Episode 273： How To Earn Loyalty From Your Team
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Summary
In this episode, I talk about how a leader can earn loyalty from their team and keep them with him or her forever. I give 17 points that will help you do so. 1. Don t be afraid of losing people 2. Be loyal to a cause 3. Find your grant 4. Keep looking for your "grant" 5. Keep trying to find your "Grant" 6. Stay true to your cause 7. Don't be afraid to lose people 8. Keep finding your Grant 9. Stay loyal to the cause 10. Keep your eyes and ears open for a potential replacement
Transcript
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I'm Patrick Bedevi, your host of ITM, and today we're going to talk about how you as a leader
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Anytime somebody asks you, you know, why am I losing so many people, there's always things
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like as if the problem is on the people not being loyal, right?
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These millennials, you know, they're so distracted.
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And then this younger generation, they're not like us because we were loyal and we stuck
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And by the way, when you start saying statements like that, you know what's happening to you?
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Time Magazine did an article talking about the millennials.
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And in the end, he's explaining, the millennial generation, they're like this.
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And at the end, it says, if you keep saying the new generation is lazy, they've changed,
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they're this, they're that, all it means is you are getting older.
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When I read that, I said, what a great article.
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So how do you create an environment where people want to be loyal and stay with you forever?
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You see, when you build your business, a lot of times you're sold.
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You're by yourself and you feel like you want a running mate.
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You want to have somebody that's going to help you grow the business as well.
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You know, it's almost like that one video that was done on TEDx.
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It was a five-minute video and it shows the guy that's dancing.
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You know, he's doing his own thing and he was by himself.
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And next, you know, another guy shows up and another guy shows up.
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And he says, and the TEDx speaker says, you always want that first idiot that believes in you, right?
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You see, the book that I'll highlight with that point, Don't Be Afraid of Losing People,
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Time Magazine says, Clinton's private Bible about how to govern.
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And in the book, one of the chapters he talks about, keep searching until you find your grant.
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And a lot of times people want to make their grant.
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But in order to find your grant, you can't be afraid of losing people.
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He put McClellan as a general of the army in and he got rid of him.
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And then he kept going through their organization.
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And he found this crazy general who, you know, came up.
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And, you know, he wouldn't talk to them all the time.
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He wouldn't communicate with them all the time.
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But every time he talked to them, he won the war.
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So if he had the mindset of trying to retain every single soldier and, you know, not hurt their feelings.
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And I can't have McClellan be upset with me because I've got to keep everybody happy.
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And there would be not so many books being written about him as the greatest president we ever had in the history of America.
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But you can't be afraid of losing people if you want to have a loyal environment.
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Point number two, you've got to be true to your cause.
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Someone asked me, Patrick, I was at a convention last week.
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You can actually click on the link below to watch the talk I gave in front of 1,500 agents of ours.
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And I talked about what got me fired up about starting a business.
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And why the company's crusade, the cause, is in my belly.
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And the crusade, the guy said, Patrick, you got up and he said,
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saving America by bringing back the free enterprise system and hope to American families.
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Man, what do you think I can come out with to get people excited?
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And the question, I was flabbergasted by the question.
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As if a person comes out with a cause to keep people.
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As if it's a manipulative way to keep people motivated.
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If you really don't have a cause that's meaningful to you, people will read it.
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If your cause is to get people to fall into this idea that something's going to happen,
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people will know about it 6 months, 12 months, 24 months later.
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If you don't talk about it 24-7, it's really not you.
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Well, I wrote a book called 25 Laws for Doing the Impossible that's been translated in five
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different languages, Polish, Russian, Romanian, simplified Chinese, and English.
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And in there I talk about how to identify your own cause.
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You've got to find your cause that fires you up.
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A book called The Leaderless Revolution, it should be somewhere here, was written by a
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It was written by a British diplomat and he said, the way you find your own revolution,
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the way you find your cause, you've got to find out three things.
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What do you love, what do you hate, and what bothers you?
