Episode Transcript

What’s up everybody? Welcome back to THE a.m guys. Welcome back to five minute rants.

So today I actually want to talk about leadership and also really define the word driving. So I say it’s really important to drive, and it’s really important to be in charge of your life and drive, but as a leader, one of the things that that means is this you as a leader, you have responsibility on your life, you have responsibility to yourself, you have responsibility to others, and you have responsibility to God, and that’s just how it is, and this is really for every individual, but especially when you’re in leadership role.

And part of your job as a leader is to take that responsibility that you have and then begin disseminating it onto the team. And so your job as a leader is to disseminate the responsibility of the work, the responsibility of the goals and objectives and the responsibility of the vision of the company or the vision of the team, and a lot of leadership fails because responsibility is not disseminated. Now what I mean by responsibility, responsibility is the promise. Right? We are responsible for keeping the promise, whatever we’ve promised, whether it’s work, whether it’s to show up at a certain time, to be present, and I’m defining it as a promise versus actual technical actions.

Now, normally responsibility in the promise results and technical actions like cool. I promise to do this. I promise to develop design code, I promise to ship these products. I promise to build this house. I promise to do whatever it is that you’re doing, right? And it normally results in technical actions, but to see that, it’s the promise that really puts weight on what we do, because if you haven’t promised anything, and then you start building stuff, there’s no weight to what’s being built. It’s a hobby, right? There’s no weight. There’s no responsibility. But if you are in a relationship with a client, if you’re in a relationship with your spouse and you promise to do something cool, now there’s response. Now there’s weight to that promise, and now you have real responsibility.

And so there’s automatic, innate responsibilities that are cultural and societal, and things that we’re born with. Like, you know, we’re responsible for treating each other well. We’re responsible for loving each other and caring about each other, like, those are things they’re responsible for. And I’m responsible when I drive down the road to be a safe driver so I don’t hurt other people. Those are given like, I don’t have to make a promise out loud, verbally, but if I’m in a in a leadership role at work, and I’m leading people within a company, and then I have a promise between clients, I have a promise between team members, and I have a promise between partners. I’m now responsible for keeping those.

And where a lot of leadership fails is we do not disseminate the responsibility. We don’t take it from ourselves, and we don’t pass on to the team. And let me tell you something that’s really important when you have worked in a team, and if you look back when you were part of a team, you wanted responsibility to be given to you. Everybody wants to be trusted, and everybody really innately wants responsibility on their lives. Oftentimes we’ll run away from it because we’re afraid of other things, right? Not so much the responsibility itself, but what might happen if we fail on the responsibility we’re we’re afraid of those so we’ll reject responsibility.

But more often than not, we really want responsibility. And when you do that, you talk about actually creating cohesive teams. You talk about creating teamwork. Now you have a way to hold people accountable, because, hey, here’s our promise, here’s what we said we would do, here’s what it would look like when we’re finished. And now it is our job to keep it, and this is now a way for us to be accountable to it. So we’ve defined what the winning looks like, we’ve defined what success looks like, I said the winning, but we’ve defined what winning looks like and what success looks like, and now we’re accountable.

I think it’s really important to see that when we don’t disseminate responsibility well, we move into micromanagement. So responsibility gives people the freedom to think and then partner. So if you look at any sports teams, and I think sports teams are a great way to see how responsibility shifts and changes, and then also a great way to see individual thinking, individual voices and talent and skill sets being implemented in a live way to where you can watch it work real time, right?

So you don’t just want people to just be a doer and like, Hey, here’s your checklist. This is how you run the job. Here’s your checklist. That’s horrible, and there are certain times for those, right? But you also want people to be able to think, hey, how would you do this? And they have their own skill set, and they’re able to perform and actually implement and this even happened to me today, being on a meeting I requested, like, Hey, this is something that I need done. Here’s some promises. And then the team members showed up, and they did it in a different way than I would have. It was better than even what I asked for.

And so I’m saying this because. Giving them that room to think and giving them that room to perform is so important, and now we’re actually operating as a team, and we’re collectively upholding that responsibility.

Anyways, guys, I don’t have time. I’ll catch you later. Peace.