Why Non-Traditional CEOs Need to Go Through Leadership Rehab

It’s time for a leadership chat. Without leadership, you can’t sell sh*t! But many of us non-traditional CEOs don’t have leadership experience from a corporate job. We learned it through the school of hard knocks, and that can have some consequences.

In this episode, I talk about what leadership is, what it requires of you, and how you can set about becoming a better one for your team.

4:30 - The wake-up call that made me realize I needed leadership help

7:26 - Why good managers aren’t necessarily good leaders

8:49 - How leadership is just like any other relationship

11:22 - A very personal example of how I had to rebuild trust

14:35 - The two things you need to be a good leader

15:45 - What to do and NOT to do if you’re looking to become a better leader

Find me on Instagram or LinkedIn or email me at hello@lesliedlyons.com.

As mentioned In Why Non-Traditional CEOs Need to Go Through Leadership Rehab

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Clockwork: Design Your Business to Run Itself by Mike Michalowicz

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Transcript for Why Non-Traditional CEOs Need to Go Through Leadership Rehab

Hey boss, I am Leslie Lyons, your embodied leadership and sales coach, and this is Pleasurable Profits. This podcast is ideal for owners and leaders of tattoo shops, permanent makeup studios, cannabis businesses, movement studios, sex toy shops, and other industries that are too often left out of the leadership conversation. If you’re looking for a woo meets strategy approach to defining your strengths and values, designing a business that supports you, and creating a soul-driven, and of course, pleasurable plan for profitability, then let’s get started.

Hey boss, the moment you've been waiting for, I am opening the waitlist to my Unshakable Sales Confidence Program. It's time for you to learn how to advocate for your work so you can get paid what you deserve. Look, I'm going to help you to dismantle any misconceptions and dismantle any nasty narratives that you have around selling.

I'm going to give you the tools that you need to confidently harness and stand in your unique selling style. Some of these tools are going to be woo. I'm going to give you a heads-up now. But you know I don't play around. It's going to be chock full of strategy so that you can go out and confidently ask for the sale so that you can make more money.

It’s going to feel good. That is why I sell so easily because I only sell things that feel good to me and play into my strengths. When you know what your selling strengths are, and we combine that with the power of coming up with great selling stories, you will be unstoppable. If you know you need some help in this area, if you know that you are hesitant to pick up the phone, you're wanting to be more confident in sales conversations, this is the program for you.

You can get more info. The link will be in the show notes but it's beunshakeable.co. All right, my loves, let's jump into today's episode and I will talk to you soon.

Hey, party people. It’s Leslie, your embodied sales and leadership coach. I hope you're doing well. I'm doing fantastic, thank you for asking. Today I’m going to have a little leadership chat. You guys know I talk a lot about selling but I also want to talk about leadership because it is my thought, and because I'm an Enneagram 8, I believe it is fact that you can't have leadership without selling and you can't sell without leading.

You will see that I will bounce back and forth between topics. Today's topic was brought on by conversations that I've been having over the last week. It was not planned, but sometimes God just keeps bringing situations to me because I feel like that's the thing that he wants me to talk about. This was not on the script, but here we are, and I'm hoping that it'll be helpful to you.

Now here's one thing I know about non-traditional CEOs. What I know about us is that many of us did not have traditional corporate-leadership experience. Now that doesn't mean you didn't have a corporate job. That doesn't mean that you are a manager, but most of us who I work with, so pole dance studios, tattoo shops, cannabis businesses, you weren't the CEO of General Mills, like it wasn't that level of strategic planning that you had experienced with before you found yourself being the owner, and now by default, the CEO of your small business.

That means that a lot of the leadership lessons that we have learned, we learned through the school of hard knocks. ♫ It's a hard-knock life for us. It's a hard-knock life for us. ♫ It wasn't only Annie and Jay-Z that sang that song. We learned these lessons by taking lumps. Some of you, truth be told, are still taking those lumps.

One of the things that came up this past week that I want to talk about was once you have a come to Jesus meeting, which is usually preceded by failure in your business, can I just say it? A failure in the people department of your business, now you go out and get support, like you hire me as a coach to help you.

I’m not just a coach when it comes with these things, I'm a mentor. When you hire a mentor to walk you through some of these things, you're now like, “Oh my gosh, I gotta change. I gotta do a 180. I've been doing things wrong, and I gotta make this right.” There's a saying in Christianity that there's no one more religious than the recently converted, and that's how I feel like when I work with a person who had poor leadership, and now they're trying to get that right. It is nothing like that energy of, “I've got to turn everything around and it's got to be turned around today, or my business is just going to fall apart.”

Here's what I want to share with you. That will fail. That mentality of “I've been a poor leader,” “I've been a substandard leader,” “I've needed help in the leadership area,” or “I haven't been leading at all and now I'm ready to do it,” if you think that you're just going to go from no leadership to the best leader in the world in 90 days, you're lying to yourself. Anybody who's selling you a program like that is lying to you and just wants your money.

