Becoming a Better Leader | Wisdom from the Trenches

In this LMScast episode, Kurt Von Ahnen disclosed that John C. is the source of one of his fundamental ideas on leadership. According to Maxwell, “Leadership is influence, nothing more, nothing less.” He thinks that everyone has an innate ability to lead, whether it be in the form of managing a team, a small group, or even just one other individual.

Kurt was the only person in a boardroom full of international executives who had ever worked at the retail level. Based on his personal experience, he cautioned that the program would fail despite making him the “protruding nail” a Japanese term for an individual who deviates from the group.

The scheme ultimately failed as he had feared, but his bravery in speaking up gained him a say in subsequent initiatives. Kurt believes that being a leader frequently entails stating the truth, going into awkward situations, and stepping in before someone less qualified does.

Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. I’m joined by a repeat GA guest. His name is Kurt Van Ahnen. He’s from Manana, NOMAS, and Kurt and I are gonna be talking about leadership today. But first, welcome to the show, Kurt. Hey, man, it’s always good to see you. Yeah. I know you’ve written books on leadership.

What’s the name of your book again? My book is Action Leadership from the Edge. Awesome. Let’s just start super high level. Like when you, somebody asks you like, what is leadership? How would you answer that question? 

Kurt Von Ahnen: I actually steal that answer from someone I consider a mentor. That’s John C.

Maxwell. He is if you don’t know, he is like an unbelievably prolific author on leadership, but he is quoted multiple times as saying leadership has influenced nothing more, nothing less, and that’s that alone has helped guide me on my pathway to continuous learning in this space.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s a, it is an interesting question and it’s such a broad topic. I feel like everybody’s a leader in the sense that once you grow up from being a baby. You have to influence yourself and make decisions and move throughout the world. And then you have friend groups and you make decisions and so on, and it just keeps going out.

Not everybody goes all the way to becoming a transformational leader that LE leads a country or a religious movement or something like that, but there’s like leadership potential in everybody. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: You’re touching on. The actual purpose of the book I wrote, and that was for me and I saw this through the pandemic and stuff, so I really got amped up through that space.

But I personally believe everybody, every single human on the planet has some natural calling to some leadership position, whatever that is. You’re called to have influence on somebody or a group of people. And personally, I feel a lot of people bypass or abstain from that calling, right? So a lot of people go, oh, I’m not really a leader.

I’m more of a good number two, I’m a good support person. I’m not, and when you see people pull back or restrict themselves from fulfilling that natural call, I believe it just leaves a gap in leadership. And and I think the universe. All the energies of the universe. I think it hates the idea that there’s a gap in things, and so it allows that gap to be filled, but then it’s filled unnaturally and that’s how we see things where.

Normal people like us can look up, people running things and go, how did that moron get in that position? And you go, oh, that’s how, because the people that were meant to fill that position never stepped up. They never stepped into their natural call of leadership. And it allowed poor fits to fill those gaps.

And then they land and expand and it propagates nonsense instead of what’s meant to be. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s a huge deal. A leadership vacuum, I call it. Yeah. Like it’s missing and like you said, it’s like physics. Something will fill that space. Yeah. And it’s not always the best thing, but it will, that’s, that vacuum will always get filled.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah it’s crazy to watch. I have a ton of corporate experience and I, and so many times the most visually striking one was I wa I was in a boardroom and it was packed. We had to bring in extra chairs, giant table, extra chairs, people from different countries, vice presidents, and there was this giant new initiative, it was a distributorship that was going to.

Implement a new program for all of the retailers. You must do this to earn this bonus. And they were gonna put this giant program out and it was immensely complicated. And and they were acting like it was a bonus for the retailers, and I had worked retail before in that field and I kept thinking, this is about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.

And I said, Hey I raised my hand and I said, Hey I wanna recognize my position in the room as not the leader, right? Because I’m president and vice president. Everybody’s in this room. I said, but I’m just really curious, who, who has a team or who reached out to the base to find out if this is a program they actually desire?

Who wants to participate in this program? And they were like, oh, Kurt, that’s not a. That wasn’t a consideration. We’re gonna launch this thing. This is what we need to see happen, and this is the bonus structure we put in place and this is the way it’s gonna be. And then I was like buy a show of hands.

How many people in this room have actually worked at that level of retail? So you know how to absorb. The program that’s being promoted. And it was me and one other dude that put up their hand and I was like I can tell you firsthand, this ain’t gonna fly. Yeah. Like the half million dollars you’ve already spent on salaries and all the junket took to, to build this program up.

