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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.
energy is the most in. infectious disease in the world, 📍 and that is 100% true.
The way that our energy resonates throughout our organization is one of the most important things to remember and refine our ability to use as a leader. Hey everybody. Welcome back to the show. I appreciate you joining me for another episode. Before we dive in, a quick favor. If you're getting value from this podcast, please go and like, share, subscribe, follow me on whatever platform on which you're listening to it, and then share it with somebody. Who you think might derive some value from this content as well.
It really helps me with my mission to reach as many people as possible. And when you're done with that, head on over to brian force.com and subscribe to our weekly newsletter where I spend a lot of time making sure that we give you actionable guidance that you can implement in your business every single week.
That is it for the PSAs. Subscribe to the newsletter. Share the podcast. Let's get back to the
📍 episode. I wanna spend some time today just cutting through the noise around leadership, business ownership, entrepreneurship in general. There's a whole industry created around just telling people how to be better at leading their teams, at running their business, and so much of it. Is noisy.
It's a lot of fluff, for lack of a better word. It can be really, really confusing to try and implement so many different strategies, break down and digest so many different lessons and really figure out. What is useful and meaningful for you as a leader and what is just part of a really large book on leadership that feels like it's just trying to hit a specific word count for the publisher?
In my humble opinion, there are so many books on business ownership, on leadership that the core message and the actionable insights could truly be distilled down into about the length of a really good email
And without the patience to wade through all of the fluff and digest all of this information that gets thrown at us, it can be really difficult to just get to the core message of what can I implement in my business as a leader to move my team closer to the vision that I have.
And that's what I want to talk about today. I want get past all of the noise, I want, get past all of the chaos,
and I just wanna talk about the five keys to effective leadership in your business. And for clarity. When I say in your business, you don't have to be running your own business to implement these five keys. You could be in a leadership role. Inside of your organization. These keys are for leading other people towards an agreed upon vision.
Whether that is for your own business, whether that is for your department, your team, whatever it is, these are simply the five keys to effective leadership of your team.
These five keys should act as guiding principles for your leadership. If at any point you feel like things are not where you want them to be, like things are not trending in the right direction, like things aren't going well, you should look at how well your executing on these five things and that will tell you where your gaps are.
Focus on doing these five things well, and I promise you, your team will run more smoothly, you'll be more productive, and you'll start to see the trajectory of your business head aggressively in the right direction. So let's dive in to the five keys of effective leadership. Plain and simple, no fluff. Here they are.
The first key to effective leadership is clarity. Good leaders provide ultimate clarity to themselves, to their team, and through the entire organization. There are several types of clarity, but before we even dive into those types of clarity. I would invite you to take a step back and just grade yourself a little bit right now on how you provide clarity to your team.
Clarity around the vision for the company, clarity around what everyone does, who owns what do you genuinely feel like your team has ultimate clarity at this moment in time?
This is number one for a lot of different reasons, but to distill them all down until we have clarity, we have no way to measure whether we're heading in the right direction, if we're not clear around where we're going, how we're gonna get there, and what everyone's gonna do along the way.
Then we have no idea day in and day out if we're heading in the right direction. If we're not showing up the way that we should, if we have no definition around what all of this stuff means, then we have no way of measuring our performance so we can incrementally improve.
Clarity is an absolute must in your organization. In order for us to succeed as leaders, everyone in our organization must have clarity on three different things.
The first is vision, clarity. Our team must have clarity on the vision we have for our organization.
Now when we talk about casting vision, that can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Some people prefer to cast visions that talk about where the business is going to be in five or 10 years from more of a goal setting standpoint. This is what we want to accomplish or achieve.
This is what we want the numbers to look like. Some people use visions as an overall ideology that the company abides by. I tend to prefer the latter in a way that speaks to the former meaning. I don't personally really love casting a vision That is, this is the numerical goal that we're going to achieve in this amount of time.
