How to Lead Like the Top 1%

Boss or leader, what's the real difference? I'm Dan Martell, the founder of Martell Ventures, a portfolio of companies that makes over a hundred million dollars in revenue per year. In my 28 years of business, I've hired over a thousand employees, and a lot of my success in business has come from learning how to lead, not just bossing people around. And so in this video, I'm going to share with you the rules of leadership that took me from a dick head boss to a leader worth following. Starting with rule number one, praise in public, correct in private. Bosses criticize publicly, praise in private. Leaders praise publicly, and then any critical feedback is done in one-on-ones private in a closed room where there's a chance for it to breathe, to explain, to ask questions, not off the cuff criticizing people in front of others. It's funny cuz I had a buddy that was like trying to elevate his leadership style, and I asked him like, "Well, how do you give feedback, and how do you do it?" And I said, "Whoa, dude. Sounds like you're a seagull leadership." He goes, "What's that?" I said, "You're the kind of guy that's never around. And when you show up, you swoop down and you [ __ ] all over everybody's work, and then you whoo, fly off to the next meeting. It's not a great way to make your team feel, especially if you only show up to [ __ ] on them." He changed that one strategy. Instead, he would swoop down and give praise to everybody doing the right thing. He'd write down all the stuff that people weren't doing right, and then you'd have one-on-one conversation with them after the meeting. It changes whole business. Stop making your team look bad and watch their performances go up. Praise in public, correct in private. Rule number two, lighthouse versus tugboat. Bosses drag people, leaders shine the way. When I got out of rehab as a teenager, everybody said, "Dan, stick to your path. Don't try to fix other people that are still struggling with their addiction, because you're only going to get met with resistance." And that's what a tugboat is. A tugboat wastes a lot of energy trying to bang into ships to try to get them steered in the right direction, where a lighthouse just stands there and it could help one, two, or a hundred ships and it takes nothing from them. As a leader, you want to be a lighthouse. [music] The worst example of this was a guy one time that came to me and said, "Hey man, yo, my teams they don't listen to me." And I looked at him and I'm like, "Bro, look at yourself. You don't listen to what you say for your health, you're not organized, you look disheveled." I mean, the guy pretty much looked homeless. You don't listen to you. That is the problem. You got to get in shape if you want your friends to get in shape. You have to be the example, not the savior. Be the lighthouse, not the tugboat. Rule number three, train, don't tell. Bosses tell people what to do, leaders train people on what to do. Telling informs somebody, but training transforms them. If you expect something from somebody, I need you to teach it with a standard operating procedure, work with them to have reps, and then coach them to success. Remember one time I had a client, they were frustrated with their team. And I said, "Oh, sorry to hear. Let me ask you a question. How about you make a list of all the things your team's doing that frustrates the crap out of you?" So for example, the first one was, "My team doesn't ideate in meetings with me. They never come up with good ideas." You tell me where you trained your team on how to ideate in a meeting. "Well, I don't have one." Zero surprise. Everybody needs to be taught how to perform. And if you don't do that, you're always going to be disappointed with your team. My favorite way of doing this, I call this the camcorder method. Just record yourself. You can jump on a Zoom call, share your screen, record it to the cloud. You just talk out loud about how you do it and the philosophy behind each decision that you're doing in the video. And if you want to take this to another level, upload that to chat GPT and ask it to create the standard operating procedure. If you haven't trained them, you can't blame them. Train, don't tell. Rule number four, delegate the outcome, not the task. Bosses give tasks, leaders give outcomes. A task [music] to somebody creates a tenant. They're like in the thing, but they don't own it. An outcome, it creates owners. It's kind of like a renter versus an owner in a home. When you rent it, you don't really think about like the maintenance and fixing stuff. Whereas if you own the place, you're going to treat it like it's your own, cuz it is. And that's a massive difference between bosses and leaders who delegate tasks versus outcomes. In my 20s, I had a business and I used to wake up every day, and I would go around and I'd give everybody their task. I was like a professional taskmaster. Doing that with a team of 20 or 30 people just created a lot of overwhelm because I never had time to do the work myself. I changed it from being task-focused to outcome-focused. All of a sudden I wasn't getting involved in the weeds, I was staying very high level, people had clarity what my expectations were without me getting involved. Here's a simple example. You could tell somebody, "Hey, send five emails hoping to generate some leads." Or you could say, "Generate 10 leads by Friday using channel of your choice." If they choose email, cool. I don't care how they do it, I just need those 10 leads by Friday. You have to give them what I call the definition of done. You have to describe what done looks like, which includes the problem you're trying to solve, so that they can go, "Did this solve that problem?" That means it's done. Ownership requires a finish line, not micromanaged steps. Leaders delegate outcomes, not tasks. Rule