560 | Training People When You Don’t Have Time

Chris LoCurto 0:00
On today's episode, we are discussing breaking out of the training trap and teaching your team what they need to know to do their job better that is coming up next.

Welcome to the Chris LoCurto show where we discuss leadership and life and discover that business is what you do, not who you are. Welcome to the show, folks, I hope you're having a fabulous day, wherever you are. Today, we're talking about breaking out of what we call the training trap. Now this is a common place for most leaders, and most especially leaders that are what we would say stuck in the leadership Crazy Cycle. Now, let me just say this, if you're stuck in a leadership Crazy Cycle, which is most leaders, you're definitely stuck in the training trap. It's impossible not to be right.

So hopefully you understand what we call the leadership Crazy Cycle where you're so slammed with all the things that you have to get done, that you're never getting to things like leading, you're not leading people. Well, you get to the end of the day, you've done so many things, you can't even remember everything that you've done, right? Well, the training trap goes right along with that. This is where leaders feel like they have a lack of time for training people. Even though they know it's important, right? They feel overwhelmed. They feel weary, that they're wearing too many hats, right? They feel like they're in firefighter mode, which is something we need to discuss as well. They feel like that's holding them back from training people well. So the thing we need to do is understand the training drop, we need to understand why we're here. And the answer lies so much in the lesson that we call killing leadership, Crazy Cycle, the leadership Crazy Cycle, where we feel so valued, we feel so much worth we feel like so much of our importance comes from all of the things that we get done in a day, that as a leader, as an owner, whichever, whatever our role is that there's so much value in us doing the 27,000 tasks, right? All if we can get as many things done, run 90 to nothing, we've got to be worth something we've got to be that's our value is getting as many things done in a day. And I will tell you, that is absolutely the worst leadership teaching. It is not and we've learned it from leaders before us, right? That is not how to lead. That is not where you should be. Instead, we need to learn how to kill the leadership Crazy Cycle when we are stuck there, then something happens that is pretty darn detrimental to our business. And that is we don't get to lead people properly. We don't get to set people up for greater success, which is the job of a leader. Your job as a leader is to make your team successful, not the other way around.

So your job as leaders to train them to be successful at what they do. Oh, Chris, this is crazy. Can't I just hire somebody with the training? Hey, listen, that is our goal. That's our hope, right? Our hope is always that we're able to hire people in who already know what to do. But what we have discovered after decades and decades of leading, you know, however long you've been in leadership, you've discovered this as well, that's very rarely the case. Very rarely do we hire somebody who is 100%, you know, ready to go in that role and knows it better than anybody else can kill it. Now, there are times when we hire people in specialized areas to get it. And they're beyond our ability to train them. That's great, fantastic. Hopefully, you're always hiring people better than you. However, that is not true in most cases. In most cases, we are hiring somebody and we can get into the role. Maybe they have some experience. If there are people out there with great experience in that role, there's probably a good reason that they're not leaving the job that they're in making money that they're making, doing what they're doing right. Now, if you can always show them that you have a better culture, then they may come your way. But what we're talking about is what we generally see in each business. And that is that we get people on our team that don't know how to do their role to the best of their abilities to the best of the role, you know, what's the capacity of the role? How could we do the role the best we possibly can they need help, they need training. Now if you're stuck as a leader, whether you're a leader, whether you're a business owner, no matter what it is, if you're stuck in doing all of your 47,000 tasks in a day, then I can promise you, you're never going to train that person up to be better.

So I want you to think about this for a second. Have you ever hired someone that you believe could do the job and you assume certain things about them? are just, you know, take their word for it, that they're going to be great at this. And after a short amount of time you learn, they're doing the things that don't make sense, that don't make sense to you. It's not the way you want them done. And you freak out. It's, it's understandable, you freak out a little bit going, if this person can't do this correctly, they're doing it weird. They're doing it wrong, they're doing it a completely different way, this isn't what I want. This isn't how it should be done, then what do you tend to do? And I'm, this is a real-world example, folks. This is something I have seen so many times, it's just crazy. What do we tend to do when we have somebody that we've put in a role that said, that can do the job, and then we find out that they are they're doing the job in a way that we don't agree with? Then we either start taking it back, we let them go, or we start limiting their ability to do that role. Right? Or, you know, if you're, if you're an angry little elf, you might go crazy on him and start yelling, and you know, being harsh and telling that's not the way to do it. And, you know, being kind of that jerk boss, right? None of those are the right things to do. Yeah, but the person said, they can do that. I hear you, I understand it, I get it get past that. Where are we right now? In my mind, you have two options. You can train. Or you can let that person go and go back to looking for somebody who can do that job well. Now, both of them are legit options. But the thing is, is that each situation is going to have to answer that differently, right? Does this person have the capacity to learn? Do they have the capacity to do the job?