We’re in this meeting and I’m like, I can tell you right now, this ain’t gonna fly. It doesn’t go over real well. When you’re the contrarian in the room sometimes there’s a saying in Japan the protruding nail always gets hammered, right? And so I was the protruding nail in that situation.

But I’m also a fortune teller. It didn’t go over well, and then that kind of catapults that natural fit for leadership for the next. Project to, to then be considered and consulted and hey, Kurt, what would you do in this situation? But sometimes that step to leadership comes through a contrarian or uncomfortable moment.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And there’s a bunch of words wrapped up in here that overlap with leadership. One of them is power. Another one is politics, which you ran into in the boardroom. And then there’s like leadership and then there’s management and all these things overlap and relate to each other.

I’d like to keep this focused on leadership particularly, but just let’s talk about the difference between leadership and management. So I see leadership as. More of the influence, the vision, the setting, the culture kind of stuff. Management is actually like the mission and getting the work done and having a great experience for employees and customers and all that kind of stuff.

So they’re different. And keeping this this conversation on leadership, but let’s take a sidetrack for a moment. Bring in management. How do you think about the difference between. What a manager does and what a leader does. And it may be the same person or it could be two different roles or whatever.

How do you d differentiate? Because I, I see confusion in the space, like where a manager is not necessarily a great leader or a leader may have really poor management skills. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: I don’t know that you and I have ever been this transparent before and I don’t know that you’ve seen my other content, part of my draw to the leadership space.

Was that I was a horrible leader. I was disgustingly bad at it. I was such a driven, a type personality coming, like before high school, like coming outta mid school. I was crazy competitive. Like when I had a paper route in the seventh grade. I didn’t just have a paper route as kids quit their paper routes.

Adopted their paper routes. And next thing I had seven seven paper routes. And the guy that ran, the guy ran a bunch of kids for paper routes, so he obviously he’s not, wasn’t the top of the list. He was totally confused, like, how is Kurt delivering? Hundreds of papers every day on these paper routes.

You didn’t realize I’d subcontracted to younger kids to go deliver the newspapers, and I just went around, knocked on doors, collected money, and went and bought Mountain Dews. And that was kinda like my first but I drove people hard and I did it even then. And so when I got outta school and started picking up these management jobs, like I managed the tuxedo store, I managed a furniture store, I ran a pizza shop.

I did these things before getting outta high school, but I did it like with this iron fist we are gonna produce, we are gonna, we’re gonna be productive, we’re gonna be on time and on budget. I was like, rah. And I was barking at people, push harder, push faster. I was a where it really came to a head.

I was a training supervisor at UPS, at one of the hubs in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. And for a long time I held the load record there. I’m just I was always a really hard worker, even physically, just a really hard worker. And so they said, oh, Kurt, you’re really good at this. We’re gonna put you in charge of a team.

I had this poor kid crying in the truck, like literally sobbing because he couldn’t load the truck fast enough. He is I feel like I’m gonna throw up. And I’m like, suck it up buttercup. Let’s get in there, throw those boxes, and that’s not a leader, right? That’s a manager. The manager is like, what are the spreadsheets?

What are the results? How hard can I push my people? And I was very much like that. Work harder. Work faster. We’ll see the results. And I had to really do a lot of studying and a lot of what would you call it? Self humility or something, right? Like I had to realize I got this wrong. And I gotta figure out what’s right.

And trying to be more empathetic and figure out how do you get performance out of people without making ’em crumble and cry in the back of a truck. Like how do you do that? And it’s a real arc form. So leadership is completely different, but the results can be very similar. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And let’s talk about power and influence.

You mentioned a leader creates influence. Influence can have or, it can also mean like exercising power and making, willing something to happen that can have positive and negative connotations. But what, what, in your view is like a great example of wielding influence in a leadership capacity to get great results in a very win kind of way.

Kurt Von Ahnen: You might be embarrassed, but you’re a really great example of it. You built a plugin by your own admission, you felt like you were late to the party when you launched lifter LMS. You weren’t late to the party. It had space to grow. And then think about it like, you have me on the team, I’ve been with the team.

I think we’re five or six years or something crazy like we’ve been doing stuff together. Emily’s been on the team for a long time. You brought Nadia to the team and she has just really blossomed and she’s knocking like every task outta the park. And the Colemans have joined the team, from an ownership perspective.

So then you have that 360 degree leadership, right? Like where you’re expanding at the peer level too, right? Not just downstream, cross stream. And so when someone takes a look at an overall picture and goes, oh, wait a minute. He’s leading down, he’s leading across, he’s leading up.

