Since I’m in confession mode, let me share another story. A year or two before that Hawaiian holiday, one of my top leaders left to try his luck with another company. The reason he left is that he felt like he was a failure. He couldn’t figure out what he was doing wrong and thought maybe a change of scenery or sponsor would help him discover what he was missing.
Here’s the Thing
He had a large, growing team and was earning more than $50,000 a month. Yet he felt he wasn’t measuring up. Why? Because I was earning about $120,000 a month and that’s the standard he was using to measure his own success.
Once again, it would have been easy for me to slip into victim mode and lament as to why he would leave me. But there’s no doubt in my mind that I lost him because I wasn’t a strong enough leader. It’s apparent that I had created a culture where someone earning 50K a month didn’t feel recognized, valued, or successful.
That’s totally on me. And when these kinds of dramatic developments happen in your organization— the good ones and the bad ones—they are totally on you.
Own the Problem
This is the stunning truth about leadership: Whatever the problem is, it is always your problem, even when the situation is not your fault nor created by you. As a leader, you have to be the first and last line of defense for your team, protecting them from anything that will distract, weaken, or harm them. That doesn’t mean this is fair, because often it’s not. But that’s why we get the big bucks. If you’re not willing to work through this reality, then leadership in Leveraged Sales is certainly not for you.
Think of your role this way: You must be the buffer between your team and everyone and everything that comes between them and their potential success.
Your team has the ability to rise to strong levels of resilience, tenacity, and effort. But these traits will only be made manifest if the team is led in the proper manner.
Five Frequent Mistakes
Here are five of the most frequent mistakes I see being made in leadership strategy when leaders face a DEFCON 1 scenario:
1) Let’s Pretend This Isn’t Happening
This is simply a case of wishful, delusional thinking. The premise of this line of thought (delusion) is that maybe the field won’t realize something bad is going down. Something horrible happens, whether it’s a scandal with the CEO or a logistical breakdown, and the leadership thinks that if they don’t talk about it, no one will notice.
I flew on the Concorde a couple times, traveling Mach 2.2, and I can assure you that it didn’t travel as fast as gossip does in your organization. The very bleak news you’re hoping many people don’t know about has probably already been shared on Instagram 459 times. (Or soon will be.) And when you don’t acknowledge this problem reality, people get very suspicious, very quickly. The result becomes the team believing you don’t have sufficient intelligence and awareness to understand what really goes on. Not a very inspiring way to lead a team.
2) Let’s Keep This a Secret
This is an even worse alternative to mistake number one. There’s a cliché in politics that was coined during the Watergate scandal: the coverup is worse than the crime. And it is just as appropriate in Leveraged Sales.
Why this mistake is even worse than mistake number one is because now duplicity is apparent. Secrets always get out. And the fact that you knew about this secret and tried to cover it up is extremely damaging, because most likely you lose credibility with your team and they no longer trust you. This is one of the quickest ways to kill team morale and forward momentum. (Or even kill a team.)
3) Let’s Launch a “Distract Attack”
They say the best defense is a good offense. And sometimes that’s true. And a lot of the time it’s not. This is an old ruse long used by governments. Companies frequently attempt to employ this technique as well. Example: Sales are tanking, recruiting is dying, and a large number of distributors are quitting. Instead of identifying the cause and working to correct it, the company starts a campaign to attack a competitor company, hoping to distract the field from the issues at hand. Distractions work temporarily, but when focus returns to the real issues, you’ll be worse off than when you started.
4) Let’s Rewrite History
Here’s a frequent scenario I’ve seen played out. Joel is a high-level leader with the company. He’s edified by both the team and the company, serves on committees or councils, and is featured prominently at events and online broadcasts. Then Joel decides to leave and join another company. Suddenly the story turns to, “Well, we didn’t really want to say anything, but Joel is actually a womanizing bank robber who was caught stealing money from the Pope.”
Trying to demonize and discredit someone after the fact always backfires on you. Because team members rightfully think, “If he really was such an evil person, why were they edifying him when it was convenient for them?”
5) Let’s Spin This as a Victory
The craziest example of this I’ve seen was a company under severe legal attack. The CEO/founder was being sued by his siblings as well as being charged by the government for tax evasion. The siblings won a $10 million judgment and the government sent the CEO to prison. What was the official company position? These were great victories.
They sent out announcements that because the judgment was “only” $10 million, such a lenient award showed that the court supported their position. And they told leaders that since this prison housed only nonviolent, white-collar offenders, the severity of the crime was akin to getting a speeding ticket. During the CEO’s incarceration, they referred to him as being at “camp.”
Almost unbelievably, this company still survives today. But it is a textbook example of a flatline company. The people who drank the Kool-Aid hang on, but the only way to increase sales is by opening additional countries, because no one takes the company or its field leadership seriously in the existing markets. Nobody wants to join a flatline company.
Often these five reactions are based on a well-meaning desire to protect a team from anything negative ever happening to them. And while this goal is noble, it’s not realistic. The truth is, bad things are eventually going to happen to everyone, including your team.
The mark of a positive, empowering leader isn’t that you will prevent anything bad from happening—because that simply isn’t possible—but rather that you will show (lead) the team how to come out on the other side still standing.
Lead Through the Bad to the Other Side
So how do you do that? We’re going to explore that throughout the rest of this book. But let’s set the foundation here. Let’s revisit the definition of a leader I gave you in the introduction:
Inspiring people to become the highest possible version of themselves—and building the environment that facilitates this process. Here’s what that looks like in practical application:
You use your power to make those who follow you more powerful.
There are lots of parental analogies we can use here, but the best one is that of “helicopter