How to earn the respect of your employees…the REAL reason your business isn’t growing

Summary

• Many leaders struggle with gaining their team's respect, and this often stems from a lack of understanding of people and not treating team members correctly.
• As a leader, every action taken is observed by the team, and leaders should always aim for actions that gain respect rather than losing it.
• It's crucial to coach team members and clearly communicate expectations and issues to them. Firing someone without this process can damage the team's morale and trust in leadership.
• Overlooking poor performance in management while over-disciplining the frontline can create significant problems in a company. This often happens because leaders are undisciplined with themselves.
• Building the business requires leaders to be accountable and disciplined. Correcting management issues should be a priority to prevent stalling business growth.
• Disrespecting front-line workers by failing to coach and hold their managers accountable can lead to major disruptions in company operations.
• Leaders should not let emotions override the necessary actions required to grow the business. Uncomfortable conversations are often necessary for improvement.
• Discipline among leadership is key to the success of a business, and taking action based on this understanding is essential.

Video

How To Take Action

I would suggest starting by understanding the people on your team. It's not enough to work hard; you have to treat your team members right. Watch how you act, because your team is watching too. Always aim to gain respect, not lose it.

You need to coach team members. Make sure they know what they are doing well and not so well. If someone is not meeting expectations, tell them. Be clear and be kind, even if the person might not be the best fit for the team.

If you manage other people, you must be disciplined. This means you must not overlook when they do a poor job just because you like them or they have been with you for a long time. If you do that, it's not fair to the rest of the team who is working hard.

Don't let feelings stop you from doing what is needed for the business to grow. Sometimes you have to have talks that feel uncomfortable, but they are important for making things better.

Remember, your actions, your discipline, and your care for your team will help your business succeed. If you respect and coach your management, you can trust them to do the same for their teams. This will help the whole business do well.

So, put yourself in your team's shoes, coach them, and don't shy away from the tough decisions. Be the leader your team needs to grow.

Quotes by Leila Hormozi

"I believe that one of the fundamental reasons that people in leadership positions actually don't have the power that they desire and the influence of their teams is not because of the lack of those things, it's the lack of understanding of people and how they treat their teams"

– Leila Hormozi

"The way that you treat somebody on the way out is all that your team's going to be paying attention to"

– Leila Hormozi

"Actions speak louder than words"

– Leila Hormozi

"Every action you take is seen by your team"

– Leila Hormozi

"You can't get past the feelings of nervousness of having the conversations"