I want that to exist. We have a numerical goal for every one of our organizations that we're working towards, but I don't consider that to be the totality of the vision for the company. What I like to cast as the vision for our organization is who we are. What we're striving to be as an organization, the vision of the company we want to be, and I love organizational visions that in and of themselves outline how our people and our team should act and make decisions on a daily basis.
I'll give you a great example of what I'm talking about. I think that Southwest Airlines, even though I think they're about to change and maybe start charging bag fees and things like that, we'll give 'em the benefit of the doubt on this one. I think that Southwest Airlines has one of the best vision statements of any organization on earth.
Their vision statement is to be the most loved, most efficient, and most profitable airline in the world. When you break that down, that's just one small sentence, but can you understand how it would guide the decision making of every team member inside of the organization?
Everything from customer service and being the most loved airline in the world as a guiding principle , for how we should always interact with our clients to being the most efficient when it comes to logistics and strategy, and how do we focus on what is important?
What's important is efficiency. To being the most profitable, which comes down to financial decision making and how do we maximize profitability without alienating the other guiding principles inside that vision statement.
Now this is a tall task for leadership. You can probably understand because these three guiding principles inside of this vision statement, they invite conversation and healthy debate as to how to satisfy all three simultaneously. Being the most loved airline in the world probably wouldn't be all that difficult if you had unlimited capital and no regard for profitability. You would just spend all of your money on every bell and whistle to increase the quality of your client experience, but you may not be all that profitable.
The same with efficiency. It's difficult to be the most efficient airline and the most profitable and the most loved all at once, and so there are probably high level leadership conversations and healthy debate around how do we implement strategies to satisfy all three.
The leadership on the customer service side is going to need to work well with the leadership on the operation side and the leadership on the finance side to come up with strategies and solutions that satisfy the vision for the company. But they have ultimate clarity around their guiding principles, and they understand that when they make decisions, they need to make them in the light of how do we become the most loved, the most efficient, and the most profitable airline all at the same time?
When you lead people with that type of clarity of vision, you help them make better decisions when you are not leading the conversation. I hope that makes sense. I'm gonna say that one more time because I hope that really sinks in. When you lead your people with that type of clarity of vision, you help them make better decisions when you are not leading the conversation.
Ultimately, that is what leverage is. Ultimate leverage is when your team has conversations when you are not around. That abide by the guiding principles that you've instilled in the organization. They make decisions, they have healthy debates, they have conversations around what should we do? And the answers come in the form of what would our guiding principles suggest we do in this situation?
What does our vision say we should do in this situation? When you've reached that peak, when the vision that you have for the company has become an ideology that's instilled in your people,
that's truly where you start to become leveraged as a leader because people get it now. So vision, clarity is incredibly important. And if your people don't yet have that type of clarity around your vision, I would really focus on that in the here and now because that unlocks the door to a lot of other leverage points. As a leader, the second kind of clarity that you want to have in your business is role clarity.
Who does what on the road to get to where we are going? This is incredibly important because once everybody understands the vision and the guiding principles, who we are, what we stand for, and how we interact with the marketplace. Now we've gotta take those guiding principles as individual team members into our role every day.
We can have a lot of clarity around the vision for the entire organization.
But in order to work together to really manifest that vision, we've gotta have that same type of clarity around our individual roles. Essentially, how do we own our contribution to the organization?
This is where having clearly identified roles for each seat on the bus is incredibly important. I say roles and seats on the bus rather than people, not what does every person in your organization do, but what does every role in your organization do? This is an important concept to grasp because as your organization scales, you may have people doing more than one role at times because you haven't scaled to a point where you need to bring on a full-time person to fulfill just this one individual role.
You may have someone doing two or even three roles in the beginning when your business is still small enough. That person can cover all three seats on the bus efficiently. But it's important to have clarity that that person is fulfilling three different roles and what the contribution is of each of those individual roles.
That way, when you do start to scale, you can start to see which roles themselves need to be filled rather than which new people do I need to bring on board. if
One of your team members when you're on a smaller scale is technically doing three different roles and you're seeing them get to capacity, knowing what each role is will help you understand the amount of input and time they're inputting to each one of those roles.