number five, default to trust. Bosses withhold trust, leaders default to it. Trust speeds everything up. I always start with access. I back it up with audits and reviews, but I don't hold back, because that's what bosses do. Leaders say, "I hired you for a reason. It's time to let you cook." I remember one time I was talking to my friend Rachel, she has a design agency, and she was like resisting letting her inbox go, until she realized that trust with some guardrails was actually the unlock. I'm not saying just let people go willy-nilly and get in your inbox and start sending emails to everybody. Give them some structure. Monitor what's being sent. Could you give in the first day full access to all the systems that they need to get going? And then you can set up some SLAs, service level agreements, on what expectations are, maybe some tracking, what I call sensors, maybe a dashboard so that they have an understanding of how they're supposed to play the game, so that if there's any other issues, it gets flagged so that you can sit down with them and coach them up. Default to trust, but the key is to inspect what you expect. It's not abdication, it's involvement without holding back. True leaders default to trust, they don't withhold it. Rule number six, take the bullet for your team. Bosses, they blame you. Leaders, they blame themselves. Great leaders own every miss first. Something happens, my bad. The language shifts from they messed up to we messed up. The other day, a video got made and there was an issue. My fault. Somebody on my team lost a bunch of footage. My fault. Your team sees you take the blame for things that are clearly not your fault. That's how you start to build trust. That's how they know you got their back, and they're going to show up to act as if they own it themselves and they're going to push forward no matter what happens. That's a leader. Ownership builds trust, blame kills it. Trust is required on a team to grow, and that's what leaders know how to do. If you want to be a true leader, take the bullet for your team. Rule number seven, design the game so people can win. Bosses demand the wins, leaders design them. How can I be frustrated with a team playing a game that I wasn't clear about how to play, how to win, what position they're playing? And that's what happens every day. You think your team knows, they don't. You don't even know. This is a crazy story. One of my editors, Nick, who at the time was 19, one of his dream cars was the Ferrari Pista. I happen to have one of those, and I said, "Anybody that gets a million view video," at this time we were only doing like a hundred thousand, a hundred fifty thousand views, "I will lend you my car for the day." I didn't think anybody would hit it. Nick comes out of nowhere, edits this masterpiece, publish. Million view videos. And here I am, heart beating, watching a 19-year-old roll out of my front yard with my [ __ ] half million dollar supercar. That's the philosophy. You have to design the game that when you win, everybody wins. The best example of this is creating a visible scorecard per role [music] with clear success criteria and weekly reporting. Like in my companies, there's scorecards for every department and there's names next to every metric, and the people know how they play the game, how their scores are being tallied up, how frequent it is, what their expectations are. That's a leader. Bosses hold people accountable to invisible scorecards that they're never clear about. Ultimately, great leaders are game designers, not just scorekeepers. You have to design the game so people can win. Rule number eight, create rhythm, not chaos. Bosses coach randomly, leaders coach rhythmically. A great leader realizes that growth compounds through cadences, not chaos. Training and coaching plus unblocking every week is the rhythm of a great leader. Bosses only show up to help you when shit's on fire. Leaders go, "I'm showing up all the time, because I'm investing in you cuz I know I'm getting you ready for the big opportunities." And that prevents the fires. They become fire preventers, not firefighters. I used to be that shitty boss. They used to hide behind my keyboard, I didn't want to talk to anybody, never coached anybody, never talked to anybody about like doing things better, and then I'd wonder why my business didn't grow. Today is completely different. Now, minimum every week I'm doing a 60-minute leadership training where I look at the top challenges my whole team is having that if I help them unblock it, we create the most value for my business. I believe that's how we build momentum. Success is all about the rhythms. If you have a rhythm for investing in people, the people will grow. You use rhythms to build the people, the people build the business. You have to create rhythm, not chaos. Rule number nine, implement sensors for decisions. Bosses rely on gut, leaders rely on sensors. A sensor is something that will catch an output or an activity before it becomes fatal. A sensor in business is a survey to a customer, is some kind of report from your CRM solution, some kind of financial analysis, but essentially it's proactively asking, "How is this person or department doing?" So I can get a feedback loop and get proactive, not reactive. A simple example of this is I get a daily cash report on every one of my businesses sent via email to my inbox that I scan every morning. Having that daily report creates a sensor that gives me peace of mind to know I'll never be surprised with the financials. Another example is to have a scorecard design where everybody's metrics are loaded in and that creates trend lines. So if you know you have a goal for the quarter and you're already the first month into the quarter, 30 days in, if the trend line's off, that's a sensor for you to get involved. Great leaders know how to design great