Leadership

Now that's a tricky one.

You think you're a leader? tough to say, remember to look behind you, cause if there's nobody there, you aren't leading shit. I'm sick of guys who think the only way you can be a leader is by either having a title, being good at a sport, or telling people what to do. You wanna know if you're a leader? put something together based totally on volunteer status, with money not being a factor, and see who is followed. Lots of people try to step up, I recently saw a friend try to step up, and get beat the fuck down because he attempted to lead, instead of attempting to serve. The poor fucking guy has it ass backwards, and always tries to attempt to impose his strong will, instead of attempting to serve young people in need. Funniest thing is, this guy in his personal life is a servant friend, put him in charge and he's been shunned 3 times in a row, because he just beats up on himself and puts pressure on himself coming out of his nose to please. He's a really open minded guy, but it's the things he's touchy about that hold him back, and he's too ashamed to face them. This is for him, as I am a leader, and I do this without leading at all. How am I a leader? I recently raised guys up to be better than I am. That's leadership.

I'm going to write my take on servant leadership, influenced by my father who bankrupted a 10 million dollar company rather than let his guys down.

I became a leader by just failing over and over and over, and being in an enivronment where I had many succesful business people just shoving advice down my throat. My one criticism about my last business is they kind of take their trust for granted, and I generally felt more comfortable asking about what i wanted to know, instead of what I didn't want to hear. I'm not really sure if they were right to handle it the way they did or not. The strategy has clearly not worked, as there is such a high turnover rate. You have to think about it, managers would deal with negative ass customers all day long, that are constantly doing anything to get 100 off, so if we litereally did not deliver 100% of what we promised, there was a 50-50 chance you'd be losing money off your original price. Our employees were young students who always had a back door if shit hit the fan, and our operating season was so short, a lot of the time we'd have to use sub standard personel or risk not hitting profit goals. If you train your painters the right way, you give them a week and get a summer, wrong way, and you're adding time to your 100% balls out sprint to beat out exhaustion. I've never been the best coach, although I'm very very good, I just simply was the best interviewer, in a company that takes the skill for granted, and was open minded from day one, but branded closed minded because I only listened to one mentor at a time. I had like 8 coaches in my first year, and all of them were better than me, and I stayed in touch with all of them constantly, and we analyzed my business over and over, as well as ourselves. My friend Nick Verkaik and I were constantly going over our skills together. We had a bond over our need for self improvement, as I am with all people that take that path.

So we'd be getting hammered with this negativity like crazy 24/7, and the only person we were supposed to rely on besides ourselves, just fucking hammered us during goal setting and review, and if we missed our goals, we'd just obsess over that shit...

When you sum it up like that, well... fuck.. I mean come on.

Being a good friend of a General manager this year, and really being able to forgive one of my long term mentors and high level business coach, I got a much deeper understanding of coaching and leading.

You see, both of them failed hard this year, one was fired, the other took accountability and is going to learn from a hard year and be better for it. The other, keeps repeating the same mistakes.

So instead of listing the mistakes, I'm going to say these are the things that people are allowed to do.

1- you can ask to learn about what you would like to know
What burns my fucking ass, is I would get a designated 30 minutes a week, rarely get a hold of after, and for that time we only get to focus on what someone who only sees the numbers of our business thinks is going on. For my coach this year, i'd write a novel for him, and he'd generally just feel it was too much.. that's about when I started to not take him as seriously. Leadership is by far his lowest strength, imo. But we'd focus on a certain theme for the week from the president.

Are you guys fucking retarded? It could have definitely be me, but I found it difficult to get the help I felt i needed, instead of the help I should have. This in turn lead me to other mentors, where I learned a lot this year, thank you Tara Barber. That chick has been laying me straight on for 7 years. She told me 7 years ago exactly what I needed to know, and it took 7 years to realize she was right all along. What people don't get is I needed those 7 years of fuck ups, that's why I'm so good compared to other people. I've been the worst, I've beent the best, I've been in between... I've done just about everything. I've had customers just about push me off roofs, my business has received the quality award from the work of my employees and team work with my partner, I've been given wild tips, I've had little old ladiess dodge me for 2 years, I've had over 150 people work directly for me, and I've been in charge, I've been 50-50, I've been just someone that hung around and watched a very skilled leader first hand... which is a game changer like you can't believe for a visual learner.