And when I say leading up, you have the LMS cast. You have influence at the different, like I’ve seen you at Word Camp, I’ve seen you interact with other people in the space. So that’s leading up, that’s leading across, that’s leading down that is like a full bubble of. Influence. And then it sounds manipulative.

I don’t mean it to sound manipulative, but when you have that full bubble atmosphere of influence, yeah. You get to say, this is the direction I want this to go. Or I’m thinking, Hey, you know what, I’m being led to think this is a good thing. And then people come along with that. And so that’s part of that power, that’s part of that, the influence, the power that the thing that people talk about.

But it’s. If you do it well and you do it with the right heart and the right intention, it’s organic. It’s not pushy, and people want to come along. It’s not like that. You’re pushing them along. And so there’s a big difference in, in how it’s subtle but it’s a huge difference in how it really occurs.

Chris Badgett: I appreciate you saying that. I think one of the, if I’m ever evaluating a company as an example and I’m asking myself the question, how good is the leadership here? One of the things I look for is how long have the team members been there? Because people and sometimes people move on and that’s fine.

But if, particularly when people move on, they were there for a very long time and then they did something different or whatever, that’s a good sign. But if you have all this churn in your organization for employees, to me that’s like a flag that, oh, is there a leadership issue here? And it can be a lot of things.

It’s complicated. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: But you, I gotta jump in. You’re reminding me of a consulting call I did two weeks ago. Yeah. A motorcycle dealership. I do some training in the power sports field for those that are listening and don’t know. I do some training in the power sports field and we had a dealer owner on a call and I said, so tell me about some of the problems of your dealership.

What are you trying to fix with this training? And he goes our technicians are flaky. We got one guy comes in a half hour late, takes two hours for lunch. Half the time you don’t know if he’s gonna show up or not. We’ve had, technicians turn in, turn out like like a bunch of people quit and leave.

‘Cause you can’t trust technicians. And then, our parts guys are, really struggling with back orders from the OEMs and the suppliers and. But for the most part, our sales team is strong, right? And then so he goes to this thing and I said okay. I said, you’ve done a really good job of outlining some symptoms, in this training we really need to talk about root causes.

And he was like, what do you mean root causes? I just told you what the problems were with the dealership. And I said, no, you told me what the symptoms were with the dealership. I said people don’t leave positions. They leave leadership. So if you have a revolving door with technicians leaving your service department, that’s not a sign that technicians in general are flaky and undependable.

That’s a sign that something’s broken. Broken in your leadership, tree, right? You’ve got a broken branch in the leadership tree that’s causing these guys to realize, hey, this place isn’t being run well. I can’t make enough money working under this leadership. I’m gonna have to go find something else.

You can imagine that probably didn’t go over very well, but piece by piece. Every problem he brought up, I was like, that’s another symptom. Let’s talk about how that root cause works. And then we got into process development talks and things like that. But it’s really interesting to see how people.

The perspective what’s the perspective of something that’s not working? And when you talk to somebody, especially if they’re really close to the problem, chances are they miss they start talking in terms of symptoms instead of what’s the root cause, how do you get, how do you establish relationship with people so that they will perform or will come to work on time or will not take a two and a half hour lunch.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. It’s a heavy load to carry. But I think about that a lot. If there’s a problem in a bus in the business, I’m like my first thought is how am I responsible for this? And I think that’s uncommon yeah it’s easier to point the finger and of course multiple parties are participating in whatever the issue is, but ultimately it’s a leadership or management issue.

I’ve watched you take personal leadership and. In short order, move your family from California to Kansas. And like part of what a leader does is they hold space or they provide safety, security through hard things. And so I watch you like, move the family to Kansas and then I’ve watched you lead into developing your network and.

Your influence locally in Kansas and get involved in lots of projects and community and stuff like that. How do you think about that transition just from a leadership, like what kind of wisdom for others? Because one thing a leader will do typically is they will make dramatic change if they need to.

And you did it, you can get stuck and just keep doing what you’ve always done and cross your fingers. But there’s times when you have to burn the boats and try something else. So what tips do you have around that? 

Kurt Von Ahnen: When I talk to people in general about the switch from California to Kansas, the paradigm shift in our quality of life is, it’s darn near immeasurable, Chris.

It really is.

Chris Badgett: That didn’t, it felt risky in a big bet at the time, right? It is lot of 

Kurt Von Ahnen: resistance. It is risky in a big bet, but. Here’s like where I’m going to, I’m just gonna get to brass tacks with it. If you’re a leader, if you’re in charge of stuff and you feel external pressure to say yes to projects that you know you normally wouldn’t want to do, or you think are a bad idea, but you know that you have to say yes because you gotta create the revenue.