Well? Do they know enough? What if I just train them properly, or get them proper training, we can get them to a place where they're doing the job, right? Is it you know, something that you've delegated, and you already know how to do the job, that's usually what we're doing right? We're usually replacing ourselves with somebody who can do the job that we've been doing so that we can get on to more things. Well, then you're gonna know the job better than anybody else. So how do you train them? To do a phenomenal job? Right? So here's something I want you to think about, before we get into solving this problem or giving you some strategies on how to solve this problem, I want you to think about the cost, the cost, let me speak to your inner self, that that the financial side of you, you know that when you recognize that things are painful and hurting in a money situation or financial situation, that's when we usually pay attention, right? So let me kind of talk about the cost of ignoring training. There are long-term consequences of you not providing adequate training. One of the very first things and I want you to think about this, because I know you're gonna agree with me when I say it, one of the most painful and difficult things, that is the long-term cost of ignoring training, is your sanity. Your mental capacity, your emotional state, daily, when you don't train properly, one of the worst things that does is it brings an incredible amount of stress to you.

It brings an incredible amount of pain to you. Why? Because you're the person who now has to solve this, right? If they're not doing it well, that it's going to come back on you somehow. And you're gonna have to spend time fixing, solving, putting out fires, being frustrated, being angry. A lot of people get very angry in these situations, arguing, fighting, trying to figure out, you know, why isn't this working out? You know, all of that stuff wears on you. And it will for a very, very long time. And something that you will see a lot of leaders do. And I remember, in my early days of leading back in the 90s, of going through situations like this and thinking to myself, I just don't ever want to hire a person for that role again, which is a terrible thought, praise God. I snapped out of that pretty quickly, and realized what was needed in that role, right? So when you don't train when you ignore training, not only does it affect you affect your morale, but guess what it affects your team's morale. Think about this for a second. How much does it affect your team to see a team member who's not pulling their weight? Who's not doing their job correctly? Who's affecting them because they're not getting the things to them that they need? Whatever it is, when you leave that person in a place in a role where they're not trained to do the job? Well, then it's going to have Fact of the morale of the rest of the team, it's going to affect everybody else. Because they're going to be frustrated that they've got to pull their weight, they've got to get their job done. And here's this person who they all know. And believe me, you might convince yourself that they don't, but they do. They all know this person isn't pulling their weight. So what do we do about that? Right? If we don't do anything, then we continue to lose morale inside of the team, we lose morale inside of the team, guess what else we're gonna lose? Yep, productivity, big dollar signs right there. When your team loses morale, because they're watching somebody get away with being substandard, they're watching somebody not do a great job. They're watching somebody not have to pull their weight, then their productivity starts to drop.

Well, if that person doesn't have to do this, why do I, and I don't, I don't want to be, you know, busting my butt and watching somebody else, not just theirs, you will lose productivity inside of your team. On top of all of that, so if you think about all these things, frustration, leadership, frustration, and team loss of morale, loss of productivity, what does all that leads to lack of business success, the success of your business will start to wane as well. So it is incredibly important for you to get this, it is incredibly important for you to recognize the cost, the long term costs, short term costs, the long term costs of ignoring training, it's unacceptable, you've got to do something about it to get that person up to speed, right? Or you got to get rid of them, get somebody in immediately who can do the job well, which chances are, whatever pond you're fishing in, you're probably going to pull out the same types of folks. So the question may not be, you know, Is this person a terrible person? Maybe it's just they don't have the skills yet.