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When you write down what you hate, what you love, and what bothers you, you eventually come
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out, come up with an answer where you say, this is what fires me up.
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This is what gets me going to a whole different level.
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But you've got to find out those three elements of what you love, what you hate, and what bothers
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And the book 25 Laws for Doing the Impossible will help you out as well.
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The link is on the bottom as well for you to find.
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Third point, leaders don't like to have their butts kissed.
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I want you to think about the prettiest girl in high school.
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Who was the prettiest girl in your high school?
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Generally, the prettiest girl in high school either dates a very, very nice guy who she
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dumps, or she dates a bad boy who he dumps her.
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When a pretty girl dates a good guy, the guy says things like, oh my, I love you so much.
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She's so, I love her toes, you know, the way she walks.
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And, you know, your mom's like, oh, this girl's about to break up with you before you don't
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And by the way, all our guys, fellas, you know what's happened to us?
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And she wants to go somewhere where a guy's saying, look, you either want to date me or you
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Is it being the person that's always there, always everything?
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Or is it the guy that's like, if you don't want, I can't go to another girl type of mentality?
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They want you to be real with them right in the middle.
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Tell them what's on your mind, but tell them in the right way that you respect them and
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But don't always go out there and try to be so awesome, perfect, everything with them.
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You don't earn loyalty by doing everything for them.
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Let me explain what I mean by doing everything for them.
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A lot of times, I'll go to a sales organization, I'll notice that the leader doesn't have any
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He may have 50 people in the room that his sales force is there, but there's no leaders
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And generally, it's because he's doing everything for everybody.
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So he's so concerned of keeping everybody that when he gets a Jordan or Kobe or jobs of his
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organization that comes to him, they say, I can't work with a guy like this.
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Give me 90% of your time because I want to work with you.
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And he wants to spread his time equally with everybody.
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See, because an overachiever, if you want his loyalty, he wants you to know.
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He wants to know that you've done stuff with your life before you're successful.
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And then he wants to go do it himself without your help because it's important for him
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to know that he can do it on his own with your coaching, helping him process issues.
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If he doesn't, he wasn't a leader in the first place.
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You were wasting your time this entire time building him.
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So point number four, you don't own loyalty by doing everything for them.
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Well, if you're working from home and you want to hold everybody accountable from home
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or from the golf course six days a week, and you say, well, I can't believe they're
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And you're constantly criticizing because you don't see what they're doing on a daily
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And you're not coming to work yourself five, six days a week.
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And there's this contradiction in business where someone told me, I said, well, Patrick,
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you know, I worked so hard and I'm making a few million dollars a year and I earned it.
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And, and, and I can show you how to do the same, but I want to golf six days a week and
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And I said, you're right, but your people also don't have to be loyal to you forever
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And if you don't do it right, you're going to lose your person to somebody else.
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And, you know, if you look at companies, Northern California, when Yahoo came out, they
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They don't lose a lot of engineers because Google's vision and cause is so big.
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They're not afraid of losing talent that they keep getting good people there because they
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But can you imagine the founders of Google started golfing six days a week and they didn't
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show up to work and they just say, Hey guys, keep searching, keep, you know, pay-per-click,
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You guys are doing a great job and they golf six days a week.
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I got a tour of Zappos and we took our staff to get a private tour of Zappos.
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Our tour guy's name was something about an equestrian.
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And as we're walking regular, we're doing a tour.
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Then we go to a place, the CEO of the company, you know, one of the owners of the company is
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I spoke to him up up up a good go middle of the day.
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Uh, that creates an environment where people want to be loyal to the brand of Zappos, uh,
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because they see you in the game, uh, to, to, to one loyalty from people and you not
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It's, it's a, it's very foolish to believe that it's just not possible.
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Uh, number six, loyalty gets stronger during times of friction.
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I see a lot of times, you know, uh, I get a call and oh my, I just got into a very bad
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I can't believe he said this to me and I think he's going to leave and I don't think he's
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And I say, listen, that was a great thing that happened.
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The process of making a sausage is very ugly, but the final product tastes good.
