Leadership Ain't Easy

(but it's tougher if you ignore it)

Author

Matt Verlaque
February 01, 2024

This is the Unbreakable Business newsletter - created just for COOs and Operations Teams who want to build a company that won’t fall apart.

In this issue, I’m gonna rock through the four mindset shifts that you need to be an incredible leader. These are ALL things that I wish someone had taught me when I first started…but regardless if you’re a newer leader or if you’ve been in the game for years, I think they’ll help you 😉 

Today, I’m covering:

  • 🔎 What it actually means to be a leader

  • 🤝 The one skill you need to actually get your team to trust you

  • 📈 The exact questions I use to get honest feedback about my own performance

Enjoy!!

🤝 Congrats On The Promotion - Now You Have To Change

Being a world-class leader is a lifelong journey. And when you step into a leadership position, you are opting-in to go on it.

So when it gets tough, remember - you ASKED for this.

It ain’t about you.

Leadership is all about the people you are LEADING. Your performance is no longer your own - it’s gauged solely on the success of the people under your charge.

🚒 My First Time Out

My first taste of leadership was when I got promoted to Lieutenant in the fire department. I had spent all my time focusing on…well, fires. Where do you want to put the ladder, what kind of training are we going to do - you know, all the stuff that you’d expect me to think about.

So you can imagine my surprise when in my first week, we’re doing some training and one of my guys tears something in his shoulder. Surgery, months of light duty, paperwork, doctor’s appointments, worker’s compensation stuff…

Not exactly the stuff I’d been studying - but in that moment, he needed a leader to make sure that his medical bills got covered and that he’d have the care he needed to get rehabbed and get back on the job.

A week later, we’re driving down the road in the fire truck and some random car crashes into us. Didn’t have that on my bingo card, either. Insurance, accident forms, the whole 9 yards - and the documentation had to be tight in order to protect the driver and the department from liability.

As a leader, you have to remember this: it might not be your fault, but it’s ALWAYS your problem.

Sometimes shit's just going to happen. I didn't hurt the guy's shoulder in training. I wasn't holding the steering wheel. But it would have been an epic failure of leadership if the shoulder surgery didn’t get covered, or if the driver of the fire truck got sued, simply because I couldn’t figure out what to do.

It was my problem. I was the leader. There was a good lesson in there.

(don’t worry, we went to some fires too lol)

I can tell you one thing for sure: You’re not prepared. No matter how much you think you’re ready, you’re not.

That’s the gig.

That said, here are the four realizations I had a few years down the road that would have helped me be a little more ready to step into the role.

🧑‍💻 Your Job Is Not To Be The “Best Specialist”

Good leaders don’t compete to be the best individually - they compete to build the best teams.

My job as a Lieutenant wasn’t to personally put a fire out faster than everyone else. I had to zoom out - my world was now 100x bigger and I had to stop focusing on the details of my own performance.

You don’t have to be individually better than your team - in fact, the best leaders are almost always leading people who are better than them.

Being good at your job is different now: You’re a coach - get in the coaching mindset.

Team your team members to be the best version of themselves. Recognize their potential, work through underperformance, teach the skills, and get the best outcome. I’m not gonna lie and tell you it’s easy, but if you break it down like this I promise you’ll find yourself surrounded by a kick-ass team.

P.S. - if you want a great book on one of the most prolific Silicon Valley business coaches in history, I highly recommend Trillion Dollar Coach (about Bill Campbell).

🚀 Leadership Takes Time and Effort

If you think that your schedule and priorities ain’t gonna change when you start leading a team, you’re dead wrong.

I estimate a minimum of two hours every two weeks - per team member - for direct leadership related activities.

This covers a one hour 1:1 meeting, reviewing weekly updates, reviewing work, creating training, etc.

So a little simple math - if you have a team of 6, this is almost a full day per week JUST for the direct, hands-on leadership stuff.

Most new managers don’t factor that in.

The 1:1 meetings are sacred to me - and I’ll likely do a whole issue just on how I run them. But in the meantime, write this down:

To be a good leader, you need to be a great listener.

This is the key to everything. The worst leaders in the game are the ones that just “talk at people” - no context, no learning, no introspection, no evolution of their opinions…they’re just talk-boxes.

You’ll be receiving more information than your distributing - especially with a larger team.

One of the best uses of time for you as a leader is to build efficient mechanisms to gather all of this information - and my favorite one is the end of week update.

It’s a quick set of questions that every direct report on my team completes (by Friday EOD) - to let me know how their week went, what’s on tap for next week, what they need, and how they’re feeling.