But you might not be getting out there and getting somebody who does have the skills either. So what do we do, right? So if we stop and take a look at the team member point of view, and I'm gonna push it on some of these, but if we take a look at a 2022 lorman.com study, then there are some things that we learn, we learned that nearly 59% of employees claimed they had no workplace training and that most of their skills were self-taught. Now, folks, this is a tough one. Why is this tough? Because I'm sure there's plenty of you out there, just like me, that hears that and goes, well, you should have got some dadgum training in your life, you know, what are you doing? If you think that kids are going off to college and getting trained to do the exact job that you have, in most cases, you're wrong. Right, unless they're focused on a specialized role. They may not have the exact training to do the thing that you're hiring them forward. And all the folks listening to this show, you're you know, the businesses listening to the show, the people listening to the show, the industries are all across the board. We're not just talking about a specialized industry. We're not just talking about doctors and nurses, and you know, somebody who goes and gets training to do that exact job, and then get some experience along the way. Most of the people listening to this show are in industries where somebody's got to teach you how to do this thing somewhere along the line, right? And so what happens is, is we go out, and we try and hire people, and they tell us, they can do the job. And unfortunately, we don't do quality hiring like we teach you. We always suggest people go through our hiring lesson. You know, we don't get quality hiring, we do three interviews, and we hire the person that we like the most, and put him in the role. And next thing, you know, a month, two months, three months later, we're frustrated like crazy. It's not the proper way to put somebody in a row. But here we are. We've all done it. Right. So here we are. And we have somebody who doesn't have the training and the skills, and we're frustrated.

So the thing you have to ask yourself is one I would say your interviewing process, if you've interviewed somebody about skills that they have to do the role and you didn't test them on those skills. We need to change that process, then your process is wrong. That's number one. Number two is, is if you hire somebody knowing they're probably not going to have all the skills you need.

But I still need this person. I need somebody in this role. Can I train them? Right? So we'll get to that piece. But understand almost 60% of team members and employees claim that they've never been trained to do the job. They had to learn it on their own. And a lot of you might think, well good, go learn it on your own. I agree with you. I'm with you. I'm right there with you. But Once again, we have to think about this right? is our hope that somebody is going to go out and make themselves an expert at the job that we're paying them to do? Or should we be very realistic, and bust our butts and get them some good training. So they do it way better than they can learn on their own or train themselves, right? 87% of millennials, that's 27 to 42 years old. Believe learning and development in the workplace is important. Now, again, I think that's very smart. I agree with millennials on this, right that workplace training is very important, the development is very important in the workplace. Why? Because again, like I just shared, consider where they came from. Now, I will tell you millennials, are birthed from my generation. For those of you who are Gen X, there are a lot of folks who are very lenient in raising their children. There are a lot of folks who did not push hard for their children to have the same work ethic that we did. I love the work ethic of Gen X. I mean, we know how to bust it, it's funny that the setting for Gen Xers is, you know, we know how to work harder, we know how to play harder. It's very true. The problem is, is many Gen X's came from pretty harsh parents, or pretty harsh situations. And so they convinced themselves that they would not make their kids go through the same stuff. Oh, for the love. Terrible idea. Terrible idea. This is where we see so many entitled children, which are now adults and you know, enabled adults that came from not having to bust their butt, not having to get out there and work. You know, so many of us were working at 14 years old, 13 years old. There are people I know who worked even younger, it got paid cash, not me. Of course, I was always up and up.

But many of us that had to work and bust our butts and didn't mind it. We enjoyed it, we had the opportunity to make money and then take that money and go do something with it. Go have fun with it, right? So there is this, these generations that are being raised up, that don't have the same work ethic. If they don't have the same work ethic, what does that mean? There wasn't a parent or parents teaching them and training them skills. Learning Skills was not very important, right? Learning how to do something is not very important. We have our youngest daughter who just turned five. And, you know, she can learn on the farm. She's able to spend time with Miss Dakota, out in the garden, learning how to garden learning how to, you know, pick things grow things. She gets to go with us as we do things on, like on the weekend, if we have some chores that we've got to get done that the team's not here, and we've got to go milk cows and take care of sheep and whatever. Then she gets to be a part of that. And she's always Daddy, can I help out with this? Daddy? Can I help out with that? Daddy, can I do this over here? Yes, baby. Absolutely. Let's come and do this. Five years old, she's learning skills. She's learning how to do things, right? It's vitally important if you go all the way up to our oldest Lenay, who has a phenomenal work ethic as a grown adult with children and a phenomenal family. She knows how to bust it. She has skills and talents in his incredible right. You know, I'm not just bragging on my kids, but what I'm Yes, I guess I am. But what I'm trying to say is it's vitally important to understand if a parent was in there teaching them skills, you probably already see that person. You see their skills and talents. If you got them on your team, you know that they had good parents. I quite often compliment people on their parents when I see how great they are. They're there, their manners, their skills, their talents, all that kind of stuff. But what about the ones that didn't get that? What about the ones that end up on your team and you're giving them your hard-earned money? Right, or the business is hard-earned money if you're a leader, business owner, whichever. And they don't have those skills and talents. They haven't been trained anything school didn't do a great job for them. And here they are. Right?