That to me is, that’s the sign. Like something. Something’s gotta change. So then you have to start really doing, again, go back to root cause analysis, right? Why am I in this position? Why am I saying yes to projects that my team shouldn’t have to work on? Why am I taking on these liabilities?

And stressing myself out about stuff that I, that normally I wouldn’t say yes to. And any business owner or a project manager is gonna have those moments, but when it becomes a consistent thing, you have to like go, wait a minute, I gotta really take stock of what’s happening here. And when we were in the Southern California economy post pandemic.

I had to say yes to so many projects that I knew I normally wouldn’t do. Either the money wasn’t right or the project was poor or something was, it just wasn’t right. And I was under a lot of stress to do a lot of things that I normally wouldn’t have done. And so I knew we had to change the economic makeup of what we were doing, but I really.

This is gonna sound, weird. I didn’t really fully understand what I was opening up when I moved away from California. So when we got to Kansas, we lowered our overhead by 65%. I’ve always been really on point I don’t need a bunch of car payments. I don’t need so if you think about the basic cost of living.

We lowered our expenses by 65% moving to Kansas. And what that did was it immediately freed me up to not have to say yes to certain projects. So by being able to pass on certain things that were not, high margin items or high, good fit items, I was able to say yes to things that were a good fit or higher margin items.

And that allowed us to grow and scale at a much quicker rate. And then you look at. What’s the population density and the expectations of one region could be anywhere. Right? And then you look at, we live in a fairly small community in Kansas now, and so all of a sudden I’m big fish little pond.

I show up and I’m like, I have all this enterprise web building experience. I’m connected to plugin developers. I’m connected to, different WordPress hosts. And so when I go to local entrepreneur meetups. And have conversations with people. I’m able to communicate in a way to them that lends confidence that I don’t think they’ve really seen before in this space.

And it’s give, and they’ve just adopted us. Everyone’s opened up their arms and let us in. The community college, the high school, the city the entrepreneur development organization in town everybody’s just been super open, super, super friendly, and they want to be, they want. They want to be in our space, but they also are inviting us into their space.

It’s very much a, it’s very much a co-mingling and it’s working out really so far. 

Chris Badgett: One of the things that interests me is the difference between a founder, entrepreneur and a CEO. And from your story you had to. Make a sacrifice, make a move, step into the unknown. And that’s what founder entrepreneurs do. And there’s like a lot of sacrifice. So there’s particularly if you’re bootstrapped, self-funded, just starting from nothing. If later you’re doing well, it looks that you’ve, it’s like unfair maybe, or it happened overnight, but there was actually like this trail of sacrifice and stuff in the past.

And part of what leaders do, it takes courage, right? Because sometimes those sacrifices don’t work out. And it was a test, it was an experiment, but it was a failed experiment. And then the more times you come back, in my experience. The more things you try, eventually it starts looking like luck, but you just, you’re actually really good at failing fast and then trying something else.

Kurt Von Ahnen: I, it’s such a weird thing because I actually used to say, failing forward and then all of a sudden John Maxwell came out with a book called Failing Forward, and I felt cheated. I was like, is he reading my emails? I completely believe in taking a lot of swings. I take a lot of swings and it’s okay if something doesn’t work.

Some things I get emotionally tied to and and I share this all the time, like my Power Sport Academy project. I put that together. I’m super passionate about power sports. I know I’m gonna help hundreds, if not thousands of families find, financial freedom or at least, financial de, consistency.

Through this training. And I’m really proud of it, but it wasn’t selling. It just wasn’t selling and it was years and years. And you even helped me with it. You were like this headline sucks. ’cause you’re really good at that kind of communication, right? So you were like change this headline, change this.

And I kept trying different things to try and promote that product and it wasn’t working. And then to your point. I was gonna turn it off. I was gonna say, you know what, I’m done. It’s too much of a distraction. I’m gonna go in another direction. And, but it was five years, like I’d let the thing sit there for five years trying to promote this thing and then all of a sudden guy calls up, he’s got a hundred dealerships that need trained and that.

Instantly turned that project into, 55, $60,000 a year of revenue. And so then people see that, like last year I went to the AM expo and I was a speaker at the AM Expo, which is a power sports thing. And people are like, Hey, you’re back. ‘Cause I used to work for Ducati and Suzuki and so they’re like, Hey, you’re back.

And they’re like, oh man, it’s so cool. It’s like you’re an overnight success. And it like, they’re acting like, it’s like some immediate. Gift and it’s no, this was five, this is the result of five years of work that I almost gave up on, and now it’s actually starting to come true, which is a cool thing.