– Leila Hormozi

Full Transcript

in this video today what i want to share is why so many people do not have the respect of their team and this is something that i experienced a ton when we were growing our businesses in the very beginning and it's something that um has been really top of mind for me for the last maybe i want to say a week in the case of a lot of newer leaders that i've been talking to and seeing where where things are slipping through the cracks and why the reason is and what i realized is the reason that a lot of the things aren't going well a lot of the reasons that things aren't growing and things aren't feeling good and why the team isn't congealing it's not because of team it's not because of the people it's because of the leader right and i think we all know that and i think that's a belief that most people who are in business know that it ties back to them in some way shape or form but i think that there's a common misunderstanding of why that is you know i think that a lot of people think oh maybe i'm not working hard enough i'm not setting as an example i'm not uh smart enough it's all these things right i believe that one of the fundamental reasons that people in leadership positions actually don't have the power that they desire and the influence of their teams is not because of the lack of those things it's the lack of understanding of people and how they treat their teams and i believe that every time that you do not do right by your team or a teammate whether they are the right person for your team or not you lose respect from other people on the team i'll tell you what sparked this which was i was talking to one of the operators from one of the companies and they were talking about a leader that they have been it's been a discussion for a while that this person probably isn't the right person but there was a lot of going on in the business and so sometimes you're like i'm gonna let that fire burn for a little bit and take care of these other things and i'm gonna come back to this and during that time what i had realized is that there had been no coaching done for that person there had been no warnings there had been no like hey like this is what you're not doing because the main issues are just that that person's not doing fundamental parts of a leadership management job right they're not holding people accountable um they're not providing transparency they're not putting kpis in place they're not really adhering to the structure that we need for the business to grow that being said they weren't told any of that and so the conversation i was having with this operator who is now kind of coming in like i need to fix all this is like you cannot fire that person until they know what they've done wrong the argument that many people make and she didn't make this but a lot of people do make this argument and this is what i typically back is like well they're just not a culture fit and like that's fine but the way that you treat somebody on the way out is all that your team's going to be paying attention to and so does anybody on your team like that person if the answer is yes then you have to respect them on the way out and you have to follow the process even if you don't like the person process doesn't give a about how you feel okay and so that's why it's so important that even if you don't like the person you don't think they're fit you realize that you hired the wrong person all those things you still need to do right by them what i was explaining to her is that the biggest thing on on their part right the biggest reason for them that this is so important is because if that person this person just happens to be very well liked by the team if you don't coach somebody and don't tell them what's wrong and then just fire them out of nowhere you know who's freaked out the team is freaked out and they're like you just fire the guy he's awesome i like him blah blah you know they don't know he's not doing well and they don't know that you haven't coached him and all that stuff they just see what they see which is like oh he just disappeared out thin air am i next not to mention then they're like i don't have respect for you you're not even doing your job as leader you didn't even tell the guy that he wasn't doing a good job and so that's really where they revert back to and i can tell you this because i've had enough candid conversations with people when i made these mistakes in the beginning of the businesses and i've heard it enough from employees when other people make the mistakes they're like well you know this dude he's not doing his job because he didn't let them know that they weren't doing their job and so this thing i experienced at the very beginning i made the mistake early on of being like well they're not a culture fits i'm just going to fire them and not tell people or not follow the process right i'm not going to like let them know and all this stuff like i'm just i'm just going to get them out fast and what i didn't realize was the repercussions that i had for my team my team was then like well layla how do i not know you're going to fire me out of thin air i was like you don't right because like all i can tell you is like they're not a culture fit but like i can say that to you but doesn't mean you're gonna believe me right actions speak louder than words and so that was when i realized i was really out of alignment with what was best for my team it's not about me it's not even about the person i'm firing it's about my team because they're the future everyone's building the business and so that's why it's so important that you have to make sure that when you're building the business you're thinking in terms of when every action you take is seen by your team right are they gaining respect for you or are they losing respect for you if they knew every single thing you did on a daily basis and how you talk to every person which they find out that anyways how would they think about you how would they view you these are things that you have to consider i wish that i had known because i think the first year of business for me was really rough because i just didn't think about that you know i was like well i just want to get someone out quickly if you know they're not a right fit for the team and obviously if someone's doing some crazy and they're you know doing something legal i'm going to get them off fast but if not if they're just not a culture fit and i just up and hiring them or not setting expectations then i need to own that and i need to put myself in more discomfort and more pain for longer to make sure i set it up well for the team so they're not freaked out i'll tell you that i corrected myself i want to say it's about 14 months into the business you know we had someone that was heading a department they had hired probably 12 people and what i knew was that they were very well liked by the team the team loved this person and the team was very ineffective and i knew that the root cause was the leader though and so i was like well they're very well elected by the team so what i need to go do is i need to go build relationships with the team coach this person on their performance both at the same time so i interjected myself i said okay i'm gonna go meet with all everyone on the team i'm gonna start having relationships with them more than i do now and then i'm gonna talk to the leader and coach him you know up or out essentially and that went over way better you know because obviously people are still shook because they like somebody they don't want to leave but they weren't like layla i feel like you're gonna fire me because the dude knew he wasn't doing his job well and he was on thin ice and so did the rest of the team because he kind of alluded to it with them that is why i would suggest like if you're struggling trying to figure out why you can't grow your business half the time it's because the that you're doing that you don't even realize you're doing and there's really like three levels if you think about this right where i think that we make mistakes and especially early on we do or even as we're scaling because things are just moving fast and you just kind of like get the out of my way i'm trying to do this and get it done and these are what i see right is one we over