So that's why making sure that learning and developing is an important part of the workplace. 74% of workers are willing to learn new skills or retrained to remain employable. Praise God. Hallelujah. I will be honest, that number kind of surprised me. I would not have thought it was 74 but I am glad to hear that it's that high. Right? What's wrong? With the other 26%, right, so 74% of workers are willing to learn something new, learn some new skills, and I think a probably good percentage of that 74% desire to, they want to, they want to learn something new, they want to be able to, you know, add another tool to the job, about 74% of employees feel they aren't reaching full potential at work due to lack of development opportunities. Now, I know a lot of you out there probably just heard that one, it was like victims, you know, you need to bust your butt to reach your full potential. Listen to me on this, hear me on this.

If we are not providing them the ability to get to their full potential by training and giving them the skills and, and things that they need, even the tools that they need, right, then you can't be surprised that they're not getting there on their own. Okay, so I want you to take some responsibility leader, yes, I want people to get to their full potential on their own, and I would love if everybody did that. There's so many of us, that man, we we were busting it we hadn't, we didn't figure there was any other way. We had to just go do this stuff on our own, learn, you know, gain information, get training on our own, whatever it was. But I need you understand, that's not everybody. Right? So if you want somebody to reach their full potential at your business, make sure that they have incredible development opportunities. All right. strategies to overcome the trap, right? The first thing you have to do first strategy, it's not even a strategy, it's just a decision.

The first thing you've got to do is acknowledge and accept, that there's never going to be the perfect moment to train people, it's not going to happen, you're not going to find it, it doesn't exist, there is no perfect moment. Right? Instead of waiting, hoping or expecting for the perfect moment, you need to create it. You need to force the training to happen. And you know, maybe there is going to be a great time that opens up and it's like, oh, wow, that's gonna fit well if we do it there. But you must be intentional about doing it. If you're not intentional, if you're not setting things up, putting time aside, wedging things into the schedule, whatever it takes, then it's just not going to happen. So acknowledge that get that in your brain. Training doesn't happen unless I make it happen. Training doesn't happen, unless I make it happen. So I've got to make it happen. Even if you're not the person to do the training, you know, maybe you're somebody who's leading one of your leaders on getting the training done, then you've got to train the leader to train, you've got to train the leader to get that time wedged into the calendar so that they can go make it happen. The second thing is you have to be honest and open with your team about your busyness. Right, what's holding you back ask for their patience. Well, gosh, Chris, I wouldn't want to do that. Why not? Well, because it just sounds like I'm not able to get everything done. Hey, you're not, you're stuck in the training trap, and you're most likely stuck in the leadership Crazy Cycle, which means you're not able to.

