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Speaker 1:
This is Unleashing Leadership, and I'm your host, travis Moss, with our season five co-host, dave Nurchi. This podcast is all about our takeaways from the book the Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz and our observations and experiences regarding those takeaways and what we are really passionate about, which is our day job at Seed Planning Group. Myself I'm the CEO of Seed Planning Group. Dave's the Chief Operating Officer of Seed Planning Group, so we don't just talk about other people's ideas and pretend we know what we're talking about. This is actual, real life experiences that we've had.
Speaker 1:
Today's takeaway what defines a leader, the ability to articulate a vision, the right kind of ambition and the ability to achieve the vision. And, as always, do us a favor, like and subscribe to us wherever you're listening or watching, and just before we get into the actual meat of today, we have to let you know how we're who's bringing this to the table for us. This is brought to you by the One Big Thing podcast, because you are not alone. Learn how to reframe your challenges and overcome the things that are holding you back. Find out more info at NQR Media on YouTube. You can actually check out the show. See it in real life, get a face with the name, with the presenters and the interviewees there, and you can also find it wherever podcasts are found. All right, dave, I've been working on those intros, I've been practicing.
Speaker 1:
Sounds, great Sounds good, all right, I can retire now. Three-part thing really. What defines a leader, I think, is the kind of the header. Then you've got the three points ability to articulate vision, the right kind of ambition and then the ability to achieve the vision. I think we're talking about the leader here. So where do you want to start?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I think, if we start with, like, what defines a leader, right, I think of a couple words come to mind Inspiring people is one and developing people. So if we think about inspiring people right, that kind of goes into the vision, I think you know, articulating that and getting people excited about what you're doing, um, as a company, right, what your purpose is, and you need to inspire people to do that. Right, they need to get excited, like the leader, like the owner is, and that's going to help everything kind of come together. So that to me, probably inspiring your people is is one of the biggest things. And then the second part is the developing.
Speaker 2:
To me, that's the leaders. As a leader, you want to create the next leaders. You don't always want to be the, I guess, like, like the person in charge of the leader in a sense, where you, your job should be to kind of develop the future leaders and get them ready to kind of, you know, take the reins in a sense. Right, I guess is where I'm going with that. So I think developing people to get to that point is also probably the the other biggest uh job of the leader.
Speaker 1:
If I pulled that from, just the three points inspiring and articulating, I think are maybe the same thing. I think that's what you were getting at. And when we're thinking about articulating, you know some people say I don't want to be in sales, I never want to be in sales. Well, if you're a leader, you're selling somebody your idea or your ambition or your vision, whatever you want to call it, and you know how you are able to do. That is going to really dictate whether or not you're going to be a successful leader. And I think it does matter if it's the right kind of ambition. And I want to circle back to that. You know kind of the whole intent on your forehead when you walk in a meeting, right, but just the ability to articulate a vision.
Speaker 1:
I think sometimes people don't understand you might be brilliant, you articulated vision. I think sometimes people don't understand you might be brilliant, you might have this incredibly good idea, you might know that something can be done or should be done a certain way, but if you can't dumb it down so that other people can like, buy into your idea and get themselves educated up to speed with you, you know if you can't break it into pieces. If we talk about project management all the time, if you can't break this into milestones and help say, hey look, this is where I'm at, this is where I'm going, this is why, this is why each step is so important, then it's going to be really hard for you to articulate the vision. And I say that with you. Know, francis, or what are those quotations?
Speaker 1:
Air quotes? It's you think you're articulating, but sometimes people are just so damn smart. If you know everything about the topic, if you've nerded out on this, you're so invested, yep, that you throw up on somebody. When they talk to you, they can't get a hold of it because there's no foothold on it, right? It's just like this 50-foot cliff they're trying to climb, but it's completely smoothed out. They're going to freeze, right?
Speaker 2:
They climb but, it's like completely smoothed out. They're gonna freeze right. They're gonna kind of like I don't know how to handle this, where do I go from here?
Speaker 1:
versus if you overly dumb it down, you know or or haven't really thought through it very much, so you can't give them, you know some any any real kind of uh logic behind it. So there's a sweet spot in between throwing up on somebody I, I think and really being able to logically explain it in a way that people can chew on it. So I think ability to articulate division is really, really important. And I think also, on the other end, you were talking about developing and it's the whole like, oh, if I hire a young person and they leave me, I've wasted all the time training them. But if you hire a young person and they don't leave you and you haven't trained them, now you've got somebody who's untrained right.
Speaker 1:
So it's, your ability to achieve a vision is going to be based on development development of yourself and those around you, development of your customers, development of your colleagues, development of your managers, your employees, whatever. That development thing never ends. So I guess those are the two things that I was thinking of as you were talking about that, and then that circled me back to the middle one and the right kind of ambition. So anything you want to say about the right kind of ambition.
