Leaders Are Doers

You're listening to Leadership Blueprints, the podcast where we explore the art and science of leading yourself, inspiring and empowering your team, and project leadership in the architectural, engineering, construction, and development industries, and beyond. I'm your host, Vijay Kramer, president and CEO of MCFA. I hope you enjoy today's show. Welcome back, everybody. Welcome to the third and final episode of our summer solo series on Leadership Blueprints.

Last two weeks, we've talked about how leaders are readers and how leaders are learners. And today, we're gonna wrap it up with Leaders Are Doers. I think one of the things I've learned over the last couple of years that maybe I didn't appreciate so much coming through West Point where everything is shifting our mindset and our philosophy or our world view towards this leadership world view that leaders are people that make things happen, and leaders are people who take responsibility for things. That some people think leadership is one of two things. One, maybe it's those special people that just had some gift or some pedigree that were plucked out of the pile and made into being leaders.

So that's one view. Then I think the other one is this romanticized view that leadership is for these people that are in the corner offices, that it's this easy life of golf outings and first class flights, maybe even private jets. So everybody has a bit of a different view on what leadership is, how leaders come to be. And I think that's why I really wanted to focus this week to wrap this up on Leaders Are Doers. And yes, the leaders that you see that maybe have some version of fame or fortune have been doers that have been compounding their doing over a long period of time.

But I want to start with just shifting your mindset that leadership is a choice. And that choice is, am I willing to take full responsibility for outcomes? And those outcomes may have big results attached to them, they may have small results attached to them, but at whatever level you exist, I think the shift about being a leader is the mindset of responsibility. So today we're gonna dig into that. Doing may sound counter to what you think leading is.

Now leaders aren't the people that are doing stuff, leaders are the people that are making or overseeing other people doing stuff. But like I said, leaders started somewhere, and I think they started by just doing what was in front of them with the idea of a leader, leadership mindset, or or owning the results, or taking responsibility for what they're doing. It really is about doing, and what you do, how well you do it, and who you do it for, starts to determine who relies on you to be a leader, and will people follow you as a leader. I've said before that leadership requires two things. One, somebody to give you a mission, so you have to have a mission that you are executing.

And then two, the people or the team that follows you to go execute that mission. And I'm starting with the leadership is leaders are doers mindset because I think sometimes that mission starts with the job in front of you and sometimes the people or person following you is really about you following what you know is the right thing to do. Great leadership starts with being a great follower. I was just talking to my dad this morning and he highlighted, Shannon Sharp was just talking about this. He gave the quote, you have to learn to follow before you can lead in his hall of fame speech.

So I watched that and I'll get into the three D's he talked about before I get into some of the material I want to hit. And then there's this story that I heard from John Maxwell. Some kid came up to him, maybe it was a young adult, maybe it was even an adult. He referred to him as a kid and said, hey, Mr. Maxwell, I wanna do what you do.

And John Maxwell's response was, oh, you wanna do what I do, are you willing to did what I did? And that really to me puts this into perspective that we see something, we may see the end result of somebody's journey. Whether that's a Hall of Fame football player that is getting inducted in a Hall of Fame or John Maxwell up on the speaker, speaking podium in front of thousands of people, or any version of somebody that we think is a leadership leader in industry. And we think, Oh, I want to do what they do. But it really is about doing what's in front of us today, and compounding that over time.

So today, we're really gonna lean into what our controllables are when it comes to being a doer. I I read this book, Who Not How, a couple years ago, maybe three or four years ago. And it was written by Dan Sullivan who has a business called Strategic Coach, and his co author was Doctor. Benjamin Hardy. And Dan Sullivan's entire audience is entrepreneurial leaders, people that are trying to build businesses.

So there is an economic slant to this who not how thing, which is basically, when you start up a business and and you're the only resource that you have, you end up taking on a lot of things. And because you're the only person there that can do it. And what Sullivan tries to shift is is changing that mindset from how am I going to do this to who could do this for me. And yes, there are economics to hiring that who, but they get into this whole thing around successes about surrounding yourself with the right who's, and they get into this high value who's or people that really make a lot of things happen. And drive substantially better results than others.

So I was reading this years ago, and then more recently I was thinking about this whole concept. And the idea, especially at MCFA, that we are building a company of who's. Clients hire us to be their who, to drive projects, to execute engineering tasks, to do the job that they are hiring us to do. We all are somebody else's who. This whole idea of who not how, when you're an entrepreneur and you're the visionary, yes, you're surrounding yourselves with who's.