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Knowing how to handle friction is the real challenge.
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The book I recommend for that is called Great Business Teams by Howard Gutman.
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Real, real good personality guy to come in, uh, uh, uh, uh, deal with a few of our guys.
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And we had a whole morning afternoon session and Q and A, and we went through confrontation.
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How to get better at conflicts, et cetera, et cetera.
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And, uh, eventually you realize that it's not necessarily that a team doesn't need to have a
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It's you need to work on how to handle conflicts rather than creating a conflict free environment.
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A conflict free environment generally is not growing.
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If there needs to be conflict in that environment, point number seven, point number seven is,
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And I think sometimes leaders don't do enough of a job of talking behind people's back.
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It's a constant thing of talking behind leaders.
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I'm not talking about talking negatively about people's back, behind people's back.
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I'm talking about you creating positive rumors about them.
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I'm talking about you saying great things behind their back without them being there.
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Everybody loves it when you say good things, when everybody's there.
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But believe it or not, people love it more when you talk behind people's back when nobody else is there.
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They love hearing rumors say, the other day I was sitting down with Bobby.
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You won't believe what he was saying about you.
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He said, you're the hardest working guy in the office.
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And he can count on you because you always go out there and deliver.
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I think sometimes leaders don't do enough of a job of talking behind leaders' back.
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And there needs to be more of that taking place with the people that you're leading to constantly talk behind their back.
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Point number eight, point number eight is creating an environment where everyone calls each other up.
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If you have an environment where everybody is too politically correct and everyone's trying to make everybody happy, it's not going to be a good environment to be around.
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It's got to be an environment where everybody is calling each other.
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It was as if it wasn't a big deal in a meeting and a leader speaking.
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If you are, you're not going to be retaining too many people.
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You need to have a place where it's an environment where everybody calls each other out.
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If there's a code and people call each other out, that environment holds everybody accountable.
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Point number nine, treat everyone fairly but not equally.
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I visit so many offices and I see so many businesses that are ran in a way and they don't even know it.
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They're running it in the old Russian regime that was purely communism.
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There isn't anybody that's not being treated better and they're spending more time to because they're performing at a different level.
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If you create that kind of an environment, here's what will happen.
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You'll keep the lower performers with you but you will not keep and retain and have loyal, high, high performers in your organization.
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And at any point, we can only have five players on the floor.
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And five players, we have a total of 48 minutes of playtime.
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We're talking about roughly 240 minutes of playtime, right?
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Typically, a great player will get 35 to 40 minutes of playtime.
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Can you imagine if I tell all the players at 12 minutes, guys, listen, here's what we're going to be doing.
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Everybody's going to get 20 minutes of playtime for a total of 240 minutes.
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He would leave your team and go to somebody else.
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If you didn't perform, you didn't get playtime, he would bench you.
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And he may bench you for nine days, nine games, ten games.
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So goes with Pat Riley and Bill Belichick and the great coaches because they don't treat everybody equally.
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And if you want to create an environment where your higher achievers are loyal to you,
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you need to understand what kind of a regime, what kind of an organization, what kind of a culture you are creating around.
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The great amount of capitalism and free enterprises.
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But if somebody says, I'm not capitalist, our natural tendencies is a tendency of a capitalism.
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Our natural tendencies will tell us what we're really all about.
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We like to do things individually that we get recognized as well.
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So on top of collectively as well, sports is purely capitalism.
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And so you've got to learn how to treat everybody fairly but not equally.
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Point number ten, you cannot challenge everybody the same way.
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I see so many leaders, the way they challenge this guy is the same exact way they challenge this gal.
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One of the books I'll actually recommend to you on that is five love languages.
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I recommend every CEO, business leader, sales leader, anybody that's doing any vice president, marketing director to read this book, five love languages.
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It says there's five ways people like to have love shown to them.
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Some of your leaders want you to put some one-on-one time into them.
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By the way, players and performers don't all come in the same shape, size, personality, color.
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You're looking for somebody who wants to get after it.
