for one of our businesses just a couple of days ago, and she was incredibly frustrated coming from a place of real frustration.
She was at a point where she felt like of the four people that she manages in one of our business, she could do all of their [00:02:00] jobs on her own. Essentially, like,
Let's forget about really elevating her out of the day to day of the business and really becoming a true manager of people. Like just forget all of that. Let's get rid of everybody. And I will just do all of their jobs myself. We'll make more money. We won't grow. We'll never hit our, our end target.
We'll never get to where we're trying to go. I'll probably be miserable, but I'll be less miserable than I am right now. Trying to manage all these people who aren't doing the things that I know they need to be doing for us to succeed. Essentially, she was incredibly frustrated because we have a whole bunch of people who are talented who do have the skills to succeed, but they're not being proactive.
They weren't going the extra mile. They weren't synthesizing problems ahead of time based on all the repetitions that we've done. They were basically doing everything that was asked of them. And that is really worth repeating. I want that to sink in. She is incredibly [00:03:00] frustrated because they were doing exactly what was asked of them.
And this gave me an aha moment because when you've been doing this for as long as I have you start to see the patterns. just unfold right in front of your eyes. You start to see the issue and how it can be solved so clearly just by observing and by listening. The greatest leaders do the best job of listening, by the way.
So if you're talking more than you're asking questions, you probably want to take more of a step back in your leadership role and get really good at asking more questions. You should be doing a lot more listening than you should talking
because when you take a step back and get in the habit of listening intently and observing most of the solutions to the problems that you're hearing tend to reveal themselves. As a leader, you should have a bigger skill set than the people that you lead in certain areas. And so the tools and the action steps, they reveal themselves very clearly if you just sit back and listen.
And then you can put [00:04:00] together an actionable game plan and execute right away rather than Talking, commanding, guiding without listening because then you're just sending people down a path that you're not sure is the right one. I digress. listening to her event and just really get her frustration out and just observing really allowed me to see what the problem was very clearly, very quickly.
It's one of the key mistakes that leaders, especially entrepreneurs that have never really been in a managerial role in any other aspect before that they tend to make. It's the idea that people understand what their job is. We make the mistake of assuming that people know what their job is.
And when we do that, we set ourselves up for an enormous amount of frustration.
We do the thing that when we assume we make a blank out of you and me, assuming that people understand what their job is, is one of the key leadership mistakes that entrepreneurs make when you're [00:05:00] running your first business or you're running a small team.
Even when you're running a large team, assuming that people understand what their job is, is a critical mistake. And it sets us up for an enormous amount of frustration.
So I'm going to break this down very clearly in this particular business, and you can extrapolate this to your own role, your own business, and maybe your own frustration. So in this particular example. Everything in this business runs off of checklists. It runs off of lists of tasks that we need to do to complete every individual process in the business.
So when we acquire a new client, there's a process for that, an onboarding process. When we are servicing that client, there is a process for how we do that for every individual aspect of the business. There is a process. It all happens inside of our task management system. Inside of our CRM, when a client gets moved to a new stage that activates a new process, which activates a whole bunch of tasks and those tasks get assigned to individual team members.
[00:06:00] So if every one of those team members completes every single one of those tasks accurately, on time, and up to our standards of quality and service, for the most part, the business should operate pretty seamlessly.
Now, I will stop down there. If you don't have something like that in your business, where when A happens, B happens, you don't have a conveyor belt, a workflow where you don't know exactly what needs to happen for every piece of your business, I would make sure That you implement something like that. You needed an operating system in your business.
You shouldn't be doing things analog. Everything should be repeatable. No matter what business you're in, you need a process, and in this particular business, we have many processes. We have about 15 different possible processes that can kick off just depending on what we're doing with the client and how we're serving them.
And so if we're doing our tasks, then for the most part, we should be in good shape. That's not reality though. That's not the real world. And that's not how businesses really operate. The reality is there are many [00:07:00] variables that are going to affect your business. The real world is unpredictable, it's nuanced, it's subtle.