fire and over discipline front line and we under fire and under discipline management this is probably the root cause of a lot of issues that happen on a team and it's all kind of tied into one piece which is that we're under disciplined with ourselves and the reason that all this ties together is we are undisciplined with ourselves right and so what we do is we don't coach management and then we go because often we like management they've been here longer they might have been someone that we ascended they've been with us since the beginning we're typically closer to management so we have more emotional ties with them right it blinds us to their weaknesses it blinds us to the fact that we're not handling that needs to handle with them blinds us the fact that they might not be the right person for the team and then what we do is we skip over man when we go to front line and we're like why is sally not doing her job getting these tickets you know closed out each day and why is billy not getting the refunds that we asked him to collect and why is sally not giving the best customer service and then we talked to the managers about it we're like hey why is this person not doing their job blah blah blah when the actual question you should be asking is why are you not holding these people accountable to doing their jobs why are you not coaching these people and doing their jobs what happens in businesses that are typically i want to say it's anywhere between like 1 million a year to usually around 15 to even 20 million years sometimes is you see this all the time where people pick apart the front line ignore management and then they don't know why they can't scale to 50 or 70 or whatever million per year it's because they continue to skip over these layers and the reason that they skip over the management layer is they lack the discipline themselves a lot of the times you get blinded by likeness of a person closeness with a person or the relationships you have with that management team i think a lot of the times the reason that businesses can't scale and the reason i know that we were stalled for a while is i don't have to discipline myself to say these people are no longer fit for management and i let it go on for way too long i can tell you that there was um one team it was a technology team and that is my absolute weakness like i don't understand how to do tech i don't understand technology systems et cetera and i don't really have a desire to learn and um i had a leader in that position and what i did is i made the mistake i would constantly look at the team and be like why are these people not performing like i don't understand it feels like you just we just can't get good technology people and i kept looking at the people on the team rather than the leader of the team and saying like this is not working we have to rehire we kept churning through people so much in that department finally one day i was like i just it's the leader right and so i started working on you know coaching with that leader unfortunately it was a long lengthy painful process and didn't end well we had to let that person go um which doesn't mean it ended badly like it's not bad thing um but you know it's obviously not something you look forward to doing but it took me so long and because of that the business suffered right the systems in the business were up because i didn't have the discipline to say this isn't the right manager and instead i was just overlooking the manager and looking at the team and so if you're wondering why your business isn't growing honestly it stems so often from these things right overlooking management and then over examining front line and then not realizing that the way that you exit people the way you exit management is what loses you respect with the rest of the team how you coach management how you fire management and how you hire management is seen by everybody in the company and the way that you do it has to be in a way that commands respect from others otherwise nobody's going to respect you they're going to fear you and they're not going to want to do their jobs well i hope that's useful because that is something that i just continue to see time and time again and i think that it requires a large level of self-accountability you know like nobody's going to tell us to do this this sucks you know like people ask me they're like well leila i don't like firing people or i don't like having these conversations i get super nervous before you know i just feel like i it's like debilitating nervousness and i'm like well dude me too like in the beginning of course like we're all human we have these reactions and i think if you're someone who really cares about people you especially have those reactions and that means it's especially for you to make sure that you do these things because if we ignore them then you're never gonna grow your business you know if like every time you're nervous about something you just avoid it your business will be up and it's so funny because people ask me they're like how did you grow the business so fast how did you build a great team all this i was like dude it felt terrible like i didn't enjoy doing most of it i don't enjoy in the beginning i did not enjoy hard conversations i did not enjoy you know the discipline of making myself have those conversations they were uncomfortable as and i felt like i was terrible at them right and i did not enjoy firing people hiring doing all these things i didn't enjoy having to have calls on my schedule for 12 hours a day like i didn't enjoy any of it because one i wasn't good at it and two was uncomfortable because i never done it before and so the unknown is often what scares us if you're in that spot right now and you're like this sounds like what i need to do and where i'm lacking and but you're like but i just feel too just take that out like you just gotta say like your feelings like i know it's it's lame but feelings are just instinctual they're not logical i think oftentimes it comes back to that and your feelings are what are losing respect from the rest of your team because you continue to disrespect yourself by not giving yourself by disciplining yourself enough to be the leader that you know you could be you're discipling your team by not allowing them to have the chance to succeed because you're not holding them accountable and you're disrespecting the front line and the rest of the team because you are undermining them by not actually coaching and holding their bosses accountable and so it just up the entire company and i think that most the reason if we get back to like i can give you this video and i can tell you what you need to do and that this is what is the reason that your business isn't growing but most people will not watch this video and do and the reason for that is because you can't get past the feelings of nervousness of having the conversations and you're probably thinking right now well here's all the reasons why i shouldn't have these conversations with people like they're actually terrible i should actually just fire them i just shouldn't actually have this conversation there's no reason oh i've already kind of told that no you haven't if you haven't said it in blatant terms you haven't laid it out clear on the table hey here's what i'm thinking right now i don't think you're fit for the team you're sucking here you're sucking there and i suck because i haven't told you until now if you haven't had that conversation then you have not taken care of this i hope that this good video gets one person to take action because i am also making it for uh mostly myself as a reminder because it is something that i learned early on and i don't ever want to forget it because it is so often what we look to you know i think it's it's so much easier to look at the symptom rather than the root cause through cause typically ourselves our lack of discipline accountability to the business and then also the lack of discipline accountability in holding others accountable in the business and so with that please if this is something that is going on your business take action encourage your leaders take action encourage your management to take action and enjoy the rest of your bike ride walk whatever you're doing while you're watching this youtube video