Glenn Mattson
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Glenn Mattson
Hey everybody. Glenn Mattson, the Building Blocks of Success. Today, we're going to be taking a look at the topic that I find is very often misunderstood. No one really wants to have a chat about it, but I really believe it's a pretty critical component of the success of those that are inside of leadership. So, today we're going to be talking about the vulnerability of leaders. Most people, when they start taking a look at leadership, believe that most leaders should have all the answers. They think that they need to have the ability to do everything. Be super strong, basically, be Hercules, right? Fastest, smartest, loudest person in the room, and they know how everything works. In today's world, this is not the case, right? In today's world, we're not looking for the Hulk in the middle of the room, the superhuman person in the middle of the room.
Glenn Mattson
What we really want is someone who can lead at the highest level. Being in the business for as long as I have and working with well over 15,000 entrepreneurs helping them start, grow and transfer their businesses, it's very interesting the amount of individuals that I sit in front of, those that are great leaders innately, those that have to become a great leader, and those that just aren't. I want to share with you today that if you want your team to buy into what you're doing, if you want your team to grow, if you're looking for your team to perform, one of the most critical things that I believe leaders are missing in today's world is they go and they learn how to communicate. They learn how to put together value propositions and mission statements. But one of the things that I find that they don't spend time doing, and I find it a big missing piece, especially in everything that we do, from a coaching standpoint, is that you’ve got to learn how to build trust. Just because you're the boss, just because you write the check to them every month, just because your name is on the front of the door, it doesn't mean that the sun sets and rises with you, right? So, we have to have the ability to build trust with our people, and building trust really starts with the core of it is vulnerability.
Glenn Mattson
So, today we're going to be taking a look at vulnerability and leadership, which, quite honestly, for many individuals, is exceedingly hard, right? We look at vulnerability as a weakness, and today I want to talk to you about it being a strength. You know, I actually did this a month ago, and when I first mentioned it, the CEO looked at me like this guy is just crazy, too much time in the sun, that I had sunstroke or something. What I like to do is sit down and talk with the team about trust. I actually asked everybody in the room, “What is trust? How do you develop trust? How is it earned, and how is it broken?” Let me give it to you again. What does it look like? How is it earned, and how's it broken? I had eight senior leadership teams in that room, eight senior people, and with that, each one had teams below it. I asked those three questions, and I asked them, “What do you think the answer would have been if I asked the people that report directly to you?” The room got really quiet. So, I'm asking all of you out there who run a business, when's the last time you actually talked to your team about trust? No one ever does. Trust is the center of everything, isn't it? Leadership, sales, culture, your office, and yet, in today's world, we trust less than ever before, and we crave it more than ever before. I'm not getting it into social media and technology and today, but right now, a lot of people are looking for and craving trust.
Glenn Mattson
So, we all know people we can rely on. We all know people we can't rely on. Many of us are desperate to have someone within the team whom we can rely on. You give someone a task, and you don't have to think about it again. What about the other way around? Many people, when I help them with onboarding or recruiting, one of the things they say is I need to have the ability to trust this person relatively quickly. So, I want to walk and talk a little bit about what that looks like. When we look at trust, I want to make sure you realize something. I don't care if your name is on the front of the door. That's even worse, if you start having that attitude of, hey, it's my office, my name is on the front of the door, I'm the one who signs your check, so therefore you do what I say, when I say it, how I say. That is not what I'm talking about. Trust is earned. It is something that you have to earn. Sure, they're going to give it to you in the beginning just because you own the place, right? That's called respect, not trust. Big difference. So, make sure you understand the difference between the two of them. You’ve got to earn trust.
Glenn Mattson
I believe that a lot of leaders feel that to develop trust, they have to have and be a walking encyclopedia. They have to have all the answers. They have to be bulletproof. They have to be Superwoman or Superman. They have to always be certain. And what I’d like to share with you is really built, I think, in three words that I want to share with you real quick. It’s kind of an easier way to break it down. The three words I want to use for today are consistency, transparency, and honesty. That's part of building trust, and yes, that's going to create some vulnerability. What I just said, consistency, transparency, and honesty. Come on. It's just three words. A lot of people think it's pretty easy. It isn’t that simple. So, when you start to look at consistency, a couple of things I want to share with you, and I've talked about this in the past, it's important. Consistency, man, is everything. What you said yesterday has got to be the same as what you say tomorrow. What you say to one person about coming in late has to be exactly the same thing you say to somebody else. How you handle discipline for one person has to be the same way you handle discipline for a friend of yours on the team.
