BY 2013, the reality had set in: I knew in my bones that I wasn’t a good leader. For years, I blamed everyone and everything when things went wrong, but I now realized that I was the one fucking it all up. Like most business owners, I thought I was a good leader, but the reality was that I was a very poor and ineffective one. When I first started Fit Body Boot Camp it was just me, my business partner, and one employee. There weren’t a lot of moving parts or people to keep track of. The pace was slower, more manageable, and we all did our part the best we could. But as the business grew and got more complicated, and as we hired more employees, I felt the pain and pressure of leadership. Rather than stepping into it and learning how to lead a team to success, I did the exact opposite of what an effective leader should do—I avoided responsibility and chose not to grow as a leader as my business grew. Instead, I showed up late to meetings. I was always unprepared. I didn’t correct, mentor, or give feedback to my employees who needed it. I avoided the conversations that I deemed uncomfortable. I pretended that everything was under control. I assumed that everyone would self-manage and get their work done. I kept my feelings bottled up until they turned to resentment. Resentment turned to adversarial relationships. And that led to a toxic work environment where everyone walked on eggshells and no one felt safe to voice their concerns.
A good example: By early 2013, I knew my business was struggling and that I had lost control of my employees and the direction that Fit Body Boot Camp was headed, so I hired a consulting company to help us. They were supposed to help create systems for my new franchise business. We were paying them $22,000 a month for their help—money that we did not have available and went into debt to obtain. This was my Hail Mary to save the company, and I was willing to go further into debt if it was going to save us.
The consultants were good guys and tried to do the best they could. They came in very motivated. The problem was that I kept pulling them into everything that wasn’t their core focus. They were supposed to fix our systems and operations, but I asked them to help with everything from sales to marketing to traffic generation. Essentially, I tried to turn them into a proxy CEO—the leader I wasn’t!—and it’s because I wasn’t willing to look hard in the mirror and own the business. Part of me assumed that they could do it better than me. I quickly learned that there’s really no white knight who’s going to gallop in and save your business. You’re it. I was it and I refused to accept it.
Soon, the consultants started slacking off because I had put so much on their plate that was outside of their “zone of genius,” and since I wasn’t asking for or tracking results they simply started to lower their efforts to match mine. They were supposed to be at our office a set number of hours on a set number of days. That started to fall apart quickly. They made excuses. I accepted them. We were paying them enough that they wanted to keep the contract, but I had led them badly and I had spoiled their chances to help me. In hindsight, I can’t blame them for slacking off. I blame myself for not giving them clarity or key performance metrics to strive for. They got just as complacent as the other employees we had. This was all a by-product of poor leadership on my part and nothing else.
See, that’s the thing: When you get good people but put them in an environment with low standards, few expectations, and poor leadership, they begin to slip. I saw that first with Nick and now I was seeing it with these consultants. And since we were paying them more than $20,000 a month, it was too painful for me to avoid. My mantra came back to me: It’s time to man up, Bedros. It’s time to man up and part ways with these guys or you’re going to go out of business. So I gave them their thirty-day notice and took matters into my own hands. It wasn’t as easy as that—untangling the relationship was a pain for everyone involved, but I had to do it. I had set a bad precedent as a leader and now I had to fix it or go out of business and file bankruptcy.
You can’t outsource leadership. I tried. I’ve seen others try. You are the leader and, like it or not, you’re running your company. You’re either going to guide them to greatness by taking ownership, rising to the opportunity, and becoming an effective leader—or you’re going to take your business into the shitter like I did by doing nothing, ignoring and avoiding your role and responsibility, and attempting to hand off leadership to someone else.
Since then I’ve had a lot of time to think about bad leadership, try to develop into a capable leader, and study models of success. For me, a big part of fixing my leadership issues began when I was able to diagnose why I was weak and ineffective. I took notes; I talked to people around me; I went to masterminds; I attended seminars and read books on the topic. And I came up with what I now know are the Seven Deadly Sins of Weak and Ineffective Leaders.
1) Poor communication: One clear sign of ineffective leadership is poor communication. Leaders who are unable to clearly share their vision and communicate problems, solutions, and recognition effectively tend to have high employee turnover, low morale in the workplace, and poor culture.