Let's say they're doing 85% of their time in one role. It's probably smart for you to go, okay, this is the thing you're gonna focus on full-time now I'm gonna hire someone else to take on these two other roles. And then as they get to capacity, we'll start to see them probably just fill up one of those roles.
And then we scale. We bring on a full-time person. Now we have one person in each of those different roles where we used to have one person for all three, but as the business scaled, we kept an eye on what each role's contribution was, and we started to plug them in. As they got to capacity, Having role clarity once you have vision. Clarity is incredibly important because it helps people stay in their lane and it also allows them to make their own decisions for that role when you empower them to own it based on the guiding principles of the vision of the company.
The last kind of clarity you wanna make sure your organization has is execution clarity. I talk about this a lot. This is knowing what the score is. At any given time for each role in your organization, you should have a score that is your major KPI that you're measuring for that role. It could be some sort of new business based KPI. It could be some sort of operations and efficiency based KPI, but everyone in your organization should have ultimate clarity on what it looks like to succeed and to win in their role.
That's why it is so important, and I really hammer business owners with this all the time. Making sure that you have a main KPI for every individual role in your organization. What does it look like to win in this role? So if you combine all three of these together, we know what is the vision for the organization and that guides us in our everyday decision making.
What is the clarity around what every role's individual contribution to that vision, and then ultimate clarity around how each of those roles succeeds. What does winning look like in each one of those roles? When your people have clarity around those three things, now they know exactly what we're trying to do, who is doing what?
And what success looks like. That sets the foundation for every leadership conversation you have from there forward.
Our number two key to effective leadership is energy. I first heard this quote somewhere a long time ago and I cannot remember where. So if you remember, comment or get in touch with me, let me know where it's from, because I want to make sure that I attribute it to the right person.
But I heard this a long time ago and it really stuck with me. And that is that energy is the most in. infectious disease in the world, and that is 100% true.
The way that our energy resonates throughout our organization is one of the most important things to remember and refine our ability to use as a leader.
We've heard this idea wrapped up in a whole bunch of different phrases before, like speed of the leader, speed of the pack, and all that type of stuff. The reality is the energy that you bring to your team is going to set the tone and this standard for how we show up. Every day.
There's a lot more to bringing energy to your organization than just showing up with tons of false positivity and optimism all the time. There's a calculated way to bring energy to your organization as a leader. So that's what we're gonna talk about in this key. But before we dive into the strategy behind energy, I want to just kind of get clarity around what I mean when I say energy.
Energy is really just the combination. Of your passion, your purpose, your focus, and your resilience, your energy manifests itself through those four key words. Your passion, your purpose, your focus, and your resilience. Energy doesn't always mean just showing up super happy and excited all the time for everything that's happening.
Energy is just simply the way that you approach your day to day as a leader, the kind of energy that you bring. There are many effective ways to bring energy to your organization. It It doesn't always mean just injecting your team with a high dose of positivity first thing in the morning, and then they're good to go. There are many leaders that lead with different kinds of energy, but they're effective. There are vibrantly charismatic leaders.
There are quiet, well thought purposeful leaders. What's important is not just to bring super high energy all the time, but to be purposeful in the way in which you energize your team.
Let's break down the three different components of energy for leaders. The first is your physical energy. This is your presence, the way you move your voice modulation, your stamina, your physical energy is what your team sees on the surface, and it's very important to consider how you are physically showing up as an energy source for your team.
In your morning power ups with your team, for example, is your energy on the morning power up saying, I am here.
I am present. I am ready to show up. I am ready to compete, and I'm ready to be the best version of myself and my role in this organization today. Just ask yourself that simple question. Because you can show up with that type of energy in a lot of different ways.
There are calm and poised and serious leadership styles. There are high energy. Charismatic, very vibrant, sort of wildly upbeat leadership styles. And they can accomplish the same things. People will get to know your personality over time, but when people get to know your personality, they'll get to know your energy as well.