Honestly I learned more in a couple monts of the visalus colture about how to comunicate with people than I did in all 7 years before. It's ok to focus on the positive, but for some reason this company just demands to focus on the negative. This year was horrible. I've watched this company run away all of it's best young talent, and is just a well known negative name. I offered to start a positive blog this year, and my general manager wasn't very excited about it.

I saw make all the gsnrs public blogs, I say get people having to take accountability to themselves in front of everyone, open to the world, or the family, and just keep moving forward. They put one person in charge, instead of putting everyone togather, just for the sake of the company keeping accurate numbers. Visalus creates a huge family, and a raising bar format of everyone getting constantly re affirmed for their positive actions, where my former company found this was work or something. I would give anything to see Andreanne Titley Peloquins gsnrs from this year, just the way she handles problems, and problem solved. I've seen her in action, she doesn't think positive per se, she just is positive. It's just natural for her, not everyone is like that. I would love to have more access to her.

2-you should always feel empowered from talking with your coach... no exceptions

Some coaches get so insecurely hung up on not getting their points across, and they just stomp their feet and demand accountability, and use the excuse it's because they care... hard work is just not a fucking excuse ok, it's a requirement. I've had to lay down after these meetings sometimes, and I just demand differently from the people that follow me.

This company trains business people to be shitty painters. I put more work into one of my employees in a summer. There needs to be much more emphasis on skill development of actual painting, 3 days is not enough, a week is not enough, managers have to be learning year round with the general manager through the pre season, working around their school schedule. The General manager can attend any business matters on the lap top, and more than enough customers will be accomodating understanding the level of supervision. This just has to be a requirement, managers should have a minimum of 10 hours of supervision a week, 20 managers is 200 hours of work going into building other managers business's guaranteed to be a success with a general manager right there. You know what, a good time to talk selling is over painting a wall together. I've learned tons in this environment. And heaven forbid a student earns a part time living while paying for cold callers. Managers leave for marketing right after, and this is done in the field as well, or school is in the way, but a general manager needs everyone sending in a block schedule every week, these have to be requirements. Being to work has to be a requirement in a city like ottawa, I drive more to get to a gym. I have employees bus an hour a day. 40 hours of school a week on top of this, should be doable, it can be on the weekend, it can be at night time, it has to happen. it has to happen before exams, and production training has to be a refresher. Weekly team meetings are mandatory, sundays are good, laptops are essential. combined goal setting and review, with family viewing privelages has to be mandatory. People need to be able to chime in, blow ups are going to happen. So what? a good leader can get this sorted out. that has to be a requirement.

3-questions are always allowed, but understand not all questions need to be asked right away

This one just annoys the shit out of me. I've managed 25 people at the same time, and it was just me, and someone to help me execute. I had a partner, but we made it a rule she was only to be contacted in extreme circumstances. I took every call, trained every person, had them all at over 250 homes in a 4 month period, and sometimes they commented later that I was scarey, but they all did what was best for them. That's being a leader. I knew where every one of those people were at all times, and was accountable to every single thing that happened. I cleaned up their mistakes constantly, and praised them for their work constantly, even though a lot of them would sometimes find me scarey.

You know what, at times, when it was in their best interest, and my own best interest, yeah, I'd bully people into doing what they should. I'd always give them the chance to do it the right way first, but sometimes you need to make it extremely clear who is in charge, and remind them it is your way or the highway, but then immediately reasure them, your way is there way as well. But when you're accountable to that much shit, it's just gotta get done.

I'm not sure what General managers of my previous company do in a day, but those are the changes I'd make.

There's a lot I could complain about, this year every time I tried to add to other managers in Ottawa this year, I'd be constantly shut down, and it was shunned to offer to help. I actually got into trouble because I didn't ask the right way. So, not my most favorite year, not really feeling up to pursuing that one anymore.