Leaders Are Readers

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, BJ Kramer, president and CEO of MCFA. I hope you enjoy today's show. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everybody. I'm your host, BJ Kramer, and we are going to kick off a three part summer series.

We are calling from pages to projects, leadership lessons that stick. We're gonna talk a lot about different books I heard many, many moons ago, All Leaders Are Readers. So I wanna talk about some of the books and stories that have influenced and shaped my leadership philosophy and how I think leaders in our world of of inspiring people in places and executing project leadership can use reading not just to learn, but to build themselves, build projects, build their careers, hopefully build cultures on teams and and build confidence and build clarity. And I think it's important. Like, a lot of people tell me, I'm not really a reader, and I don't care if you're a reader or a or a podcast slash audible listener.

I think the the ideal here is to consume wisdom and then be able to synthesize and apply it to your life. I think that's why we read. It it gives you a lot of perspective. So I want to start because I was not always a great reader, and I ebb and flow in my reading habits and my listening habits, probably based on how much I have going on in my life. And there are times where I feel like I cannot consume anymore because I'm trying to apply lessons that I've learned.

And I think the information consumption without application, it has a place. So there there are times where you're just reading to to gain some knowledge, and there's probably some wisdom in the neurons firing back and forth and just putting that in your mental archives. But I do wanna talk about why we should read, what you should read. And I'll with how I even got bit by this bug. And it's interesting.

I talk about how sports shape lives. Well, sports have certainly shaped my life. The year is 1996. I remember March '96 watching the swimming Olympic trials, and I swam for a club team, the Jersey Wahoos, which still exist today. And I I actually am on their board.

And we had an athlete. I was in eighth grade, but we had an athlete that was from Delran, New Jersey, a local guy swimming for Wahoos, had just graduated from UVA, and was competing in the Olympic trials to make the Olympic team in the 1,500 meter of the mile. His name is Peter Wright. So Peter ends up coming in second place. He represents The US at the ninety six Atlanta Olympics.

And it was the first Olympic games that I was really, really connected to. '92 and '88. '88, I was probably not even watching. '92, I remember watching. Summer Sanders, I know for sure, maybe Matt beyond the...

But it was the ninety six Olympics that I felt totally connected to. And swimming is kind of the spectacle for me, but Michael Johnson was a track and field star, and he happened to be setting the world on fire with his his gold shoes and his gold medals. And he was this kind of rock star in the Olympic Games. And after the games, I came across... And I don't know if somebody gifted it to me or how I got my hands on it, but it was Michael Johnson's book, Slaying the Dragon.

And this is the first book I remember reading start to finish, and it was it was the book that bit me with kind of this... The possibility of not just dreaming about greatness, but setting goals, planning for it, training for it, and building habits, discipline, and belief in yourself. Around the same time, so this is probably 9096 going to '98, getting a little better and better in high school, and a local entrepreneur named Pat Croce, kind of a Philadelphia fame, some people may recognize the name, others may not. Pat Croce was writing books on self help. And Pat Croce started as a a physical therapist, started a company, kinda turned into an entrepreneur, professional physical therapist that was professional sports trainer.

I think he helped the Flyers and Sixers, started his own practice. That practice kinda grew into a multisite practice, and then he sold that group to NovaCare. And he had this cool professional sports physical therapy career, was all about coaching and mentoring and and training athletes. He built a business around it, then he sells the business and puts together kind of a framework of a deal, I guess, and ends up becoming the president and minority owner of the Philadelphia seventy sixers and takes them from last place to the NBA championship. They they end up not winning it, but they...

It was kind of this rags to riches story in the NBA. And Pat Croce wrote a bunch of books about goal setting and positivity. I think he even calls himself the prince of positivity in in some of his speaking. But his speaking and his writing just kind of wrote to me, and it it was all it was all kind of a pep talk of professional development or personal development and taking taking ownership of your career. And I I fell in love with his writings.

I fell in love with his spirit. And I think part of it was his local connection, but a lot of it was his writing. So those two books kinda set me on on my journey. And then I don't remember for sure, but I think it was when I was in grad school. So fast forward, I read a ton through my deployed career about a bunch of different topics.

But I think it was when I was in grad school, I ended up reading Stephen Covey's book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. And I can't remember if it was that or First Things First, but those two books really put some structure and framework to this whole idea of personal development. And seven habits of highly effective people pop up every now and then. And just recently, I saw Britton Covey who was a punt returner and wide receiver for the Philadelphia Eagles. I saw something he was tagged in on Instagram because they received their Super Bowl rings.