2) Lack of action and follow-through: Leaders who do not have a bias toward action and follow-through are among the most ineffective. They expect others to do the work, make the decisions, and call the shots while they stay isolated and inactive. Indecision (lack of action) has cost entrepreneurs more money, time, and market share than making the wrong decision or taking the wrong actions.
3) Disconnection: Keeping isolated or disconnected from your team, business partners, clients, and customers is a sure way to erode respect, loyalty, and confidence in your leadership.
4) Weak character and integrity: Leaders who lack character and integrity will never have trust or likability by those who work for them or by those with whom they do business.
5) A negative perception of others: Ineffective leaders tend to find fault with most people and focus on the things that have gone wrong. They often seem irritated and have a negative perception of team members, the industry, and their customers.
6) Lack of vision: One telltale sign of weak leadership is a lack of vision for the business. Ineffective leaders fly by the seat of their pants and are reactive in the way they do business, thereby creating a sense of confusion, chaos, and instability.
7) Poor personal discipline and structure: Ineffective leaders lack personal structure, so they often chose the path of easy in their personal lives rather than choosing the hard work that produces results. They have chaotic schedules, are disorganized, and always seem to operate in a state of overwhelm and irritation. Weak leaders lack the discipline to structure their days, their thoughts, and their actions, and they constantly have their priorities out of order.
I started with the negatives, in part because, at one time or another, I’ve committed all these sins. (Oscar Wilde once said, “The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.” He’s right!) I’ve been disorganized and a poor communicator. I’ve been indecisive and lacked vision, and so on. But it’s important to identify these deficits before you can correct them. You’ve got to take honest stock of the places you’re falling down, and then you can figure out how to work to pick yourself back up in those areas. Sometimes, it takes someone else identifying those spots for you.
One of my coaching clients, Byron, is a very enthusiastic, driven individual. A simple conversation with him fires you up so much that you want to join Team Byron. His enthusiasm is contagious. Early on, Byron owned two Fit Body Boot Camp franchise locations in Arizona. He had amazing potential to grow his empire. Even though he had the potential and desire to own many more FBBC gyms, for some reason there was a limiting factor that kept Byron from reaching his fullest potential—and I was about to discover exactly what it was.
It wasn’t until Byron joined my mastermind program that I got a better understanding of the things that were limiting him. I run several mastermind groups for entrepreneurs and each of them meet three times a year for two days at a time. The goal is to help, guide, and direct each member through their business challenges and bottlenecks while finding hidden growth opportunities. Any group of like-minded entrepreneurs can start a mastermind together with the intention of helping one another achieve greater success and holding one another accountable.
During the mastermind meeting, Byron seemed on top of it. He was doing all the right things in his business, with his marketing, and with sales. Yet the numbers on his profit and loss report didn’t show it. His attrition rate (the rate that a business loses clients or customers) was through the roof. If it wasn’t for his lead generation and online marketing strategies, his business would be losing clients faster than it was gaining them. Another red flag I noticed was that his clients didn’t do a lot of referring. In a business such as personal training, or any high-end service for that matter, one of your strongest marketing systems should be advocacy, or how often clients recommend you to other people. But this wasn’t the case for Byron. A lack of referrals is usually an indicator that something is wrong in the business.
During the lunch break, I asked him to sit with me because I could tell that he wasn’t giving us the full picture of his business during the mastermind session. We got to talking about his business, and he mentioned that his employees weren’t on the same page as he was. This was clearly causing him a lot of frustration. He went on to say that several of his employees had so much potential, but until they stepped it up and did a better job he wouldn’t be able to open up more Fit Body Boot Camp locations.
That was my first clue that he didn’t have an employee problem (people rarely do). He had a leadership problem. Employees should never be the limiting factor. I asked him what might have seemed, in that moment, like an odd question: “Byron, what’s your morning routine?” He went on to tell me that on some days he’d wake up at around six thirty and other days he’d wake up at seven or seven thirty.