This is something that I am constantly honing, I am constantly refining, I am constantly learning, it’s a lifetime of learning. The first thing I would encourage you to do is number one, celebrate yourself that you do realize that you need help. I know for me, my turning point was when Mike Michalowicz had his Run Like Clockwork book and the litmus test if you were running a business or if you were just owning your job was if you could take four weeks away from your business without anybody bothering you, without you needing to be putting out any fires, people calling you while you're on the beach, that kind of thing.

Could you literally unplug for four weeks? That was such an eye-opener for me. Because at that time I was like, “I couldn't unplug for four hours.” It was like I could barely go to the bathroom without an employee calling me, without something blowing up at the front of the studio, without something happening. I noticed the same with tattoo shops. I noticed the same with sex toy shops and photographers. I know it's the same when you don't have that leadership ability to nurture other leaders.

Because a lot of people might be listening to this now and you're like, “Leslie, oh, please, my team is good. We all work together.” But the question is, do they work when you're not around? Some of you are amazing managers, but managers aren't necessarily leaders. The primary litmus test for me when I'm determining what my leadership looks like, am I leading or am I managing, is have I created other leaders? Have I delegated, not just task but authority to make decisions? Are those people able to carry out the decisions that they made without having to check in with me? They understand my value so well. They understand the heartbeat of my business so well that we think alike.

It's like that movie Drumline because it's like one band, one sound. We're all on one accord, that's when you know you've stepped into a leadership role. If people need you to make decisions, if people have to check in with you and you have to check in on people, you are a good manager at best. But leadership, I don't know about that one.

Here's something I want to say to you. When you hire that coach, when you hire that consultant, when you start reading your leadership books, when you go through leadership training, do not run back and think that the staff who you haven't been leading for the last seven years is going to be all ecstatic about your newfound religion. They're not going to be all on board just because you decided that you want to change things up.

I akin it to leadership is like any other relationship. If you've neglected a relationship for a long period of time, people aren't going to just trust this new version of you right away. Think about it. If you've ever been in a relationship with someone who breached trust with you, whether that was through an affair, whether that was disclosing something personal to someone else, whatever the breach was, if that person came back to you and was like, “I'm a changed person,” or if you've ever had to deal with an addict in your life, and they're like “I'm quitting drugs. This is it. I'm going cold turkey,” and you've unfortunately seen them relapse several times, when they come to you the time that they really are getting ready to quit, when they are turning things around, you still meet it with skepticism.

Your team is the same way. It's like you've been this person for seven years, you've been working with Leslie for seven months, and now you want a whole new day. It doesn't work like that. That's not how trust is built. Trust is built by interaction. Trust is built through time spent with one another. Trust is built when I see change in your actions long term.

Now we ain’t talking about anybody being the perfect leader because none of us are that. Like I said, I'm constantly growing. I'm constantly learning. You don't arrive at a pinnacle in leadership. When you think you have arrived, that is part of the issue that will keep you from getting to the next level in your business because you lack humility.

One of the best character traits of a leader is someone who is empathetic and possesses humility. If you like those things, get a therapist child so that you can start to work on those things. Because Lord knows that's what I had to do. What I think about building trust, though, moment by moment, I will use a very personal example for me.

I was a single mom, you guys have heard this, I was pregnant at 18 and involved with a very abusive man physically and emotionally, drug dealer the whole night. I decided when I was 19 and a half, almost 20, that I was going to move out and to move out with this guy. My parents, in their wisdom, knew that I was not mentally, spiritually, or emotionally prepared to take care of my daughter.

My parents took care of my daughter. Essentially, I moved out and I left my daughter to be raised by my parents. While I still believe that was the best thing that I could do for her at that time, there were some consequences for my neglect. It took me years of therapy to even say that I neglected my daughter because we think about neglect as she was out in the street with no clothes on and she was fending for herself. I left her in great hands. Neglect takes varying forms, and emotional neglect where I was in and out the house, not really invested in my daughter, was neglect.

Fast forward to years, I'm talking years of trying to get my relationship right with my daughter, and my own therapeutic process of “Who do I need to be to my daughter now?” When I wanted to start spending time with her, she met me with resistance because it was like “Who is this person? What is this? Is this going to be consistent?” Because I had been so inconsistent her whole life. Our relationship to this day is still not perfect. But it's intentional.

That is the message that I want you guys to get. I had to show my daughter that I was invested in her through my actions, my consistent little actions. I could not get my daughter to get onto my plan. I couldn't be like “Don't you see I've changed? Respect me, I'm your mother” when I had a history of doing things that weren't worthy of respect.