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It has nothing to do with how many degrees they have, how much education they have, what background.
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If you can find this, the rest should work out for you.
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So five love languages, learn how to not challenge everybody the same exact way.
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And by the way, when you learn how to challenge them, they'll definitely appreciate that as
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well when you learn how to challenge different people.
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Point number 11, it's on you to protect their egos.
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I hear a lot of times people say, this guy is so egotistical.
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I like to work with guys that don't have an ego.
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Anybody who becomes a president, they have an ego.
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No one becomes a president not thinking they're a badass.
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Any Jordan, any Kobe, any Steve Jobs, any high achiever, they got massive egos.
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The challenge you're having is not the fact that they have a big ego.
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Your challenge is you don't know how to lead people with big egos and explain the different
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The lower level ego to me is someone that comes to you and they want respect.
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They know they've done things and you've got to give them respect, but they want you
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They're going to ask a lot of questions of why.
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But generally, if you use common sense and you explain it to them, they'll take it from
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The ones that you don't need to waste your time with is those who come and tell you about
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a degree they have and how fancy of a degree it is and all the lower level people.
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I'm above everybody because I have a degree and you guys don't and they want to go and
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start right here without having done the lower level part, without learning sales, without
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You don't need to worry about earning their loyalty.
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You keep the people that have an ego that want to perform.
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Best book I'll recommend on that is this, First Rate Madness.
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See, I love this book and I'll tell you why I love this book.
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This talks about the madness of crazy performers such as Kennedy, Lincoln.
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This is by far one of the best books I've read on how crazy people are out there.
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You want crazy people with big egos in your company, in your organization that you want
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The challenge is you're learning how to deal with other people's ego and not getting your
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own ego offended because you've got to drop your ego if you want to lead other people with
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If you've got a big ego and you lead with this, you're going to have a hard time with this.
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By the way, they also want to make sure that you have an ego as well, but you know how
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to set it aside and talk to them and challenge them and give them suggestions and requests
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Point number 12, ask for their opinions regularly.
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In my organization, when I lead my executive team or if I lead the leadership team that I
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have, I always like to ask, what did you think about that?
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But I also say, I want you to know, even though I'm asking for your opinion, there's an 80% chance
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we're not going to implement what you're suggesting, but there's a 20% chance we will consider and
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And they like the fact that you're being fair and open with them.
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So at the same time, out of the 20% of the ideas that we implement, guess where 90% of
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So you've got to constantly ask for their opinion.
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Because believe me, so many times people are like in this nest and they think they know
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everything and they are not connected with the people.
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You're spending too much time golfing and you're no longer talking to your field leaders,
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Another thing Lincoln talks about in this book is, he talks about go out there and circulate
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The key is to know that you constantly ask for their opinions.
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Point number 13, persuade instead of manipulate.
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Look, you ever heard someone say, you know, that guy is too calculated.
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Well, why don't you give me that calculating guy?
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Because when it's times of crisis and you're in war and the enemy is shooting you from every
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single angle, what kind of a leader do you want?
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You want a naive leader or you want a calculating leader?
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You see, you give me a calculating leader that's going to say, hey, seven of you guys,
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I want you to go behind that mountain right there.
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Eight of you guys go to that building, hide right there in the sniper, go to the top.
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You guys, I want you to stay here and make them feel like this is where we are and we're
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But here's the part that people have a problem with.
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They want to make sure you are calculating, but this is what they don't want.
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They don't want somebody that's manipulating everybody because the better you get at communication,
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They have a very big problem when you manipulate people.
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You've got to learn how to communicate and connect with your people.
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I explained this to one of my friends today from Chicago.
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And this person would come and sit us down and would ask ideas.
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And we would spend one day, two days, and it was ideas, ideas, ideas, ideas, ideas.
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And then they would go to the board and they'd say, this is the idea I came up with.
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And then he would go on stage and say, I came up with this idea.
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All the guys would come up to me and say, wait a minute.
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And typically, you know who you lose loyalty with?
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If somebody gave you the idea, give them credit for giving the idea.