And I looked into it, and for those that don't know, he is the grandson of Stephen Covey, the son of Stephen MR Covey, I believe. And he actually has a podcast with his brother called Paradigm Shifting Books. I haven't really dug into it. I don't know how good it is, but it brought back the idea of seven habits of highly effective people. And I think that is the book that really set me on a course to, hey.

What is it about personal development that that we need to connect to? So each of those books, again, there are three that stand out in those early early years of me getting kinda connected to personal development philosophies. All the while, I obviously... I went to West Point, and there was all kinds of leadership development going on there. And I think it's important to point out, I've I've probably said this before, that self study is a very critical part of personal development.

So I've talked about all leaders are readers. I've talked about the power of books, and I think the quote that sums it up better than anything is one by Jim Mattis. And Jim Mattis is known as as the warrior monk. He's a retired four star general, former secretary of defense, and one of the most respected military minds of our generation. The quote goes like this.

Quote, if you haven't read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent because your personal experience alone aren't broad enough to sustain you. So retired marine corps general, what he's saying is that you you just can't possibly get enough experience to give you these diverse broad perspectives. It's not enough. It's not enough to be a great leader. So the best way to get those experiences to...

Is to read about others. And that... It kind of allows you to collapse time. It expands your perspective, and it sharpens your instincts. And like I said, even if some of these are archives in the back of your head, these things are the quotes or the wisdom or the ideas or the concepts that come out when the pressure is on.

And leadership is kind of easy when everything is going right. Leadership is very hard in the day to day when when tensions are high or projects aren't going right or people are feeling disconnected. That's when you need to lean into this wisdom. You don't get that wisdom by collecting it just in time for the moment you have it. You have to collect it over time, and like I said, allow those neurons to fire.

So I think the best place to start is this whole idea of lead yourself first. There was a time, and and again, from time to time, it still happens, where I was reacting to everything. The day or maybe the calendar or the inbox just ran me. I was I was very reactive. And getting experience, I was probably achieving some level of success, but I didn't feel fully aligned with where I was going.

And I was just getting things done. I was crossing stuff off the list, but I wasn't wasn't really building momentum towards anything. And I think it was this time that seven habits of highly effective people really changed everything. And the entire first portion of this book, the first three habits are all about self mastery. So one is be proactive, obviously the opposite of reactive.

So one, be proactive. Two, begin with the end in mind, and that's all about, like, what are we trying to accomplish before we start trying to accomplish something? What what do we want the outcome to look like? And then third is put first things first. I think it's a Tim Ferriss, never let the critical few get taken over by the trivial many.

So putting first things first, and we talk about rocks. So that all comes from from Covey. I think of him as the the OG of at least our era, and maybe I'm getting outside of our era, but the OG of personal development. I've read Dale Carnegie, and I've read Napoleon Hill. Those guys are are a little further back in time, but Steven Covey really made the seven habits this international bestseller, I think, really gave some great framework.

So let's start with habit one, be proactive, stop waiting, start leading. Colby talks about the difference between being reactive and proactive. In our world of projects, I feel like it's very easy to feel like our job is to be reactive and to fight the fires that are happening. It's kind of an easy easy trap. An RFI comes in, differing site conditions pop up, a call from the client, some some delay, some design mistake, and you get you get swept up into trying to fix that daily storm.

But if you're always reacting to what's happening, you're never actually leading. And being proactive, it doesn't mean ignoring problems. It means, similar to all of this reading I'm talking about, it means being prepared for them. It means taking initiative. It means being influential.

So instead of reacting that you can you can respond. One of the habits I've talked about maybe on the podcast, certainly at MCFA University and recently at some keynotes, is the ability to initiate. Not just kick off the meeting, but to really own and initiate conversations around what's going on. So we are used to kicking off a project with with an initiation of some sort, but almost every conversation we have as a leader, we should be being proactive in what we're trying to accomplish in that meeting. Initiating the tone of that meeting, initiating the tempo, we can either bring urgency and chaos to a conversation, or we can be the calm and the peace and the wisdom to that conversation.

And a lot of that is about how we ourselves initiate our own day. So how you how you initiate your day... And conversation around this, I think, was really good. How you initiate your day and set your own tone for the day, blocking the time, having your your morning start up routine, and maybe your work start up routine really set yourself feeling like you're you're organized and you're in control of the day. And by having control of your day, creating margin inside of your day for the fires or mishaps or got a minute conversations that are super critical to leading and getting the project executed.