And while you need a process, what you need are people that understand that the process and the tasks associated with that process are a roadmap. A very, very, very valuable roadmap to help you get to where you're trying to go, which is the outcome that you're trying to achieve. Without a roadmap, we wouldn't be going anywhere.
It wouldn't matter how skilled we are. It wouldn't matter how much we care. It wouldn't matter how, how willing we are to dive in and take great care of our clients. If we didn't know what we were trying to accomplish, we didn't have a map to get there, then we would be set up for failure from the beginning and it doesn't matter how talented your people are.
So the roadmap is incredibly important. Having that operating system and those sets of processes in your business is invaluable. What the roadmap doesn't give you though, is it doesn't give you an [00:08:00] idea of how efficiently you follow the map, whether or not you hit 45 other cars on the way to your destination, whether or not the other people in the car felt comfortable, whether it was a safe and comfortable and enjoyable ride.
It doesn't tell you any of those things the road map simply points you from A to B You need to know where A is and you need to know where B is But there's a whole lot of stuff that's gonna happen in the middle that can't be accounted for by simple task lists, that can't be accounted for by just kicking off an automated process inside of your system.
Where a lot of entrepreneurs get really frustrated when they're running their first team is that they make the mistake of not making it clear what their team's job is. And I'll make it very clear now, every single person's job inside of your business is to provide an outcome.
I want to make that very clear. Every single person's [00:09:00] job inside of your business, including yours, is to provide an outcome. Your job is to provide the outcome that you want for your business. Whatever it is that you're measuring.
Your job as the leader is to get the team to provide the outcomes that help you manifest the vision that you have for the business. That's your outcome. And that's your job. Every single one of your people has an outcome that they need to be accountable to inside of the business.
That is their job, no matter what.
There's a really big difference between your job being to provide an outcome and your job being to do tasks on a task list. And that's where most entrepreneurs, incredibly systematized ones even get really frustrated with their teams at times because their team believes that they're doing a great job by checking off all the tasks.
And they're confused why you're so frustrated with them because you're focused on the outcome that they're not achieving. And this [00:10:00] boils down by the way, to the fact that nobody will care about your business as much as you do, right? Especially if you are running your first team of W2 salaried employees, there's no profit share, they're not contractors or anything like that.
You have to understand you're hiring talented people and you do need to be making sure that you're putting the right people in the right seats on the bus and people need to have an emotional investment in the quality of the work they do. But at the end of the day, you're the one with the most skin in the game.
No one will. Ever care about your business as much as you do. I want you to just have that as a default mentality, because if you do find people that do, that's gravy on top. For the most part, you want to hire people with the right skills, right mindset, right attitude, but you also want to be cognizant that you are going to have much more of an emotional investment in your business than they ever will.
And so there's a disconnect there. People think that they're doing great work often when you allow them to believe that if they check these tasks off the list, if they just follow the system, that they're doing their job and they're doing it [00:11:00] well.
And that creates a big disconnect between you and them. And it creates a lot of frustration when the outcomes that you want are not achieved.
This is why it is so important that every single person on your team and in your business has a scorecard for their job. I've talked about this in past episodes. I've written about it a lot. It is a big part of the EOS operating system. Every single person in your business should have a scorecard.
That is their main KPI. The thing that when they achieve that number, they're doing their job. It is the outcome they're trying to achieve. Now that number is going to be different for everybody. It could be new business brought in. It could be efficiency and time and quickness. It could be a percentage of accuracy.
It could be a million different things, but I guarantee you, if you boil it down, There is absolutely a number for every single person in your business. I remember a story about a great entrepreneur having a scorecard for their receptionist. And it was two that she had to pick up the phone when it rang no more [00:12:00] than two rings.
If it got to three rings, then she had to achieve the outcome that she was trying to achieve. There's a scorecard for everybody. And that scorecard needs to be the outcome that that role is designed to achieve.
So let's break this down and make this really actionable. This was the aha moment for me that made me realize that we hadn't clearly defined for our team in this business what their jobs are. My managing partner was really expressing a lot of frustration with one of our mid level managers. This person oversees about three people.