But all of us, even that entrepreneur is somebody else's who. Because when somebody buys their service, somebody buys their product, they are now delivering. They are the who that that person is asking to do something for them. People don't... I've I've heard this before, people don't hire a hammer, they hire something to put nails in the wall.

So similarly, they're not hiring an engineer, they're hiring some result that that engineer is going to get them. Maybe it's to de risk something, maybe it's to create a blueprint or a design. They're not just hiring the engineer, they're hiring the result that that engineer is getting them. So you, no matter who you are, you are somebody's who. If you were hired for a job, they expected some result out of what they were hiring you to do.

So you are a who, and today I want to talk about how you become a high value who, a project leader, or a doer, a leader is a doer. By just shifting that perspective and leaning into that. Before I get into the framework I want to talk about, which are the seven R's of Doers, and it's really 5 Rs, and then there's two two Rs related to the economics. I wanna talk about the three Ds that Shannon Sharp was talking about, which are dedication, discipline, which are disciplined, determination, and dedication. And similar to the R's, I think that these three D's, discipline, dedication and determination, really are things that you can practice.

They do not require, everything requires some level of talent, but these three things do not require talent to do them. People do not all of a sudden, maybe there's a little bit of nurture nature argument to be made, but I think that discipline, dedication and determination are decisions. So I think because I talked about Shannon Sharpe and you gotta be a follower before you can be a leader, I thought that that was worth highlighting here. But I actually want the whole conversation to be around the seven R's, which are reputation, resume, responsibility, results, recruiting, and then the economic drivers are rate and revenue. So reputation, resume, responsibility, results, recruiting, rate, and revenue.

So let's start with reputation. I tell my team all the time that when I hire you and we put our our shirt, our brand in your hands, you are either improving our reputation or hurting our reputation. Reputation is earned every day in every meeting, in every email, in every interaction that we have with the world. Your personal reputation and your professional reputation is earned every day. I think when you put those three D's into your work ethic, you will all of a sudden start building a very strong reputation.

It's about... And and I think the younger you are, the easier it is to start this. And it might even be easier to prove yourself because typically we know when somebody has less experience, we're looking for the right attributes. We want people who are hungry. We want people who are curious.

We want people who are consistent. And you can differentiate yourself really by your approach more than your intelligence. Somebody who's willing to step up and show up early for for the meeting or stay late and and hear the conversation after the meeting or at the end of the day, you just start building this identity of what other people think of you, that is your reputation. So your reputation is earned every day. Warren Buffett says it takes twenty years to to build a reputation in five minutes to to lose it.

But your reputation is built in and out every day. Second one is resume. We tend to think of this resume as a thing that we we have to build when we graduate college to go start applying for jobs, and then it goes into some, back in the day it was a floppy disk or a 3.5 disk. Now maybe it's in a piece of paper in a folder, maybe it's on a Word doc or a PDF that again, sits in some file on some hard drive or on your computer or in the cloud. And we don't we don't touch it until it's time to look for a job, or we have the unfortunate experience of getting laid off or we are feeling stagnated.

Now we go polish the resume. Resume is not just that document. The resume is a log of all of the experiences that you are having every day, every week, every month, every quarter, every year. And we tend to summarize them into these one to three to five year experiences. I've got my bachelor's degree from this university.

I've got my master's degree from this university. Maybe I have some certifications or or credentials. And then I have these job experiences. And it's a small little paragraph or three to five bullets of what what was accomplished in each of these three to five year experiences that are worth highlighting. But your resume really is being built day in, out.

Again, like your reputation, you you never know where your resume is being built. Maybe maybe you don't get the credential of PMP or PE or AIA or Centimeters or scheduling professional until you actually take the test and pass. But you're incrementally preparing yourself every day for that. Similarly, on the job experiences, how can a three to five year experience be summarized in the three to five bullets? It can't.

You're you're learning every day on that job, and you should be keeping track of those bullets. Maybe they don't meet the hard copy of your resume, but every time you get an experience, whether you succeed or fail at that, when you fail at it, somebody's buying your experience for not failing at that again. So you learned a bunch of lessons for that. That should be going into this mental resume that you have, Because it's built through those challenges, through those experiences, through those mistakes, through those successes and failures. And it is what tells the world and tells yourself, I can take on the next level of challenge.

