← Build with Leila Hormozi
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In order to be a great leader and to lead a winning team, you have to learn both the hard and the soft. You do not have one without the other. And you will be at a constant disadvantage if you only have one skill. I have built my company to over 250 million and I have learned the best employees don't always make the best leaders. But the best leaders do share the same traits. So if you've ever wondered why do you have what it takes? Why someone else got qualified for a role that you didn't? Why you got passed up, Here are six signs that you'll make a great leader. Number number one, stop asking for permission to lead. When I started working at a small group training gym, I did not have the leadership title, but I did start doing things that leaders do. You know, I would notice like patterns and client drop off and I would bring new ideas to my boss without being asked. You know, when a new person was confused about like client interactions. I didn't say like you should just be better with clients. I was like, hey, let me show you what I do, how I say things, when to say it, how to do this during a sales process, how to do this when you're having trouble with your client. And I would break it into like very specific behaviors and let them watch me. It's interesting cause like the owner didn't offer me a boost in my role because I asked for it. He offered it to me because the behavior made the case for me. So by the time it was like, hey, we want to promote you, it was like the title had already happened. Promoting me was a formality. So my point here is this. You have to make the title obvious when your boss would feel embarrassed. I not promoting you because your leadership is so visible. That is when you know that you have done it right. And there is a lot to say on this, but there's a lot of different skills to doing your individual job versus doing the job of a leader. And it is very hard for people to make that jump. If you can make that jump while in this job, then you essentially have de risked the move to put you in a formal leadership position to get promoted. There's a ton of research on leadership behaviors that predict if you're going to be seen as a leader or promoted into one right initiative. Do you do things without being asked? Problem solving for the group? Do you solve problems beyond just your own problems and emotional regulation under pressure? When things get hard, do you freak out and freak everybody else out or do you stay calm and actually Calm everybody else around you. The thing about this is, oftentimes when people come to me, even in my company, they're like, hey, what do I need to do to get promoted? Like, why am I on the executive team? What's the skill? What do I need to know about finance and legal? And I'm like, soft skills, which are not soft. It's a terrible term for them. Like communication and delegation and empowerment. Like, those are more important than your hard technical skills when it comes to being a leader. Here's what nobody's gonna tell you. The promotion does not unlock the behavior. The behavior unlocks the promotion. So stop waiting for permission and start acting like the role that you would like. Now, number two is show your flaws. I had two people sign up for the same role in my company. Person A had never brought me a single mistake in two years. Person B came regularly and was like, I made a bad call. Here's what I missed. Who do you think got promoted? I promoted person B. And now why is that? Person A was not flawless, but they were hiding their mistakes from me. A lot of people assume that because they don't see mistakes, they don't occur. But the reality is, is that a lot of people do not share their mistakes out of fear. The. The best leaders cannot get better unless they provide you with room to coach them and room to understand that they are flawed just like everybody else. They don't hide. They put their flaws out on the table, and they allow for themselves to be vulnerable. And what a lot of people don't realize is that whatever you do as a leader, other people are going to model. So if you hide your mistakes, guess what? Your whole team's gonna hide their mistakes. When you own your mistakes, your whole team's gonna own their mistakes. I can promise you this. There. I've had. Gosh. I had a customer service team that accidentally stopped facilitating our refund process after one Christmas break. They just, like, forgot to do the refund process. And three months later, after Christmas break, I was like, oh, very weird. Our revenue line over here, like, what's going on? It took me about maybe an hour to figure out that it was. That they had stopped doing this process. And when I investigated, I talked to everybody on the team. What I realized is that two of them had actually known that had happened and it had stopped. But they didn't share anything with anybody. Now, why is that? The leader on the team never shared anything. They never shared when they made mistakes. They had this illusion of perfection at all points in time. Harvard Did a study and found that when one person shows vulnerability, it creates a signal that invites everybody else to do the same, which builds trust faster than any other thing that you can do in a business. You think about the amount of money that businesses spend on off sites and team activities and investing in your team, being honest, sharing your mistakes, that actually increases engagement by 25% according to that study. And, and a lot of people think, oh my God, but Leila, you're a girl. It sounds so soft. Well, mother, there's nothing soft about winning. That's what I say. Like, I didn't learn this stuff