How Bart McCollum Thinks About Consistent Behaviors for Enduring Success
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[00:00:00]
Welcome & intro
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Bart Mccollum: It's kinda like physical therapy. Tom Brady is an incredible professional athlete. Tom Brady learned to do physical therapy and work with trainers that would like, literally have him take a a resistance band and go like this 50 times. LIke he had 100 of Those things Thoseare the fundamentals of him being able to play quarterback into his mid to late forties.
Behavioral competencies are those kinds of things, the kinds of things that most entrepreneurs will brush over and say, we don't need to do that. I can already run a marathon and, and in three and a half hours I don't need to like stretch my calves.
You do need to stretch your calves, and there's a specific way that you can do it. There's a specific way that you can hold your team accountable for doing the same thing
Kenny Lange: Welcome to the How Leaders Think Podcast, a show that transforms you by renewing your mind and giving you new ways to think.
I'm your host Kenny Lang, and with me today is the Bark A Column. He is the integrator, which is a fun word, business leader and operator and [00:01:00] co-author. Of you before me, a book about transforming teams through servant leadership and behavioral psychology. So it gets you here and here. And this is my lung.
Bart's leadership journey
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Kenny Lange: My wait hard's over here. I'm used to the right finger. We'll all we'll fix this in post. He helps high performing founders build great, scaled and enduring companies by unlocking clarity, trust, and traction at every level of the business. Welcome to the show Bart.
Bart Mccollum: It is an absolute pleasure to be here, Kenny. Thank you.
Kenny Lange: We are gonna have some fun. I, I do have to say I really do love your background. 'cause I feel like we're either, we are gonna talk about leadership is what I think, but you might also be streaming on Twitch right now through a different camera. Which I would be fine. I'll be.
Bart Mccollum: my shirt didn't clash with the background. And what we got was the absolute worst combination of colors that you could possibly have, so you.
Kenny Lange: If you like the Lakers, uh, you probably got some purple and gold going for you. Um, so there's [00:02:00] that. Um, I only like one slice of the Lakers known as Luca
Bart Mccollum: Still
Kenny Lange: don't wanna, I.
Bart Mccollum: did you like? Yeah.
Kenny Lange: I'm still reeling. I've sought therapy changed some medication just to really make it through this difficult season.
Mavericks fans are desirous of prayers and grace and, and understanding, but that's not what we're here to talk about. Bart, tell me what is on your mind.
Bart Mccollum: Well, since you went straight to sports and for everybody listening, we're both Dallas people. I guess I, I shouldn't ascribe you to Dallas. We are both North Texas to East Texas people. And so the Mavericks would probably be the ball club that we're talking about. But um, have you ever, maybe this is just me and maybe I'm telling on myself, have you ever been on YouTube and seen those street brawl videos that people have?
Kenny Lange: Yes.
Bart Mccollum: Kenny's kind of questioning why he asked me to be on this podcast with my so guy. [00:03:00] People who, have these organized street brawls and there's a guy named Kimbo Slice that if you follow MMA, and again, I'm not a follower of MMA necessarily, he was a brutal street brawler. Um, he's since passed away, but he was one of the most intimidating and scariest human beings that you would ever see.
He was just enormous and he would just dispense with people on YouTube. Quickly, and he became such a thing that he eventually tried to make a career in MMA. So he tried to go from being an amateur kind of brawler to being a professional fighter. And in his first professional fight, he got KD in 14 seconds.
And
Kenny Lange: Geez.
The power of servant leadership
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Bart Mccollum: I was, I was thinking about that just because. We work with lots of entrepreneurs, and Kenny, you do as well. And we know people who are visionaries and who are able to take something from nothing and create something oftentimes very unique, build [00:04:00] something very, very impressive. Create an organization.
And a lot of times the way that you get there is. Because you have a great idea or because you just have a very strong will, or maybe it's because you charismatic and you're just a driver and you get yourself to a certain point and. Then the game changes. And so, a lot of people peak out at a certain point, but for certain leaders that wanna get beyond a certain point, they go from being essentially knife fighters to playing chess.
And what I have by accident come upon in my career is helping people who have that grit and have that capability, make that transition point so they can kind of scale to the next level if they so choose in doing.
Kenny Lange: Gotcha, man. Okay. There's a lot I love about this, so, uh, we will have some fun and, uh, uh, you have restored my faith and, and my choice to have you on the show. Just kidding. About the initial questioning what [00:05:00] this is making me think about, is there's a book by Stephen Pressfield, which is, he's most notably known for the, the War of Art, which I used to make required reading at my agency.
But he has another, another great book just 'cause he's a, a phenomenal author called Turning Pro.
Bart Mccollum: Yep.
Kenny Lange: and just that difference between amateur and a professional. And so I love, I love your illustration from, you know, fighting amateur to pro, like what a difference there is. 'cause you would think like, oh yeah, he is gonna hold his own.