I can take on the next bigger experience. So we have reputation as earned every day, we have resume as earned every day. Reputation is kind of this mental outlook other people have of you. Resume is this mental Rolodex of all of these accumulated experiences that you you do day in and day out. Alright.

Next are responsibility. And I wanna open this one up with this quote I heard from Mark Cuban the other day about people who reduce his stress. The quote goes, the people who tend to think that they are invaluable are typically the ones who create the most stress by creating firestorms and creating drama and making things more difficult for me. Anybody who reduces my stress becomes invaluable to me. I never want to get rid of them, end quote.

And here is a guy that is responsible for a lot of things. And I think what he is saying here is, when I'm responsible for a lot of things, and people wanna engage with me, there's two ways that people engage with me. Some people, I'll take the BCD, some people engage with me in a way of BCD, blame, complain, defend. There's a lot of talk, there's a lot of noise, there's a lot of drama, there's, they create urgency and stress in my life. And then there's people who just take responsibility.

They own, they own the results. They own the the task or the project, and they just say the the buck stops here. They take ownership. Responsibility is what leaders do. They take responsibility.

They don't BCD, they don't blame, they don't complain, they don't defend. They just say, I got this. So responsibility is about saying, I got this. It's about saying, you can count on me. And that leads to the next one, which is results.

So when you take responsibility for something, the expectation is you'll also drive results. Now the beautiful thing about taking responsibility is whether you deliver the results or fall short of the results, taking responsibility is saying, that's on me. It's not about blaming somebody around you, or blaming somebody else, or some environmental situation, or some cultural situation inside of your organization, it's about like, hey, I fell short of the result you hired me for. The ability to take responsibility is awesome. The ability to drive results and get success is even better.

And we're gonna get into some of the economics of of our industry and the AEC industry and project management that we do. But clients don't actually buy hours from us. Yes, that is the economic valuation comes down to an hourly rate, but really what they're hiring different businesses for in the professional services world is results, it's outcomes. You don't hire an accountant for six hours, you hire them to do a tax return. Yes, the six hours may be how you pay them and how how you monetize that deliverable, but you're really paying them for a high quality tax filing.

Similarly, you don't hire an engineer for the four hours to just have an engineer for four hours, you're hiring them for the safety and the quality of the design that is going in for a permit. So you may be hiring them for a permit ready set of drawings. So we don't buy buy hours, we buy outcomes. We we want people, we want to hire organizations that solve the problem and deliver the results. So number four is results.

When you are somebody with a strong reputation, a good resume that takes responsibility and drives results, you will find yourself out of time. You will not have any capacity left. And you have two choices. One, you could say, hey, I'm not taking anything on right now. Or two, go to the next level of leadership and bring people with you through recruiting.

Recruiting is how we multiply our efforts. Recruiting, like I talked about before, is being willing to share your reputation, like Warren Buffett said that you built, maybe you built it over one year, five year, he talks about building it over twenty years and losing it in five minutes. When you recruit other people and you put your reputation on the line, you multiply. Recruiting only happens because somebody saw something in you being responsible and driving results that they say, hey, I trust you. And then what you're saying to them is, hey, you should trust me.

I am going to lead somebody else to execute the way I execute. So recruiting is a huge responsibility that we have. When we bring other people with us, it's not just, hey, here's your chance. It's, hey, I've built my reputation. It is this sacred thing to me, my reputation, my word, my ability to tell somebody I will deliver for them, that I will take responsibility for their problem, that I will drive results.

Hey, when you join my team, I am telling you that I am considering risking my reputation with you, on you. It's a huge responsibility for somebody that joins the team. And if we don't communicate to that that to them, then we may... Or communicate it to ourselves. We may be lazy or loose with our reputation and with our hiring decision.

What we are doing is we are we are taking responsibility of recruiting, selecting, training, and developing, and managing, and holding somebody else accountable to the standard that we just set in the marketplace for our reputation. So the fifth r is recruiting. So we have reputation, resume, responsibility, results, and recruiting. Those to me are the five r's of leadership. Maybe at MCFA, I think really in in the world of any organization.

And then I get into the economics, because as much as I love being able to talk about impact, a lot of us want to be able to convert that impact into value. I talk about two different p and l's when it comes to leadership. You have the leadership p and l, people and legacy, and then you have the economic p and l, profit and loss. Reputation plus results drive value. And like I talked about before, even though people are hiring results not necessarily rate, the rate is one of the ways that people value your time.

