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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.
I've been very, very fortunate in my career to lead a lot of amazing people, lead a lot of amazing teams, build teams from scratch and be in a position to help influence people in a positive way towards their goals. I've also been really fortunate to be [00:01:00] led by a lot of incredible leaders to learn from people that I truly aspire to be more like, that I look up to, and that have imparted a lot of wisdom on me that I've taken forth and taken those lessons into my leadership journey.
And after years of building teams and leading people and building companies, I've really found that leadership comes down to just a couple of key ideas., in my opinion, there are really two main keys to leadership that sort of encompass everything that it means to be an effective leader.
And those two keys are really simple. To be an effective leader, you need to learn what is truly important to your people and use that to inspire meaningful, consistent action. If you can do those two things, you can accomplish anything in your business. If you can do those two things as a leader, you can bring people together to accomplish almost anything.
Building a business is simply just combining the talents of different individuals [00:02:00] to create some sort of purposeful outcome. That's really all that building a business is,
whether you provide a service or sell a product, all we do in business is bring communities of people together based on their skill sets and abilities to take meaningful action towards a predetermined outcome.
And when you can align those meaningful actions with what is truly important to those people, you can create anything.
so what does this look like in practice? Cause it can almost sound manipulative at a high level, right? Like your Jedi mind tricking your people into doing great work. And that's, that's not true at all.
That's really not what I'm saying. Being an effective leader starts with finding the right people in the first place. And so when I say that you want to find what is truly important to your people and then use that to inspire meaningful action, that starts with finding the right people in the first place for every one of the roles in our organization.
For example, there are some things that I would like to be truly meaningful to those people for them to fit that role. [00:03:00] Salespeople are a great example. I will give you one really useful tool in hiring great salespeople. Great salespeople hate to lose more than they love to win. That is so important. I'm going to say it again.
Really great salespeople hate to lose more than they love to win. When you can find salespeople that what is deeply meaningful to them is not losing even more so than winning, you're going to have an incredibly resilient human being that you can inspire to action that creates meaningful outcomes for you, them, and the company.
We have a lot of fun in our sales business. We operate out of a big bullpen. We call it the shark tank. All our sales people are in there trying to serve new clients and bring more business in the door and hit their sales goals and really make an impact.
And what I really love about it is that we've created an environment where people really don't want to get second place. Right? Like second place is not that bad. At one point we had 40 salespeople in [00:04:00] our organization. And so second place is like the top 5%, 2%, I guess, or whatever, right?
Like second place out of 40 people for a month of sales is really good. But what we've done well in our sales organization is align with people who find deep meaning and not being second place.
They want to win, but even more so they hate losing. And there's nothing wrong with that.
This is healthy, friendly competition that inspires meaningful action towards all of us. And being second place. Isn't the end of the world for these people, but they definitely want to try harder next month. Not just because they want to make more money, but because they know when they have a more meaningful impact, they fulfill their need to be number one.
They don't like being number two. And that's very specific for that skill set. That's very specific for salespeople. That's very specific for individual contributing salespeople that are really focused on their job. You really want to find salespeople who hate [00:05:00] losing more than they love winning. That's why a lot of former athletes make incredible salespeople, at least the ones with really good interpersonal skills, because they cannot stand the idea of being second place.
When you have a whole bunch of salespeople that are just okay with being like top five in the company. What you get is a whole bunch of people that are just trying to be somewhere near the top and they don't have any emotion Towards losing
there's nothing wrong with hating to lose as long as you use that in a positive way. So that's just a way that you can align with people up front is understanding what is deeply meaningful to a really impactful person in that role. And then aligning with people that share those values and the same is going to be true for many roles in your business.
Every role in your business should have a chief KPI one number. That is the most impactful number for that role in the business. If you're a follower of the EOS system, they call it the scorecard.
Every person in your [00:06:00] business should have a scorecard. That scorecard is the one metric, the one or two main metrics that when these metrics are met, everything else will fall into place. What is it that we're trying to accomplish every month, quarter, whatever it is, what is the score for every individual role?
For our salespeople, it's usually some form of new business brought in for our operations people. It's usually some form of efficiency, maybe a percentage or something like that. But every person in our world has a scorecard. And what you can do is you can take every individual role in your business and ask yourself the question, what would need to be deeply meaningful to this person in order for them to succeed in this role?