They run a lot of our processes. They are the point man for a lot of different things in the business. And she was telling me that she was so frustrated because every single time she asked this person to jump in and help some of the other people on his team with their tasks that they're getting behind on.
So we could push the processes further along and get things done efficiently. He was all [00:13:00] for it. He would dive in head first, really help out. He's an a level player. And things would get done. And then she made a comment that made it all come together for me.
She said, you'd think after asking him so many times he would just get it. That was the aha light bulb moment. That was where my observation came to fruition and I realized the problem right then and there.
And it's a very simple solution, but I realized that we had not clearly defined what his job is.
So this is the conversation that I had with my managing partner. This mid level manager thought that his job was to do the tasks that were his part of the process as quickly, as efficiently, and as accurately as possible.
And then his team, the people that worked just beneath him, were doing more of the administrative side. They were doing their tasks and when they did their tasks, that bottlenecks and allow him to move to the next stage. He [00:14:00] believed. That if he was doing his part of the process, he was doing a great job.
And so what would happen is that when our managing partner would come to him and say, Hey, can you help these people? Can you help with this? Can you help them get caught up? He thought that he was going above and beyond. He would jump right in because he's enthusiastic. He's a, a level talent and he's always willing to contribute and he was always willing to help.
And so every single time our managing partner would come to him and ask him to pitch in, He thought that he was going above and beyond. He thought that he was doing even better work. We didn't realize because we as leaders hadn't made it clear to him that his job wasn't to do tasks. His job was to own the outcome of the process.
He's the manager. His job is actually to make sure that every process happens accurately and on time. So when he does his tasks and he sees that the rest of the process hasn't been filled in. It shouldn't feel like it's going above and [00:15:00] beyond for him to go to his people and start to take things off their hand or give them more resources or pitch in or help out or do whatever needs to happen to move the process along.
That should be his default mode. His default mode should be my job is to make sure that every single process happens accurately and on time. He had a misunderstanding because we hadn't made it clear to him and we as leaders have to own that. He thought that his job was to do his tasks as efficiently and as accurately as possible.
And then anything beyond that was him going above and beyond. And so you can see the rub there in times when he thought that he was going above and beyond our managing partner was getting exceedingly frustrated because she felt like he just wasn't getting it. Like I keep asking him to do these things and he's always willing to, you'd think he would put it together by now that he should just do them all along.
Well, in his mind, he thought that every time he was being asked to do something that was above the call of duty, he was like going to get an award for it. Like he was going above [00:16:00] and beyond. You can see very clearly how that causes a lot of tension, how that causes a ton of frustration on the part of the managing partner, and it wasn't necessarily his fault.
You would certainly love people to be able to adapt that way and just start to get things. But there's even going to be times where A level talent doesn't quite understand because you as a leader haven't made it clear what their job actually is. Their job is to provide a particular outcome. And you actually may even have a disconnect so severe that some people in your organization think they're doing great work when you're so frustrated with them.
And that's on you as a leader because you have given them an unrealistic idea of what their job actually entails. Their job is to provide an outcome.
So now that we've made it clear that every job in your business is to provide an outcome. I think that we've equipped you to go and start to make those scorecards, figure out what those KPIs are for every single role. But I want to go one step further on this. This is a tool. [00:17:00] That has really helped me in a lot of our businesses.
And I think really makes it very clear what people's jobs are. And it helps them work outside the bounds of just the checklist. Because you're going to need checklists. You're going to need an operating system. Without a process, a system, and a way of anything. Your business will descend into chaos, especially as you grow.
And so knowing that those checklists, those processes, they're just roadmaps. They're just guides to help you get there. A really useful tool that I've implemented in all of our businesses is boiling down everybody's job to no more than one sentence. I just call it the one sentence job description. I have a philosophy that every single job inside of your business, every role should take no more than one sentence to articulate.
