The next article features a transcript with business coach Clay Clark (US Small Business Administration Entrepreneur of the Year) discussing customer service training and leadership with business coach Clay Staires (The Millionaire School Teacher) on Thrive15.com.
Clay Clark: If I’m watching this and maybe I feel this is maybe my weakness, would you recommend that I maybe hire a business coach or maybe just find an accountability partner who’s maybe a little more successful than I am? What would you recommend I would do if I kind of buy into this idea? Where can I start maybe?
Clay Staires: Well, I would think … For me, I think … My advice would be do what I did, which is hire a business coach. Again, I was not strong in the detail and when I thought about being strong in the detail, I got tired immediately, so like, “Uhh, just let me go to sleep.” I had to make … I knew that I would have to get somebody in my life that I would be meeting with on a regular basis that would be able to tell me, take these steps and then checking up with me, “Did you take those steps?”
Clay Clark: There was actually a business coach that I talked to today about you but he actually is a guy who’s in Las Vegas and he is very good at the details but he’s not good at the sales.
Clay Staires: Oh wow.
Clay Clark: He wanted another business coach who could get up there and share with people some principles and was a articulate speaker and immediately, I was like…
Clay Staires: Boom!
Clay Clark: It’s interesting because here’s a guy who he have the mastery of details but as you look at over these traits of these leadership traits, the pleasing personality was the one he was missing.
Clay Staires: Yeah. It’s very intriguing. I was talking to a business coach on the phone today about a company that she’s wanting to start and I was just trying to get to her goal. What is your goal? What are the … I’d met her at a speaking engagement earlier this week and I had given them an opportunity to set a 48-hour goal. What are you going to do the next 48 hours, 48-hour action item. I’m going, “Okay, so did you that?” “Well, I didn’t do this.” I mean I’m just hammering away trying to get to this thing. I never did get to it with her, probably talked to her on the phone for 15 minutes and she just kept like going here and going there. I finally finished up with, “Okay. It just seems like you’re a little scattered. Seems like you’re a little scattered. It’s going to be very hard for you to build until you get something sturdy, until you get something just a little bit more stable.”
Clay Clark: Now, I want to ask, is principle number ten, it’s the willingness to assume full responsibility. Napoleon Hill says a successful leader must be willing to assume responsibility for the mistakes and the shortcomings of his followers. If he tries to shift this responsibility, he will not remain the leader. If one of his followers makes a mistake and shows himself incompetent, the leader must consider it it is he who failed. If I’m somebody who admittedly, let’s say is struggling with this idea of the willingness to assume full responsibility, what would you recommend that I do or I guess how would I go about doing that?
Clay Staires: Right. Well, there’s three things I wanted to talk to you about on that Clay. First of all, rather than taking responsibility, I would do, I would play the victim.
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Clay Clark: Oh yeah.
Clay Staires: People do this all the time and I know that I’m playing the victim when I begin with the excuses. “Oh, it wasn’t my fault. It was this. It was that. It was this thing. It was the one-armed man,” and all that kind of stuff. It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my fault and I come with excuses. First of all, what we’ve got to be able to do is as soon as we begin to feel those excuses come up out of our mouth, we realize, wait a minute, that’s me not taking responsibility. We arrest ourselves at that moment. Again, it’s going back to that discipline that we were talking about, that self control not allowing our self to go and play the victim. The second one, Clay, is if the victim doesn’t work playing the victim and using the excuses, if that Jedi mind trick isn’t working, then I’ll go to the second one. All right. Or, maybe this is the one, it’s my go-to. It’s the one I got in the back pocket that I always pull out and this is always a fun one. We use manipulation.
Clay Clark: Oh yeah.
Clay Staires: This is simply when we begin to use emotion to get our way. Either I’ll get really small and pull the puppy eyes so you’ll think, “Oh, well I don’t want to hurt him,” or I’ll get really big and act angry, kind of puff up, try to force myself but I begin to use manipulation as a leader and I’ll try to manipulate the people to do something. Again, if to take responsibility as soon as I begin to get into that place of emotion with people, I go, wait a minute, that’s me not wanting to take responsibility. Just back out of that thing as a business coach, you go, “You’re right. I need to do this,” as opposed to blaming other people or using emotion to get my way.
Then the third one, if all else fails, I simply go to distraction. That’s just other stuff. Yeah. I didn’t do that but look at everything else that I did. Yeah, I didn’t do that one thing you told me to do that you said was really important, if I didn’t do it, I’d get fired, but look at everything that I did do. A lot of times, those other things that I did really may not have been really important, they have been just smaller things but I will point at them and try to act like, but look how productive I am when I really didn’t do what I was supposed to do. Once again, if I’m doing that as a leader then I’m coming in and I’m telling people, yeah, we didn’t get the things done that I was wanting to get done but I I would start looking at some other points and some other points and other things that have gotten done. Clay, I’ve had in all three areas people leave me because I would use these different Jedi mind tricks with folks.
Clay Clark: I mean you recognizing your own life, I mean you’re pretty self aware. You’ve recognized that you no longer could point the blame somewhere else. You got to accept responsibility for where you were in life.
Clay Staires: Totally. Totally. Because what I began to find was when I would do these, people, they lost confidence in my leadership. They didn’t feel like I was really going to be able to get myself, the company or them where we were wanting to get, because if I started to make a mistake or if things weren’t working out, I would go to excuses or I would manipulate them. A lot of times with me, I would just manipulate using my real pleasing personality that we were just talking about a second ago. Hey, you know, and I would come in and get the smile, but hey, don’t I look good. Don’t you love me? Type o