Unbound with Chris DuBois

You've got 99 problems, and I've got four ways to leverage your assets as a leader Sebago. Are you a leader trying to get more from your business in life? Me too. So join me as I document the conversations, stories and advice to help you achieve what matters in your life. Welcome to unbound with me, Chris DuBois. All right, today, I want to talk about something called the leadership levers. What are these levers they are for assets that you have as a leader that you can strategically deploy for maximum results. As with any problem, we have a desired outcome, let's call that an output here. But to manage that, we need to know what inputs will achieve that output. Right? As a leader, very frequently, you're stuck doing this like trade of one for one. And we don't want to get stuck doing that, because it means we're not able to go do everything else, we want to find ways to be exponentially better at getting things done. So what we actually want is to find leverage, and there are tons of leverage points. But as a leader, you have this like unique position, where there really are four things that you can put to play, almost always. And that's what we're going to cover today. So without further ado, number one is capital. Right? So here we're talking about actual financial assets, the ability to move money around in order to make problems go away. challenge is that, once you have used all of your money to make problems go away, what you're left with are the problems that money can't make go away. And that's where we'll talk about some of the other three. But for now, leaders are often in a position where they have a budget, right there you have investments you have, even if it's your own capital that you're putting into it, generally speaking, there's some money that you can put to play, so that certain things are just going to work in your favor. Now, this could be, you know, the purchasing of equipment, things that you might need, you know, software that you might need for your team to be able to do things better. It could be research and development for like a new and better way, this could be hiring better people on your team, it could even just be like launching a marketing campaign, right? All these things cost money. But if you can apply more funds to it, because you have that capital, then everything's going to start moving, you're gonna take that input, you're gonna multiply it by this leverage point, right and get a much larger output. So number one, capital number two is connection. As as leaders, right, purely because of the position that you're in, you're going to have a lot more connections. And now this can differ depending on how much you actually want to What does go next in your circle here, it means building a genuine relationship leaders are going to have so that larger, professional thing, right, there are people that you can reach out to, you know, and you can use your position kind of get that this is like, can be something super simple. sending out emails, right from a company, you can have Bill from marketing, sending out those emails. But as soon as you send you as the CEO, those email rates go up. And it's because there is a connection there, while this one's you know, a lot looser, because you're not actually going out and shaking hands with every single person on your email list. It's one way that connection works. Now, this could also be from your professional networks, it could be like influencer partnerships, it could be with your stakeholders. It could even be internally with your team. But we'll get into some of that and one of the different levers. But so with connection, the goal is to know who can help you get that how right books written on this, tons of different ideas there. But that is something that the leader has at their disposal. So number one, capital number two, connection, number three is character. You can attract people, you can push the, the people you wouldn't want to hire, you can push them away just by who you are as a person. And so it's really important that you maintain integrity, you're transparent, you're you're resilient, you have a strong vision, because people are going to look at you and they're going to decide if they want to work with you if they want to be a part of what you specifically are doing. If you are someone that can be trusted, a lot of people are going to lean towards that. Right. And that's not just for hiring people, that's for business deals. That's for other partnerships. It could even mean you know, marketing campaigns, it could literally be anything. But if people can trust you and they know who you are as a person and that you're going to come through, they are more likely to want to work with you. Therefore, you can use this as a leverage point in order to get that better desired output. So Capital Connection character, and the last one is culture, we got another episode on this, right? The culture is the one thing that a leader truly owns. And so it is something that only you can truly leverage this, this comes down to shared values, right? People like us do things like this, if you can have a strong enough culture, you are, again, are going to attract people to your your organization, it's going that strong culture is going to help you maintain team members, right, your turnover rates aren't going to be as high, it's going to help you with maintaining that standard. Because everyone else is going to be checking in with each other and saying, Hey, that's this is the bar, right? We don't want to accept anything less than this. People are going to be more willing to share ideas, people are just going to be happier, you're going to foster this environment of continuous learning and just people being recognized. And so having a strong culture is really that fourth way that you can really get some leverage into into solving whatever problems. And so for all of these, right, there's not always going to be a perfect answer for which one you should be using. So Capital Connection, character culture, there won't always be a perfect answer. But you can think through these very quickly and say, Okay, I have these right now that I can use, they're in my toolkit, I can go put them the boy, which one will have the most bang for his buck? And you should also ask which one is going to deplete? Right? Like you're kind of bank, if you will, right. So like, maybe you could spend a lot of capital on it. But it's going to take a lot more than if you had just gone and talk to the right person through your connection lever. And so you don't want to go too hard into one where there might be an easier answer. Maybe you can actually use your your character, you know, to make something happen much quicker. And so you want to be able to think through those, use them accordingly. And then start putting them into play yourself. So that's a quick episode. Just wanted to share this. If you want to go deeper on this. We're throwing together a mini course that you can get just by signing up for the email newsletter. You can you'll get basically another rundown of everything we've covered on this podcast but we're going to give you more examples for how you can use all of these as well as some tips or how to put them into play much faster. So hope you got something from this episode. Keep getting after it. Make sure you deserve it.

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