5 Mistakes Beginner Leaders Make

Summary

• As a leader, it's crucial to have full context to make the best decisions for the company.
• Over-hiring is a common mistake in scaling businesses. Address short-term inefficiencies with proper systems rather than immediately hiring more staff.
• Normalize giving feedback early on to shift from being a "buddy" to being a "boss," ensuring team members have clear directives.
• When delegating, implement quality assurance to maintain work standards. Tracking metrics and having task checklists help.
• Remain humble after promotions. Stick to the behaviors that earned the promotion instead of changing drastically.
• Regularly communicate with the right stakeholders. Daily reminders to update the team can prevent miscommunications.
• Constantly seek to improve communication within the growing team. It's a perpetual challenge but critical for success.
• Focus on what you can control, such as staffing correctly, maintaining quality assurance, and effective communication.
• Leadership isn't about extraordinary intelligence but about conscious effort and consistent work.

Video

How To Take Action

I'd suggest implementing a few strategies for improving your leadership and business operations without a lot of cost or time commitment.

Gain Full Context:

• Stay updated on your team's work. Schedule regular check-ins and be part of important meetings so you can make informed decisions. Spend a few minutes every day reviewing what’s been done and any challenges people are facing.

Avoid Over-Hiring:

• Assess your needs with a system or a short-term project first before adding more people to your team. Use temporary contractors if you estimate that the workload will reduce soon. Always ask yourself if a person, process, or project is needed before hiring.

Normalize Giving Feedback:

• Start small with “Feedback Fridays.” Give each team member one piece of feedback every Friday to make this routine. It’s an easy way to transition from being a buddy to being a boss while ensuring everyone knows what to work on.

Implement Quality Assurance:

• Use checklists and track metrics to ensure the quality of work. This can be done with tools like Asana or even simple spreadsheets where tasks must be checked off and notes added, ensuring everyone is following the processes you've set.

Remain Humble:

• After a promotion, keep doing what made you successful. If you acted as a leader before, continue those behaviors. Be the same hardworking, approachable person you were before your promotion.

Communicate Regularly:

• End each day by thinking about what needs to be communicated to whom. Spend a few minutes sending updates or summaries to relevant team members. This ensures everyone stays in the loop and feels valued.

Constantly Improve Communication:

• Accept that communication will never be perfect. The goal is to continuously improve. Regular briefings, summaries, and updates can prevent misunderstandings as your team grows.

By focusing on these strategies, you’ll build a strong foundation for leadership and efficiency in your business.

Quotes by Leila Hormozi#### "The person with the most context makes the best decisions"

– Leila Hormozi

"If you don't even know if your people are doing their job to the best degree possible, how can you determine what to do to make the department better to grow the department to grow the business"

– Leila Hormozi

"If people don't know what to do when you have a big team then people either do everything or nothing"

– Leila Hormozi

"Your commitment is to the leadership team right your peers not just the department that you're over"

– Leila Hormozi

"If the tree falls in the forest and nobody sees it fall right if you do work and let nobody know they assume you do no work"