You're not going to get it perfect every single time. But before you go out and start hiring and asking yourself, what skills does this person need to possess? What talents does this person need to possess? You really need to ask yourself, what is deeply important to this [00:07:00] person?
Because just like salespeople, you can have all the skill and talent in the world, but if you don't hate to lose, you're not going to reach your potential. And there is an identical version of that idea for every single role in your organization. And so one of the best questions you can ask yourself as a leader is what is deeply meaningful to the person who is going to succeed in this role.
Now, once you've aligned with the right people based on what's deeply meaningful to whomever would succeed in that role, you also want to connect with what's deeply meaningful to them on a personal level.
This is one of the more difficult things to do at scale. If you run a larger organization with hundreds or even thousands of people, it's going to be difficult to find out what's deeply meaningful to them in every one of their individual lives. But it's an ideology that you can infuse into the leadership at every level of your organization, where if you are the leader, you are the CEO, you are the founder, you're probably at scale, not going to have that [00:08:00] relationship with more than a handful of people in the organization.
But when you instill that set of values and that set of principles into those people, it will trickle down throughout the entire organization.
So I'll give you an example of finding what is deeply meaningful to your people and aligning it with meaningful action. I have an operations person that is very client facing. They are basically the first person in our operations department that a new client makes contact with through their main point of contact throughout the entire transaction process.
It's a very heavy lift, this job. And what's deeply meaningful to this person, the reason that they go to work every day is in their personal lives.
They want to build a future where they can spend more time with their family, specifically their kids. This person wants to spend more time focusing solely on building an incredible family. And that's one of the reasons that they work so hard in their nine to five job.
But I also understand that those two things aren't really correlated. The more you spend at work, the less you can [00:09:00] spend with family. And so there's a rub there.
What's really deeply meaningful to this person on a human level is kind of at odds with what they do at work, or so it would appear on the surface. But we can connect the two. In fact, it's truly important that we do connect the two. That's how you create an incredible community of like minded people working towards a common goal.
That's how you connect with your key people as a leader.
One of the things that I am hell bent on is that we are radically transparent in our business with as many things that we can be open and transparent about in our business, I like to communicate effectively. There are some boundaries where we have sensitive information, where only key partners can be in the know.
But for the most part, we try to provide radical transparency at every turn. And that helps give people a roadmap inside our organization to align what is deeply meaningful to them. To the work that they're doing.
So for example, in order for this operations person to spend more time with their family, our company is [00:10:00] going to need to grow. this organization grows is purely in the form of referrals.
And this operations person being the main point of contact throughout the entire transaction process is the gatekeeper for a lot of those referrals. The better job that she does, the better reviews and ratings that we get, the better relationship that she builds with the clients, the more likely they are to refer more business to us at zero cost of sale.
And so I've laid out a roadmap with this person where when we reach a certain level of transactions, we're going to be able to bring on a piece of leverage for this person. We're going to be able to bring on an assistant or a junior beneath them. That's going to take a lot of the workload off of them.
Allow them to be effective in what they do, allow them to level up and become a leader and allow them to work less hours while being as or more effective and go spend more time with their family. Now, every day when this operations person shows up, [00:11:00] me and this person are on the same page about doing meaningful, impactful work because it aligns with what is deeply important to them personally.
And in turn, we've hired the right person so that we've aligned what is deeply important to them with what is deeply important to us as an organization.
That's how you build a great community. That's how you take people with all sorts of different personality profiles and skill sets and talents and from all different walks of life and get them pointed towards a common goal.
Find out what is truly important to your people and then find a way to align it with meaningful action inside your business.
Now, things may not always be this clear cut, so it's important for you to have the right habits as a leader around discovering what's deeply important to your people. Every single person that comes into your organization that you lead directly, you need to be having regular one on ones with starting with a deep dive goal setting session.
Invite them to uncover their big why, and then [00:12:00] challenge them to really discover their deep why, and that's something you may want to challenge them to do in private, really getting into an emotional conversation around someone's deep why it can be a very difficult thing to do right at the beginning of a partnership.
So that might be something you just invite them to do on their own, but exploring their big why, the outcomes they'd like to achieve, especially if you've hired the right person and they have the right deep meaning around their role.