Chris Badgett: This episode of LMS Cas is brought to you by Popup Maker, the most powerful, trusted popup solution for WordPress. Whether you’re selling online courses or memberships, popup maker helps you grow your email list, boost sales conversions, and engage your visitors with highly customizable popups. Imagine creating custom opt-ins, announcements and promotions that actually convert.

I personally use pop-up maker on my lifter LMS websites for lead magnet opt-ins, card abandonment, upsells, downsells in guiding users to helpful content. Pub Maker is an essential tool for growing my email list and making more money online through my website. Ready to take your website to the next level?

Head on over to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% on your order. Discount automatically applies when you visit through that link. Papa Maker also has an awesome free version, so you can just use that as well. Go to wp popup maker.com/lmscast and save 15% off your order or get started with the free version.

Now. Get more leads and sales on your website with popup Maker today. Now back to the episode.

One of my favorite things is to develop other leaders and and the reason why is because when I was younger in my leadership career. I had some people develop me, so at the place I worked in Alaska, there was an opening for a manager and I felt like I, I was probably less Type A than you. Like I was a all star employee.

Worked really hard, pulled more than my load was always helpful. It was, I’m a good employee and then. One of the other managers at the time brought me aside. He is you really should apply for that manager position. And then I got a lot of mentor from my boss and other managers and stuff like that, and really developed and also just naturally found that I liked also to develop other leaders and stuff like that.

But what advice would you have for somebody and let me just say, I see this at lifter, LMS, like the entrepreneurs that use our tools are some of them, if I’m looking for case studies, some of the best ones are like super humble and they’re like, oh, I’m not ready yet. And they’re like, but they’re actually like doing great and making great progress.

But they’re underselling themselves on their. What they’ve accomplished and the influence and power that they have, and there’s different leadership styles. But for someone who’s maybe not realizing how much of a leader they already are, what advice would you have to like, discover that or encourage that, that, that 

Kurt Von Ahnen: seed to grow?

I almost don’t wanna encourage it and spoil it to be honest with you. True leadership to me, like people that are organically great leaders. One of the, one of the things, one of the traits of that is a sense of humility, right? Is like they’re still approachable. They’re still normal people.

They’re, I can go and I don’t really like, like domestic beer but I can still go to the neighborhood pub, grab something that tastes decent and and get along with everybody in the room, and there’s just a certain. That’s a certain sense of humility, right?

I’m not above any of these people. Farmers, tow truck drivers, whatever. It doesn’t matter. You’re in, you work hard, let’s crack a cold one and have a good time. There’s a certain like that trait, that humility is so attractive to people that you don’t wanna spoil that.

You don’t wanna put people on a pedestal and be like, man, you’re slaying it. You’re awesome. You are kicking butt. Because then you run the risk of leveling down the humility, which is the attractive part of leadership. And then they start to get, inflated. There’s gotta be a certain balance to things.

So for me it’s like I really like to focus on accomplishment or direction or, apparent potential of somebody, but not so much you’re slaying it, you’re the bomb, you’re the this. It’s more I wanna say, Hey, you’re in a really good space. You’re in a really good, this is a really good moment.

Momentum. Momentum moment, can’t speak. This is a really good momentum moment. We want to capitalize on the momentum, right? But I want to use that kind of talk instead of break them out of their shell, because that shell is part of the attractiveness that’s making them successful.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And one of the, my favorite quotes from the DA by Lao Sue is he says, the people will say, we did it ourselves. So great leaders, in my opinion, are almost invisible, and they’re empowering others and they send out, influence and positive change through others and don’t even necessarily care or need to take the credit for it.

Kurt Von Ahnen: When I tell people, like when I first started coming outta my shell as I’m gonna be purposeful about this leadership thing, I took over as a service manager of a Pep Boy store. And this place was, I’m not gonna say it was in the ghetto, but it wasn’t in the best of neighborhoods. It was a little bit rundown.

The shop was filthy. The cars were junk in the lot, it was a pep boys service center. And I walked in there. In regular clothes. I didn’t have a uniform yet. I walked in and it was like a day or two before I was actually supposed to start the job, and nobody stopped me. Like it was one of those stores, like no security.

Nobody gave a credit about nothing, right? So I walked through the shop, nobody said anything. So I picked up a broom and I started sweeping. And then I, so I cleaned the back room where the oil disposal place was, and then I started cleaning the shop and I literally started pushing like toolboxes around and scrubbing the floor and.

Usually if you touch a technician’s toolbox, you’re fixing to get, some hands, right? Nobody said a word. They all treated me like I was some kind of paid labor to come in and clean the shop, which to me was fine. I went into the restroom and it was just coated and grease and hand prints.