He is just he's knocking people out in 14 seconds or less on, on these YouTube videos. What happens when you encounter somebody who has not just had raw talent, but they've honed it as a skill and a craft and they understand the nuances of fighting and they can read, and there's an intelligence and a as George w might say, strategery about this. Why number one, I'm [00:06:00] curious. How do you see people in, in the entrepreneurial space that, like you said, rightfully said, like you and I are, are talking and pouring into and, and actively participants in, how do you see people not understanding the gap that exists? It's a gap. You're helping people traverse.
They're willing, but only if they're willing to choose that route. It's not easy, and it's not for the faint of hard, but what really is the difference in the entrepreneurial world? Of someone who has maybe that raw skill as an amateur and someone who's really honed it, uh, as a craft, as a professional.
Building trust in teams
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Bart Mccollum: Yeah, so it's like I love Stephen Pressfield, by the way. That's a, both of those books are fantastic. And he actually wrote, uh, the Legend of Bagger Vance, and there's a lot of golf analogies in this space as well. What you find is. My fighting analogy isn't the right, perfect analogy for this because the, the types of things that you have to be good at to create something and build [00:07:00] something from nothing.
And the types of things that you have to be good at in order to be able to get to quote unquote the next level. Whatever that level is, once you've peaked out, are very different skills. So that's why I like to say this versus match. I don't know if you've ever heard the, the terminology of success versus significance. And so, I happened to work with a a visionary at LY Media, Heath Hill, who realized he is the quintessential entrepreneur. He created something that frankly doesn't have a, an analog anywhere else out of really sheer will and, and brilliance.
And he got to a point where he was like I know that there are things that, uh, there, there are holes in my swing, so to speak, that I'm going to need to fill in order to be able to, first of all take the company to the next level, but also build the culture that I'm telling the world that I want to have.
So again, like it's the things that got us to that point. The things that drive a visionary to get to that point aren't necessarily the are. So you have [00:08:00] to realize that, first of all, and then you have to do that other thing because doing that second thing. Oftentimes, like you are completely and so may choose.
Most people choose not to do that're happy. They've achieved a level of success with an organization and with something. Shifting gears and kind of going into orbit requires them to, at some level become different people, or at the very least, bring in people around them that are very, very different, and at least have enough of presence of mind to know that I have these three weapons over here that are kind of my natural go-tos.
Behavioral psychology in business
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Bart Mccollum: But there are other things that are going to have to. Come to the forefront that my weapons can't dominate in order for us collectively to go from, let's just say 20 million to a hundred million or a hundred million to 500 million things that founder led companies rarely do by themselves. So there are some exceptions to that.
There's there, there are very few exceptions and they're notable for the most part though. Founders get to a point and then they have to sell the company [00:09:00] or they only get to that point and they kind of flounder at that point whether they want to go above it or not.
Kenny Lange: Right. It's probably just a, a, a. A little bit of a recency bias, but you know, before we hit record, I was telling about the new certification I got with scale architects and, and one of those key elements or frameworks as part of that training is the predictable success model, which deals with those lifecycle stages.
And you get outta early struggle and you get into fun and you're growing and just like, like you said, sheer force of will and brilliance, intellect, networking, connecting, like all these things happen and you're selling and you're having fun, and then you hit this patch. Which in the model is called Whitewater, and you have a choice.
Do we stay, like you say do we stay in fun? Where like I'm sort of the center of my company's universe and we can keep doing this, but we've chosen a cap on our growth. And that's fine for, for a lot of people, but others actually wanna scale, which is why I, I've been [00:10:00] having a lot of fun discussing growth versus scaling uh, with people.
You have to choose, I'm gonna go through this tough season where I'm gonna feel like a beginner all over again, which for a lot of people they wanna run from that as much as possible. And I'm, I'm curious, what do you see most often? When people start butting up against that, that whitewater, and they say, I don't, I don't really know if I wanna, maybe I wanna stay as a really skilled knife fighter, I don't want to play chess.
I don't know that I can learn to play chess. Or if I want to appear stupid, basically, you know, it makes me think, uh, Alex or Moeys posts lately he'd been talking about the, the people who are the most successful are the will ones who are willing to look foolish for the longest period of time.
Bart Mccollum: Yeah.
Kenny Lange: I'm curious what, what do you encounter in those conversations?
What are they like? Because that's gotta be sobering.
Unlocking clarity for growth
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Bart Mccollum: Well, so I think a lot, and again, you could you tell me if this is kind of in your experience as well. A lot of entrepreneurs are, they're [00:11:00] generally okay with being uncomfortable and they're generally okay and they have a lot of experience kind of breaking through and having success muscling their way through things.