So whatever your version of showing up with the energy that says, I'm here, I'm present, I'm ready to go, I'm ready to produce today, and I'm ready to contribute. That sets the expectation that everyone else in your organization should have their version of that type of energy. This is especially true when there are chaotic times or turbulent waters in the business when you have to have some endurance when everybody's getting beat up, when it just feels like, oh my gosh, we have had a week, we've had a month, we have had a quarter.
The market's tough. We're getting fired left and right by our clients. It is an exhausting time to be part of this organization. That's when they depend on the leader to show up with that same energy. That's the stamina. Part of that energy is consistently showing up, ready to go, ready to contribute, present.
Calm, composed, ready to lead that day. Think about how you show up every day from an energy standpoint for your team. Are you letting your personal stuff get in the way? Are you letting your fatigue get in the way? Are you letting your frustration with certain things shine through?
How is your energy physically as a leader? That's very important. The second kind of energy is your emotional energy. This is how you control your emotions through all the ups and downs that get thrown at your organization long-term, short-term, day in and day out.
Running a business or leading a team takes an emotional toll on the leader. And when you fail to regulate your emotions, well, you give your team free reign to deregulate their emotions as well. That's the energy transfer that happens there.
I'll give you a really great example of how this shows up. When you are tired, when you are frustrated, when you've got a client that is just driving you crazy and you get off the phone with that client and in front of your team you are ragging on that client, you are talking about how you wish you could just get rid of that client.
They're annoying. They're all these different things. How do you think. That energy permeates into your team. It gives every one of your team members to think poorly of that client and any other client that they see as a burden to them themselves. Right? When we let our emotions get the best of us, we set a new standard for the entire team around how they are permitted to show up in this organization every day.
So when we're frustrated about things, when things aren't going right, it's our job not to lie, not to be. Unbridled optimistic about everything all the time. We need to be serious. We need to be transparent, but we need to regulate and control our emotions because that's what we do when we lead.
We need to be cognizant of how our emotions affect the energy of the entire organization. It is our job as leaders that no matter what is going on in the organization, we have a vision and we are going to head towards that vision. Every single day your team is looking for a leader that is. Physically present and emotionally stable. And when you deviate from those two things, when you start to get physically distanced, you withdraw. When you're emotionally unregulated, you're all over the place. Your mood is all over the place. Now you're creating turbulent waters from an energy perspective inside your organization.
So physical presence, physical energy, emotional presence, emotional regulation.
The last type of energy is intellectual energy, and this is an important one as well. The best way to showcase intellectual energy is curiosity. Are you curious about your business? Are you constantly learning? Are you continuing to become more knowledgeable through powerful question asking, or are you sure of yourself?
Are you the type of leader that your favorite thing to say when you don't agree with something right away is, I've been doing this for X amount of years. That is poor intellectual leadership. Sorry, if I just offended you, if that's something you say often, you shouldn't say that.
You should be intellectually curious. It doesn't mean that you're wrong. It doesn't mean that you're right by the way. It means that I want to set a standard of curiosity throughout my entire organization because I don't want my people to start to get the energy that they should always be sure about things, that they're always right and they've stopped learning
businesses, organizations, teams, markets, industries. It's all an evolution. There's always something new to learn. There's always some new thing happening, and we need to maintain a level. Of intellectual curiosity. Do we approach our team with questions more than statements?
Do we have this assuredness about ourselves that our way is the way and only the way, and if that's true, are we maintaining a level of intellect that makes that actually true? Are we continuously learning? Are we staying ahead of the curve when we show up with a low level of intellectual energy, we create a dependency within our team where we are the gatekeeper of all things intellectual. We know how to do it. We are the best way. We are the smartest. We are the leader. And if you are unsure, you should come to me for anything and everything when we flip the script.
And we become curious and we ask our team to teach us about the things that are happening in their world and their roles. We inspire them to ask more powerful questions.