So I basically pressure washed the bathroom, slapped on some gloves, cleaned the bathroom. It took me two days to clean this shop, clean the whole shop. On the third day, I walked in with my service manager uniform shirt on, and I said, Hey, gather everybody up. We’re gonna have a quick meeting, and they were like.

Oh no. And I just said, Hey, does the shop look good? Oh yeah, the shop looks great. I said, great. Now you guys already know I’ll never ask you to do something I wouldn’t do myself first. Now we just need to maintain it, and they were like, oh. But it was like instant buy-in that way.

There wasn’t any there wasn’t any question about whether Kurt was gonna come in and work hard at this job, and then. I gotta admit, I’m pretty good at running a service department. So everyone started to make more money as soon as the sh like the shop was already clean. But once they started to make more money, these technicians were like, what can we do next?

Like that influence starts to take over. And then we ended up having one of the number one stores in the district for profit. But it’s, to me it is the way that you come into leadership. When I started at Suzuki, it was the opposite. They had, Suzuki had promised my job to people that were on staff, and then they hired me from the outside, right?

And then I show up and it’s this is Kurt. He’s the new manager of publications and training. Everyone that was promised that job instantly hated me. And then I had to overcome all this negativity that I didn’t create. I had to overcome all, it took two months to get people to have any buy-in with anything I wanted to do.

Because that’s the difference of how you enter the space, right? And the difference is like 15 years between Pep Boys and Suzuki. So at the beginning of my leadership journey, I had this great success. And then near the end, recently in my employment career, I have this giant failure I gotta overcome.

But I guess that overcoming is part of the success. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Leading by example I find is really powerful. And I see some entrepreneurs not do it in the sense that like for me it wasn’t a surprise when you were two minutes early to this meeting. I’m timely to my meetings, right?

And if I’m late, something crazy happened or if I like, it rarely happens. But if I completely missed something, something came up that was outside of my control. So I demonstrate the behavior that I like to see, which is respecting each other’s time. Being ready and prepared. A funny story from Alaska is we would have our team meeting in a tent in the morning with about 20 people, right?

And outside of the tent, it’s about a 50 yard walk to a dog yard that has a couple hundred sled dogs in it. On the corner of the dog yard is a porta-potty, right? And it was interesting like how. 25% of people would use the porta-potty before the meeting and 25% or and, or 75% before the meeting, 25% on the clock out to start their shift.

And I just, it’s, part of leadership is to pick and choose your battles. Is that really a battle I want to have or do I care more about this other thing over here? Yeah. But. Leading by example. Like being prepared to work and ready for go time is a very important signal. And if a manager or a boss or a leader doesn’t do that themselves, they’re literally setting the bar like really low and then they act surprised when performances, basically similar to what they’re doing.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah, that do as I do not as I say, or do as I say, not as I do nonsense. That’s there’s a couple of different ways to look at that. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Yeah. It’s a, it’s an interesting one. Let’s talk about leadership styles, because there’s not just one leadership template, there’s like the humble leader, there’s like the command and control leader, and a lot of it depends on context.

Are we going to war? Are we doing life coaching? Are we doing like fam, like some kind of major decision as a family? There’s all kinds of context, but there’s so many different leadership styles, yeah, the, the humble one, the command and control one. Another one is I position myself probably more as like a servant leader.

I’m the opposite of command and control, but I’m still effective and I’m, I care more about unblocking my team, making sure their goals fit inside the goals of the business, adapting and, lifting people up. I’m not trying to push ’em down and push ’em out and deploy. That happens like through the work and stuff, but it’s just, I have my own style.

It’s soft. It’s not hard, but you can also be a hard leader too, and be effective and respected and respectful. So tell us some thoughts on style and finding your own style. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: I, if anyone is like thinking, let’s say that someone listens to this and they go this is a different message today. This is cool.

I’m inspired. Maybe I should do something. One of the first steps is to figure out how are you internally wired? Yeah. So take an assessment and there’s. Half a dozen right off the top of our heads that we could go through, right? Whe whether it’s A-A-A-A-A-C-V-I or a Briggs and whatever, and or a disc or, but find out like how are you internally wired and then how do you actually naturally communicate or naturally work within systems.

And then Chris mentioned a couple of things. Is this a process driven leadership example, right? Is this something that is really dependent upon process, organization, and conformance? Like you have to conform to a certain process to find success as a team? In this arena, whatever that is. Could be war, could be making cars on an assembly line, could be like all kinds of things.

