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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.
📍 We tend to do this out of order as leaders at times, what we do. Is we look at the role and what needs to be done in the role, and then we go look for a person who can do those things already. What we need to look for is what type of person will excel in a role like this, even if they don't necessarily know how to do everything. The role requires right now Hey everyone. Thank you for joining me for another episode. I really appreciate you taking the time to be here. Before we dive in, if you could do me a favor, if you are enjoying this podcast and getting value out of it, if you could like, follow and subscribe or share wherever it is that you're listening.
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 forest.com and sign up for our weekly newsletter. I spend a lot of time really making sure that we provide actionable insights every single week that you can implement in your business right now.
So please like, share, subscribe the show, go ahead and sign up for our newsletter. That is enough for the PSAs. Let's get back to the 📍 episode.
I am gonna start off today's episode with a hot take, which might not actually be all that hot. You probably agree with me on some level. A really good team with the right people can make a mediocre leader look like a rock star, a really talented team can compensate for mediocre to poor leadership.
We see this in a lot of different areas. I think sports are probably the best example. Now, I wouldn't say that anybody at the professional sporting level is poor at what they do. I think that you have to be pretty darn elite on some level to even get into the major leagues of what. Ever sport that you're in, but we have seen over the years, head coaches see really phenomenal results in one city with one team, and have a really hard time replicating those results when they leave and they go join another organization.
Oftentimes, that's because the first team that they were with had elite talent on it.
We've also seen this with coaches that have become legendary figures in their organizations that have been with a consistent group of players for a very long time. Some of the most talented players in the league, and they've had phenomenal results. And then when those players finally move on and they retire, or they eventually get traded.
You see that coach having a lot of trouble replicating those results with a new era, new generation of talent, really talented players on a team can make up for mediocre leadership. And unfortunately, it doesn't normally go the other way, At least not in the way that we'd like to think that it does. And what I mean by that is a great leader can't always get a mediocre team to perform at an elite level. We'd all like to think. Real life works like the Mighty Ducks or something like that, where you can take this ragtag team of misfits who are chronic under performers and with the right leader, you can turn the entire ship around and win championships and hit your goals and perform at an elite level.
Now it is absolutely true that to some extent, a great leader can get superior results out of the same team than a poor leader that is undeniable. That's what leadership is truly all about, is getting the most out of your team, trying to create consistent results from the group with which you're working.
But the reality is one of the most important parts of being a leader is finding the right people to lead in the first place.
Without the right people in place, it's going to be very difficult to manifest the vision that you have for your team.
So much of the results that your team is going to see is based on the fit of the people in their particular role.
If you have the right people, you have elite people in every role, you are going to almost guarantee yourself elite results. If you have mediocre people in every role, then you as a leader. May be able to lead them to slightly superior results than mediocre, but it's not going to be where you want it to be long term.
It's gonna be very unsustainable and so we've seen throughout time leaders in different industries that look like rock stars, that when you take away that superior talent, they tend to not be able to replicate those results. We also see. Leaders who recruit great talent consistently show fantastic results
we'll go back to the sporting world again. The University of Alabama's football program is probably one of the most preeminent examples of a leader consistently finding the right people.
Nick Saban is a phenomenal head football coach. The reality is he's not necessarily any smarter from a scheming standpoint, a play calling standpoint, a strategic standpoint than a lot of the other elite coaches in college football. He doesn't. Outsmart other teams and doesn't outsmart other coaches.
What Nick Saban did very well throughout his tenure at Alabama was stick to define standards and find the right people to consistently hit those standards.
If you wanted to be recruited by the University of Alabama to play football, it became very well known what was expected of you Before you ever met Nick Saban in person for a recruiting appointment, there was a culture that Nick Saban was able to build that was based on superior results, showing up every day in a way that you are striving to achieve excellence. And then what Nick Saban would focus on more than scheming, more than strategizing, more than play calling. Any of that stuff would, Nick Saban would focus on is going out and finding the right people that could consistently hit that standard.
And it showed up on the field for over a decade at the University of Alabama, one of the most consistently elite football programs in NCAA history.
It's also true if you look at the track record of the human beings that have gone on to play professionally in the NFL level that have come from the University of Alabama. The quality of character is very much consistent with the standard that Nick Saban set all those years at Alabama.
You rarely see an Alabama alum in the NFL getting into controversial situations or jeopardizing their career. It speaks to the level of character that Nick Saban placed a premium on when recruiting the right people.
To come play football at the University of Alabama. There's a lot that we can learn from this example. One of the most important things to focus on as a leader. It's not just running the team that you have, but it's finding the right team in the first place.