I'll give you a great example of this. One of our first businesses, our real estate sales business, we have a lot of moving parts in that business. You have the lead generation side, [00:18:00] the agent representation side, the transaction management side, all sorts of moving parts in a very large business. And I had to make sure that everyone understood at the end of the day, getting transactions closed on time and with quality service was our number one goal.
Obviously we wanted to sell as many houses as we possibly could, and that's the lead generation side. But our job as an organization was to serve our clients at the highest possible level, and that's how we did it. And so, we have a role, for example, our listing manager role inside of that business. That listing manager is responsible for every single time a person wants to sell a home with our organization.
They are responsible. for the intake, getting it on the market, getting it all the way until it's under contract, basically. So there's a lot of moving pieces in that job. There are some really hefty checklists in that job, and it's a very client facing job. So it's not only important that we get things done accurately and on time.
It's important that we give our clients [00:19:00] an incredible experience too, because you can be the best at what you do, but if your clients don't really understand. What you do from a day to day standpoint, because they only transact once every five to seven years, or if a lot of it's happening behind the scenes and they're not feeling like they're well taken care of, you could be a superstar and your clients still won't get a lot of satisfaction.
You won't have high satisfaction ratings. And so we want to make sure that not only are we doing things well, our clients know that we're doing things well.
And so to simplify a very nuanced role with a lot of tasks and a lot of moving pieces. Our listing manager's one sentence job description was to ensure that every single one of our seller clients would give us a five star review on Google. I don't care how she did it. She's got a whole bunch of checklists that'll help her do it.
That's the roadmap. But at the end of the day, just doing all those tasks, isn't going to ensure that they give us a five star review on Google. And so what she needed to be focused on was using the task [00:20:00] list as a guide to work towards her goal. That was her job, the outcome that she's trying to achieve.
And that's getting a five star review on Google from every single one of our seller clients. Not feels really simple and it's supposed to be. That provides a heck of a lot more clarity. Then itemizing the 150 things per transaction that she needed to do and saying that was her job or getting this really robust job description.
Like you might use for a resume or to post on LinkedIn, those things might look good on paper, but the reality is if you want to make your people effective, what they're supposed to do down to one. Because if that one sentence is true, then everything else in your business comes to fruition. And that sentence needs to correlate with the scorecard and her scorecard, as you can probably guess, was how many, what percentage of our seller clients gave us a five star review on Google.
I can easily measure that. I know how many [00:21:00] seller clients we serve on a monthly, quarterly, yearly basis. And I see how many of them give us reviews. So her scorecard, her goal is to get a hundred percent and every percentage along the way becomes part of her scorecard. Now I can have as many checklists, as many processes, as many tasks as I want.
But at the end of the day, this person knows that they need to go above and beyond to make sure that this person would give us a five star review on Google. And that's going to be what drives them every day. That's going to be what drives their decision making. That's what's going to be what drives.
Their idea on whether or not they're doing quality work, not have they done their tasks for the day. And we had that fundamental gap in our other business. We, as a leadership team, made the assumption that people understood. That they were supposed to do more than their tasks. They were supposed to provide outcomes, but we hadn't made that clear to them.
We let them believe, and we set the standard that if they check their tasks off every day, they were doing a great job. And [00:22:00] that's what got this managing partner in a big place of frustration. you're feeling that way in your business, you may want to take a step back and ask yourself, does your team know what their jobs are?
Have you boiled them down to the simplest possible format? One sentence. And really gotten their emotional buy in on. This is the thing I'm trying to achieve. This is the outcome. My role is, is designed to provide. If you haven't done that in your team is underperforming, you may be setting yourself up for more and more frustration.
If you allow them to believe that their job is just to follow the process, follow the system. This is a key piece of insight that many leaders miss and it can handicap your business until you get it right.
So if you haven't implemented something like this in your business, absolutely start now. Drop a comment below. Let me know how it goes for you. Let me know if it's been valuable and let me know if your team is on board. If you feel like you might need to get new people in new seats on the bus, I really appreciate you watching.
I hope this was [00:23:00] helpful and I really look forward to talking soon.