Certain things are very process driven, whereas if you get into like the coaching space, you are more like, like a really great coach never teaches the subject anything. A really great coach asks phenomenal questions that allows the subject to teach themselves. And so that’s like a form of leadership where you’re extracting it out of somebody else, but you’re leading and you’re having influence because of your method of extraction.

But the success is really coming from the person. So it’s completely different. And some people are wired for different ways. For instance, sometimes I’m really good at asking these questions and being this coach kind of person. But if I’m honest with myself and how I’m really wired. Sometimes I just don’t have the patience internally.

I just don’t have, ’cause it, it could be like a tattoo on somebody’s forehead. Like you’ve got this issue and you are skirting around it. Someone needs to bring it to your attention. And so I’m the kind of person that’s a little more direct and I’ll bring something to someone’s attention and then I’ll say, now let’s do some root cause analysis and figure out how to erase this tattoo issue.

So that’s not really great coaching. That’s more like. Great consulting and that’s like a different thing. So I really thrive in the consultant space. I thrive really good on seeing things that most people don’t see from their own environment. Maybe they’re in too deep to really see the details.

And so I’m really good at saying here’s our existing structure, here’s our existing process. Here’s our existing, results. Data set that we’re looking at. Where is this coming from? If we take a snapshot of this right now, what’s actually causing this snapshot to be reality? And then where do we want it to be?

And then I’m really good at so what would be the next steps to get to where we want to be? So that’s more of a consulting leadership mindset. And that seems to be like where my real strengths are. The coaching side, like I said, I don’t know that I have enough patience for it. And when it comes time to crack the whip and really get something moving like a soccer team that needs to win the big game. That’s one of those that’s process driven, right? Defense is defense. Offense is offense, the triangulated play, and the art of the sport, like all of that. So when you’re yelling from the sidelines, yeah, it’s maybe, it seems like you’re being really hard in the moment.

To me, successful leaders that are in those environments, they are hard in the moment and the team looks for them to be hard in the moment. They’re looking for that discipline in the moment, but you have to have the cognizance the self-awareness to realize that when the moment’s over you, you can gear back and be more relational.

Then it’s that relationship that allows you to gear up in the moment. It’s that emotional bank account. If you make enough positive deposits in the emotional bank account, when you’re not in those moments, then in those moments you are fully qualified and fully deposited so that you can make that emotional withdrawal, and be demanding in the moment.

Chris Badgett: Let’s leave people with an actionable leadership superpower or something to work on. It can be anything. I’ll do mine first, which is realizing that people are not robots and realizing that we, there’s something called the superior worth hypothesis, which means this is from my anthropology background that, you perceive a culture, another culture through the context of your own. And I think it was Margaret Mead that said we see the world as we are, not as it is. And so once you realize that not everybody else is neither a robot, nor are they wired, just like UNC, have the same mindsets and viewpoints and everything, you start realizing how different people are.

If you can empathize with people and really take their perspective, you can be a much more effective leader. And the human brain likes to take shortcuts like you may see yourself like, oh, I’m a b plus leader. I’m pretty good at what I do. But the reality is, if you have followers this person over here sees you as an a plus.

This person over here sees you as an F. This person sees you as a c. Like, and you can’t control that, like respect is earned and stuff like that. And maybe your style doesn’t match their style. So what I learned is if you can really take the perspective of the other person and adapt, particularly in a one-on-one situ situation, like if you have a global challenge at your work and the te the whole team is involved and you go to people, maybe you have a team meeting about the challenge.

But then you go to people one-on-one. I might approach this person who, and you can use things like personality type assessments and things to figure out how people are different, but I’m like, this person over here needs a lot of autonomy in the work they do. And what they need from me is to just clearly paint a picture of where we need to go and then give them a hundred percent freedom on how to get there.

This other person over here is more of a process person. And they’re gonna, if I give them like, here’s what I would do, and maybe structure like a flow chart of changes and activities and time boxing and calendaring and chart the path they’re set up for success. But those are two completely different approaches that achieve the same outcome.

When you’re leading first be okay with lots of people having different perceptions of you within and with and outside of your organization. Also treat your team, your customers, your industry partners, your colleagues. Everybody’s different. And if you can meet them where more, where they are, it, you become a lot more influential as a leader.

Yeah. That’s good stuff. What about you? What’s a superpower or insight you had that you would hope other leaders could unlock or explore further?

Kurt Von Ahnen: One of the things I think really needs explored by most leaders is a lot of leaders don’t give themselves the space to be able to find success. They allow themselves to get into too many obligations or putting out too many fires or, not having that clarity of thought in the moment where they really would perform well.