And the more that you drive your reputation, improve your resume, take responsibility, drive results, the higher your rate goes up. That is not your organization giving you a raise, that is you going into a marketplace and converting your resume, reputation, responsibility, and results into an economic value. Your hourly rate goes up. When your hourly rate goes up, your value goes up. When your value goes up, you get to share in that value.

At least most smart organizations know how to do that. Some organizations will give you a raise before you even understand how your rate is earned. Maybe it's because they they just wanna keep you focused on the task that you're doing. I tend to want to treat everybody in more like a teacher or a coach where I don't give a raise, you go out into the marketplace in partnership with me and you earn a raise. Just like you don't get or a teacher doesn't give you an a or an f, you earn the a or the f.

You don't get given the starting role, you earn the starting role or you earn the bench. You earn your rate. And yes, the market has certain drivers and the timing, and the project, and all of that. There's certain drivers to different rates, but at the end of the day, you are earning that rate. And then after you figure out earning your rate, and you're bringing other people with you, eventually more revenue is put under your P and L.

So if everybody thinks of their rate as their own personal P and L, hey, the marketplace is is paying the business for my time at x rate, and I can improve that over time, but eventually, I only have two thousand hours in the year that I can sell or, you know, I know law firms that have twenty two hundred hour goals or maybe even more. But eventually, the number that that constrains you is the amount of hours, and that's when we turn to recruiting. But that doesn't stop you from growing your p and l, bringing other people with you, taking responsibility and driving results for bigger, larger projects and and bringing to bear bigger and larger teams. Revenue, revenue generation and revenue responsibility, and all of the customer service, risk management, team building, team leadership, accountability and discipline that goes into leading a team and having owning a P and L is where a lot of value gets housed and translated. And I think when you start your career out, looking at your rate and looking at yourself as a p and l, it drives your ability to think like a business person and an owner at an earlier point, and understand how the economics of of business work.

And again, I don't think that there's a job or a business out there where you couldn't translate that into, you know, I'm talking about professional services and how we do it in MCFA and how I think the AEC in general or professional services in general work. But this applies to construction companies, this applies to the snack bar, my first job. You know, the person at the front, there's some economic value that the manager or the owner of the snack bar at the swim club has decided is worth giving a 14 or 15 year old kid the ability to earn $5.05 an hour or whatever it was when I was I'm pretty sure that was what we were making. But then the person above the the front counter gets a little more money. Why?

Because there's more responsibility, they're responsible for more things, they're driving more results, they've earned the reputation, they've got the resume. So that may be the maybe that's not a very good example. But that that may be on the very low scale, but apply it to any other business. And I think eventually, you get to a point where you understand that leadership and doing is about all of the same things. Let me wrap this up by just saying the whole point of this series was to introduce this idea.

Leaders are readers, leaders are learners, and now leaders are doers. And when you shift your mindset to those three things, and you you shift your perspective to, oh, leaders aren't leaders aren't just somebody that makes it someday and got lucky. Leadership is something that I can build upon all of the time. And when you apply these R's, reputation, resume, responsibility, results, recruiting, and then put them together with rate and revenue. All of a sudden, you can start to see how how you can grow your career and your leadership journey, and how that translates into economic value.

So the last thing I want you to think is that leadership is just a title that gets endowed upon you. Leadership is an action. Leadership is about doing. Leadership is about earning your your reputation, building your resume, taking responsibility, driving results, then bringing other people with you. It starts with doing what is in front of you.

Do it well. Do it consistently, and like John Maxwell said, if you want to do what I do, you got to did what I did. And did what I did starts with whatever is in front of you. Leadership grows through responsibility. It's established through your reputation.

You have to be delivering results, but it starts to multiply through others. So that's it for this week. Leaders Are Doers. The 7 Rs, keep reading, keep learning, keep doing what's in front of you. And until next time, have a great week and a great weekend.

We are going back to interviews next week, looking forward to sharing some of our recent interviews and looking forward to continuing to build our audience here at Leadership Blueprints. If you are getting value out of the show, please like, subscribe, share it with other people, do a LinkedIn share, however you can help us influence the marketplace. If you're getting value out of it, we appreciate you listening, and we appreciate you sharing. Until next time, have a great week and a great weekend. Hey, everybody.

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