What's different about this is. It's foreign to them. So building the type of competencies, and that's kind of the framework that I'll talk about behavioral competencies in order to lead an organization and do all of the things that you need to do at scale, it's. It's just so far out of most people's wheelhouse who are, of the type, who got the startup energy in the first place.
And so you hear about this classic trade off of kind of professional managers versus entrepreneurs. And again, there's opinions and there's morality ascribed to, uh, both of those at different things. There's this thing called founder mode that has been trending lately. You've probably seen it.
Elon Musk is probably like the. The king of this right now Elon Musk loves to sort of advertise himself as the ultimate [00:12:00] micromanager and micromanagement would be something among the list of kind of behavioral competencies that I talk about in the book, is not a thing that works sustainably over the long period.
But that said, like Elon Musk is the exception that proves the rule. Most of us are not Elon Musk and Elon Musk. Is he's got, there's a whole Walter Isaacson biography about Elon Musk and founder mode and how he just can lock in and focus. Well, the reason he's able to do that is because he has something like 140,000 employees across like six different companies, and these are big companies.
He's trillion dollar market cap companies. Elon is not micromanaging 140,000 employees. Elon has professional management and he has an amazing culture that's very, very dedicated to whatever that mission is in all of these organizations. And that means he can go and find the biggest problem in a given day and just focus on that.
So he goes right to the biggest problem and he, he has that kind of engineering mindset, and so he is able to go and then micromanage and founder mode. What is our [00:13:00] biggest problem or our biggest opportunity? While I can have my other 39 people focus on all the dayday things that need to happen in this off.
Supporting high-performing founders
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Kenny Lange: Yeah, that, no, that makes a a lot of sense. Um. Uh, the, the phrase it's used a lot. Uh, I don't think people always appreciate the weightiness of it. The what got you here won't get you there. Um, which I, I think is a Marshall Goldsmith book. But we'll look that up or my editor will be like, that was the dumbest thing you've ever said.
That's never been a book. And that's okay too. That's me showing vulnerability, but I. Part of it, I also wonder is, you know, when you first start and you're hustling, you expect it to be hard, maybe not as hard as it actually is, but you're willing to grind. You have a vision, you have a passion.
And even if that passion is just not to work for somebody else because you want your freedom of [00:14:00] time is once you break through, you're like. Ah, this is it. Uh, this is, this is what all the hard work has been for. And then when you butt up against this next di really difficult stage, you're like I fought so hard to get through that, so I wouldn't have to go back to that. Do you think that for some entrepreneurs it's like, look, I fought and I got through this. I don't, I don't really want to go through this patch again.
Bart Mccollum: Yeah, for
Kenny Lange: that really, it took something outta me or it's just I'm really co I like I got to the place I wanted to get
Bart Mccollum: Yeah, and that's, and that's perfectly fine. Like that is an admirable place to be if you've gotten to that level of success. I. Most, there's a reason why, you know, there are a lot of little tiny companies and there are very few extremely large companies, and then it looks like a pyramid, like all the way up the chain.
It's a different kind of hard. And again, like you don't have to choose to do that kind of hard if you want to. You can be completely in your comfort zone with [00:15:00] the things that you're naturally good at, tackling those problems every single day and creating extreme value for people That's. completely admirable and completely acceptable For the ones that want to go to the next level, they're going to be, again, it's like the difference between feeling a pain and feeling cold.
Like some people are great, have extremely high tolerance for physical pain, and if you get 'em into a cold plunge, they can't stand it for more than 30 seconds. It's a different kind of hard. It's a different kind of an experience, and so you can choose to say, I, I wanna per persevere and deal with that, or I'm gonna be very comfortable in the realm in which I'm an expert, continuing to be very successful.
Lessons from "You Before Me"
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Kenny Lange: Gotcha. Now, for those who say they're moving on you, you had mentioned this, that there's a couple of different things that, uh, probably more than a couple, uh, that, that need to happen. What's the balance of learning new behavioral skills, like you said, a lot of your work comes down to and choosing new people for the journey.[00:16:00]
Like to balance where, where, how do I start to figure out if I'm a leader listening to this? I'm in a tough season. Uh, I've had some success. I'm listening to you and I'm like, yeah, okay, yeah, that's right. What, what got me here won't get me there. And, and, and this is a new season and I have to choose it and maybe I want to, but.
How much of this is me developing me differently and how much is it me finding new leaders, partners, strategists to, to come along? And I just sort of like incrementally keep going along and I don't have to substantively change. Like what's the ratio or breakdown there?
Bart Mccollum: That is a fantastic question. The way that we look at behavioral competencies is around, it's always around other people. And so there's a competency called organizational partnership. There's a competency called talent management. I. If you're a manager or a leader you have to build those, those are behaviors.
They're actual behaviors that we can measure and we can teach you what they [00:17:00] are and then we can build accountability around them. But they are behaviors of you. Recruiting the right talent, having the right management in place, have teaching different departments within your organization to cooperate properly with each other and not fight each other.