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There's a lot of people out there that read this book, 40 Laws of Power.
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Stay tuned because you'll see the video with them as well.
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There's a lot of people that talk about the book, 40 Laws of Power.
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And the challenge with this book, 40 Laws of Power, is to teach you what manipulators will do to you.
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But it's not about reading this book to be this book.
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See, I read this book to know what some people that try to overpower you by manipulating you with the tools that this book offers.
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This book was never written for you to do actually everything it tells this book to do to other people.
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The book says, you know, go let other people do the work you take to credit.
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If you want to build a team of one person, you go do that.
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If you want to build a team of loyal people that want to run with you for the rest of your life, that will run through a wall for you, you've got to let them read this so they also know that other people can do this.
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A lot of people read this book and they don't want to share it with other people.
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Go read this book and see what happens when other people try to overpower you in manipulative ways.
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And eventually when you lose the naiveness, because in a world of competition, if you're not sharp and you're too naive, you will be eaten alive in the world of business.
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And it happens all the time in the world of business.
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So if you think it's about let me take the ideas from other people and take the credit for it, guess what book you need to read?
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You need to read Barbarians to Bureaucrats by Lawrence Miller.
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I spoke to Lawrence Miller, a brilliant man, consultant, and he wrote this book.
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In the book, he talks about different phases that every society, organization, company goes through.
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There's always an original prophet as the founder, right?
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After the prophet is a barbarian, people that are willing to go run through the wall and, you know, take over territories.
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And then you have the synergists that brings the whole thing together.
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See, sometimes if you're going out there and you're losing things with your guys because you're not giving them the credit, you're taking all the credit, and you're so far at the top, and you no longer are connected.
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They've got to go through 50 different people before they get a hold of you.
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Maybe you're becoming a bureaucrat and an aristocrat.
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If your handicap is par, you're probably a bureaucrat and aristocrat because you're playing too much time, spending too much time golfing.
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You go out there and you want to find out if someone is in the trenches with them, see how bad their golf game is.
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You'll generally be able to tell if someone's still in the game how bad their golf game is.
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I could care less about my game impressing you.
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I want to care about you seeing me growing the organization and leading the troops.
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That's what a CEO, that's what a leader, that's what a sales organization leader needs to care about the most.
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Give people to earn the opportunity to own a piece of the company.
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For many years, companies have taken the philosophy of, you know, I'll give them a pension plan.
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You know, you give pension and they give you 30 years.
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Do you really get the best out of them or do you get the mediocre part of them for 30 years?
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Do you know what happens when your leaders have a shot at owning a piece of the company?
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So imagine if a pool of people own a company together, own a business together.
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That is powerful when people are going out there and building a company like that.
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Have examples of successful leaders that you personally have developed.
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John, for how long did you struggle coaching your freshmen that came out of high school?
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And these kids that came out of high school, everybody was all American.
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So they would go from being the guy that everybody in high school talks to, I got 12 of them that
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How did you get that guy that come and play for you, for him to be coachable to you?
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Did it happen where eventually they won one championship and they started listening to
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you and said, no, it wasn't one championship because anybody can get lucky and win one.
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But the moment I won two, people started buying into my philosophy.
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In business, you got to have proof of developing leaders to earn long-term loyalty of people.
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Not once, but it's got to be two or more times of you having success developing leaders to
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And the last book, because of that, is Hypo Manic Edge.
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It talks about how many people are the link between craziness and success in America, is
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Hypo Manic Edge talks about how crazy people are.
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Hypo Manic Edge talks about how different people are.
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Anybody who is too perfect, no one wants to work with a perfect person because you constantly
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And so those are the 17 points on how to create loyalty with your organization.
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Don't be somebody that is too late and you lose somebody.
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Start creating the environment of these 17 points to create loyalty.
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And by the way, if you haven't already subscribed to Valuetainment on iTunes, please do so.
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And if you have any questions for me that you may have, you can always find me on Snapchat,
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And I actually do respond back when you snap me or send me a message on Instagram.