Great leaders recruit great talent by knowing exactly who they're looking for and not compromising on who they bring onto their team. Great leaders embody the idea that you should be slow to hire and quick to fire.
Great leaders will spend a lot of time, they'll even go through moments of pain where they're spread very thin, doing a million different things in their business because they've not found the right people yet to fill those roles, and they refuse to sacrifice the quality of the team that they're building just to alleviate some of the momentary stress that they're under.
So today we're gonna talk about how do you find the right. People in your business, how do you incentivize them to join your organization, and how do you ultimately make your role as a leader a little bit easier by doing the upfront work to partner with the right people in the first place?
So let's get right into it. What is a standardized process that we can follow to ensure that we're getting as close to finding the right people on a consistent basis as possible? Well, first things first, in order to ensure that you're getting off on the right foot whenever you're hiring people for a new role, is to do two things. The first is to set the standard that every single person in your organization needs to meet. For them to even be considered as a potential partner for your business that simply comes down to your mission, vision, and core values for your business. If you're a big follower of the EOS system, your mission, vision and values are a critical component for any team. You've gotta know where we're headed, how we're gonna get there, and how we're gonna interact every single day with the world around us.
That is our values. It's how we show up and our organizations. We have core values that we wanna make sure that every single person that we partner with exemplifies or they're just simply not a fit for their business.
And when we think about core values, I wanna stop down just for a second and really reiterate how important it's to actually define these in our business
and define them to be specific for the business. So I'll give you a great example. In one of our organizations, one of our biggest core values is proactivity. We have other core values like integrity and diligence, people that we wanna work with, people that work hard and that are honest, but I think that everybody does.
I think that that's probably a core value of just about every business out there. I don't know that anybody's running a business where they don't care whether or not their partners are honest. So those are kind of defaults. But proactivity is a very important core value of our business because that business is such that you're almost always playing catch up.
It's just an industry where you're always feeling like you're behind the eight ball. And if you don't set yourself up for success by doing things ahead of time, by being proactive, then every day that you wake up, you're already going to be behind. And so what's really important to us when we hire people for that organization.
Is that they're not the type of people that as soon as their checklist is done for the day and it's only 2:00 PM they basically are cruising and coasting and taking the next three hours off because they've essentially got everything they're supposed to do that day done. We wanna hire people that are gonna spend the next few hours getting ahead for tomorrow because we know if we set ourselves up for success tomorrow by getting ahead now, then we can create a better client experience. We can grow the business, we can achieve our goals, and we can mitigate.
All of the day-to-day chaos that keeps us constantly treading water. And so it's incredibly important to us that we do not hire people that are just there to do today's work and be done. We want people that understand the bigger picture, that if we have time today to get stuff accomplished that isn't necessarily due until tomorrow.
It's gonna make not only tomorrow easier, but the day after and the day after, and eventually we'll have a lot of. Forward momentum because we were being proactive the entire time. We take that proactivity core value very seriously, and it affects how we hire people and the questions that we ask
If we get into an interview and we start to ask questions around how people set themselves up for future success on a daily basis, we really, really hone in on those answers. Those are important to us because those are gonna be the answers that tell us whether or not this person is actually really.
A consistent, proactive person, or if they're just saying something in an interview to appease us. If they get tripped up on that question about what they do now to set themselves up for future success, if they don't have some sort of process that helps them get ahead, they might not be the right fit for us.
It's not an automatic disqualifier, but it's a really good insight. Into how they're gonna show up in the real world. So defining your core values as it pertains to the people that you hire is very important. So if you don't have that already set up in your business, go back and revisit your core values and ask yourself something.
How does your current team align with your core values? I think that you'll gain a lot of insight just by asking the people that you have hired this far, the people that you are dependent on to show up and to help your business achieve results. How do they exemplify your core values on a daily basis?
And it might not just be honesty and integrity. They might have all those things, but how do they show up for the specific core values that are most important to your business? Like for us, it's proactivity and we have to ask ourselves, are our people being proactive? And if they're not, we have to coach around that
'cause the onus is on us to partner with people who are organically proactive, and then the onus is on us to coach them, to continue to be proactive as we go through this up and down journey of entrepreneurship.
So once you have established the baseline level of core values, you are already going to be zooming in on people that are going to be a better fit for your business. If they don't exemplify your core values, they shouldn't even get past the first interview. what's also going to set you up for success as a leader is doing your work on the front end to clearly define exactly the skillset and the behavioral traits that the person has that's going to excel in whatever role it is that you're hiring for.
We tend to do this out of order as leaders at times, what we do. Is we look at the role and what needs to be done in the role, and then we go look for a person who can do those things already. What we need to look for is what type of person will excel in a role like this, even if they don't necessarily know how to do everything.