So that's habit one, be proactive. Habit two is begin with the end in mind. This one, I think if if it was the one habit everybody adopted and every meeting started with and every project started with, it is a really aligning question. What does the end of this look like? What does the end of this conversation look like?

What is the objective of this meeting? What does success look like on this project? And in particular, for for stakeholder engagement and stakeholder management, what does success look like for the end user? What does it look like for the client? As we know, a lot of our a lot of our projects, the end user is a different group of people than the client.

And then what does it look like for our own team? Do people just wanna get through the project and live to see another day, or are people looking at that project as a stepping stone in their career? And does them being able to look at, hey. Where will I be in my career at the end of this project? What would success look like for me at the end of this project?

I think it connects everybody everybody's day to day to the end result that they're looking for. And if if you begin each project, each quarter, each month, each week, each day with beginning with the end in mind. Do you feel that much more intentional in the the things that you are doing? It's not just a bunch of things you're crossing off of your to do list, but you actually feel connected. And those to dos feel like they are impacting where you are headed.

Again, begin with the end of mind, really connects end results and objectives to day to day activities. And then the last habit is put first things first. Covey and and James Clear wrote Atomic Habits overlap a lot here. Clear has a quote that you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. So in order to be a great leader, you can't just set goals.

You have to also have a system that helps you execute those goals. And to me, that's about routines. And I talked about initiating your day with with routine. If you don't have daily routines, and the four routines that I've read a lot about that everybody should have, and I try to have some version of this, is a morning routine, and there's a book, Miracle Morning, and the acronym is SAVERS. He suggests everybody should have silence, affirmation, visualization, exercise, reading, all leaders are readers, and scribing or journaling.

That's the miracle morning routine. So a morning routine and then a work start up routine. And some people suggest like, hey. Your work start up routine should be, what is the number one thing I need to do today and make sure that the first, call it, sixty to ninety minutes is blocked for that. Other people would say, like, hey.

Part of my work morning routine or startup routine is just making sure I look at my calendar today. I understand what the priorities are. I kind of have have my day mapped out. Everybody, and I'm guilty of this, will say the thing that should not be part of your morning routine is reacting to emails, reacting to LinkedIn, reacting to Instagram, infinity scrolling because it's it's the first thing that you have control over. And as soon as you give up control to the infinity scroll, you've already started giving up control of your day.

But the the morning routine, whether it's thirty minutes, an hour, whether it's time blocking for deep work, or just having that time to organize, I think both the morning routine at home and the morning routine at work are critical building blocks of your day. The one thing that everybody brings up when I talk about these things is, but my day always gets interrupted. I feel like I do these things, and then my day gets away from me anyway. And I think that there's some version of either not enough margin or too much reaction that we are doing. So I think part of this is in your daily routine creating enough margin and whether that's, hey, thirty minutes before lunch or fifteen minutes before lunch.

Plenty of people tell me, don't even have time to take lunch. It's the ability to create some boundaries in your day to give yourself the time and space to maybe reprioritize the afternoon. The morning didn't go the way I wanted to. I had to do this. You have to be flexible and nimble to it, but you have to give yourself the room to be flexible and nimble.

If you don't have margin in your day, you are always going to feel reactive. And this is a lesson that I learned the very, very, very hard way. I always felt like I had more room for more stuff, and something always was giving, and usually, it was probably my own sanity or my presence with my family. When my kids were young and we were just kind of building out the business, there was nothing I wouldn't take on, and I would just take responsibility for it, and I would just fill my plate up. And I was not giving myself margin.

So that caused two things. I was not my best self in any of the things I was taking on because I was I was just functional enough to do them. I was not making us great in those areas. And then I would go home burned out, and burned out either meant I would fall asleep reading my kid a book at night and not having time for spending time with my wife, I would feel exhausted and not get the gym in. And it was always a perpetuating effect of, like, if I did not give myself time, I thought I always had room, but something was being sacrificed.

And I just heard a homily last week. Father Mike Schmitz, who's a kind of an international Catholic social media priest, was talking about the the biblical story of the Good Samaritan. And to keep kind of a a long story short, there was a study at Princeton Theological Seminary, and they tested people's ability to stop along the way to giving a sermon across campus. They hired an actor. The actor was positioned as if they were the individual in need.