And then creating a roadmap to help them achieve it inside your organization is something you should be doing for every person you directly lead.
I believe we as leaders are charged with creating a world big enough for all of our people's worlds to fit inside it. So if your people's big wise, don't fit inside the world that you're building, you either need to expand the opportunities inside that world, or you'll eventually lose those people.
And you need to be okay with that. There's nothing wrong with that either. Some people come into our organizations just for a season. And then we love them as they graduate to their next opportunity because their [00:13:00] big ultimate why didn't align with the world that we were creating. They were simply there for a season and they were very powerful and very effective, but we ultimately had to wish them well and cheer them on as they graduated into a new world that served their purpose a little better.
So understanding big whys of your key people is a must, and that's going to take a lot of active listening as well, by the way, because oftentimes what people say is their big why is not actually their big why we expose our big whys through our behavior, through our conversations, through our daily habits and activities, and so it's incredibly important as a leader to be observant, to create the habit of slowing down and truly observing your people as they work, as they converse, building the habit of actively listening to your people. They'll tend to tell you what's important to them through their actions and through their daily conversations, rather than just when you sit down for goal setting sessions and in performance reviews and things like that. And then as you're listening, as you're observing, it's really [00:14:00] important as a leader to document what you're learning. I keep a little file. I wouldn't say it's a file.
It's a little journal where I write all my notes about the people that I'm leading. Not in a creepy way, I just, little things that I've learned about them, little things that they've told me, little things that I think are important to know, little things that help me provide them with the resources that they need to be successful, little things that remind me what's important to them, And where we can find alignment.
You're going to discern so much information just from listening to your people. But if you don't document it somehow or somewhere, there's so much noise in our world, especially as entrepreneurs all the time where we're just controlling the chaos that so much of that information gets lost if we don't document it.
If you truly want to make a meaningful connection with your people, do your part. To remember what it is that you've learned about them.
And beyond that, one of the things that's incredibly important to do as a leader is to openly communicate what's important to you, openly communicate your vision [00:15:00] around your organization and why it's deeply meaningful to you.
People look up to leaders that are open, honest, transparent, and not only communicate a clear vision, but tie that vision back to what is deeply meaningful to them, the positive impact that they want to make through their organization.
The best leaders not only share massive visions and communicate them well, but also tie those visions back to the purpose that their organization will serve in society.
And you can see the companies whose leaders have articulated their visions and tied them back to purpose.
Chick fil a is so much more than a fast food restaurant. Not only do they have, you know, great chicken sandwiches, but their leadership has obviously articulated a massive vision and tied it back to the good that they feel it does in their customers lives. And that's why their business has been so massively successful.
And so if you as a leader haven't articulated, not only a clear vision, but how that vision creates a meaningful impact in the [00:16:00] world, that's step number one.
Because your vision can't just be to sell a million units, your vision can't just be to build the biggest company in the space. Those things are great goals. Those are great outcomes, but the vision has to tie back to why that's meaningful. What is the positive impact that makes? We as human beings, we all have a desire to contribute to something positive.
It's one of our basic human needs. So taking that massive vision that you have and aligning it with a positive societal impact, that's how you truly drive people forward.
So here are your action steps. First, you need to identify what is deeply meaningful to the person that would fill every role inside of your organization. And then ask yourself, is that true of the person that is currently filling that role or the person I'm looking to fill that role?
I think you're going to get some great insight as to whether or not you have the right people in the right seats on the bus, or if you've truly gotten to know the people that you lead at a meaningful level,
you can't effectively [00:17:00] lead people until you know them a little bit.
And then I want you to go through the process of aligning what is deeply meaningful to those people with the ultimate vision that you've articulated and the positive impact that it will have.
I know this is going to take a little time and it's one of the most impactful things that you could do to bring your community together. And get a whole bunch of different people from all different walks of life pointed in a unified direction.
And when we can bring people together and rally them around a common impact and a common vision, we can accomplish just about anything.
So start this process. I would love to hear how it's going for you. Drop a comment. Get in touch with me. Let me know how some of these thought exercises are working in your leadership journey. I truly appreciate you watching this episode and I look forward to seeing you soon. [00:18:00]