Glenn Mattson
So, consistency is not only the actions or reactions to certain things that happen in your company, consistency across the board. But consistency also means that your words, your actions, your tone, and your body language are all the same. Consistency is, if someone says to you, “Are we okay?” and you say, “Yes”, but your body screams, “No!”, that's not being consistent. If you look at what we call the rapport pie, which is your words, your body language, and your tone, that's what I mean by consistency. So, what you say, how you say it, and then the body language that you have around it all need to be consistent. That's when we have a break of trust; when you say something, but your body language says something different. You use your words for one thing, but you roll your eyes, right? So, we have to be consistent, and you have to be consistent with different people on different tasks. So, consistency is a big one. You’ve got to realize that you set a precedent. The first time something happens, you have to think about it through a lot of different lenses, on how you're going to handle the consequences to this. What you have to ask yourself is, “Will I do what I'm doing right now for everybody?” So, consistency is key for trust.
Glenn Mattson
The next piece is transparency. Now, transparency is, I guess, a newer word, but the reality is, you’ve got transparency in your communication, transparency in your intent. So, transparency is, you’re not hiding anything. You're not saying something to one person, going into the back room, and saying something else to somebody different. Transparency, also, which is huge to me, if you've ever heard anything that I've done, transparency is also about owning your own word. Transparency is about, if you drop the ball, you turn around, you tell everyone you did. You expect them to do it. You better do it. You're the role model for goodness' sake. So, transparency is that if something does go sideways, it does go in a direction that you weren't hoping for, your transparency is the fact that you will stand up and say, “Look, I'm being straight with you guys. I'm the one who dropped the ball.”
Glenn Mattson
The next one is honesty. Now with transparency, the easiest thing to think about with transparency, by the way, is; is what you're doing right now for malicious intent? Just think about it, if you're doing it for alternative motives, like you're being nice to someone, just to be nice to them so they like you, so they stay over the weekend to do work. That's wrong. That's not creating trust. That means your message wasn't transparent. Next one, honesty, being truthful, not hiding, not blaming. Honesty also includes and engulfs, not making excuses. If you have ever heard me speak, you know I just absolutely disdain leaders who aren't honest, leaders who don't own their mistakes, leaders who make excuses. Because if you make excuses as a leader, trust me, you will accept it from your team, and now you have a team of people who don't tell the truth, a team of excuse makers. Remember, the team can only be as strong as the shadow of its leader. So, when you're looking for trust, think about consistency, transparency and honesty. Big, big pieces. Now, it's not going to be easy. Trust me on this. Telling the truth is not easy. Being straight, not easy. Owning a mistake, not easy. Slowing down to actually understand where someone's coming from, not easy. Stop trying to flex your muscles to show everyone else how strong you are, not easy.
Glenn Mattson
So, when we start taking a look at this, I want you to realize that there's a big difference between being friendly and being familiar. Being friendly means that if you're the leader, you're on a level of a relationship that's friendly, and for some people, it's very hard to hold them accountable. So, you have to decide and realize this takes action and this takes courage to do it. Not everyone is necessarily on the team. Look, everyone wants to be known, they all want to be liked, they all want to have value, and they all want to be trusted. But a lot of us get stuck in the world of who we are, not necessarily the world that it is. Meaning that we take our filters and put it into our reality, and then we create that to be our reality. We judge based on our beliefs; we speak from our own filters. We tell people what we think instead of how we feel. If you really want someone to trust you, you’ve got to start understanding what they trust. Have you ever sat down with someone and said, “Hey, can I ask you a strange question?” “How do you know, from where you sit, that you can trust somebody?”
Glenn Mattson
You know, when people bring a problem to you, vulnerability is not trying to solve the problem. Vulnerability is listening to find out why they have the problem. What have they done to fix it? How come it's not working? What's going to happen if they keep doing it? So, how do you think about as a leader, constantly thinking about being curious, and not being right? You should write that down on your desk. More times than not, it's not about being right. I get it, you know, listen, I get it. Bottom line. But do you want to be curious, or do you want to be right? Do you want people following you, or do you want you dragging your people?