– Leila Hormozi

Full Transcript

the person with the most context makes the best decisions as the leader of the company if you don't have context how do you make good decisions for your company you don't and same goes for a leader of a department if you don't even know if your people are doing the their job to the best degree possible how can you determine what to do to make the department better to grow the department to grow the business you can't you want to have visibility into everything that's happening yeah so I guess the thing that's been top of mind for me has been mistakes that less experienced leaders make when scaling and the reason it's for me is because it's not just happening in my own company at acquisition. comom but it's also happening within multiple portfolio companies that I have and I'm lucky because I've dealt with it before because gym launch our company went from you know zero to 7 million to 27 million to 36 million to 50 m so like that's a very steep growth trajectory and when it was happening I thought that everything was up and wrong right and now as it's happening again in this company I understand what's normal what's to be expected and what I can do about it so what I want to point out is the top five mistakes that inexperienced leaders or leaders who have never scaled quickly before make the first one is over hiring why do people overhire they overhire because there's short-term pain that you solve with a long-term solution but then the shortterm pain goes away in the very beginning when something's growing really quickly everything has to be done in a in a very inefficient way and so you have a ton of his inefficiencies everywhere and so the first thing people say when they see all these inefficiencies is we need more people like we're not able to do all this this is not this is not fathomable like I can't keep doing this kind of work so they say cool let me hire somebody and then what happens is that 4 months later when that work is no longer needed what does that person end up doing I experienced this in my company Prestige Labs we had a customer service department and we were going to launch for the first time our entire line of supplements and so the head of the customer service department basically said here's how many people are going to need what she didn't account for was that when you launch a brand new company when you already have an existing customer base you're going to have way more demand in the beginning than what it kind of trickles down to and then stabilizes it and so what happened is we brought on 20 customer service reps and you know how many I ended up meeting after that after the first 3 months six it was so bad that literally one of the customer service reps called me and she was like Leila I've taken one email and I've been here for 7 hours ethically I can't keep working here she's like I don't feel good that you're paying me to do nothing and I was like holy and so you know when I talked to my customer service manager she had hired for the short-term pain the fact that right now we have two 250 tickets a day or however many it was not the fact that in 2 months we're only going to have 50 tickets a day and then she didn't think about what am I going to do with all these people once the volume settles down a lot of people um make this mistake when they are first time in the position because they don't see the pain ever ending and the reality is it always does because what do you do you get the systems in place with your CRM or technology you start tracking data so you have more transparency and less meetings you get people in and up and trained because you have all these new people they're not their degree of productivity is never as high as people have been there for a long time they gain more productivity more knowledge more context they can take more off your plates now what I do to protect myself from this is I ask myself there's the three PS is it a person is it a process or is a project and I do this because I want to think is this something that is going to continue to exist forever like why does this work even exist right now is it because we don't have a process in place is it because we need to do a six-month project like a Sprint or is it because we truly need a person that's going to fill this role and so a lot of times I see is you know first-time leaders for example they want to hire somebody to do this manual labor well Our IT guy is working on that is working on the CRM so in four months that's going to go away so do we really want to hire a full-time employee to do that or do we need a contractor or do we need somebody that's for 3 months do we need surge support right right and so a full-time employee is a one-size fits-all solution to a very intricate problem which is how do you meet the demand of a growing business you know the second piece is looking at a project which is you might have work that is in Surplus for a period of time and so is it perfect to bring on contractors or people that you only work with for 3 to 6 months no but if it solves the problem and you don't have to fire somebody 6 to 12 months later it's an absolutely much better solution and lastly is if it is not a process problem and it is instead a project that will never go away that somebody else is half ass doing right now that if you did would capitalize on a lot of missed opportunity for the business maybe is a person that need to hire the second thing that firsttime leaders Miss is they don't quickly normalize giving feedback to their teams in fact I call it the Buddy versus boss problem you get in you've got a small team you act like they buddy and what happens is as the team gets bigger whether you like it or not you don't succeed unless you also act like their boss and what's the difference between a buddy and a Boss Buddy doesn't tell you what to do boss gives directives a buddy often doesn't do that they're there for you they support you they encourage you but they're not direct about what they need you to do a lot of first-time leaders when they come in they do really well with the small team because they can get by being someone's buddy and there's so much camaraderie and such a close relationship you don't need to be direct about what you need someone to do but what very quickly happens is that the team gets bigger and in order to function as a leader you must give clear directives and if somebody has not gotten there yet what happens is that the team doesn't know what to do they start to lose respect for the leader and the leader is ineffective in getting things done I had a leader at gym launch that did this you know this person essentially was on the