because I was like, oh, I feel like I want to be softer. I want to be more vulnerable. But you know what I did find? In order to be a great leader and to lead a winning team, you have to learn both the hard and the soft. You do not have one without the other. And you will be at a constant disadvantage if you only have one skill. Number three, you are being evaluated for a completely different job. Okay. This actually took me a while to learn and also to then be able to teach to people. I promoted one of our best team players into a leadership role. It was funny because I was so excited. I was like, dude, she's going to kill it. She's amazing. She's so good at her job. And then the moment that I promoted her and she had direct reports, she couldn't actually do the job I just put her in. She couldn't delegate. She would actually take their work, redo their work. It was just like everything all of a sudden was so wrong. And the reason is because what made her so good at her job was doing the work. And so the only way she knew to help them was to do the work for them. And so it was really, I mean, I want to say funny, but it wasn't that funny because it sucked to live through the first time. Within three months, her team was sober down. They were so demoralized, they did not like her as a leader. I had four of them come to me. They pulled me onto a call and they were like, we cannot deal with this. Look at all these things that are happening. As I looked at what she was doing, it wasn't that she was trying to be malicious, trying to undermine them, trying to. It was that she was doing her old job in a new role and didn't realize it. For example, if you told a 10 year old be better at basketball, they would have no idea where to begin. Like, you would have to break it down into the component parts Teach them how to dribble, how to shoot, how to pass. Leadership actually works the same way. And so when you are promoted into a leadership role, what you must understand is there are so many skills within the skill itself of leadership that you have to learn to be proficient at your job. And so what it is, is it's a bundle of very specific but learnable behaviors. And those behaviors that make someone a great performer are not the same ones that make you a great leader. In fact, oftentimes they are at odds with each other, which is why it's really hard to go from being like the top salesperson to the best sales director ever. They heard different skills that often contradict with each other. To reinforce that, MIT and Yale did a study that found that the best salespeople were both most likely to be promoted and performed the worst as managers. But employees who shared credit and collaborated increased their team's performance by 30%. The trait that predicted great leadership was not individual excellence and being really good at your job. It was actually collaboration, which is a completely different skill. So if you think about it, if you're really, really good at your job, you don't need to collaborate with people to get things done, which means your collaboration skills are low. So then you get promoted into leadership. You don't know how to collaborate. So now you're not a good leader. That's why it doesn't work most of the time. If you look at Phil Jackson, who has 11 NBA titles, you've got Belichick, who has six Super Bowls, you have, you know, Sir Alex Ferguson, 38 trophies. The greatest coaches in the history that won across all these different eras of different players. The players came and went, but those coaches kept on winning. Now, why is that? Because the leverage isn't just in being the best player. It's in making the best out of every player. It is in raising the bar and the standard for every player on the team. Here's a good way that you can kind of gauge like, am I ready for leadership? Is this something that I could do? Look at your week. How much of your time of your week is spent on your output versus improving somebody else's output? If it's 90, 10, then you're showing your boss that you're a great player, not necessarily a great future coach. There are people in my organization who, when I know somebody is a future leader, it's not because they're the best individual performer. It's because what I notice is that in their spare time, they do not seek to improve their own performance, but to help others improve theirs. It's the sales guy who spends three hours drilling his teammates and teaching them his overcomes because he just wants to help. That's somebody who has the skill of collaboration and of helping others. The fourth piece is you solve problems that aren't yours. I had an employee who came onto the team and essentially fixed another team's onboarding process. So she came on in operations, and while she was in operations, she was like, oh, my gosh, the HR team has no onboarding process and it's HR without asking me, without telling me, without, you know, knowing she didn't have authority over there. Instead, what she did is she asked questions, she offered to help, and then she worked alongside them to help them put it into place. And the funny thing is that I found out from the other manager, not from her. Why is that so important? Because what I saw in that is I was like, wow, I have somebody who went out of their way to make another function better in their own spare time. For why? I don't know. Because that person had leadership skills. So what did I do? She actually got promoted within the next three months. When you go out of your way, you inconvenience yourself. You create more friction in your life to help other people when it doesn't necessarily benefit you directly. Compare that to an employee that I had that was only completely focused on their