We create a standard of intellectual curiosity inside of our organization. Then you get an organization full of team members who are used to asking questions, who are excited to learn more, and who follow an ideology of, we might know a lot, but there's always something more to learn.
That's how you build an organization that organically stays one step ahead. So those are the three aspects of key number two, physical, emotional, and intellectual energy. Take some time to assess your energy. How are you showing up? How are you controlling your emotions, and are you curious as a leader?
Those are really good questions to just ask yourself if you feel like you don't have any improving to do in any of those areas, ask yourself again. 'cause we can always be evolving as leaders.
The number three key to effective leadership is momentum. I truly hope that you have an absolutely wild vision for your organization, that the goal that you've set where you want to go seems really far off right now. I hope it doesn't seem impossible because as soon as your team starts to believe that things are not possible, they're gonna show up a little bit differently.
The goals you have for your business should be really difficult to achieve, but absolutely achievable. The reality is it takes a long time for us to achieve the things that we want to achieve in our business. And the most successful thing that we can really do in our business is just create forward momentum.
We define our business as being successful in a lot of different ways. Some people define it as successful when it gets to a certain level of growth or when we achieve certain outcomes. I tend to prefer to define success in my organization by its level of momentum. Are we simply improving at a certain rate?
Are we better now than we were at this time last year? And how much better are we? What does the organization look like? Now as opposed to this time last year. That's a really good indication of our sustainability. If we're creating forward momentum, then even in difficult markets, the ups and downs, the rollercoasters of business cycles, that's a really, really good indication that we're getting better as an organization if we're continually seeing forward momentum.
And we're not always gonna see forward momentum in every aspect of the business. So as leaders, we've gotta find that momentum. There are gonna be times when our business isn't growing. In fact, it could be shrinking to difficult market. Things have changed.
We're losing more clients than we're gaining. But where are we getting better right now? Are we getting operationally more efficient? Is our client onboarding getting better? Are our processes getting done more efficiently?
Are our individual roles getting sharper, getting better? Are we building a better team? There's always ways to find. Momentum in your business, there should be something that's going right and what I have found as a leader is very effective is taking that big, far off goal that we have for the organization that, at times may seem too far away to energize us today.
And I'll break that down into small victories that are palatable that we can achieve right now.
One of the big things that we're working on in one of our businesses right now is getting our reviews up, getting our five star Google reviews up, and we have a big push towards that right now. We're going back to all of our past clients. It's just something we didn't have a good mechanism around in the beginning.
Uh, it wasn't as important for the business in the beginning as it really is now that that organization's been around for a while, and this is something that's become more and more important over the years. The vision we have for our company. Long term is like 10 x where we're at right now we're working towards that goal every day. But right now I have a short term goal that we've rallied the team around around how do we get to a certain level of five star reviews for our organization. That's something that we get behind every day and we can see forward momentum every day.
Every time a new five star review comes in, we all celebrate, we get excited. It rallies the team. It helps us stay energized. It doesn't mean we've lost focus of the long term goal. It just means that this is gonna help us get there. When we celebrate smaller wins, it builds forward momentum. It shows that things can be done and eventually that long-term goal that we have is just gonna be a series of small term wins built up over time.
And so if you are lacking energy in your company right now, you're having trouble rallying your team, you're really having trouble getting them to show up in a way that it feels like that bigger goal is possible. Ask yourself, what are we aiming for right now? What are we working for today? What can I rally the team about and get some momentum?
What are some small wins that are already happening inside of our organization that I can celebrate? What can I gamify that I know we can accomplish in the next 90 days to really give my people some juice? What's a short term goal that we can really bust our butts towards that when we hit it? Now we've got some momentum.
Now we've got some forward velocity. Think about how you are engaging with your organization from a momentum standpoint. How are you celebrating those small wins? How are you challenging people in the short term to get them to show up and feed off of every individual victory and carry that into the next one?