The role requires right now people can learn, they can be trained, they can grow. What does the person look like? Who excels in this role? And then go find that person and teach them the role. I think as leaders, sometimes we get a little bit too focused on the intricacies of the role itself rather than the character of the human being who's going to excel in that role, and then we can train everything else.
so A good way to think about this comes in three different forms. What are the technical skills this person needs? What are the behavioral traits this person needs? And what are the motivational drivers that this person needs? Those three things together are going to combine to make the human being that will excel in this role.
And now to get more specific, when we're. Thinking about this person in relation to this role, let's look at things like technical skills. A lot of times leaders will go, I need them to know how to use this software 'cause this is my CRM. I need them to know how to do this particular task because it's very important.
That's the wrong way to go about creating a profile for the person you're trying to partner with. Somebody who has elite technical skill in a certain area. Can learn to use a multitude of different programs. Someone who has advanced technical skills and a certain persuasion can learn new skills. What you're really looking for in those scenarios is a technical skillset rather than a specific literacy or fluency with certain tools or a certain tech stack.
I think this is important whenever you're going to create a job posting or a profile or something like that, don't get too narrowly focused on your stack. Or your tools and start to weed out people that don't already have skills with those particular programs, you're gonna alienate some really, really great, talented people that could pick up your tech stack in 30 seconds , if you chose to partner with them, but you're not even ever gonna see them because you're too narrowly focused on somebody being able to use your specific tool set.
Think about the technical skills that you want this person to have, rather than the specificity of the tools that they can use right now.
And secondly, you want to hire for behavioral traits. So how does this person operate? Right? For example, is this role highly collaborative? Meaning this person could be the most. Talented and technically gifted person in the world, but they don't communicate well with others.
And there are four other people that they are dependent on high levels of communication with every single day. And nobody can ever get ahold of this person because they're always in a hole with their head down working on something. But no one else actually knows what they're doing at any given time because they're not very responsive.
That's gonna be an issue for a role. That is very collaborative. That's very, as we call it in the biz, cross-functional, right? I hate that word, but collaborative. you need to identify what are the most important behavioral characteristics of the role and you need to be looking to hire for that.
Is communication absolutely key because this is a very collaborative role
is proactivity, again, a very important part of this role. Does this person need to be willing to not ask for permission, but to be okay going out and breaking things and failing forward and putting them back together and moving on
without your oversight all the time. That's a really important behavioral characteristic to have in some roles, or people that don't want your permission to go and start taking action. If your managerial style is one of hiring better people, giving them less oversight, letting 'em go, cook, do their thing and bring results.
You're not gonna wanna hire people that need to ask you for permission for everything. So that's a behavioral trait that you need to look for, and these are things you can flesh out during your interview process.
Think very deeply around the behavioral characteristics of a person who's going to excel in this role. You could be in an interview with somebody who knows your tech stack inside and out, knows it upside and down, has experience in this role. Is very gifted, but they have the wrong behavioral profile for your organization, and if you partner with them, there are going to be a point of friction in your business because they don't operate in the way that you have imagined this role operating.
Whereas you could pass up on somebody. Who has the exact behavioral profile that you want and all the technical skills to learn your tech stack, and you never even sit down with them because you're too narrowly focused on the wrong things. You need to really look at those two things. What are technical skills rather than technical specificity, and what is the behavioral profile of a person that's going to excel in this role?
And the last thing that you want to look for, I just call it X factor. Every role in every organization has an X factor. It is that thing that is so perfectly suited to that role
that when you find people that have it, it's what differentiates high performers from elite level performers or mediocre performers from high performers. It's that X factor and it is another. Personal characteristic, behavioral characteristic, and it's different for every single role. But I'll give you a great story on how I had this aha moment years ago, and it fundamentally changed the way that I interview and hire people going forward.
My first business was a real estate sales organization. We built it up to about 40 real estate agents selling homes for our company. At any given time, we'd all worked together. Every single day. We had a big boiler room. We're making phone calls and lead generating and setting appointments, and I was always.
Fascinated with the difference between how people would show up in an interview that wanted to join our organization and the fire that they had and the game that they would talk, and all the things that they said that drove them and motivated and all that type of stuff. And then the way that they would show up like a month into their tenure with us when all of the warm and fuzzys sort of wore off when the novelty of being in a new place wore off and they kind of settled in to their true and absolute self.
I would oftentimes see their level of activity come nowhere close to matching what would be required of them to hit their goals. They knew what they had to do, but they just weren't that motivated to do it. They would operate consistently at about 60%.
