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Change the way that you think about the person that's leading you, your boss. So this is for you, those of you who work in a company and you have a leader. Now, in order to do this, you need to understand what I call, like, the iceberg illusion of leadership. The best way to become a great leader is to become a great follower. When I worked my first couple jobs in gyms, I remember that I had a boss that would leave earlier than me and come in later than me. And I would think to myself, must be nice. I. I felt resentful. I mean, like, that's what I did because I was working really long hours. I was grinding, like, drinking, like coffee grinds all day. And I felt like when my boss came in, they were, like, in a great mood all the time. And they were always, like, well rested and, like, had a good frame of mind. And my thought was like, well, a good boss should be there all the time. Like, they should be able to do my job better than me. And if they can't, then they're bad boss. Like, if they don't know how to make the sale better than me, if they don't know how to train better than me, if they don't have the same skills with clients that I have, that then that means that they're not good at their job. How can somebody who's worse at my job be my boss? I did not understand the point. What clicked for me was when my boss, I remember I walked into their office and I saw that they had tears in their eyes. And I said, is everything okay? And they said, I'm just dealing with a lot right now. And I said, what are you dealing with? Suddenly I hear everything. It's like, there's a huge staffing issue, there's a huge budget issue where they can't bring enough resources. Their boss is asking them to do something that they don't have the resources to do. And there's a bunch of construction issues with one of the new locations. And I remember in that moment, that was when, like, the paradigm broke for me. I realized, holy, I did not realize how much this person was holding. And it was the first time I had empathy for my boss. From that moment, I was like, how can I take things off their plate? Instead of resenting them for not being able to do my job, I started saying, how could I help them do their job better? It's interesting because that one little shift in seeing that moment, like, that glimpse of, I'd say, like, vulnerability, it changed how I was treated. How they developed me and ultimately my entire career trajectory because they offered me a management position not even 10 months into the job. Now, why was that? This is what a lot of people don't get. There's this iceberg illusion of leadership. You think about any organization like an iceberg. There's the work you seek, the tasks, the meetings, the client facing or team facing stuff. It's like above the waterline. Just assume that what you see is 10%. The other 90% is strategy, politics, financial decisions, preventing crisis, managing, up managing, sideways, negotiating, hiring, creating culture, firing, protecting the team they'll never know about. And so when you judge your Boss by the 10%, you see you will always be underwhelmed by their ability. The whole point of them being above you is to shield you from all the that they deal with because you're supposed to focus on your job and they are supposed to protect you from everything else. So when you understand your boss's job is not to do your job better than you, it's to do a different job. Their job is not to do your job better than you can, it's to make decisions and operate and do a completely different job than you do and to see ahead and deal with problems and open up opportunities for you that you didn't even know that they will do and then that they will never get credit for. What I learned from that experience is how you think about the person leading. You will determine how leadable you are, and how leadable you are determines how fast you grow. And the people who rise in the organizations, they are not the ones who think they're smarter than their boss. They're the ones who figure out how to make their boss's job easier and how to be a great director of work. So when you shift from my boss should serve me, my boss should be better than me at these things, to how can I take things off my boss's plate. My boss should be better than me at their job, not mine. Two things will happen. One, your boss is going to trust you more and they're going to give you more stuff. And then two, you're going to develop more skills because they give you that stuff. Which then leads to three, you're going to grow way faster and you're going to get more skills than everybody else around you. So one thing you could do this week is you could literally ask your boss one question. What's on your plate right now that I could take off. A lot of people think to themselves, they're like, well, why would I help Them do their job so you can learn. Motherf cker. What are you talking about? If I could take something off of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos play, I do it. If they were like, hey, you can be my janitor for a week, I would do it because I want to learn. Most people never ask these questions and they never do it because they let their ego get in the way and they believe all the sh t they see on social media about how bad bosses are and how bad it is to work in companies, blah, blah, blah. Those people don't get noticed, they don't grow, and they certainly don't have lives they want. So replace resentment with curiosity. Instead of saying but must be nice that they leave early, try thinking, I wonder what they're dealing with that I don't see that they have to get down with more time to recoup from work. That one. Reframe. It is the difference between an employee mindset and a leadership mindset. Number four is how you think about the people that you lead. Now you are ready for the higher level of leadership. This comes when you change how you think about the people that you lead. So if you want to become a top 1% leader, you need to understand the other key aspect of what we call Phil Jackson's strategy, the triangle offense. So this is not just a basketball strategy. It's a very, very good leadership philosophy. In most offenses, there's a point guard who controls the ball and makes all the decisions. The triangle eliminated that. Every player had to