Our number four key of effective leadership is accountability, and no organization is complete without a high level of accountability. I think as leaders, we talk about accountability a lot, but one of the really impactful phrases that I consider when thinking about accountability.
So I believe that great leaders use accountability as a path to empowerment rather than a fear mechanism. So accountability for every individual role and every individual team member inside your organization should be a tool used to empower them rather than a tool that makes them afraid of being fired, Once we have an understanding, we have role clarity and what success looks like in our individual role, we need to be accountable to it.
This is where our hiring practices become very, very important because I would always rather hire slightly less knowledgeable, but highly accountable people that I can train to learn the role than higher skilled, higher knowledgeable people that just don't have a high sense of personal accountability.
It's very difficult to train accountability. But if you hire the right people and you get two way accountability, That's really where the magic happens. And when I say two-way accountability, I mean that they are accountable to their role and the outcome of their role.
They own that. And you are accountable to providing them the resources to succeed and to achieve that outcome. So accountability in every role is massively important.
Let's discuss what accountability as empowerment rather than a fear mechanism means.
There are always gonna be people in your organization, most likely, that report directly to you. You're probably gonna have weekly meetings with them, maybe weekly coaching sessions with them. And this is where we really instill the accountability. We understand what the role is trying to achieve, whether that is being responsible for an entire department, whether that is an individual contributor when we first partnered, we had an agreed upon expectation as to what we were trying to achieve. In this particular role, and we have ultimate role clarity.
So there's no guessing as to what success in that role looks like. We're either achieving it or we're not achieving it.
And what has always helped me hold my team members more accountable is to understand what achieving success in that role truly means to them.
I spend a lot of time with my direct reports, understanding what's really important to them as human beings. You're not gonna be able to do this with everybody in your organization, but the people that report directly to me, I understand what success in their role does for them as individual human beings.
What it means for them, what it means for their family. I take time to understand their personalities more deeply. I take time to understand what makes them tick a little bit, and so when I hold them accountable, I'm able to do that in a way that speaks to the expectations that they have for themselves.
It speaks to the vision that they have for their own lives. If I'm meeting with a director of sales, for example, and we are not hitting our sales goals, we're able to have an honest conversation around accountability that goes back to what success looks like for them, how their life looks when we succeed.
I get that permission from my people by spending a lot of time getting to know them in the beginning. Your organization at the end of the day, is made up of human beings, and you're not gonna be able to have a deep relationship with every single one of them as you scale.
But the ones that you have regular conversations with, the ones that you personally are holding accountable, it's really important. That they understand that when you hold them accountable, it's because you know that they have the ability to succeed, and you also know what success truly means to them and truly looks like to them.
And now you're having a conversation around us both being successful, us being successful as an organization, and you being successful in your role and what that does and the outcome that provides rather than. This is about the company. You are not successful, and if you don't change, we're going to have to get someone else to do the job.
Fear mechanisms don't necessarily work all that well, especially not long term. I've found as far as accountability, what works better is understanding the human being. Setting expectations and then holding them accountable to achieving those expectations and coming from a place where they know that you genuinely care about their success.
Accountability is absolutely key. What's more important is the way in which it's enforced. let's move away from using accountability as a fear mechanism and towards using it for empowerment.
And the fifth key of effective leadership is adaptability man, especially in today's environment. This one might be moving up the list from number five to. Two or one pretty soon because the world is changing around us. As a leader, you've got to be adaptable. You're probably not always gonna be the smartest person on your team.
I hope you hire and lead some really amazing, curious. Intellectual human beings, but you need to maintain a certain level of fluency of what is affecting your company, your industry, your marketplace at any given time. The world is rapidly changing right now, and one of the best things that you can do as a leader is see through all of the chaos and all of the noise to what is going to be important in the future, and make plans to adapt to a changing environment.
That might mean regularly testing new strategies in a controlled environment. That might mean listening more intently to your team when they throw things and ideas at you. That might mean spending a lot of extra time reading and learning, and masterminding and seeking mentors, but your job as a leader is to set the tone and to stay ahead.