So what you've got to do is be open and honest. Hey, guys, here's where I am. But here's what I'm doing about it. Here's what I'm trying to accomplish. So that I get out of this. I'm trying to learn how to kill this leadership Crazy Cycle. I'm trying to make sure that we never end up in the training trap. Again, I want to get these things done. But I need your patience, I need you to understand this is going to take me a little bit of time, right as I get time freed up. And I'm going to be intentional about getting things off of my schedule and making sure that we get things done. So bear with me. But we're going to make this happen when you do this. It teaches them the importance of accountability and transparency. You want that on your team. You want your team members to be accountable, you want them to be transparent. You don't want them doing the same thing of hiding things and acting as though everything is perfect, and they're getting everything done the way that it's supposed to get done. And then you find out a month later that you know 14 balls of have dropped and you gotta go fix you know, you're back to firefighting again. So it also helps relieve fear and guilt that you may have over not spending time with your team. Right now our goal is not to get you to this place of like, Oh, I feel so good about myself then I'm not leading them because I just explained it to him. That's not the goal. But there's probably a decent amount of guilt that you carry inside or even fear that you know you need to do something but you don't know what to do this We'll help by being intentional, even if you say it to your team. So that you know, you've got to do something about it. Because now that you've put it out there, they've heard you, they're going to expect that you do something about and if you don't, then they're going to be pretty disappointed in you. So it's a good thing to make sure that you are not only setting them up for success, but you're also setting yourself up a little bit of accountability to yourself. Next thing is you've got to set uninterrupted who circle highlight star the word on interrupted. Some of you leaders allow yourself to be interrupted 14,000 times because something more important, has got to come through the door. And let me tell you, you are communicating to whoever's with you that they're just not that important. Well, imagine it's you trying to train somebody, not only are you communicating that the training isn't that important, but everything else is, but you are losing momentum and Mojo on your training. There's no possible way you can do a great job training somebody if you're constantly being interrupted. So set uninterrupted time on your schedule, set up, determined to 30-minute blocks of time where you can commit to being fully fully available. Put on your calendar, and make it happen. Get it done. Right. Next thing, ask yourself some stretch questions. And I love this. This tip from Jones Laughlin, that kind of helps you look beyond the near term. When you're planning your day or your week, he says Ask yourself, what he calls stretch questions such as Who needs me to help them grow? Guys, this is such a vitally important question. We are constantly in our our group, our team, looking at our team members and asking who needs help. Who's doing phenomenal, who is continuing to grow? If you're doing your carry reviews, then you can see who needs to grow. Another great thing about doing your career reviews is that you start to see people who are popping up with Hey, can you add more to my plate? I'd like to do some more. I feel like I've got this way down. And you know, you keep telling me it's it's 100% it's doing so well then, what else can I do? So you need to be looking at who needs your help for them to grow? Also what needs to change? So I'm not in the circumstance 30 days from now. So this is a tough one. Because man, we so often end up in the same circumstance 30 days later. What does it take to make sure you're not? What does it take to make sure that you don't end up in the same situation? 30 days from now, it's not just a handoff of something and hope that somebody gets things done. That's not the way to get it done. That's not going to do it. It's just not going to happen that way. You've got to be asking, What are the things that must take place? So I don't end up here again? Number three, where should I pay more attention in my team? Now, I'm always gonna tell you, you know, as a leader, you've always got to be looking for us, you know, it's your job to make your team successful, not the other way around. So you've got to be looking at, you know, the first question he asked is something that we always ask, who needs help? Who needs to be trained? Who needs to grow? Where can I give growth, right? That needs to be a heavy-duty focus. But also, problems for me, I'm always gonna say, as a leader, if you aren't spending all of your time doing you know tasks or you know, one-offs, then you get to dig into your team and find issues that you're probably not going to find otherwise you're not going to hear about them. Hopefully, you do. Hopefully, you've got some great team members that are going to bring up some stuff. But there's a really good chance you're not going to hear about them until something goes wrong.

So it allows you to dig in and find problems, and teach and train and you know, help others develop in that area. Number four, why can't I keep leading this way? Now? You know, that's a great question. And it goes back to the thing I told you in the beginning. If you're stuck in the leadership Crazy Cycle, there's no way you can continue to lead this way. You can't, because you're so focused on all the things that you've got to get done every single day. So if you're wondering, why are you not able to lead the same way that you're doing by setting these blocks of time, it's because your time is too overloaded. You've got to properly delegate things off of your plate that you shouldn't be doing properly. There's a whole process that we teach, it's not a handoff, and then did you get it done? Did you get it done? But there's a whole process of delegating properly. As you do that, then you can start to pick not only more important things that you need to focus on, but also put blocks of leadership time into your schedule that I'll never forget. A client of ours Bo McDonald one day called me and he's like, I spent 30 hours leading My team this week and I am exhausted. I just laughed at him. He goes, Why have I never done this before? And he had a fantastic reason we dug into it to find out what that reason was. But once he started killing the leadership Crazy Cycle, it changed his life. It changed his leadership. So it's very powerful.

Joel Fortner 30:20
Hey, leaders, this is Joel Fortner President at Chris LoCurto. Company. I have some questions for you. Do you as a leader feel like you are caught up in a Crazy Cycle of stress and tasks that never ends week to week? Do you ever have to deal with tough conversations with team members? And you sit at home the next day the night before? Worried about how's it gonna go? What am I going to say? What are they going to say? Can I think fast enough on my feet? Is it going to be a total failure? Are you experiencing culture problems or that stuff that just breaks down trust in unity on your team? Well, if you're if you can relate to any of this, this is a pretty typical leadership story and situation. Here's the thing though it doesn't have to be that way. And we can help you solve these things, we can help you become the leader that solves these problems and leads your team to greater success. I want to introduce you to the key leaders program. This is an ongoing leadership development program. That gives you the lesson track coaching and accountability. You need to become the leader you can become to implement what you're learning in this program. Things Fall Apart without great leadership and intentionality. If you want to solve the problems that are holding you back from being a great leader, we can help you with this program. Get in touch with Joe Chris LoCurto.com.