Glenn Mattson
There was a Navy SEAL, and some of you may have heard it. There’s a podcast, and, oversimplified, it's this: They were talking about friends, and they were talking about people they trust, and they're talking about people they work with. The Navy SEAL was talking about one of his friends. Let's just call him Eugene right now. Eugene's in the Navy SEALs with him, and he's part of his team. When he goes into a building, Eugene will just tap him once on the shoulder, and he knows Eugene is going to his left. He knows Eugene is going to clean that room just the way he would, and he knows Eugene is going to be up the stairs and is going to tap him on his right shoulder when he's going to go clean out that floor as he's heading up the stairs to the third floor. He knows that's what Eugene is going to do, and he trusts everything in his being that the second he feels Eugene's hand on his shoulder, that room that he was in is completely clean, and he has no fear that there's anything in there. You know, the interesting thing is, he's really never sat down over the weekend and had a beer with Eugene. You know, Eugene's never been in his house, but this individual, talking on the podcast, trusts his entire life with Eugene, but he's not friendly with him. Now, his buddy, Steve. Oh, Steve's awesome. Love hanging out with Steve. They have fun. They go fishing. They go wakeboarding. He said, a whole bunch of stuff. They have a blast with Steve, the absolute best time in the world. I would never go into a building with terrorists with Steve behind me and expect me to come out alive. So, he trusts Eugene with his life, but he would love to have fun with Steve, but he wouldn't trust Steve with his life. So, as a leader, what do you think your people are thinking of you? Which one are you?
Glenn Mattson
You know, because when we want to be vulnerable, there are really three ways that people deal with confrontation. I want to share this with you. A lot of times, when something goes sideways, or I bring in another idea, or staff brings in another idea, there are only three things you can do. One is you can just turn around and say, I don't like your ideas, let me defend what I do. People who are in the first phase, defense mode they shut down. They protect their position, they defend their position, and they look for poke holes in your position. What they're basically doing is guarding their ego. The second is a blend. The blend is that they listen to and only hear the things that they can say, “Okay, yeah, we could use that.” So, they take what's useful and they adjust a little bit to your recommendations. The third is embrace. Embrace is that they lean into it; they wrap their arms around and say, “All right, let's explore all this stuff.” They are wicked open-minded; this is going to be fantastic. There's no defense to it, they're open, they're listening to everything that's being said from a curiosity standpoint, to see how to make it work, not why it shouldn't work. A lot of us defend, but, you know, it's interesting, we coach about 80 to 90 business owners a month here, give or take, on a pretty consistent basis. The interesting thing is, if I look at the top percentage of the CEOs and business owners that we deal with, top, top, top, top, top. Meaning that top size revenue, they also have larger teams of people, higher quality clients, etc. So interestingly enough, when I deal with those individuals, and we start talking about breaking down process to rebuild it, when we start talking about breaking down something to rebuild it, it could be anything. If I just say that “Hey, how open-minded are you to break something down, to rebuild it, to see if there's a gap there?” Most of your middles, which means the people in the middle of the pack of success, will defend what they've done. But I'm telling you the people way up front, when I say, “Hey, let's rip apart your practice, and let's figure out when we build it”, almost 100% will say, “Done. Love it. Rip it down.” If you rip it, whatever is good will stay. If you rip it and it's not good, we're going to fix it so your owner, your heavy hitters, the strong leaders, are saying to themselves, “If it's good, it'll stick. If not, we can upgrade it.” So, they don't defend what they're doing. It's a mindset.
Glenn Mattson
How many of you rip up your practice every one to two years to rebuild it? You’d say that's insane. Now, when you rip it up and you start to rebuild it, what's good stays and what needs to be updated gets automatically changed. It's a constant evolution of perfection. When your team comes to you with a different way of doing it, before you say anything like, “No, that's dumb. Why did you do that? How much time did you spend doing this?” Just turn around and say, “Hey, love the concept of thinking outside the box and going ahead outside the curve and trying to solve the problem. I love that together. So, help me understand your point of view. Let's see if we can figure this out together. So, one of the things I want you to think about is, when we go from vulnerability, I want you to go to from vulnerability to actually acceptance. Don't defend yourself just because.
Glenn Mattson
You've heard me say this before: when we get out of the house, my wife likes to go to the end of the driveway and take a left. When she gets to the driveway, she goes that way. She goes down the hill, goes in front of the Yacht Club, sees the nice ocean, and it’s a beautiful drive. Then wraps around, goes up to where the library is, passes another beautiful duck pond, and then hits the grocery store. Me, I like to go down the driveway, bang it. Go down about another 400 yards. I hit three more lights. I'm on the road for another, I don't know, half a mile, and I'm at the grocery store. I go on the main road. She goes on the back roads. We both get there. Neither of us got there wrong. We just drove differently. We got there differently. So, one of the things I have a tough time putting my finger on, but I want you to think about it, and hear me in this, to see if I describe you. I would like you to think about being egoless when it comes to your leadership. What I mean by egoless is that you got to where you are because you have swagger. You got to where you are because you've bet on yourself and you've won. You got where you are because you have a way bigger sense of risk-taking than the average person does by far.