I then asked him what his top two or three tasks were first thing in the morning. He responded with, “Well, that depends on if there are any fires to put out.” Naturally, I asked him what kind of fires he was talking about. He replied, “Well, if my trainer missed the first workout session of the morning then we might have twenty or twenty-five pissed-off clients. So I have to deal with that sometimes.”
“Okay,” I said. “Tell me what time you normally go to bed.”
“That depends,” he said. “Some nights I’ll be in bed by midnight. Other times I’ll be up and working on my business till two in the morning.” Burning the midnight oil, as I said, is usually not a good sign. He was working hard but not smart.
“Tell me about your eating habits,” I said. Byron went on to explain that he tried to eat healthy for the most part, but many times he would be starving during work hours only to come home and binge on a big dinner, a few glasses of wine to take the edge off, and something sweet before going to bed. He was stress eating, operating out of the fight-or-flight state. I suspected he was depressed and that he probably didn’t know it. And this guy was training other people to be healthy!
“Tell me about your workout habits,” I said.
“Oh, yeah,” Byron said, “I need to get back to working out regularly again. I just have so much going on right now that I don’t have time to work out regularly. To be totally honest, I don’t even have the energy.” It was as plain as day to me: Byron was burned out and overwhelmed.
This is the point in the conversation when I said, “Byron, can I be brutally honest with you for a moment?”
“Sure, of course!” he said.
“Byron, you’re a bad leader. You have great qualities, but right now you’re not living up to them. You’re a hypocrite.” It was the same conversation I had with myself that fateful afternoon when I left the doctor’s office after experiencing that massive anxiety attack a few years earlier.
I told him about the two patterns I noticed—and I noticed them because I had been guilty of some of these same things myself.
Pattern 1: His use of “Yes, but . . .” followed by a reason why something that he intended to get done hadn’t worked out. You know those people who use “um” too much in their speech? Byron had a similar verbal tic: “Yes, but . . .”—and it was indicative of a much bigger problem. He was hooked on excuses: “Yes, I’m not eating well, but it’s because I’m working too much”; “Yes, I’m not able to get the business on track, but it’s because . . .” And on and on. Pointing this out was the first step to helping him break the habit.
Pattern 2: The man didn’t match the message. There’s a great line from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you say.” It’s something I think all leaders should ponder. In Byron’s case, he was struggling personally, and he had bad habits. It affected his authority and his ability to lead people. He had all the right people in his organization, but he was incongruous with his message. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that you can shout about getting things done all you want, but people can take one look at you and know if they should follow you. Byron hadn’t made himself followable. Hypocrisy is the fastest way to erode trust in your leadership abilities. The only way to lead is to lead from the front.
When you first hear someone tell you that you’re a bad leader, it comes as a bit of a shock. But if you’re growth minded and know how to put your ego in check, then it could be the start of something new and incredible. For Byron, that’s exactly what it was—an opportunity to become a great leader so that he could build the business of his dreams. Over the next few weeks, Byron gave me open access into his personal and professional life. We started doing the work to make him an effective leader.
HONESTY ABOUT YOURSELF BEFORE ALL ELSE
I don’t want you to have a distorted view of yourself, and believe me, you’re the easiest person you can fool. It’s just too easy to buy into your own hype. One of my favorite quotes on this comes from the Russian master Fyodor Dostoyevsky. He said, “Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
I once read a study in which one hundred people were asked to rate themselves on intelligence, communication skills, decisiveness, and work ethic. Something like 92 percent of the people ranked themselves well above average in all areas. Later these same people were tested in all four areas, and, wouldn’t you know it, almost the exact percentage who ranked themselves well above average actually ranked below average in all four areas.
So I’m asking you to be brutally honest and fully transparent with yourself. Or to find people who will be that honest with you. Feedback is the food of constant evolution and improvement. You need someone to point out when the emperor has no clothes. You need people in your life who will level with you about your leadership weaknesses, because that’s the only way you’ll get to work on them. Without feedback we don’t get an objective view of who we are and therefore can’t become who we need to be to reach our fullest potential.
