How To Tell What Your Team Thinks About You
What Does Your Team Think About You?
Do you ever wonder what your team actually thinks about you?
Listen, you could do something perfectly in business 10 times, and most of your team will think that you're getting it right because you own the company, or they’ll think that you’re working hard just because you're the boss. On the other hand, if you mess up just once in front of your team, that will be the standard... it’ll be what they believe is acceptable from that point forward until it’s literally trained out of them.
I'll give you a very simple analogy that I believe will help clarify this, because I believe that understanding this helps us to be significantly better leaders, and it also helps us to develop leaders beneath us almost automatically.
The example is showing up ON TIME. But I’ll go much deeper than that, because in my life, I run each of my companies with daily meetings. They’re short and very productive, and no matter what kind of meeting we're having each day, I'm there on time. And it's a requirement that everybody who's part of each meeting shows up on time.
And I know a lot of business owners who show up late to their meetings because they believe that, for some stupid reason, they are above everybody else, and it's OK for people to wait for them. And I'm always amazed at the number of people who are CEOs or owners or leaders inside of a business who feel like it's okay for them to be a few minutes late to a meeting. And then they wonder why people on their team are not highly driven and autonomous in achieving their targets.
Important Leadership Lesson
One of the most important lessons you could ever learn about leadership is that your actions are being watched by everyone else on your team, and more importantly, your actions are setting the standard.
And what's worse is that, because you’re at the top of the ladder, you could show up on time 90% of the time, but if you show up late even just a few times, then that is now deemed acceptable by everybody else on your team.
Because as the leaders in our companies, we’re held to a higher standard, and we need to remember that ALL our actions are training others around us how to act.
The best leaders know two things about leading by example:
The Difference Between A MANAGER and A LEADER
There's a big difference between the way a manager handles things and the way a leader does. Because a manager will hear this and believe they need to reprimand somebody who does something wrong. Whereas a leader will correct the action and then look at themselves, knowing that most employees' actions come from watching those ahead of them.
Great leaders are always learning how to become better leaders by watching the actions of the people on their team. Because if someone on my team picks up a bad trait, I always use that as a litmus test to determine how people see me and my actions.
Now that doesn't mean that every bad action of your team is a reflection of you, but if a great team member all of a sudden picks up a bad habit, then pointing it out to them and telling them they need to fix it is only a temporary fix... we need to constantly lead by example. And leading by example needs to be an every day, every hour, every minute kind of thing.
The example I used was showing up on time, and I learned it because after I was late for a few meetings early on in my career, I found it really hard to get everybody else to show up on time.
It was only after I addressed it and then was on time for months before everyone else automatically not only showed up on time but showed up prepared with their numbers and ready to bang through a highly productive meeting.
That’s when my first company started to grow. Because I made sure that every action or every value, I needed my team to live by, I lived by first.
So, think about someone on your team who you wish was performing better, then make a list of the top one or two actions that, if they took them on a consistent basis, would inevitably help them to perform far better. Then ask yourself, are you leading by example and taking those actions in a way that they can see and learn from?
And if you are not the direct leader in your company, then have a meeting with their direct lead, and find out if that person is leading by example and taking those specific actions in a way that will be learned from.
In our organizations, leadership is often less about teaching and more about improving ourselves because our team learns from our consistent actions, like showing up on time... every time. Or being supportive of everyone else on the team or staying focused on the most important actions that produce the results we want.