That leads me to another point about leadership. To be a good leader, you need two things. It requires that your people trust you and that they respect you. Respect is earned and you'll never get to respect without trust. At best, you'll get to fear, and people who fear you aren't loyal to you. That's a whole nother conversation. But some of you think you're good leaders because people are doing what you say under duress just until they can find another job or find enough f*cking esteem in themselves to leave you.

You need trust and respect from your team. If you have not been leading in a trustworthy way, if you haven't been showing up in a trustworthy manner, you need to start to establish trust with your team. Alright, I've preached to you long enough. I'm going to give you some action items.

If you're looking to become a better leader, and you want to build trust with your team, it doesn't start with you sending out an email saying “This weekend we're going to have a team retreat. I'm going to take everybody to Hawaii. Yeah, let's go,” and then you're met with dead silence and people don't even want to go on a luxury trip with you because they don't trust you and respect you.

Don't waste your money or your time putting together some elaborate team outing, team bonding event, or some team adventure when you haven't done the groundwork or the basics to build trust with your team. Because if you do that, you're going to be disappointed. When you're disappointed, your tendency is going to be just like the addict, to go back to what you knew which is to withdraw, to play on the sidelines. Don't set yourself up for that. Take it one day at a time.

Look for little opportunities in your team's life to show that you're interested and you're invested. Don't plan the big retreat, start with something small like just hanging around after they finish their shift, helping them close. If you normally leave and have your teammates close the shop, maybe you start taking one day out of the week to help them close so that you can have simple conversation, so that you can build relationships just like you build relationships with anybody else you care about intentionally.

Look for little opportunities to show yourself trustworthy. Look for little opportunities where you can show your team that you trust them. That's another thing about trust. It’s a two-way street. When your team feels like you trust and respect them, unless they're psychotic, or major f*cking narcissists, they will probably start to show you that they trust and respect you. It's reciprocal.

Look for those little moments where you can say “I trust you to make that decision.” Look for those little moments where you can affirm them. You're going to have to create these moments where you talk to your team about something that has nothing to do with your business. Get to know what they care about and show that you care.

It’s those little moments that show, “Hey, she's really quit the narcissistic b*tchy crazy leadership behavior that she had, and she's really turned to a new leaf. She really cares about me. She really is invested in me as a person. I can trust her.” When they trust you, your business will turn around.

But you got to have the humility to say your team gets to determine the timetable, you don't. See, that's the consequence of your poor actions, which leads me to my final point about poor actions. If you're looking to bridge or repair your relationship with your team, it must start with accountability. Yes, it must start with radical vulnerability where you say to your team, “Guess what? I've been a terrible leader.”

You don't just say that in some highfalutin general way, you give specific examples of where you fell short. It might be you say to your employee, your manager, “Hey, for the last six months, I left you to close this studio all by yourself knowing that it was taking you an hour and a half after your time that you should have been off to close while I was at home sleeping. That was sh*tty behavior and I apologize.”

See, that's the other piece. Oh my gosh. In Christianity, we say there is no reconciliation without repentance. Repentance means a complete ownership of the wrong you've done and a complete commitment to make it right. You got to repent to your people specifically, not this general “I know I haven't been the leader I should be, guys. I know I haven't always been the best boss, but I've been going through a lot.” Nobody cares.

What they want to hear is “I've wronged you. I want to make it right. Do you forgive me and will you give me another chance?” That's the framework. If you're taking notes, and I hope you are, here's specifically how I did it: “I wronged you. I am sorry. I want to make it right. Do you forgive me?”

When you do that, that level of humility, man, do you know that the divorce rate would be so low, children being reconciled to their parents would be much greater, people being reconciled to just people in general if people did that? Because it's easy to say but hard to do. But if you want to scale your business, and I know you do, that's why you're here, you're going to have to be the type of leader that people want to follow. You will not build your dream alone. If you do build your dream alone, you will be alone. You will be insufferable. Trust me, I've been there, ask me how, I know.

I hope this was helpful to you. I hope that this framework that I gave you will support you as you start your journey to become the type of leader that I know you can be. I am cheering for you. I am here to support you. If you want to work with me, my Be Unshakable Program is a blend of sales and leadership. It's a 12-month mentorship container. Because like I said in the beginning, you don't learn this in 90 days. You learn this by feet on the ground, by mistakes, by having accountability, by getting support, and that's what my community is about.

Alright, my love, until next time, you know what I always say, and I mean this to you, grace and peace. I'll talk to you soon.

Thank you for listening to today's episode. I just want to remind you that I've opened the waitlist for my Unshakable Sales Confidence Program. Head on over to beunshakeable.co. But if you know that you need some support around selling, specifically around mustering up the confidence to go after the money you deserve, this program is going to be for you. Jump on the list now. People who get on the list early will get access to special pricing and bonuses when I open the doors. Head on over to beunshakeable.co and I will see you next week. Grace and peace.