That’s what Byron did. Our conversation was a wake-up call. He spent the next two and a half years manning up. This started with a deep assessment of his self-esteem (how you feel about your selfworth) and his self-image (how you think others see you). Together, your self-esteem and self-image determine what level of success you will rise to; if you’ll self-limit before reaching your potential; whether you will tolerate mediocrity; if you’ll be approval seeking; how you will handle stress, criticism, and setbacks; and, most important, if you will give yourself permission to be worthy of success, achievement, recognition, and wealth.
For Byron, this meant he would have to rein in his personal life first: start eating better, go to bed earlier, get back to exercising regularly, and join the 5 a.m. club with me. Then he’d work on the deeper factors that influence self-esteem and self-image like shutting down his negative self-talk, overcoming his limiting belief systems, fixing his relationship with money, and setting higher expectations and standards for himself and others around him.
Just two and a half years after our talk, he opened up his fourth Fit Body Boot Camp location. Byron is proof that change in business, culture, and expectations start at the top. Your business, your team, and your income are simply a reflection of your leadership quality. His trainers and staff have turned up the dial on their “give a shit” factor, so, not surprisingly, his clients are getting better results. Because he takes pride in his business, so does his team. His clients love the workout community that Byron and his team have created. But before Byron could make any changes with his staff and within his business, he had to start with himself.
That’s where you start, too.
The Six Pillars of Effective Entrepreneurial Leadership
PILLAR #2: CLEAR AND EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION
Your communication skills (or lack thereof) influence every interaction that you have with your employees, customers, vendors, and business partners.
Most of us were raised to be polite, often making us apprehensive about clearly communicating how we feel, especially when it comes to expressing negative feedback. These neutered communication skills make it very difficult for anyone to know what you really want. When your team members don’t get a clear message from you, they aren’t able to produce the outcome that you’re looking for. Miscommunication quickly breeds passive-aggressive behavior and sets an adversarial tone for your relationships, which leads to setbacks, frustrations, and lost potential.
The solution is to speak with absolute clarity, to be specific, and to ask that the person across from you repeat back to you what your expectations are so that there is no misunderstanding whatsoever.
How Clear and Effective Communication Serves You
It has been reported that poor communication in business leads to increased employee turnover, poor customer service, higher litigation costs, and stunted growth. In study after study, poor communication is cited as the number-one reason that businesses fail to move faster. Avoid this problem and experience fast growth and market domination by utilizing clear and effective communication.
EXERCISES
Leaders Take Responsibility
Think back to your last failure. I want you to rewrite the story of how it happened, only this time I want you to take full responsibility for everything that went wrong as you tell the story. Take every single moment and turn it back on yourself. Rewrite that narrative. Now take a look: What does that tell you about your leadership? How does it feel to have all the control in your hands?
Leaders Keep the Garbage Out
I don’t check emails or texts, take calls, or surf social media in the mornings. Anyone who does is wasting time, and it’s going to cost them dearly in the near future. The mornings are my time to GSD—Get Shit Done. This is when I work on my business and focus only on things that will move the needle. When I’m doing important work, I put my phone on silent mode, flip it over screen-side down, and push it more than arm’s length away from me. This may sound excessive to you, but for me, it’s all about protecting my “magic time” in the mornings and focusing on getting shit done. I don’t want to be tempted by sounds or notifications on flashing screens, so I take every precaution to kill the temptation.
Disciplined leaders have guardrails like these in place all the time. When I have my computer open and I’m working, I have my emails closed, the volume on mute, and social media closed. I’m not here to build Mark Zuckerberg’s business, I’m here to build mine.
Good leaders are careful about tilling their mental gardens. They are careful about the information, distractions, and noise they let into their lives. You need to do the same thing. So try the following:
1) Turn off the notifications on your phone for one day. I don’t mean turn off your phone. Just the notifications. How did it feel? How did it go? How much more time did you have to focus on your stuff?
2) Install an app like RescueTime and do a quick scan of where your online time is spent. Where are you wasting precious hours? You’ll be surprised to discover how much your device robs both your business of productivity and your family of meaningful time with you.
3) At the end of the day, look at your to-do list and your schedule. Did you get things done today? Did your time actually match up with the things you needed to get done? If not, what do you need to do to prevent time theft tomorrow?