lane. I have had many who are completely exceptional at their job, but when another teammate is drowning and asking for help, they say, sorry, can't do it. I've already got enough on my own plate. Technically correct, but also the opposite of leadership. The person who sees a problem that isn't theirs and fixes it is the one who shows their true character. And character like that is one that should be in a leadership position. You want people in a leadership position who are willing to sacrifice their own personal comfort for the better of the team. If somebody is a very, very good individual contributor, oftentimes what they are doing is constantly foregoing team collaboration to focus on their individual skills, which is fine. Just don't also wonder why you're not in a leadership position. There was a product done by Google. It was Google's era project Aristotle that basically analyzed like 180 teams to identify fact actors of high performance. And what it found out is that when even one teammate regularly stepped outside their lane to help other people, it had this ripple effect on all the other team dynamics. Because a lot of people think, oh, gosh, what can I do in the organization? And I Try really hard to instill this in my team. I'm like, you can make so much more of a difference than you think. It's just that a lot of people don't have the courage to try. The reality is everybody around you is watching and we once everyone's watching and everyone's watching you, your boss is eventually going to notice. The fifth piece is trade credit for influence. I think, like, this has burned into my mind from when I first decided that I wanted to be a great leader, which is the best. Leaders take the blame and give away the credit. It also makes them really hard at self promotion and marketing. So that has been an interesting skill to learn because when you market yourself, you want to promote yourself, which means taking credit, which you'll notice for a lot of leaders is very hard to do. When I first heard that term, I remember what I did immediately is that any time that the team had a win, even if it was me leading to the initiative, I was like, amazing. You guys did so great. Look at what we did here. We, we, we, we, we, we did this. We accomplished this. We, we, we. It was so cool to see because when I started giving away the credit and then anytime we had a loss, I was like, here's how it's on me. What I noticed is that people continued to come to me with their problems and their ideas. It wasn't because I was a top performer in the company. It's because I made people feel like it was one, okay to fail because I owned failures constantly. And two, like, they were important because I was constantly telling them why they were and what they did well and why they were deserving of the credit. So if you remember that MIT Yale study that did on salespeople who become managers. So they also found that salespeople who shared credit became 30% more effective as mentors than the top solo performers. So. So if you look at, like, what's a leading indicator that somebody would be a good manager, it's like, do they give away the credit? I can tell you that we have a really, actually fantastic sales team@acquisite.com. and what I love seeing the shout outs is like, anytime somebody, like, goes on a hot streak and they're just having like a great week where they're closing at like, the highest amount, they'll be like, I want to thank these seven people for helping coach me, helping role play with me, staying late, watching my calls with me. I think that's so cool because what it tells me is there's a lot of future leaders in the organization because people who are defensive of their success often cannot be great leaders. Number six is to develop patience as a competitive advantage. I remember when I worked at 24 Hour Fitness, I had a manager and he was like, anything but flashy. Like, sometimes, you know, it's like you've got the boss and they're leading the winning team. It's like they show up in their new Lambo or they have their, like, new Jeep and they've got, like. And all of a sudden they're wearing this cool watch. Like, you just see all the trinkets popping up, right? Especially when you're working on a sales team. And I remember instead, like, he showed up every day just wearing the T shirt, hat, shorts, and he just did the boring with excellence day in and day out. He trained new people, he was patient, he listened to calls, and he ran meetings with the same high energy day in and day out, every day. And I remember there were so many times when I was like, dude, I just want to, like, fast forward and get past this phase of my career. And. And what I realized in hindsight was that he understood something that I didn't, which is that leadership is built in the fundamentals and repetition. And after studying a lot of great coaches, I see this across themes. Like, Vince Lombardi did the exact same thing. He started every training camp by holding up a football and saying, gentlemen, this is a football. It's not like he said, oh, I gotta cut it. I've said it enough times. I've done enough camps. The cool thing that you can see is that the best coaches and the best teachers across industries, across athletes, across business, they start with the fundamentals every single day. Time consistency beats intensity no matter what. If you say something once and you expect to stick, you're never going to get what you want out of your team. You have to say it until it sticks, repeat it until it sticks, teach it until it sticks. I go even deeper on all this stuff on leadership in my weekly newsletter. It's called Layla's Letters. You can find the link in the description or you can go to laythehormozi.com.