372 | No Excuses – Increasing Your Leadership Impact
What happens when you have a “No excuses” way of leadership. Well, first it changes everything. It also depends on you. You must be able to take full ownership of your work, projects, goals, and the process. No excuses are also more than just you. It is creating a culture that is not willing to accept excuses from anyone. I share with you some insights about how you can create a No excuses way of leadership. I do share a story from Kyle Porter, CEO of SalesLoft, about his realization that he has no one to blame but himself when a key performer leaves his company. Discover what Kyle did that is so different than most leaders.
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Increasing Your Leadership Impact: The Transcript
Have you ever made an excuse for the reason why you didn’t achieve the goal you wanted or finish the project on time or any reason? Did you make an excuse? Think about it for a second.
Yes, I’m calling you to the mat. I wanna talk about excuses today, because if you are making excuses inside your business, then you really don’t have the power to make a change. What I mean by that is by making excuses, then you are giving something else the power to make that shift. If you didn’t hit your revenue goal this quarter or this month, then you are making it so that, and you wanna blame it on your employees, then your employees’ the only people that can fix it.
You think in your mind, “I’ve gotta get them engaged.” But if you’re the leader of that team, or if you’re the leader of that company, then you must take full ownership of that goal, and you can’t blame someone else. You have to say, “What could I have done better? “Where could I have improved communication? “Where could I have supported? “Where could I have filled the gaps “that were necessary for us to hit that?” You have to look at it yourself. I’m gonna share a story with you about a leader who did just that when a really tough moment happened inside his business, but before that, lemme share with you a little bit about who I am.
My name is Gene Hammett, I study the one percent of companies growing at the fastest level in America, the privately-held companies growing at two x, three x, 10x. I recently interviewed someone on this show that has been growing at 39000% over a three-year period. Now that’s astronomical to many of you, and I’m not saying that I’m gonna teach you how to get to that level of growth, but I’m teaching you the secrets and the rituals of those leaders, and if you’re interested in that, then keep listening here.
Few weeks ago, a friend of mine, Kyle Porter, had posted on LinkedIn about a key performer of his company leaves the company, and it was actually even worse than that, because a friend of his was a CEO of another high-growth company had hired them away. His first indication was to be angry, to make excuses about that. And he thought about it for a second, and he said, “You know, that would’ve been easy to do. “What’s hard to do is to take full ownership.” He didn’t wanna make excuses, he didn’t want to do anything other than take responsibility for those actions, and when I talked to him on the phone a few weeks after that, he told me exactly what was goin’ through his mind, and I’ma share it with you today. He thought about the company that he was building.
There were about 300 employees, they’re growing really fast, ‘s called SalesLoft, Kyle Porter, if I didn’t mention the name already, and Kyle said to me, “It really comes down to the kind of company “that we wanna build, and there’s two things “that are really important to that. “We wanna train them so that the best companies in the world “admire our talented employees, but we want to also “create such an environment, a culture, if you will, “that they don’t wanna leave from.”
Now think about that for a second. They wanna train them so that everyone wants them, but they want to create the culture so that no one wants to leave. That, my friends, is what I’d call a competitive advantage. So, how do you get there? Well, you gotta really think about the excuses that you’re making right now.
Are you willing to let go of those excuses? Are you willing to take full ownership of the work that needs to be done, and that you are the person that can change it? If you continue to make excuses, you will give power to the things that you think will make a difference, and that won’t help you. You’ve got to internalize what’s going on inside you. That’s the only way you can do it. I’ve see this happen time and time again.
You’ve got to take ownership. And when employees come to you with problems, are you buying their excuses? If you’re common and quick to blame someone else, they will be quick to blame someone else too, and that won’t help you create the kind of leadership and culture that you really want your business if you wanna grow fast. All of this is about you being really keen to understand that excuses are not a go-to in those moments when you want to blame someone else. You’ve got to figure out what you can do, and what you must do, to move forward. And when your employees come to you with excuses, you wanna make sure that you can, in good integrity, call them on it, and ask them, “instead of blaming “someone else, what can you do?”
This is really hard to do, I know a lotta people struggle with this, and I might get some people saying that I’m absolutely wrong, you’re welcome to send that message to me, but I firmly believe that you don’t wanna accept excuses in your leadership, and if you give excuses, then you will start to get excuses from the employees that you work with.
That’s my take today, if there’s anything I can do to help you grow your company, grow your leadership, just reach out, I’d love to get to know you, my name is Gene Hammett, and if there’s anything I can do just let me know.
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