And the percentage of priests that stopped to help decreased substantially based on how they were feeling about the amount of time they had available to them. So the first group of priests, they sent them off and said, hey. You gotta give your sermon across campus. No rush. Take as much time as you need.

Something like 80% of those priests stopped to help the person in need. Decrease that to the next group. We're told, hey. You're tight for time. You gotta get across campus.

And they were feeling crunched for time and 40% stopped. And then the next group was told, hey, you're running late. You gotta get across campus now. There was something like 20% of those pre stops. So one population, I don't know if I did the story justice, but the whole concept was people's ability to stop for those in need decreased substantially by the amount of time they felt they had available.

So this whole idea of scarcity in time, and we create scarcity in time when we don't give ourselves margin. Alright. One more thing. I think this is a mindset shift, so I'm bringing in one more author, Ryan Holiday. The obstacle is the way.

A lot of times, we also look at problems as these obstacles that are getting in the way of the day as opposed to an opportunity to to develop, an opportunity to to grow, to expand, to teach, to learn. And I think just being able to shift problems that pop up in the day, these things that we feel like we have to react to, of reacting in the moment, responding to them by saying, what is this teaching me? Maybe it's teaching me my system is not working right. Maybe it's teaching me I'm not giving myself enough time. Maybe it's teaching me I'm not giving my team enough time.

Maybe it's teaching me I don't have enough, or my team's not big enough. And we may not have control over all of these things, but if we can at least shift our mindset from feeling burdened to feeling like these things are teaching us, I think, one, it changes our own mindset, and two, it helps us change our team's mindset from feeling like the project is happening to me to what is the project teaching us and how do we continue to fix it. And I think just that that simple shift of being open to always learning, always growing from what's happening to us, as opposed to defending why it wasn't my fault or blaming somebody for why it's their fault, really shifts the spirit and the energy of of a project, of a problem set, and of our day. So let me wrap up, give you a little bit of a blueprint for your week. First, starting with the routines.

Check out your morning. Are you an infinity scroll person, or are you a very strict routine person? Whether it's savers for miracle morning or some other simple, I think, thirty minute morning. Somebody has that. I I forget who has that.

I'll I'll see if I can put that in the show notes. But think about if you're reacting to your morning or are you leading your morning. That's the first place you get to lead yourself. What's one habit you can add this week to start the day with clarity? My recommendation is the most powerful habit everybody can start if you're not already doing it is to start reading.

Twenty minutes, whether it's bible, business, or otherwise, twenty minutes of reading, and I'll I'll get into this a little bit more. Read for twenty minutes or read till you found a nugget. And then once you found that nugget, take notes, write that nugget down, and teach it to somebody in your day. So I think that's the way to take reading from just consumption to impact because when you teach it to somebody, it kind of reinforces it for yourself. Two, what's a conversation you've been avoiding?

Initiate it. Even if it's uncomfortable, go and initiate that that conversation. I think Tim Ferriss, another quote from him, is something we... Our development is a direct correlation or directly attributed to the number of uncomfortable conversations and uncomfortable situations we're willing to put ourselves in. And then last is reframe a challenge.

Some challenge this week, instead of thinking of it as an obstacle, think of it as an opportunity. And what is this obstacle teaching me? So I covered a couple of books I mentioned today, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey, Atomic Habits by James Clear, The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday, and Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod. We will continue the conversation next week, but, hopefully, this this kinda starts you on a on a reading journey. All leaders are readers.

If you have books that you recommend, I'd love to hear what's kind of a must read in your library. But appreciate you listening in. If you are getting something out of this, if you know somebody that might get value from it, please do me a favor. Like, subscribe, send it out. Oh, I forgot.

I didn't... I talked about some other books. I started out with Pat Croce. I feel great and you will too is at least one of the books I know he wrote, and then slaying the dragon by Michael Johnson. I don't know if it holds up to the test of time, but like I said, it was probably...

Those two books were probably the first two that that bit me early in my career. So whether you're a coach, a parent, a project leader, or a business leader, I think all these books have something. So until next time, have a great week. Thanks for spending some time with me, and look forward to to speaking with you next week. Hey, everybody.

Thanks so much for tuning in to Leadership Blueprints. I hope today's episode gave you some valuable insights, a chance to reflect, and some practical tools you can start using right away. If you enjoy the show, I'd love it if you took a moment to leave us a review. Your feedback helps us reach more leaders like you and keep bringing you the content that matters most. And if you know someone else who'd benefit from today's episode, go ahead and share it with them.

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