read the defense and make their own decisions. So what that meant was there was no single decision maker. So Kobe Bryant couldn't just like ISO ball his way through the triangle. And Shaq couldn't just demand the ball in the post. They actually had to trust their teammates. And more importantly, their teammates had to develop the basketball IQ to make real time decisions under pressure. Phil Jackson forced this not by giving speeches about teamwork, but by designing a system where individual talent dominance authority wouldn't work. He literally created the conditions where the collaboration was not optional. It was the only path to success. Now, the result in the first few weeks was always panic because people were so used to being told what to do and would escalate it to Phil Jackson and then what he would do is send them back. And the first month, I remember they talked about like how frustrated everyone was. Why won't you just tell us what to do? Why don't you tell us what the play is? But then by the second month, because he knew you have to Wait. Something shifted with everybody. The players started talking to each other. They started solving problems together, essentially being their escape hatch. The real work in leadership is learning to delegate not just tasks, but decisions. If you delegate a task, it means go do this thing. I've already figured out. That's to the degree I trust you. When you delegate decision, it means here's the outcome we need. I need you to figure out how to get there, which means I trust you. If you want to create doers, then give people tasks. If you want to create leaders, give people decisions. I had to let people make decisions that I disagreed with, and I still do. There's so many things I don't fully agree with in my company, and I have to watch them take approaches that I wouldn't always take and still won't. And sometimes they fail. And I'm like, I thought that would fail, but sometimes they don't. And I'm like, wow, I suck. I can't believe I was going to tell them not to do that. And sometimes their approach actually works better than what mine would have. And I'm like, I'm getting old. But here's the thing. Both outcomes were very valuable because in both cases, they are building the muscle to think and lead independently. And so I have stopped asking the question, did they do it the way that I would have done it? And I start asking the question, did they achieve the outcome we wanted? That has changed everything about how I lead because it just, it completely removes me as a person from it. And it makes it all about what we do for the company because we are all stewards of the company. And remember this, companies plateau at the competence of the founder. If you are the genius with a thousand hands, then your ceiling is always the company's ceiling. So if you want to avoid that, take these few steps, audit your delegation. Look at everything you've delegated this month. For each item, ask yourself, did I delegate a task or did I delegate a decision? And I'm going to go ahead and tell you it's probably mostly tasks you're probably building. People who come to you for every decision point. They can do the tasks really well, but they don't think. So you have to ask yourself, how do I switch that? How do I create decision makers? The second one going with that is create a decisions I no longer make list. Okay, look back at the last week, two weeks of your life. What are all the decisions that you made? Walk through your day. Go through your calendar. Remember the meetings you're in, what you were talking to the conversations you had, what decisions did you make that you don't need to make? Somebody else can make them and then hand them off. You don't need to approve them. Just, like, let your team own them end to end, and resist that, like, very compulsive urge to overrule everything unless the building is actually on fire. And then the third thing is replace. How would I do this? With did they achieve the outcome? Okay, you need to stop measuring your team's success by whether they did it your way. Measure them by if they got the result. Now, I'm not saying disregard all values. I always tell people, I'm like, listen, our values are there because we abide by the values to get the results. But your way and my way are going to look different. And there are usually multiple paths to the right outcome. And sometimes their path is actually going to be better than yours, but you're never going to find out if you don't give them the shot. And the last thing I would say is schedule your own absence. Okay, so for every role that you play in the business, identify who could do this next. I'm doing this right now. Who could do this next? If the answer is nobody, that's probably like, your most urgent priority is to find somebody who can or bring somebody on who can't. Because the goal is to always be training your replacement. Not because you are leaving, but because that is what's going to free you up when the next opportunity comes. And if you are not growing your business, your department, your team, who is. And so next time there's a crisis, don't just jump in and rescue the team and rescue the thing. Go to your team and say, I trust you guys. You guys are smart. Come to me on Monday with your plan to solve this. And then sit on your hands, I don't know, go on a hike, lose reception, go camping, distract yourself. I know it's hard. I get it. By the second time you do this and the third time you do it and the fourth time you do it, you're going to see that people really rise to the occasion because you stop being the escape hatch. If you are serious and actually interested in becoming the kind of leader that your team wants to follow, you can go ahead and check out Layla's letters. I know it's cheesy. This is a weekly memo that I send to my leadership team. So I send it in our Slack channel. I just send, like, once, maybe twice a week sometimes when I'm feeling inspired. It's not filtered. We don't write it for this. I've been doing it for years and I decided to repackage it for my newsletter has the frameworks how I'm thinking to build people and build businesses. So if you're interested in that, you can go ahead and grab the link in the description. You can sign up for it. So you just learned how to think like a leader, but if you can't speak like one, none of it's going to stick.