Speaker 2:
Well, just before we go to that one, I think the development part too, what I think of there is a lot of a lot of leaders or managers whoever we're talking about sometimes they're afraid that someone might get better than them. Right, yeah, and I think that's something you got to look out for. Like you want that, I think in a sense, right, like that, that shouldn't be a bad thing. That should be like wow, look at how I helped that person develop into some, you know, someone who does have a different specialty or can do something better than I did, and that should be encouraged and welcomed at the company, not something that's like oh, now my job's at stake because I did such a great job getting this person to develop and now I'm, you know they don't need me anymore.
Speaker 1:
But don't you think that that's tied to the right kind of ambition?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, maybe that segues us into that conversation.
Speaker 1:
Because I'm thinking, if you have ambition, if you have this idea of this incredible thing that you want to do, but you're afraid of other people getting recognized or personally or professionally developing and possibly outpacing you, does that get to kind of your intent? And whether or not the is the ambition for you personally to get all the recognition and and all the money and all that kind of stuff, whereas your ambition, based on this, is a way to change the world or improve the world right, or my, my product or my service or whatever it is. And you know you're like smiegel from lord of the rings it's your precious, it's mine, you know I can't share it with anybody.
Speaker 1:
I you know all the, all the bad stuff that comes with. You know overly inward focus on on return versus understanding that you know it takes a village to build a city, basically yeah, no, I think.
Speaker 2:
I think that's exactly right. There's that balance there. Right, you need that ambition to advance yourself or get to what you want to achieve. But if that's your focus and all you're concerned about, then that will show up. You talk about wearing what your intent is to a meeting, right, like on your forehead. Well, that's going to be known pretty quickly, even if you don't actually have a card on your forehead saying what it is.
Speaker 2:
If you come in there and it's like, oh, you know, dave's walking into a meeting again, he just wants to control the room and how great everything he's doing is and all that, well, you're going to lose a lot of inspiration from people, right. But if you walk in it's like, hey, this is the solution we're looking for today, or whatever, the point of the meeting is right and everybody's involved working towards the same thing, that meeting is gonna go very different. And that is that ambition. Right, I'm going into that meeting with the intent and the ambition of making you know, getting to our purpose, getting to our just cause in a better way and maybe that's how you ought to be living your life too.
Speaker 1:
I mean, you know you can just say it's in meetings, but I don't think people only observe you in meetings. I think people observe you the way you walk around the office.
Speaker 1:
I think, people observe the way you interact with people. I think people overhear you when you're talking at coffee. They watch how you interact with waitstaff. You know they watch how you are with your family and that kind of stuff. So you know when we're talking about intent. So, for the listeners, what we mean by intent is I did an episode a while ago on a take from Jocko Wilk's Leadership Podcast and I think you can go to YouTube and look for this particular episode.
Speaker 1:
It was about intent and his whole point was you know, you really ought to think about when you walk into a room taking a piece of paper and writing in big Sharpie across the paper, um, what your intent of the meeting is, and slapping that to your forehead, because no matter how smart you think you are, that's going to come across to people, even if you're trying to hide it, if you are good at hiding it.
Speaker 1:
Once they figure out that you hit it, they're going to come Now.
Speaker 1:
They're never going to trust you again, right, so you're better off just walking in a room saying here's my intent, for better or worse. This is what I'm here for, and that also gets you to this idea that, look, you can have personal ambition. You can want to climb the mountain, you can want to have great and nice things right, but there's a place for that and and there's a return. There's a reward for that. So if your ambition is a right kind of ambition, it's about building something and making something better, and because you've done that, you're going to get these other rewards, and this is why I think that the cemetery is littered by entrepreneurs that failed. This is why so many people found the first five years. Are you doing it to make money or are you doing it because there's a greater cause, a bigger thing that you're trying to conquer? Now you've got to figure out how to articulate that and you've got to figure out how to develop things around you so that you can actually do it.
Speaker 1:
But if you're coming, right out the gate and you're saying, no, I'm really doing this because I want to count the zeros in my bank account. You're going to have a really hard time really inspiring people which is at the other end of the articulation and developing people to help achieve your vision. So I think that you know that's maybe where the line is on the right kind of ambition. It's like in your heart of hearts. Why are you really doing this? Yeah, because if it's and I'll just leave it on this If it's all about making money, it doesn't matter what you're doing, it doesn't matter the reasons you're doing stuff.
Speaker 1:
What really matters is it's all about making money. And I would just go back and say look, why are you trying to make money? Well, I want to be a better family person, I want to have a nicer home, I want to send my kids to whatever schools or you know whatever. The reason is maybe that more part of the ambition and why you know like I want to do better things for my kids because I didn't have those opportunities. Okay, so maybe your why is helping people who haven't had opportunities?
Speaker 2:
Yep, which includes your family. Yeah, money doesn't have to be evil. Right, it's the, it's the purpose behind it, and I think, like tying all that in you mentioned it with the like it's not. As a leader, you can't turn an offer on like, you can't turn off and on, right, it's not. Well, I'm going to pretend in this meeting, this is what I care about. Or when I walk through the office like it's who you are, you have to live it. It is who you are and it has to be on all the time for people to be inspired, and we know people can see through the veil, so just be honest you.