team and then over time got promoted and then when they got promoted there were only three people on the team it was a delivery team and then over time there became about 11 people on that team and what I noticed as I would go into meetings that person was afraid to make decisions afraid not to please everybody on the team and afraid to even just tell people what to do I got on a meeting with that person one day and I reframed their role to everybody there I said listen he is no longer just your buddy he's also your boss doesn't mean he can't be your buddy he's just also your boss so here's what's going to be different from here on forward and here's why we have to do it that way if people don't know what to do when you have a big team then people either do everything or nothing and they either do the same work as other people or nobody does the work and then to the second degree they're afraid to give feedback and so I explained like you know this person the reason that they've been promoted is because they've done X Y and Z and so now they're in a position where they are here to give you feedback are they here to be the end all be all that is the all knowing of your performance and everything potential you have as like a human no of course not but they are here to be a source of feedback for you and so you need to get used to that new relationship a way that you can I would say like get ahead of being you know the Buddy versus the boss is just by being upfront about it by telling people something that you need to work on and by putting systems in place that make it easy you know something that's a great first time system is you could just do what you call feedback Fridays when a somebody's struggling with going from a buddy to a boss what they can do is they can say you know what I'm going to do every Friday I'm going to give every person on my team one piece of feedback and what that does is it normalizes the process of giving feedback to people so that they don't associate with being negative but they associate with being positive and it also puts a commitment on the calendar so that both people are expecting it and it's not something that is done ad hoc or like once a quarter which is absolutely not enough you know another example of this is I had a customer service department I promoted one of the girls with from within and then I was like cool so I need you to work on the schedule and so she came back to me about a week and a half later and she said I present schedules but none of them wanted to do it and I was like wanted to do it we we don't have a choice this is what like these are the hours that we need to make the business work what she didn't understand is that she was still operating as their buddy as being like do you guys want to do this oh if you don't no we don't need to go we don't need to go get pizza there if we don't all want to get pizza there but the reality is if you're their boss you're like this is where we're going to go get pizza and we're going to go at 5:00 it's the different difference between buddy and boss and so what did she do when she I pointed out to her you're acting like their buddy not their boss as she said okay I am rolling out a schedule and I'm explaining to them why which is it's not to punish you it's to make the business better and keep promises to our customers so we have to do it if you are not able to do it I understand but we have to do it in order to work in this department the third mistake that young and new leaders make in a fast Growth Company is they delegate but they don't do quality assurance okay so what happens is people finally learn how to delegate right they've been doing doing doing and they're in this mode of just like constantly doing and they finally get relief they're like I know how to give other people tasks and responsibilities and they feel invigorated and amazing and then what happens is this leader starts to feel like they're too far away what is too far away mean too far away means that you don't actually know how well they're doing their job because you don't have any level of quality assurance in place to make sure that you know that they're doing what you delegated to them to the degree that you were and so what happens when people scale is that the quality decreases because they don't have measures in place to make sure it stays the same an example of this is in my last company I delegated our recruiting function I said you know what recruiting is kind of like one of my core to my competencies and after I built the department I said you know I'm going to hand it off to this person and they're going to run it and you know IID put in place all the things to make sure that we did great culture interviews great skill interviews I'd put in all the systems and so I felt like there's no way that this can't be followed right 10 months later I was watching an interview and I said to myself I don't think anybody's following any of the processes so I reached out to one of the girls on the team who was new and I was like hey can I see the you know recruiting Playbook that I made can you let me know like how how's it going like you're still using it and then she was like what recruiting Playbook and I was like what the I'm like the thing that I spent weeks making to make sure I delegated this properly so what had I done where did I go wrong I delegated and I didn't check I did not assure quality thereafter which how could I do that right tracking metrics and making sure that people have checklists that they have to go through so two ways I like to do this now and actually that I have visibility into our recruiting current and present day is that one we track metrics of recruiting so I can see where people are in the pipeline and where if we're following the process because if we're following it we'll stick to these metrics right there's a difference between two things right you can make an sop and it's just static and people just read it and say that they did it or you can make a living sop which is what I have in Asana which is there's tasks say there's 20 tasks to recruit a person into the company and you have to check off and write notes in each task to indicate that you've done it and so the reason I'm a fan of that is because if somebody does not have to take action to indicate that they have read something it is very unlikely that they're actually going to read and do it that's when I learned my lesson which is I can't just delegate and forget about it I have to delegate and follow up because the reality is just like somebody who weighs them every day you're the scale to your team you are the thing that is supposed to measure them and so if