402 | Fast Growth Leadership Requires More Than Responsibility
If you want fast-growth leadership, you must understand the gap between responsibility and ownership. This gap exists because you ask your employees to trade money for time. Many leaders believe this is enough — I give you wages and you give me work — is a common thought. Fast-growth leadership has a very different view that encourages employees to take ownership of their work. This message is a small portion of a speech I gave a few weeks ago to a group of multi-million dollar business owners. Discover why leadership that inspires people to feel like owners is so important.
Don't miss an episode. Subscribe to Growth Think Tank.
Share the LOVE and TWEET about this episode.
Fast Growth Leadership: The Transcript
Disclaimer: This transcript was created using YouTube’s translator tool and that may mean that some of the words, grammar, and typos come from a misinterpretation of the video.
Hi, this is Gene Hammett. I’m the host of Leaders in the Trenches. My question for you today is how do you get your employees to go beyond responsibility to take full ownership for the work and for the client experience for their projects? That is the question, right? How do you get them to go beyond nine to five thinking? How do you get them to think like founders and owners? Well, I hopefully am gonna give you a little bit of a treat today. I’m gonna give you an excerpt from a speech I recently did to a group called Gulf Coast CEO Forum. These are multi-million dollar business owners and founders, and they really wanted to understand how to grow faster, and so that’s what we’re talking about. This is just a piece of it. So here’s the speech right now. Do you remember your first car? The one you paid your own money for? What color was it?
[Man] Red.
Anybody else?
[Man2] Multiple colors.
I remember my first car. It was nothing special about that car. It was kind of a crap brown color. It had almost 100,000 miles on it, but you know what was special about that car? I owned it. I paid for it. My dad paid half. I paid the other half, but. I owned that car. Lemme ask you another question. Do you remember the color of your first rental car? You guys are old enough to know that, I know you didn’t rent one just yesterday. But you know you went up to the counter, looked over that contract. You signed, initialed. You accepted responsibility for that car, right? If you wrecked it, you would have to pay for it. There’s a big gap in responsibility and ownership. We’re gonna talk about that today. I study the Inc. 5000. This is the fastest growing companies privately held in the United States. They’re the top 1% of growth. Do we have any Inc. 5000 level companies here?
One, two. Fantastic. There’s a lot of industries represented in there. So if you think your industry is too stable to not be here, look at this, 23,000 companies over 11 years. This research is available. I mean I can give it to you if you want to. I know you can barely read the slide, but I wanted you to see that there’s a huge variety of companies that are growing really fast. Let’s put this in perspective. The average company over a three year period is growing between five and 40%.
40% is not too bad, right? I went to the CEOs of the fastest growing companies. I sat down with them, had these conversations. I surveyed them. I had one-on-one talks about what’s growing them. Their average growth, 2,700%-plus. That’s what I’m sharing with you today. What could we learn from those companies that are growing so fast? A few months ago, I had an interview with Ben Wright with Velocity Global, number four on the list. This is astronomical when I say this. It’s probably unbelievable, but his company over a three year period grew 39,000%. Everyone says well, how big was the company when he started because I know math?
Today, he’s over 50 million to give you an aspect of how fast he grew. First-time entrepreneur. A lotta the stuff we talk about today comes from not only his interview but the other interviews I had with those leaders. I asked them about their sales and marketing. I asked them about the strategies that were driving growth ’cause that’s where I’ve spent a lot of my time is how to get companies to grow more from a revenue standpoint, and I noticed a lotta my companies were having a tough time getting the employees aligned with that. So I asked this question. It’s a pretty good question, right? With big growth goals, how do you get your employees motivated to take responsibility for those goals? Do you like that question? I like it. I wanted to understand how they did that.
A few interviews into it and I realized it wasn’t about responsibility. It was about ownership. They got them to feel, they gotta get the employees to feel like owners inside the work even if they don’t have an employee stock ownership program, even if they don’t have commissions that they’re in front of. How do you get someone to feel like an owner when it comes to the work that they’re doing and the clients they’re serving? That’s what we’re talking about today.
Ownership is yes or no, black or white. There’s a reason why I opened up the story today to the talk and asked you about your rental car and your car that you owned. The way you feel about the rental car now is more like a trash can, and the way you feel about your car that you own is quite different. Would you agree to that? Do you want your employees to treat their work like just with responsibility or a sense of ownership? I’m not saying this is easy, but this is what’s required if you wanna stay relevant in today’s marketplace. It’s an own its culture. How do you get them to own the project, own the client experience?
Hopefully, you enjoyed that as much as I enjoyed giving it. I know it’s not the full speech, and you may want to know more about how you could actually spark ownership beyond just paying for people and giving them profit sharing and all of the things that you can use monetarily. It can be done from the internal perspective, and actually, it’s more effective if it’s done from the internal, but you have to get some things aligned right. If you have any questions about that, make sure you reach out to me at [email protected]. As always, lead with courage. See you next time.
Disclaimer: This transcript was created using YouTube’s translator tool and that may mean that some of the words, grammar, and typos come from a misinterpretation of the video.
Resources
A QUICK FAVOR
And lastly, please leave a rating and review for the Leaders in the Trenches on iTunes (or Stitcher) – it will help us in many ways, but it also inspires us to keep doing what we are doing here. Thank you in advance!
If you want more from us check out more interviews:
Best Selling Author Interviews
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | https://www.youtube.com/user/leadersinthetrenches