They didn’t set themselves up for success in advance, so they don’t perform as well as they could. So one of the things I recommend to people is, and you’ll hear this with a lot of people, right? But it, but I’ll say, Hey, just get up a little bit earlier, right? Have some quiet time. Do some kind of inspirational reading, whatever that is, a chapter of the Bible some book that you like, whatever.

And then for me, I use a digital planner and I actually write down my schedule every day. Even though I have a digital schedule, I have, nine calendars for all these different projects I do, and everybody’s trying to book time on that calendar. And but I have everything set up so that they can only book an appointment.

24 hours away, right? So when I get up in the morning, there’s not gonna be any more appointments booked on my day when I get up. So I get up and I physically write down my calendar every day. And what that does, Chris, it sounds stupid, but it like. Plugs me into the day, it aligns me with what are my requirements for the day, and then what am I able to fit into the other spaces of the day?

And then that’s my time blocking, like when you say time block, right? And if a customer needs to meet with me, they’re gonna if it’s today’s Thursday and they need to meet with me, they’re gonna go to my link and they’re gonna pick an appointment. The next available one’s Friday. Not a problem.

So when I get up tomorrow, I’ll see that appointment. I’ll put that, I’ll write that into my schedule. So if that appointment’s at 11, I know that I’ve got from nine to 11 to knock something out of the park, and I’ve got from 12 to five to knock other things out of the park. And I think that a lot of leaders don’t have the clarity of their day, so they’re constantly jumping from one.

Distraction to the other, and they never really get the time to succeed at any one element. And I think if you build that as a habit, you’re able to have influence on others to build similar habits. And then if you have a team of people seem to be more organized, more, more together in their space, more clarity of thought.

And I think you start to see a lot of great things happen. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And just in closing, leadership is it’s a whole other job and you have to make time for it. Like I have a, yeah. I have a block in my calendar and I learned this trick from somebody else. So leaders are supposed to be visionaries, right?

And a lot of leaders and entrepreneurs are, they have a vision for the future. But I have a block of time on Fridays where for 30 minutes I have everything off, every device off. And I just sit with one question, which is, how can I create more value for. My, my users, my customers, the person I’m serving than anybody else in the world.

And that’s a, that’s like literally an exercise or a workout around vision. But if I don’t make the space for that and I’m just in reaction mode like you’re saying and oh, that time block just went away, but make time, like you said, get up early, read a book on leadership, pick one area of leadership and try to just work on that over a month.

And if you do that for 12 months, you’re gonna be a much better leader at the end. 

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah, the time blocking thing is huge. Personal development is huge. Part of that personal development, and I know that you’re strong on this one, Chris, some kind of physical activity. Oh yeah. Our talk today has been mostly about, mental stuff, mental gymnastics and relationships and emotions and all that.

But I think there’s a lot more clarity in that space when you’re physically fit or when you. Exert energy. When I’m working on the computer and I feel like nothing’s happening. Like I get that, just that weird I’m not being very productive right now. I don’t force myself to work through it.

That’s, to me, I’ve learned over the years, that’s not gonna work for me. I’m just gonna get more and more frustrated and work slower and slower. What I do is I go jump on a bicycle, knock out 10 or 20 miles, come back, take a shower, sit down on the computer and knock out three days worth of work in an evening.

Like it, it’s so if you’re a physical person. Don’t let this other, don’t let the stuff that Chris and I are talking about distract you from that physicality. Make sure you still center yourself with, the exertion that you need. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Burnout is real for everybody, but particularly leaders. You have to have, it is a balancing act and you have to unplug and do other things and just be a human and just like you getting outside, exercising is a definitely a superpower that.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Is, I really opened the door for you to say you bike 15 to 20 miles. Heck, I run that far almost every day. Hey, I’m a humble leader, Kurt. I’m a humble leader. They say that they say that bicycling they, how is it? It’s four times the distance for running, isn’t it? That what it is.

I don’t know. So so a marathon is like 23 miles? Yeah. But a century ride on a bicycle of course is a hundred miles. Yeah. So running is four times harder than bicycling. I just wanna be super clear on this show running is four times harder than bicycling. So if I’m biking 10 miles and you’re running three or four a day you’re slaying me.

You’re absolutely slaying me. 

Chris Badgett: Awesome. That’s it for this episode on leadership. Hope you enjoyed it and continue to develop as a leader. It’s a lifelong thing that never ends, but it’s one of the most rewarding things in life, both in business or work, but also in your personal life, like personal development is personal leadership.

Thank you Kurt, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it, and we will do another episode down the road. Take care. Nice.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.