Chris LoCurto 31:46
All right, another thing you need to do is make sure that you're being very clear, very clear about deadlines. Deadlines are super important, guys. Deadlines are something that we blow off all the time, if we are not being intentional about them, right, if we're not being very clear about them. So don't say stuff to your team, like well get it to me when you can. I'm not saying that there's not a time that you can say that. But that needs to be very minuscule, it doesn't need to be on important things. It doesn't need to be on training, it doesn't need to be on development, right? If we're talking about something that just doesn't matter that much then okay, that's fine. But that doesn't need to be said on important things, you need to make sure that you are putting in place good clear deadlines. Well, I need it by this time frame. Is there anything that's keeping you from doing that? Is there anything that's going to hold you up? Right? Is there anything more important on your plate than this, that we may need to shift to somebody else and get it to them? Right? So make sure that you're not telling them it's okay to get it to you whenever put a clear deadline and then ask what it's going to add, you know, everything, think of everything possible? What could possibly keep you from doing this? One of the things I think is funny is people will put deadlines in December on important stuff. And they don't think about how much you know, people are off work. You know, team members are off work, people are on vacations, clients are on vacations vendors are slammed or they're on vacation, you know, you have to make sure that you're putting a clear deadline, and you're thinking through the deadline. Another thing about setting clear deadlines is make sure that you drive communication to specifics. Specifics such as you know, what's being done and when it will be done. What exactly are we doing? You know, I don't want you to don't go give somebody a whole big idea, go accomplish all of this. And we have not gotten down to the details, the specific things that must be accomplished to get that thing done. They've got to know what steps, you know, what are the steps of the process that's gonna get me to this end goal to this destination, right. So be very specific, you've got to do A, B, C, D, E, all of those things. And you got to get those things done by you know, 17 days from now, whatever it is, right? Make sure that they understand that's another great time for you to ask them. Is there anything on your plate or anything that you see that's going to keep you from accomplishing this? That gives them the ability to think through now? High I hate this, but sorry, eyes? It's important to think through this. If the person immediately without thinking says, Yeah, I got that, then you need to push back. Right? My eyes don't do that. Don't hurt yourself by over-committing to something that you're not going to get done. Right? Think through the process. Can I actually do this? Is this something that I can make happen if you cannot, don't commit to it? You know, think through, list out the things that might keep you from getting it done, and allow the leader to make decisions from there. Sometimes you might need to negotiate with your team members, right? If you do that's fine. It's sometimes it's needed. But just be specific get get to the specifics, right? So one of the negotiations maybe I can't get this done because is 20% of my time is spent on this other administrative thing over here. And that's a requirement. I've always been told how important that is yet, that's super important. Let me pass that off to so and so for the next three weeks, right? Let me get this over here. They've done it before they understand it or whatever, yada, yada, yada. Let me give you some room or, Hey, you know what, that's not that important. For the next three weeks, you don't have to report on that or get that thing done. Whatever it is, you may have to negotiate. But just make sure that you do whatever it takes to set the team members up for success. I'm not saying let other things fall through the cracks. Cover those as well as make smart decisions, but set the team members up for success so that they can get it done by the deadlines. Now, what happens when you do this? Oh, pure joy, pure joy. I have been leading this process for decades. And it is something that not only allows me to focus on higher-level things that my team expects me to focus on. bigger things that are you know, doing stuff like this, doing shows, doing events, doing straplines, doing Next-Level Life's coaching, guiding, directing, all of those things, they don't want me stuck in the smaller tasks. When we teach and train, you know, just for my leadership team alone, for decades, I have spent time almost every single week, having a leadership team training, or I'm training them on leading, how to lead better how to lead their team, how to solve problems, how to have tough conversations, all that stuff. For any of you that have met my leaders, you know, they are phenomenal. They are incredible, right? And it was worth it. I've spent so many hours. And it's funny, whenever usually I'm teaching a leader or a CEO or business owner who is stuck in the leadership Crazy Cycle, what it looks like to train up a leadership team, spending time every single week. You know, there's often we spent an hour and a half, two and a half hours of training. Now, part of that we do over lunch period, I will tell you that so that we have personal time together, we grow as friends where I get to work with my best friends. It's it's fantastic. But then we get into heavy-duty stuff. Now the great thing is I've been doing this a long my leaders, there's very few times we get into heavy-duty stuff, because they're just excellent leaders. They know so much of this stuff. So the stuff that we're hitting is not super complicated. But it's stuff that's important, right? The early days, totally, very complicated stuff, very heavy-duty stuff. And I've been doing this for decades. So what does that mean? If you're willing to put the time in, then you don't get stuck in the leadership Crazy Cycle. My team members and my leaders don't get stuck in the leadership Crazy Cycle. Because we make it an important thing in our our leadership, our training, not only do our team members need to be trained, but our leaders most importantly, in my mind, if I don't have solid leaders who are trained to the hilt, then what in the world are they going to do? How are they? How are they going to lead up and train other people? Right? So for me that is vitally important. So things you can take away from this again, awareness is the most important thing. Know that you're stuck in that cycle? You know, whether it's the training trap or the leadership Crazy Cycle, just be aware start there. Yes, I am. Yes, I am. My worth does not come from how many things I do in a day. It never will. But I'm here now and I've got to do something about this. So what am I going to do about it? How am I going to fix this? What am I going to, you know, what am I going to change? How am I going to get myself in a place where I can train people while maybe it's your leaders, maybe your leaders are stuck in not being able to train well because they have so many things on their plate? So make sure that you are going through, you know setting yourself up with awareness. First, understand where you are, acknowledge where you are, acknowledge that you have to be intentional about time, and you have to force this into your schedule into your team members' schedules. Understand the consequences if you don't think long-term, you know what is it going to look like? If I don't get this done? How painful is this going to be to me personally if I don't get this done, and then do the things to overcome the training trap? Right? Start getting in there being honest with your team, share with them where you are what you're trying to do set uninterrupted times, and take a look at the team who needs help. Who needs it the most? Where can you jump in and lead well. Now? After all this, if you're saying to yourself, Well,

I'm not sure I know how to train them. Okay, on anything that you can train them well get in there and make it happen. If it's stuff you don't know what to do, then what does it look like for you to spend time finding the right training, right? Don't just look at that and go, Well, I don't know how to train him on that you probably do in certain aspects. And if it's something you delegated, then my gosh, you should know how to train them. But if it's outside of your wheelhouse, then how do we find proper training? Is there somebody on a team that knows how to do it? Or can we get training outside of the team, no matter what it is, do what it takes to get your team better information, do what it takes to get them greater skills, greater talents, right, encourage your team, that this is vitally important for them that they get to grow with this stuff, right?

This is not only going to make a big impact on the company, the clients, and all that, but it's going to make a big impact on your team. So for more information to help you lead better, if you want more information, we teach on all of this stuff, then go to Chris LoCurto.com. There is hundreds of free blog posts, there's podcasts, there's all kinds of resources that will help you get to a better place and understand this so much better. Now, listen, running your own small business means wearing a gazillion hats. We all understand that one minute you're crunching numbers the next year solving a team issue and the next year working hard to keep customers happy. It's a roller coaster. Well, here's a thought. Have you ever noticed how understanding yourself a bit better, can make all of this well? Simpler. That's where self-awareness steps in. It's like having a secret weapon that helps you tackle those everyday challenges with a bit more ease and a lot less stress. Imagine knowing exactly what makes you tick, what fires up your team, and how to keep your cool even when things get hectic. That's the power of self-awareness. It's not just good for you. It's great for your business. And guess what? You can dive deeper into this at the next level leadership live event that is happening April 17th. Through the 19th in Franklin, Tennessee, it's the perfect place to explore how self-awareness can transform your business and make your life a lot easier. So why not join us? Sign up right now at Chris LoCurto.com/events. Remember, that's April 17 through the 19th. Visit Chris accardo.com/events To take advantage of early bird pricing. We hope that we will see you there. Folks. That is all the time that we have for today. I hope this information has helped you greatly. As always, take this information, change your leadership, change your business, change your life. And join us on the next episode.