Of the curve. A lot of great businesses simply die on the vine because they don't adapt. They have a great product or a great service at a particular moment in time. And then as soon as the seasons change and technology advances, they become obsolete almost overnight. And they're really smart people.
They just didn't stay forward thinking and you can't expect anyone in your organization to be as passionate about the future as you are. This is your team. This is your organization. You've gotta set the tone for how we're going to approach the future. So stay in a mode of curiosity and prioritize being, learning based.
The next big thing these days is always right around the corner. It doesn't mean that every one of them catch on, but it is important for you to understand the evolution of your industry. The way that I would implement this in your business is I would always be conscious and aware and looking for the next iteration. Whatever aspect of the business that it is, and then beta testing it and implementing it on a small level.
For example. AI is the biggest technological advancement in. Maybe human history, and we're just now starting to get a taste of what it can do as far as automations go in our business.
I would be looking at how AI can be implemented in all sorts of different aspects in your business. And I wouldn't be going all in on all of 'em 'cause there's a lot of just kind of toy apps out there and, and a lot of stuff that claims to work, but really doesn't make anything better just yet. But I would be looking at operations.
Can we automate something and beta test this? And if it doesn't work, we just have a human take it right back. Over on our sales side. Is there something we can do from a prospecting standpoint, from a customer service standpoint that we can implement an AI solution for, and we don't have to go all in on it.
We can take it right back if it doesn't work. If we do that, we're gonna find this stuff that really does work and we go, wow, that just saved us a ton in man hours, and now we've got momentum here. Or we're protecting ourselves from the downside where it says, that didn't work at all, but we're not fully all in on it.
Let's just take it right back. I would be spending a decent amount of time trying to find AI solutions for all sorts of different aspects of my business right now.
The reason being, when I can find a way to replace man hours with an AI solution, I can take those man hours back and not necessarily let that team member go, but now they can focus on the next thing that we haven't even gotten into yet.
Going and doing something else productive that we haven't even gotten to yet. There are so many things that we leave on the shelf as business owners, because this is our core strategy. We don't have time for anything else. We're already spread really thin. If we could get some of those man hours back, just think what our team members could go accomplish.
It's not about replacing them, it's about empowering them to go do things that they don't currently have the bandwidth to do. Imagine if you were able to replace even 20% of your team's dollar productive hours with artificial intelligence, what they would be able to accomplish with that time.
That's where I would be looking for solutions, but again, I wouldn't be going all in on every single one of them. I would be beta testing, I'll be getting an idea of what works. I would be sticking with the stuff that does work.
I'd be pulling the stuff back that doesn't, and then iterating and finding the next solution. As a leader, it is our job to set this kind of tone that we are gonna stay ahead of the curve, that we are going to try new things in a way that is manageable, that we can always take 'em back if they don't work, but don't get so stuck in your ways that the market just passes you by that the industry just evolves without you.
If you get stuck in the past, eventually you'll become obsolete. And nowadays, especially the past, gets here a lot sooner than it used to. So adaptability is something, as a leader, you very much want to instill in your people, and that tone starts with you.
All right, so let's bring all of this together. We've talked about a lot in this episode, but I really wanted to take time to distill down like a 500 page business book and just turn it into five keys for effective leadership, providing clarity, energy, momentum, accountability, and adaptability. If you can do those five things, clarity, energy, momentum, accountability, and adaptability, that's truly all we do as leaders, I hope the breakdown of each one of these individual keys was helpful and you found some things that you could implement in your business right now, because truly at the end of the day, it is as simple as that. Provide your team with ultimate clarity. Bring energy to them every day.
Provide forward momentum so that we can break down that big goal into smaller chunks. Hold people accountable, and always be 📍 adapting. If you can do those five things, you can accomplish anything in the business that you're trying to run. I really hope this episode was helpful. Drop me a comment below, give me some feedback.
I'd love to hear your thoughts. I appreciate you hanging out with me for another episode, and I'll see you next time.