This is my exact template - feel free to steal it:

Team Member Weekly Update

  1. What projects / key initiatives did you move forward this week? How did it go relative to your goals from last week?

  2. What's something you learned this week?

  3. What are your top three priorities for next week? For each priority, include action items, dates, a DRI, and how we'll measure if it's working. 

  4. Is there anything that you need from me to get unblocked or operate more effectively?

  5. Anything else on your mind you’d like to share?

  6. How are you feeling this week?

Pro Tip: The more you reply / acknowledge these, the more effort your team will put into writing them.

This gets me all the time - I read every single one, but I notice that unless I actually reply to them, people will start to miss them occasionally, and I’ll have to reach out to them and “re-enroll them”.

Take a second to reply - it’s worth it.

📊 Write. Stuff. Down.

You’ve all met my alter ego by this point, right? Hi, I’m Matt Verlaque, aka the Writer Downer™️.

I can’t stress enough how much writing down every damn thing has made a difference in my life. My teammates will sometimes even mistake me for someone with a good memory 😂 

My big secret is literally just writing shit down, every single day.

You’re not going to remember everything you need to know about the people on your team. It’s just not gonna happen.

Instead, follow this incredibly simple system:

  1. Create a document for every one of your team members.

  2. Create two lists in each document:

    1. Coaching Opportunities

    2. Training Needed

Under Coaching Opportunities, jot down anything you need to review / coach against on your next 1:1 so you don’t forget it.

Under Training Needed, write down the list of training that you need to produce. Don’t do this 1:1 on a Zoom call; instead, do it asynchronously - make a Loom video, write an SOP, etc - so you can refer back to it the next time someone needs training.

That’s it - you don’t need any fancy software to do this. Just two lists for each person.

That’s the system.

🔎 Ask For Feedback

You’re gonna f*ck up.

Sometimes it’ll be obvious - but frequently, it won’t be - and your ability to improve as a leader will depend on the willingness of your team to give you feedback.

The more perfect your team says things are…the more concerned you should be.

I use my 1:1s as my primary feedback mechanism - always in the last ten minutes, 100% of the time.

I ask two simple questions:

➡️ What’s something I did that you loved?

➡️ What’s one thing I can do to get to the next level?

You receive the feedback first - and only after you’re received it do you have the right to give it in the other direction.

This order is intentional - but it’s only half the battle.

Your team will feel super nervous giving you critical feedback - it’s just human nature.

A big part of your job is to create an environment of psychological safety - so they know that they’re allowed to give you this feedback in the first place.

And the biggest contributor to that safety is the way that you receive the feedback they give you!

You’re under a microscope here - so if you get pissed or defensive when they finally give you the feedback you’ve been asking for, don’t be sad if you never ever ever get it again 😂 

Show up, seek out the growth, and remember to say “thank you” - because feedback is a gift.

📽️ Go To The Movies

Wanna jam on this in a video format? Check out my latest YouTube video where I go over my first-time leadership tips in under four minutes ⌚

Also, make sure you subscribe to my channel so you don’t miss awesome videos like this one.

🎯 Default To Action

Here are the key action steps you can take TODAY to put things in motion:

1️⃣ Stop Trying To Be The Best

That’s not why you’re in this seat. You’re here because you have the qualities it takes to create the best through your team’s results. Time to shift the focus away from yourself and onto the people who surround you.

✅ Foster a coaching mindset - support your team to excel, identify their untapped skills, address performance issues, and you’ll get the results.

2️⃣ Pay Attention

Remember: you have to put people first. It takes time and effort to really know someone and earn their trust. When you build that rapport with your team, challenges will surface long before they become real problems.

✅ Never let 1:1s slip through the cracks. Take the time to connect with your team and understand their well-being.

3️⃣ Continuously Improve

There’s no peak to reach as a leader. There’s always an opportunity to grow and become even better in your role. You should be actively seeking these opportunities out.

✅ Regular feedback from your team needs to become the expectation. No one knows your strengths and weaknesses better than the people who work for you.

There’s no secret formula to this stuff, but if you apply these principles to your leadership I guarantee you’ll feel a lot more comfortable in this seat. Most importantly, your team will feel more comfortable with you in it as well.

Next week, I’ve got some heat for my fellow bookworms out there 🤓 I’ll be sharing the 4 books that changed me as a leader and why they should be on your shelf as well.

Always in your corner,

MV

📣 Overheard On The Interwebs

Why Am I Even Doing 1:1s?

Staying in the theme of today’s issue, I ran into this thread from Claire Lew this week that had some awesome questions you can use in your 1:1 meetings.

It was an instant bookmark for me, so I wanted to share it with all of you: