This is a special episode of The Chris LoCurto Show! My team and I put on the Next-Level Leadership LIVE Event in May (2019), and we had a phenomenal LIVE Q&A session.
LIVE Business and Life Q&A…
We hosted the event at the Embassy Suites in Franklin, Tennessee, and had a great time with our attendees. The live Q&A session at the Next-Level Leadership LIVE Event was for our V.I.P. attendees only, so you get a sneak preview into the V.I.P. experience!
Hear LIVE answers to leaders’ most pressing questions:
Resources:
Continue scrolling for the full transcript:
Welcome to the Chris LoCurto show where we discuss leadership and life and discover that business is what you do, not who you are.
Folks this is a special episode of the Chris LoCurto show. A couple of weeks ago my team and I hosted our annual next level leadership live event and we had a fantastic live Q&A session. What phenomenal questions. Today you’re going behind the scenes and inside the event to see the questions leaders had and my answers LIVE. Before we do that, I want to tell you about one thing that will change your life. Next Level Life is our two day personal discovery experience. It’s a one on one personalized event where we guide you through a process to help you discover your root system, to get unstuck in life and to discover what’s holding you back from freedom and peace. Imagine this, what if you could wake up every morning with a clear purpose? What would it look like to have healthier relationships with less conflict? Where would you be in a few months, a year, five years if you had clarity, purpose and peace?
Probably a big difference from where you stand today. Now, I know it’s possible because I’ve been where you are asking myself, is there more? There is and there is a better way. And it starts with Next Level Life. You can go to Chris LoCurto.com/discover to take the next step. Now, if you’re struggling with this contentment, regrets, or not feeling good enough, which most of you are, if you’re filled with anxiety or your relationships are lacking, don’t keep going through the same motions every single day. Learn how to move past the things robbing you of peace. Go to Chris LoCurto.com/discover and take the next step. Okay, here we go. I hope you enjoy hearing these leaders questions and my answers LIVE from the Next-Level Leadership Live Event.
So Lauren asks, she says, I like to share my own personal growth moments with my leader. I thought it was because I was excited and wanted to celebrate. And now I’m wondering if I’m a kiss up. How do I know if my desire to share is actually coming from an unhealthy place? So what a fabulous question. Our intent matters so much. We can do something and say, wow, this is an area where I’ve grown because it’s demonstrating to somebody I’ve grown in that area or I need or I want you to know I’ve grown in that area and for their benefit of knowing, well that’s really great that you’ve grown there. Our intent and agenda matters so much. So as a lifelong people pleaser, so much of my intent and agenda was to make it about me. It was about, well let me share this with you so that I can gain worth because I’m looking at it for me, I’m looking at what am I going to get from this by getting you to think this about me.
Let me shape how you think about me cause I need for you to think about me in these, these ways that I desire. It’s all about me. It’s my own selfishness. It’s my own ego. It’s my own pride and I’ll be in conversations with people a lot and I will be checking myself. Why am I saying what I’m saying? What’s the goal? Because I’m gaining perspective on myself: is this to share with them? Is this about me? Is this to teach them something? Is this to show them something? What’s my intent and my goal? So oftentimes people come through next level life
it’s like I’m not going to do this, this is and
this anymore and there are things that are like, no, do it with a different intent. Do it with a different agenda. Check yourself on, why am I saying this? And I think that’s a place to be as when you’re looking at analyzing and gaining perspective. Chris mentioned earlier today that that he attributes so much of his growth to his awareness of his brokenness, his sin, his flaws, his mistakes, so that we can look at those things and say, oh, I can grow there. The awareness of what I’m talking about now is, is pivotal and adding.
Yeah. I think a big piece to that is it’s not the things that I taught in that lesson are not to say, hey, you’re a bad person. That is the point of the lesson is to help you not feel like you’re a bad person. Now, if you’re doing something stupid, you need to take responsibility and recognize that you’re doing something stupid. But if I am sharing something with somebody and I’m wanting them to be excited because this is an exciting thing for me, I’m a high, I, you know, I’ve got a lot of I in me. I’m a high s, I’ve got a good amount of d in me as well and I love to share things and get excited about stuff. If I’m sharing the thing to say, hey, look at how amazing I am, don’t you think I’m something special, then it’s not healthy, because the concept is my worth is contingent on your answer because what happens when they’re not excited?
Crud. Now, I feel like a total loser. I feel like I’m not good enough. Take a look at your response. So I’ll probably share this with the group at some time, but I had that same high C leader that I had a long time ago. I used to go to his office and I’d go, dude, here’s the thing I’m thinking of doing. I’m thinking of doing this and this and this. And he’d go, how are you going to do that? And I’m like, I don’t know thinking about that yet, but look at it. Isn’t it great? How are you going to make happen? Don’t worry about that part. What do you think about it? And he’s like, well how are you going to do that though? And I’m like, forget it. I’m like out. Oh I can’t share stuff like that. Now
I wasn’t looking for him to look at me and go, Chris, you’re amazing. I knew he wasn’t going to do that. So it wasn’t, I wasn’t doing it for my worth. I was doing it to celebrate, look at this great idea. But when I didn’t get the response, if I was there for my worth, I would be so deflated and then I would have to defend myself and I would have to really say , “no, but you don’t understand. Let me show it to know you, but you’re not getting it. Let me…” And all of that would become that worth, you know, down downward spiral. So there’s nothing wrong with doing things like that. We want you to have joy. We want you to be happy. The problem is, is when you get so much of your worth from human beings that you have to have it from human beings, then you’re not getting it from the only consistent place that could possibly fill you up. Does that make sense? Good. Paul. I think that’s all.
Yes, it is. So when you were talking about awareness earlier and you guys are going over it right now, Chris, you mentioned that it’s a major thing that’s helped you to be successful as a leader. What are some of the things that you did early on once you, I assume, identified it to grow in that, in that area?
Uh, I don’t know if I’m going to talk about this during this event, but one of the things I point out is when I was back in the days of e trade, um, and I started learning. So I’ve been leading people since I was 21 years old. Now, I’ve always helped people. I’ve always guided people. Even when I was young, a teenager, I was trying to help people. You don’t take a whole lot of advice from a 14 year old, but hey, my heart was still there, but I got officially in leadership when I was 21 that was at e trade. Uh, I was on the ground floor of e trade well before it became public. You guys know the e trade, the commercials on the Super Bowl, all that kind of fun stuff. Weird babies and stuff. Um, the baby’s probably don’t think they’re weird, but that’s okay.
Uh, I started leading, so my first leadership job was assistant customer service supervisor. I was not even the customer super service supervisor. I was the assistant and I had been working with folks for a while now and we all had really good comradery. We liked each other really well, good relationships. I got the title of leader and I started telling people what to do and I started giving direction and you know, I started doing the leadership things that I had been taught to do. Anybody else do that when they stepped in their leadership role? And it, here’s the one thing I praise God for, this is, this is such a blessing I think in my life. I’m a big noticer. I pay attention. All y’all who’ve been through next life for strat plan or like, yeah, he does. We watch every bit of your body language.
We watch everything that’s going on because it gives us information. It feeds information to go, oh, this is what they’re experiencing, this what they’re going through. Well, here’s what I started noticing. All the people that I liked stopped having light in their eyes when they were around me or I was leading or whatever. They started responding to me differently. Praise God. I started noticing that at 21 years old, that became a piece of for me to go. Hold on a second. This isn’t about you and Josh I was going to answer your question first, which this is probably good. This my answer would be, Josh asked, what’s the most powerful advice? It’s not about you, and I started to realize, wait a second, this isn’t about me. And that really made a huge impact on my career. That from that point was that 28 years ago that the numbers aren’t working.
That’s it. Yeah. Right. 28 plus 21 Golly, doesn’t it suck for some of us that can actually say those numbers. I don’t believe that I’m that old…it can’t be 28 years ago that I started to realize it’s not about me. It’s about you guys. And from that, instead of telling people what to do or being that kind of leader that I had had since I was 14 years old, because I’ve been working since I was 14 years old, I started actually doing what I now call taxing the collective intelligence. I didn’t have a name for it back then, but I would start asking, so what are your thoughts on this? What’s your input? What do you have to say? And I would start getting in pulling information because I realized something at 21 years old, I realized I’m not the only one in the room who has good ideas.
And if I’m the only smart person on this team, we’re screwed because we don’t need anybody else and I can’t do anything else and I’m going to have to be the one that comes up with all the answers. And so I knew that couldn’t be it. I knew that everybody else was intelligent or they wouldn’t be at a place like that. Right? So I started taxing the collective intelligence and bringing people into what I thought was my process. And I started discovering back then, if I set people up for success, they became successful. Now, I was still doing it for me because I was a big people pleaser. I hadn’t learned all the things that I teach you guys in next level life now yet. So I wasn’t doing it with the greatest of intention. I was still doing it for me, but it was working. I was making them successful. Does that make sense? And so I, I promise you, if you want to succeed in leadership it, it really is as basic as this. If you can make another human being successful that you’re paying, more than they already are, shouldn’t you?
What we get afraid of, and I’m going to talk about this in the next lesson, is if I start focusing on that, what if I don’t know how to make them successful? What if I don’t know how to make them better? What if I don’t? What if I give up some of my stuff and I focus on them and then I fail miserably? Who’s all that about? Me. So as long as it’s about you, it’s never going to be about anybody else. It just can’t be. So the sooner you get that, the sooner you can lead better. Does that make sense? Does that answer that question? Fantastic. Who’s got the next question? First,
the question is, is what is submissive leadership rooted in? And then secondly, for those in that organization, what’s the healthiest way to lead up to effect positive change in that?
Okay. Do you want to jump on that?
Yeah. I’ll definitely hit this, this front part. There’s a lot there. So I can look at my own story, Brent, and look at like, uh, being, being a submissive leader. I’m one that holds back one that falls under like a “No. Okay. You do what you want to do. No, that’s fine.” Let me not address certain issues. Let me be submissive to my team members because they were more dominant and I would receive it as like, Ooh, this is bad. I’m being bad. Let me shut myself down to just ignore it. So much of submissive leadership, can be rooted in insecurity, feelings of not feeling good enough, not feeling equipped, feeling like I’m not as smart as this other person, all that internal stuff. We don’t have to rehash the entire lesson here, but all of the internal battle is what holds me back.
So I grew up with a very submissive father, um, dominant mother, very submissive father. And there are times when I can be mom, ask my wife, she’s here. Um, that’s like a weakness that I, that I had in the early part of our relationship was it was just, I could shut her down. I could just shut her down. Why? It’s about me, I’m going to win. But then there are so many of these moments when I would be submissive in my leadership, even from being at home, working for the air force at the time, working on this team, those moments can crop up because of my modeling, my teaching, my own insecurity that says, my worth comes from you Brent. So because I care so much about, well, I want you to like me or I don’t want to rock the boat, or you’re a little more dominant and I’m used to that, shutting me down. I, I’m like, okay, that’s good. And then I would creep in my office and be like, why am I all right, whatever and just ignore it and move on in my life. That was so much of my early leadership career. It’s just rooted in, in all all things root system.
I would definitely say insecurity is absolutely, the answer. Um, it depends on what you came from, what root system you came from as well of how the why showing up the way that it is. For me, I grew up being wrong. I was the guy who hurt people when I had absolutely nothing to do with anything. If something went wrong or went bad, did anybody have somebody in your life that if something was wrong in their life, you are the problem? Even though you weren’t, you had nothing to do with that. If I pushed back a little bit or said something, how dare you, and then all of a sudden I’m this horrible person, so I grew up in a lot of my life of if you were hurting, it must have somehow been my fault. It was my fault somehow and I didn’t know how, but I definitely couldn’t be that because it was so painful for me to be the fault of somebody else.
The cause of somebody else’s pain that in the first half of my life, if, and this is the funny thing, if you have somebody who’s more demonstrative, they can see that and take advantage of it. Where they will see that you will back down and they will put that right on you. And so for me, in my life, if I felt that I was actually the fault or if I was causing somebody’s pain or hurt, that’s it. I backed off. I would not allow myself, I couldn’t be the reason why they hurt. And unfortunately it had no bearing or no perspective in reality, what it meant was, is that I took on, I chose in a very unhealthy way to be the problem. Instead of going, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, hold on, I’m sorry. Healthy boundary here. I’m not the problem for your problem.
I’m not the cause of your crisis. Don’t dump this on me. This has nothing to do with me. It wasn’t until I started to learn and I actually had to, I had been coaching people for so long and actually went through a very incredibly dramatic time in my life and I had a counselor that was talking to me going, do you see what you’re doing? And I was like, oh my gosh, I’m doing the same thing. I teach people not to do. How did I not see this? So submissiveness in leadership can be rooted in many things. A parent who tells you that you’re not good enough, people who tell you that you’re not good enough, somebody who rips you down and tells you that you’re a horrible person. Somebody who guilts the living crap out of you. A lot of people in here may come from, um, you know, broken homes where you have almost always, I’ve seen it maybe once with a man, but a lot of times with women where the separation will happen in the mom not understanding what she’s doing will actually dump her emotions on the child.
She feels closest to… Anybody in here ever have that? It’s called being a parentified child, and what happens is, is that individual, so you think about somebody who’s probably in her mid twenties gone through a divorce or something like that, has kids struggling in life, doesn’t really have somebody to connect with. So she bonds with the child who’s supposed to be a child and dumps all that emotional stuff on that kid and creates this parentified child. Unfortunately that child grows up having to parent everybody and be responsible for everybody’s happiness. Put that person in leadership. What do you see? You see somebody who’s submissive, who’s responsible for everybody’s happiness, who can’t let people hurt. They have to pull the hurt away, which tends to eventually enable people, all of that. So ton of answer on that. There’s even, there’s more to that. There’s even more to that, believe it or not, but that’s where a lot of that submissiveness is rooted in. How do you lead up? I’m assuming what you mean by that is if you have that as a leader, if you know, how do you lead that person?
Yeah, more so in a bigger organization, like the part of the organization I’m in, it’s 800 people nationally. It’s several thousand globally. And if like most organizations, I assume you have pockets of that rooted probably in organizational root systems. Is there a healthy way to try to lead up to positively effect or change that leadership?
Yeah, so one of the things we say a lot is we, we love counselors. We’re glad that there is a world of counselors out there. There’s one struggle that we have with counselors and that is counselors usually stay stuck in what we call the surface level. As you go through next level life, we show you what those surface level responses are. Something like submissiveness, control, fear, anger, alcoholism, procrastination, whatever the thing is there, you can get a ton of help and you should get help from somebody. Our struggle is we don’t want you to cope with the surface level response. We blow past it. We spent a short period of time on the root system in next level life we actually show you why the surface level response exists. So you can actually change your decision making. If we teach you to cope, you actually don’t change your decision making.
You just push the surface level to something else. You may compartmentalize this piece, but then it shows up in something else. That’s a waste of time. We want you to grow from that. So our hope is that we can give to somebody. If you’re, if you’re leading somebody who’s struggling from something and you can point them to somebody who actually can guide. If you can see that they’re struggling with something from their root system, that’s always a great thing to do, but that’s not what you’re asking. How do you lead somebody? You are not their counselor. You have to know that. You’re not going to be the person unless you come in and spend a ton of time learning what we do to be able to lead their root system. But what you can do is pay close attention to the things they’re struggling with and focus on worth. Focus on worth the thing that they are struggling with more than anything is losing worth or trying not to lose worth.
So if you have a submissive leader anywhere above you, beside you, below you, whatever it is, the thing that you need to focus on is what is causing them to struggle. Where do they struggle? When do they struggle? What’s the thing that causes them to back down? And then you can be somebody… Here now Ds get this idea in their mind. You just go on and tell him, Hey, don’t do that. Stop doing that. What was that, oh, what was that Bob Newhart thing? The gal comes and he’s the counselor and he’s like, okay, I’m just going to take…STOP IT. Thank you. Sure. Yeah, don’t do that anymore. Oh, okay. That doesn’t help. It literally doesn’t help. You have to show them what they’re struggling with. Hey, why are you struggling with that? Hey, what are you experiencing in the moment? What are you feeling?
Are you, do you feel, does that coming across as something that is telling you that you’re not good enough? Now, again, you’re going to have to be careful with their relationships because you may not be able to do that with some people, but others you will. There’s an old saying we used to say is that you can’t pop somebody upside the head unless your arm is around their neck, right? So if you come up to just pop somebody upside the head, they’re not going to listen to you. But if you actually show somebody that you care and you love on them then when they’re struggling, you can be there for them. So there’s been many times, this is my brother in life, right? There’s been many times we’ve been in events and he does not want to disappoint me. I know this. I don’t want to disappoint my team.
And so there are times it can be forever before you actually have a root system moment. And then all of a sudden out of the blue Joel can have a root system moment and I’ll go, what are you struggling with? And Bam, it’s right there. He just sees it. Yep. Okay. Nope. Yep. And I mean I love it. And again, that’s why he’s a facilitator because he can see it so fast and go, you know what? This is the thing I’m struggling with, but I don’t sit there and rip his head off because that’s not going to help. Instead I lead, I help. I guide, Hey, what is the thing you’re struggling with right now? The first time you say that to somebody, what’s the High D going to say?
If you weren’t eating Chris camp, I’d go straight to you. It’s a high D going to say, what are you struggling with? Nothing. I’ll struggle with anything. Hide Ds come in for next level life. Hey, what are you afraid of? And I always say before the answer, now you’re going to say that you’re not afraid of anything. And they laugh because they’re not right. Let’s get serious. What are you afraid of? I don’t know what we’re going to find out. You know, what are you struggling with right now? You know what that situation didn’t go so well. That meeting kind of sucked. Why did it suck? Go for the why. Why did it suck? Well, I didn’t say the right things. What are you worried about? Well, now afraid that so and so thinks I’m an idiot. What if they do? What if they do
think you’re stupid. Well, that’s not exactly what I want. Okay, but why is it affecting you so much? Gosh, I’d never thought about that before. When you care, you can lead. When you care, you can guide and direct when it’s about you being right. When it’s about timetables, I don’t have time for this. I’ve got too much to do. I got more important things to do. Like what tasks. Oh, okay. You go do that, then it’s not going to be about the person. So to lead up, lead around lead in any direction must start with caring more about the other person first. Then yourself, when you see somebody struggling, why, what are you experiencing? What are you going through? Help them through those processes. You can help them to an extent, right? To actually overcome some of that. It’s all that makes sense. Bridges. Yes. That’s what I’m afraid of.
Very high d but anyway, um, I’m glad you didn’t say spiders. Bug Man. Not a big fan. But anyway. Um, so when you’re working with somebody who they suffer from analysis by paralysis or however that’s worded and you’re trying to help them make a decision, what are some things we, you know, we could use to help that person?
Yeah. So now analysis paralysis happens mostly by high Cs. Why? Because it has to be all the right information. So what happens is a high c already triple checks everything, put them under stress, they quadruple check things right over and over and over again. What’s the number one thing that a high c does not want? Well, that’s the number thing. Number one thing they’re afraid of, right? Conflict Change, that kind of stuff. They don’t want to be wrong. They don’t want to sound stupid they don’t want to look stupid. They don’t have the want to have the wrong answer. They want to have the right answer. It’s vitally important. Cs and Ds hate to be wrong, have to be right, right? The only difference is is what’s a D discovers they’re wrong. They’re like, ah, okay. Hi C discovers their run. They’re like, I’m not so sure.
I’m still thinking I’m pretty right. So when somebody is struggling with paralysis, you know, analysis paralysis, paralysis of the analysis, they have so much information that they can’t make a decision. What’s the problem? They don’t have quality perspective. Over and over and over again whenever I see somebody struggling with too much information, what I like to do is I use it as a metaphors. Put it all good. Let’s get all the information out on the table and start ripping things away that don’t matter. So I will start asking questions. I’ll see it does no good. And as a fixer, what I want to do is just give them the answer. But that did not solve the problem, right? Don’t fix the problem because you didn’t teach them anything. You just fixed the problem. And they may not even agree with you. Right? So instead what I do is I will start to ask questions.
Now, what’s the struggle? What’s the thing you’re working on? And then I will ask perspective gathering questions until they see it. And the more I do it, I’ll take something away. So what about this? Well, this, okay, so that means this is a no. Yeah. Okay. So that’s out. Now, where does that take us here? Now what about this? And the more I ask perspective gathering questions, the more they start to see through their paralysis. What I say is when you freak, you freeze. When you have so much information or you feel like you haven’t gotten enough right? High C’s because they’re never there obviously can never be enough information. You have not searched out every inch of the Internet. There must be more, right? The interwebs have more information, so maybe you need another three days worth of discovering information. No, you don’t get as much information.
Take a look at and again, timeframes is huge. You have this timeframe to get as much information as you possibly can. Then let’s make a decision. If you give them the time frame, they’ll get the information in that time. If you leave it open ended, they will struggle. They will struggle. They will struggle. Get the information and then ask perspective gathering questions until they see the answer. Once you get them there, then the other leadership part happens, which is how did we get here? How did we do this now? How can you do this next time? What questions can you ask next time? What could you have done to get to this answer faster? Why did you struggle with coming up with an answer? What were you worried about in getting to the results? Were you afraid that I was going to think you’re stupid? Do were you afraid that you were going to sound stupid? You get all of those pieces in and now the person feels good. Okay, I don’t have to walk through that process. Does all that make sense?
I’ll add a little bit to this, is that, put some other words on this. It’s just when a, when a high s and C feeling overwhelmed slightly different angles, when you look at yourself as a leader and leadership is about making your team successful, not the other way around, making your team successful, your team member in that moment. It doesn’t mean just fix the problem. Well, it’s fixed so therefore I’m successful and I’m successful really? Because I’m trying to make you successful by training you how to think differently, how to grow yourself, how to solve these problems. Otherwise, who always becomes the problem solver? The leader. Well, that’s great if my worth comes from that, I love that arrangement. I’ll, I’ll buy that for $20 every day, but it’s about what do I need to teach you and when you’re stuck in the leadership crazy cycle and feeling overwhelmed with tasks and all the things you need to do, it’s really hard to breathe and stop and say, let me care about you and training you up to teach you how to solve your problems because the process we’ll go through is teaching them and you’ll teach them that we’ll walk through to, that’ll make sense.
Do you see how I guided you there? Can you think you can do that yourself? They start attempting it. They started attempting it. They get better, they get better, and then eventually there’s a point where accountability comes into play here as you, as you’ve taught them and as they’ve demonstrated success with saying, you know what? I’m overwhelmed. Let me create a list of everything on my plate. Everything that I’ve got that I’ve got to do that I’m feeling like everything’s important, which is a struggle. That personality styles, all of it’s important. Okay. Is it really because we’re lacking quality perspective? Let’s walk through all of it. Reprioritize. What do you think about all of this? You will see this is helpful. I feel better about this. Do you think you can do this on your own? Absolutely. And you start working with them and then eventually comes to a point where they come to you again, Josh and say, I need your help.
I’m stuck again. Okay. Okay. Did you do what I’ve taught you to do? Well, well no. Help me understand why you haven’t done what I’ve showed you five times and we’ve talked about over the last month? Exactly. Do you need to go back and do that. Accountability now is a new level of healthy pressure that gets them to say, no, that’s exactly what I need to do. I need to implement what Josh is teaching me and now my competence in what I’m doing is going to increase. I don’t need to come distract you. Let’s say I’m distracting. It’s not always a distraction, but I don’t need to bring this to you because who set me up for success? You did.
A lot of people understand this. Uh, uh, I think I shared this story during this event. I think I will share this later on, so I want to actually go into the story. But Aaron West back there, I’ve got a fun little story that I’ll tell later on. I think I do. I think it’s in this event. I think it’s in every event. I’d probably do share that story in every single event. But a lot of people come from leaders who did not foster their success, so they don’t come with answers. So they don’t come with drive to figure things out. They come with a fear that if they’re not right, you’re going to be disappointed. So they don’t take risks. So just as Joe was sharing, understand where your people come from. If you don’t do the process that we just said, they’re not to choose to grow, they’re going to stay at that level hoping you answer everything and for you fixers who fix and give answers to every single thing, guess what
they will do? Come to you for answers on everything until you have to solve everything inside of the business. So by doing this process, it also helps them to think for themselves. So after you do this enough times and you hold them accountable and accountability, is that like, why aren’t you doing the thing I taught ya? And it’s like, did you do the thing? No. Okay. Help me to understand why. Just like Joel was sharing, sharing, you know, I didn’t even think about it. Okay. Go do it. Right now? Yep. But I really need an answer. Great. Go do the thing and come up with an answer. Come back to me. Right. You’re teaching, teaching, teaching, teaching, teaching. The greatest leaders have the heart of a teacher. All right. Uh, there you are. Are we done or do we have time for more? Anyway, I’ll stop talking.
What’s that? That’s, that’s a, that’s a, no, we’re done. That is a, let me make those guys happy because they want to answer more questions. Do we, can we really, we have time for one more. Someone who’s got a question yet, Josh leadership is guiding people to a destination. Um, this kind of new to me. And I’m curious, when you say destination, what, can you unpack that a little bit for me? Yeah, I’ll talk a little bit about, nope, not at this event. I won’t, but think about it in mine. Okay. One of the things we talk about is vision, right? So, um, that’s a very confusing thing for people in mission and vision. So I’m going to do this very quickly and briefly. Mission is your purpose. Your company should have a mission. It should have a mission statement. But the statement means crap
if it’s not the purpose of the company, you should have a purpose that people look at as the reason why they show up every single day. Right? Does that make sense? So for us, our mission statement is worshiping God by loving his children and guiding individuals and organizations to greater perspective. People say all the time, you changed my life, you changed my business. You change my family. We actually didn’t. You actually did it. But we got gotta do like crazy to the information to go and do it. But our biggest thing is we’re going to worship God. That’s where we are. That’s our start. So that’s the purpose our people know to show up, to love on you guys, to love God and love you. And those of you that have been to our office, would you agree that that’s what you’ve experienced from my team?
There you go. Grilled cheese sandwich. That’s Paul’s love language. Grilled cheese. Oh yeah, the triple cream Brie Sandwich. Love with that roasted red pepper soup. Uh, so vision is where you’re going. This is where people screw this up all the time. Vision is the destination. So where you’re going to go, that’s the vision. So a leader should always be leading people somewhere. Where is that somewhere? So for me, I have to lead my company to a unified, folks that have been through StratPlan, know this, if you’ve not been through StratPlan, I will guarantee you, you most likely have a shotgun approach inside of Your Business and you have people going in 17 different directions and wonder why you can’t get anywhere. You need a unified direction. If we can all go that place, we can get there.
So I have to lead my company to that place. I have to lead my leaders to being better leaders. So I spend time making sure my leaders, every single, it happens all week long, but every Monday in our leadership team meeting, I’m guiding and directing. I’m leading them to where I want them to be. My leaders are great, they’re phenomenal, but I don’t stop learning. If I’m not done, they’re not done. So my job is to get my leaders to be better and to be better and to be better and to be better. So wherever that destination is, and and with vision, so you have one mission, you can have 700 visions. It’s the next one. It’s the next one. It’s the next one. It’s the next one. We say next level life, there’s not one next level life level. There is 700 levels. So my job is to always lead them better.
My job is to lead them to a place of leading their people. How do I get them to be stronger leaders and not look to me? Right? I want to make sure, and I will remind them from time to time, hey guys, don’t forget, don’t wait for me to lead your people. You lead them. They’re your people, right? It’s your job to lead your people. So whatever that destination is a as a, as a whole, I believe it is my job to lead my people closer to God. So we have insane devotionals, I think they’re insane they’re pretty deep, pretty, you know, just we literally crawl through the Bible because of how much discussion that we have. I believe that’s my job. Um, so for those of you that are believers, here’s what I want you to understand what the Bible says, because you’re a leader.
How many people in here are leaders? Should be everybody in here. Even if you don’t think you are, guess what? We have a higher call. We have a higher standard to God. People don’t understand how many times in the Bible it says that God puts people in leadership good and bad. Any time God’s put pretty bad leaders in place for his purposes. We’re all held to a higher accountability as a leader. So it’s my job not to make me look great. I have to stand before him and he’s going to say, what’d you do with my kids? And I pray to God, he goes, well done. So for me, leading to that destination, what is the destination? What is the thing I’m looking for? I want my leaders, this is a great example. I shared with somebody. The three of us went to Israel for two weeks last year.
There wasn’t a leader at the building. The rest of the team was that the building, two weeks ran by itself. I dealt with one email. I think Joel dealt with one or two. I think Heather handled one situation in two weeks. We came back and a lot of the clients in here, we’re going, how many fires did you have to put out? Zero. What are you talking about? We didn’t have any fires. How could you not have any fires? And this is my answer. We do what we teach. It actually works. So by leading these guys really well, they lead their teams really well. We removed leadership for two whole weeks and we didn’t have a single fire. We didn’t have a single problem. Let me rephrase. There were some situations that came up that the team handled and they rocked on with, so that’s leading people to that. Where do I want them to be? Get them there and then ask the question. Okay, now that we’re here, now what do I want? Get them there. Get them there. A shepherd is always going to be somebody who leads from the front, right? The sheep will know my voice. Why? Because I’m at the front leading them to that place, so that makes sense.
There you have it folks. I hope you found that valuable. Now, if you don’t want to miss out on next year’s event and get the best possible prices, go to Chris LoCurto.com/Events and get on the waitlist for 2020 event right now. Again, that’s Chris LoCurto.com/events. Thank you for joining me today. I hope it serves you well. I encourage you to subscribe, rate, review, and share the podcast to help more people join our community. And as always, take this information, change your leadership, change your business, change your life and join us on the next episode!