Glenn Mattson
But I want you to share something with you that you've probably not heard before, but it's that when you're a leader, a lot of times, ego isn't your best friend. See, our overachiever mindset is the one that got us to the position of where we are, and with that, honestly, comes a little bit of an ego that says, I did things that the average person couldn't do. That's all fair. But when you're arrogant, you're that kind of person where you have to make every conversation about you. When someone starts speaking about a piece of business, you say, “Oh, that's amazing. Let me tell you how I did it.” If every time you have a conversation, the story seems to constantly turn around at a cul-de-sac and go back to you, we’ve got a little bit of an issue. So, you know, not every conversation is about you. When you listen before you speak, when you seek to understand people before you start telling how great you are, that's how you start building trust. You know how you break it? When someone starts telling you about themselves, and you try to outdo them. “Oh, yeah, so you got a new house? Let me tell you what we just bought.” So, you’ve got to make sure that you know this to be true about people; people want to feel like they're being heard. People want to feel like they're being seen, being recognized. People want to be valued. So, there's nothing better than walking through your office, and you turn around and say, “By the way, I heard what you did the other day for Mrs. Smith and getting that that piece of business out, I just want to say I really thought that was thoughtful and unbelievable how you stayed and did it and got it done for them, because that really means that they have the ability now to do X, so, awesome stuff.” You know, when someone comes to you and says, “I want to change some ideas”, we have a tendency to shut it down. The best thing to say is, “I love the fact you're coming to me. I love the fact you thought about this, and you trusted to come to me so we can have a conversation. So, tell me about what you were thinking and help me to see how you got there.” Be quiet and listen, and do tons of active listening.
Glenn Mattson
Now we look at sales, we look at leadership, we look at other things that we're doing, we all know communication is the critical component of this. Communication means, in sales, we know this; it's 70/30, right? 70% of the time you're listening, 30% of the time you're talking. So, as a good leader, remember, someone gave you two ears and one mouth, try the ratio for a little while. Sales and leadership are immensely based on inspirational communication. But we also have to understand the audience. So let me give you a couple of things you can do to build trust. Number one, you’ve got to sit down with your team and ask flat out, what does it look like to them? When do they have it? When do they feel like they lost it with somebody? What caused it to be lost? So, the first thing you’ve got to find out is the baseline. What is trust? How do they define it, and how is it lost? Usually, the easiest way of doing that is finding out how and who did it in the past. Number two, understand their sources of information. What I mean by that is, who else do they listen to when they're outside of work? What is the content they listen to? Where do they get their information from? Important stuff. This helps you know and meet a little bit halfway on who they are and what they do. So, understand.
Glenn Mattson
Next is, be consistent. Make sure that you do what you say and say what you're going to do. You’ve got to own your word. Man, you better watch out. If you make a commitment to do something, you better giddy up and make sure it gets done. So be consistent. The next one is instead of starting with defense, instead of being dominant, instead of saying, “I’m right and you're an idiot”, instead of saying things like, “Well, it's my business, not yours. Why would you even be telling me what to do?” What I’d like you to do is write it down and put it on your blotter or right underneath your desk blotter or you can put on a little post-it note on your computer screen. It doesn't make a difference, but for many of you, you need to see it constantly. The third thing I want you to write down in your notes on how to build trust is, be consistent and be curious. So the thing I want you to write down is consistency and curiosity. No matter what they tell you, imagine that you're trying to write an article for it, so you're going to have to know all the w's. You're going to have to know information. So be curious, but also be consistent. It's not simple, not easy, but the absolute number one way to build trust is consistency. So know where the information is coming from, what's important to them. You’ve got to be consistent. Be super curious.
Glenn Mattson
The last one is going to be interesting. Just like I said that you can't tell excuses or make excuses, because if you do it, people below you will do it. The same thing is true with challenging. If you truly want to challenge your people and have them okay with it, who do you think you are that they are not allowed to challenge you? You have to make it free and open. You can't just say, “Hey, challenge me”, and when someone does, you beat them up with a two-by-four. I had that about a year and a half ago. I had a client, and he turns around and goes, “Hey, I need some feedback on this.” When someone said something, he literally, without missing a beat, goes, “That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life. Let me tell you why.” And he went over and told him why. It was dumb in his eyes. Then he turns to the rest of the executives and says, “All right, so who else?” No one says anything. Afterwards, you go, “See, Glenn, no one gives me feedback.” I'm like, “Whoa, all right, Braun, if that's what you thought”, and we had a serious problem.
Glenn Mattson
So, make sure you are constantly curious and you're consistent. Make sure that you challenge yourself all the time with beautiful questions surrounded by “What if?” I'll talk to you soon on the next episode of Building Blocks of Success. But remember, from where you are, ego is important, but ego gets in our way, so make sure you have a vulnerability with your leadership skills. Talk to you soon.
Glenn Mattson
This is the Building Blocks of Success with Glenn Mattson.