sensors. And the best part is that if you do it right, your team will correct the problem before you have to say anything. Stop running your business on gut feeling and start running it on real data. And by the way, if you want my CEO scorecard template that I use, the exact one to track all the key metrics across all my businesses, just click the first link below in the description and I'll send it to you. So remember, implement sensors for decisions. Rule number 10, words matter. Bosses speak loosely. Leaders speak with intentionality. Language is leadership infrastructure. Your team will echo what you repeat to them. And if you use a lot of words off the cuff and you're inconsistent, they won't be able to echo anything cuz nothing's memorable. It's like when I hear my team repeat phrases like default to trust or outcomes over effort, that's when I know culture is scaling. The whole point is you use language to program the culture within your teams. That's what a leader does. A boss has no idea, there's no intentionality, and they just work off the cuff. A great way to think about this is how do you codify maybe five culture phrases and repeat them over and over and over again until your team starts saying them without you. And here's the big one. If you don't give a story for your team to tell, they will make up their own. And usually it's less interesting, negative, full of self-doubt because they don't have a brighter star to focus on. Words matter. Rule number 11, your energy sets your frequency. Bosses, whoo, they spread chaos. Leaders set the tone. Leaders provide clarity. It's kind of like your team will adopt your leadership nervous system. If you're a chaotic leader, always coming in after an event or reading a book and be like, "Oh, we're changing this. We're changing that. And this is [ __ ] up and I'm going to fix that and blah blah blah." And you're just like Mr. Chaotic, be zero surprise if that's how your company is. I remember one time I was working with this leader and I noticed every Monday he had like this chaotic approach to running his team meetings, but I think it's because it mirrored his sloppy weekend resets. He'd like go off Friday night, get drunk Saturday, get drunk Sunday, lay in bed. And I was just like, "You do realize that your energy on the Monday meeting is affecting your team?" Here's the cool part. He fixed himself first, his team got fixed. Here's a great thing you can do. Start every Monday with a leadership mirror. Write down exactly how you want to show up for your team before anybody sees you and commit to that. Write them down no matter what and then ask yourself, "Did I show up that way for my team?" Because guess what? They'll react to the way you show up. Your energy is like a frequency wave that impacts everybody it comes in contact with it, like echoes out to your team. So if you're off, they'll be off. Regulate yourself, you'll regulate the room. Your energy as a leader sets the frequency of your team. Rule 12, ask, don't answer. Bosses command. Leaders ask. Answers end in thinking. Questions start it. If I tell somebody what to do, I don't have them learning. A question gets them to self-reflect. Sounds so subtle, but it'll be one of the most powerful tools you can use as a leader. Use more questions. What beliefs would you have to have to do too many things for too many people? No one can do it better than Boom. What else? The other day I was working with one of my private coaching clients, I would ask them, "How do you interact in your meetings?" Before weighing in and you set the tone and everybody's like, "Oh, that's what they think. I'm not going to contradict them." I want you to step back and ask, "Hey, what do you think?" My favorite example of this is a guy named Patrick Bet David. He's actually my coach and I've watched him sit in a room on his podcast and be surrounded by people that he completely disagrees with at his core from a values point of view, but still has enough foresight to sit back and go, "I'm just curious, what do you think about this?" And then he gets all their opinions and then using that he can take it and he can kind of shape his answer. Instead of going there first, he uses their feedback to shape it to get them on board with his strategy. It's brilliant to watch. That's what true leaders do. When my client changed his approach by asking other people what they thought, it changed his whole autonomy in his business. Everybody started taking action on their own cuz he empowered them to think. For example, in my life, if somebody comes to me with a problem, I always ask them what their 131 is. One is the problem they're trying to solve, two is the three options that they considered to solve it, and the third is what's their one recommendation. 98% of the time, I go, "Sounds good. Do that." Questions build thinkers, not doers. [music] You want more people that think and do, not just do because you told them. What I want to encourage you to consider is there's probably one of these that you went, "Oh, I probably do that." That one, I want you to write a comment below and let me know what it is. I want you to have a little accountability, a little bit of honesty with yourself because I know that if you can work on that one over the next 30 days and really make it a priority, and then you come back and you watch this again and you work on a second one and a third one, over the next year, implementing these 12 will change your approach to leadership like nothing else, but it requires a commitment and a 30-day focused effort. And remember, if you want access to my CEO scorecard template that I use to track all my business metrics across my teams, click the first link in the description below and I'll send it over. And if you want to learn how to build a business that runs itself, click the video and I'll see you on the other side.