they know that you're checking in on their weight they are much more likely to stay lean or to stay on track or to stay in adherence with the things that you've given to them a lot of people have told me in the past you're a really Hands-On CEO really tactical CEO well ironically if you look at some of the best CEOs in the world they talk about how Hands-On they are they talk about how many things they're involved in how much stuff they know now is that something for everybody not necessarily it's really tough it's very demanding on your life but if you like it and you're good at it I think that is absolutely the way to go you want to have visibility into everything that's happening the person with the most context makes the best decisions and so as the leader of the company if you don't have context how do you make good decisions for your company you don't right and same goes for a leader of a department if you don't even know if your people are doing the their job to the best degree possible how can you determine what to do to make the department better to grow the department to grow the business you can't it's like how do you know you're losing weight if you don't weigh yourself if you don't take pictures right there has to be some sort of way to measure to know that you're adhering to the standards that make us successful and so I just see that a lot of people they delegate and then they always say the same thing they say well I don't want to seem like I'm micromanaging I'm like micro this word needs to be burned to the ground you're managing people you're not micromanaging micromanaging would be if you followed up with them 10 times a day right managing somebody asking for a report once a week good Lord if that's micromanaging then I'm just going to jump off a cliff because that is not micromanaging that is doing your freaking job as a manager and if anything it's doing it in a way that when they send you stats and reports you encourage them and tell them how theyve done a great job and then give them advice how to improve if there are areas for improvement which is again you being a good boss showing them how they can get better which is what most people want the fourth mistake that first-time leaders make and leaders in Bas growing companies make is that they choose hubris over humility so I had a leader this person was truly one of the most humble people in the entire business I think for that reason probably like somebody that I just like adored like just a truly great person just worked very hard very quietly you know never boasted about her work and because of that a year and a half into her career I wanted to promote her and so I promoted her to director of customer success and what happened was actually crazy is that within a week's time she started acting completely different right so she went from being like work hard keep your head down all these things to like she thought now that she had this title and now that she was this leader she had to be somebody else she had to act differently than she had acted and the irony of that is that I promoted her for the behaviors that she was exhibiting before she was a leader because I was looking at her and saying you already act like a leader therefore I would like to officially make you one I'm not going to promote somebody and wish and hope they start acting like a leader I promote somebody because they already act like one it was actually a really good lesson for me because it took a few weeks of me pointing out like you're stying to rub people the wrong way you've never had issues before and all of a sudden people are complaining about you you know you were kind of acting like an on this meeting like what's going on and finally after about a month we identified where it was all coming from which was just not being sure of what to do as a leader and how to act and so what I told her was like I promoted you because of how you were acting right and who you were not who you are right now in fact if you had acted like this I wouldn't have promoted you and so it was actually really cool because she completely turned it around you know and then she regained the trust of her teammates she gained this respect back of her team and she absolutely regained my relationship with her and my desire to invest in her and so you know sometimes when you're a first-time leader you feel a lot of pressure and that pressure makes you do things you wouldn't normally do you start acting weird you start acting goofy you start doing things that are not not like you because you feel a lot stressed you feel like the spotlights on you right and the reality is if you're in a leadership position for the first time it's probably because you've already acted like a leader and so you don't need to act like somebody or not ask your boss if if you feel like you need feedback ask your peers ask your team but don't feel like you have to act like this overly verbose confident you know arrogant person in order to be a leader because that's just not it I think the best leaders are relatable they are kind they put others first there is no specific box one must fit into and then the last mistake that first-time leaders make and leaders who are scaling up make is properly looping in the right stakeholders now this sounds dry as lame but let me tell you why it's not so when you're an individual contributor when you don't have people who report to you it's not your job to tell every other team and every possible leader and every possible person what's going on what change is occurring what new thing is happening what happened yesterday what is the job of somebody who's a leader is to communicate those things and so for example I know for me as my company grows and as each company I've had has grown My Level and the amount of time I spend simply communicating things continues to increase so in the beginning when the team is small I might spend 5 minutes a day communicating things whereas right now when my team is much bigger I might spend 90 minutes communicating things the same goes for leaders and so when somebody goes from an individual contributor to a leader the one skill that is often missed is their communication I would say specifically looping in the proper stakeholders when they make a decision when they make a change when they propose a solution when they have a conversation when they talk to the customer because somebody else used to always do it for them so it's not that they don't know how it's that somebody else has always been doing it for them and maybe they don't realize that now it's on them in my last company uh one of our Junior leaders got promoted um and another Junior leader