Of what they needed to be doing to actually go out and see the results that they themselves said that they wanted. And as I gained more experience, and as we grew the business and as the journey went on, I realized that there is one X factor about high performing salespeople.
Every single one of them has this exact same characteristic for every single one of our top performers in that business. And every business I have run since then, every single high performing sales person has the same characteristic in common. And that characteristic. Is that they hate losing way more than they like winning.
And that is an X factor that you cannot coach, you cannot train. You either have it inside of you or you do not. It's a way different thing to like winning, which we all like winning. Than to hate losing. We will always do more to avoid pain than we will to seek pleasure. And so if I really hate something like losing, I'm gonna do everything that I can in my power to not be second place, to not fall short of the standards that I set for myself.
If I have a. Goal, and I consider not hitting my goal to be losing and I hate losing. I'm going to do everything that I can to hit my goal every single time. Whereas if I just really enjoy winning, that doesn't mean that I need it in my life. I enjoy a lot of things. If I come in second place and I like winning.
Second place isn't gonna bother me that much. Third place probably won't even bother me that much. If I hate losing, then second place is gonna drive me crazy. And that's the X factor that I found in every great salesperson, in any organization that I've ever been a part of. And so nowadays, when we're looking for salespeople, that directly affects the interview questions that I ask.
It directly affects the conversations that I have with new talent around what is important to them, what are their motivational drivers? And if they don't organically give me the sense through my question asking that they hate losing more than they like winning.
I tend not to want to partner with them on the sales side. 'cause they might do okay, but I'll tell you one great salesperson that hates losing will outsell three people that like winning every single day. We can do more with fewer of the right people than a whole bunch of mediocre people who don't quite fit the mold that we're looking for on our organization.
So I tend not to partner. With salespeople that don't hate losing because I hate losing, and I hate when our organization is full of people that don't have the right mindset to help us get to where we're all trying to go. So you have to think about that for every single role in your organization. It's gonna be different for all of them on the operation side.
What may be the X factor are the things that keep them up at night, disorganization, things like that. You want people in certain roles that have certain characteristics that if those characteristics are not present, it haunts them. It drives them crazy.
You want your operations people to be very meticulous and organized, so you're going to look for X factors that speak to that type of organization. It is very beneficial to sit down and truly map out what an avatar looks like for someone who's going to succeed in any role in your business.
And the X factor, it is an important part of that. What technical skills does this person need? How do they operate? What does their behavioral profile? And then do they have that thing that if that thing is present, they are going to be an elite performer? Something to think about and map out before you even start the interview process.
All right, I'm gonna get you on your way today because I think we've gotten some good actionable insight thus far. And I don't wanna overload you with information,
but here are a couple of things before we, part ways that you should really look to avoid when you're trying to find the right team as well. Hiring for experience over potential is number one, don't get blinded by a potential partner's past experience if they don't fit the profile that you've created for that role in your organization.
Technical skills, behavioral traits. X factor. There is a reason at times that talent with great experience is available, is on the market and is looking for a new team to join. So just because they have mountains of experience, I wouldn't hire someone with mountains of experience over somebody who is the right person that meets all of my requirements.
But doesn't have experience in this particular role, and I need to train them. I can train great people to do just about anything they're suited to do. So don't get blinded by resumes and experience.
The second is the personality trap. Don't fall for it. Don't hire people just because you like them. Don't confuse charisma with compatibility and with competency. Just because you like someone doesn't mean they have the X factor. Doesn't mean they have the technical skills and doesn't mean they have the behavioral traits.
This is really important guys, for any of you that run a family business, family and friends and things like that, it doesn't matter. If they're family, if they're your best friend in the world, if they're not a fit for the role, do not hire them because it will ruin your relationship with them and it'll be your fault as a leader because you probably knew going into this they weren't the right person, and you were too scared to have a hard conversation around how they're not a good fit for the business.
Do not hire for personality. Hire the right person for the role.
And lastly, I said this before and I'll say it again, great leaders are slow to hire, quick to fire. If you don't have the right person, don't hire the next best thing, because if you make a habit of that, you're gonna look back on your career in 10 years and realize you've got nothing but a team of next best things, and that's why you're seeing mediocre results.
Wait until the right person comes along. If you want to expedite that process, be proactive and go find that right person. You do the work as the leader to go find the right person. Don't wait for them to show up at your doorstep, but definitely don't hire the wrong person just because they're available.
That's all I've got for you today, guys. I hope that these insights 📍 help you build a better team partner with the right people and ultimately achieve your goals. If you enjoyed this podcast, please follow, like, share or subscribe, sign up for the weekly newsletter@brianforest.com.
I really appreciate you listening to another episode, and I'll see you next time.