got promoted um and they were both working on involved with our payment processor and somebody without my permission my cfo's permission without anybody knowing switched our payment processor yes so we had a backup payment processor and we had our main payment processor and somebody without telling anybody switched and so the money started flowing somewhere else and so as you can imagine that was very frightening for me to find out that that occurred with nobody telling anybody about it and me not finding out for about 2 weeks why did that happen neither of them thought to tell anybody why they hadn't get trained themselves right because they're both new leaders and they didn't realize that it's not him and a like now you need to overc communicate right you don't have the luxury of working in a silo once you're in a leadership position your your commitment is to the leadership team right your peers not just the department that you're over and so something that I have that is a trick for me and that I teach first-time leaders is it's very simple at the end of my day every day I do this literally to this day like I have it on my calendar right now is I look at everything that happened that day and I think to myself who do I need to let know about what that's it so if I have a meeting with a portfolio CEO and we make a big decision I should probably let my portfolio leadership team know so that they can carry out and execute on those tasks if I like today have a conversation with Alex and determine exactly the plan for his book launch I should probably follow up and let my leadership team know what the final plan is right but what happens when somebody's been an individual contributor is they do do do do but they don't communicate what they've done and so multiple perceptions happen which is like to other leaders on the team you look like you don't do jack because if the tree falls in the forest and nobody sees it fall right if you do work and let nobody know they assume you do no work and that you're a lazy piece of just being honest I've seen it happen so many times some of the hardest working people but they cannot articulate their work they cannot communicate their work or showcase their work right so what happens people think they don't work right and now on the other end maybe you communicate but you communicate poorly into the wrong people people start to think that you have something against them because you didn't Loop them in it must mean that you hate them that you don't like them that you don't respect them that you think that they're not capable right and so when you don't Loop in the right people you give people the perception that you think think something about them or feel some type of way and so as you can see like this only results in problems and so I would say if you're first-time leader or your company's growing really fast just put a little no at the end of the day remind her to follow up what do I need to communicate about what happened today that's really what it is and then you just send out a bunch of messages and that's it here's the thing if you have a team full of people that are in positions for the first time or if your company is growing very fast and you've never had a fast growing company the main thing that you're going to notice is communication issues here's the thing though every company that gets past 10 15 20 employees what's the number one thing they're always going to tell you what's the number one issue every quarter what's the number one thing people want to improve communication I can tell you this because as soon as my company my first company crossed 30 people the first thing that everyone said when it was like what was the constraint this last quarter communication now it would get better but it would EB and flow but it was never good enough why is it never good enough because it's never like it was when there were 10 people it is very difficult to communicate everything and all the right things in all the right channels as you continue to grow and grow quickly what I will say is this you're never going to have perfect communication and you're never going to communicate everything perfectly you can only do your best and so I say all of this because you're still going to up you're still going to make mistakes the company's still not going to have perfect communication and if you think that one day nobody is going to complain about communication you're wrong and you're going to be miserable because I can think that I have communicated perfectly and then somebody is like you suck and I'm like damn and so you're never going to be perfect you can't hold yourself to that standard these things are normal and if your company's growing quickly these things are to be expected it doesn't mean there's anything wrong it doesn't mean that you're doing something terrible it just means that your company's growing right but watch out for these five things because these are things that you can control you can't control how satisfied everybody in the company is always with the communication but you can control if you properly hired and properly staffed and really think about if you need those resources and if you make sure that you come across as a buddy and a boss rather than just a buddy you can control if you put quality assurance measures in place AKA measure and kpis to make sure that your team actually executes what you delegate to the degree needed for the business to work you can control acting like an versus just continuing to be the awesome person you were before you got promoted or before you were in this position and you can control if you Loop in the proper stakeholders put a reminder on your calendar this is not rocket science this is not like gosh I really need these leadership skills guys if you break this down these skills are not rocket science we're not learning how to build a rocket we're learning how to talk to people we're learning how to communicate with other people I just want to put that into context for everybody that's watching this right now this is not impossible you don't need to be some crazy insanely smart person to be good at what you're doing right now you just need to do the work and the reality is is that being a leader requires more cognitive work and more conscious work than not being a leader so that is where you're going to have to level up you're going to have to think and do not just do and that is where a lot of this stems from is like you just have to think think twice before you do something should I actually do this should I Loop somebody else in is this the right thing for me to do should somebody else be doing this rather than just doing it