Like that's what it is. So it's not necessarily an either or. The competencies that you would develop if you've chosen to scale are all around you Fostering an environment that allows for other people to pick up the torch and do more together than you could have done by yourself.
Kenny Lange: Gotcha. If you would go through, um, some of those, some more of those traits, just kinda line out so that we have a sense of this framework that you operate under.
Bart Mccollum: Yeah. And I'll give you a, a 32nd kind of history of this. So one of the things that I really like about this is there's again I love personality tests and I love all kinds of other vetting tools that
Scaling companies with purpose
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Bart Mccollum: people use. And we use them at lymed and I've used them in other organizations. Behavioral competencies are like, there's [00:18:00] like 70 years of, of research, of academic research on this.
It was pioneered back in the fifties and the sixties by a guy named Dr. Robert McClelland at Harvard, and it was then used in organizations for 30 or 40 years and documented there was a group called the Hey Group that was later required by KornFerry, which is a huge talent. Job out of law school was at a bank and I was brought in as part of a talent program. And the guy that ran the talent program was this behavioral psychologist named Dr. Gerald h and he's my co-author on this book. And he comes from that school of behavioral psychology. So he is not a shrink and he is not a therapist.
He was brought in because this bank is a hundred years old and they wanted to sort of bring new talent in and sort of pivot the culture. And so I was part of one of those cohort. By an ownership group to run a healthcare payments company. And again, when I was put into that [00:19:00] role as part of a, a management buyout of the, uh, owner of that company, I never managed anything in my life.
I hadn't even managed a project. I, I was on a, a bond desk at the bank before that, trading municipal bonds. And so we retained Dr. Hannah, who again, he was still running the talent program at this bank as kind of, our executive coach and kind of person to help us with this. And then I retained him as my coach, and I've been working with him for the last 15 years.
And so he brought this methodology to us. It's something that we've used in multiple organizations and it is to go back to Stephen Pressfield and.
Kenny Lange: Mm-hmm.
Bart Mccollum: It is very, very basic stuff like training, behavioral competencies is very basic stuff and that's why nobody does it. They don't think to do it.
It's kinda like physical therapy. If you have a professional athlete, they like, like a Tom Brady. Tom Brady is an incredible professional athlete. Tom Brady learned to do physical therapy and work with trainers that would like, literally have him take a a resistance band and go like this 50 times. LIke he had 100 of [00:20:00] Those things Thoseare the fundamentals of him being able to play quarterback into his mid to late forties.
Behavioral competencies are those kinds of things, the kinds of things that most entrepreneurs will brush over and say, we don't need to do that. I don't need to do physical therapy. I already have, I can already run a marathon and, and in three and a half hours I don't need to like stretch my calves.
You do need to stretch your calves, and there's a specific way that you can do it. There's a specific way that you can hold your team accountable for doing the same thing.
Overcoming leadership challenges
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Bart Mccollum: That's really what this is. And so there's something like 200 different competencies that were mapped as part of this research project.
And the Hay group, I don't know, they might have a million people, a million managers and entrepreneurs that have been. Through and research through meta-analyses over the, over the decades on this. And they identified, I think about 26 competencies that actually lead to higher performance. So out of the 226 roughly.
And so what we did, uh, at my last organization and then at Line Media was [00:21:00] we took our culture, we have behaviorals behaviors, we have values, we tied those behaviors back to leadership competencies that correlate with high performance. They might be adaptability, emotional intelligence. A lot of people have heard that term before.
You already heard me mention talent management and uh, holding people accountable, building trust, like these are all, like when you hear them, like, what do you mean building trust? Like of course I built trust. If I built an organization, if I built a marketing agency, which I know you did, of course I had to build trust.
Like my clients had to trust me or they wouldn't have paid me. Right. Well, it's.
Among your team and decrease trust among your team. Taking an intentional, uh, approach to that and having a program around that for you and your leadership team, again, is that basic kind of like balls and strikes training that you have to be able to do in order to be able to get to the next level.
Kenny Lange: Gotcha. The thing I so appreciate about what you're saying and again a lot of it's reminded me of, uh, some interviews I've been listening to with [00:22:00] Alex Hermie and just his approach to scaling organizations. But he talks a lot about behaviors and skills. It's like one, nobody can take those away from you.
They could take your job, they could fire you, you could lose a client, you can do whatever, but you still have your skills. But the way that you're breaking it down, I, I think if I'm, if I'm listening to this, and this is the first time I'm encountering this sort of thought process, and I'm not saying I've gone deep on this.
Mentorship and co-author insights
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Kenny Lange: I like to think I've somewhat into it just because of my profession. I have a bachelor's in psychology, which by the way, you can't do Jack with but but I got it. But it should give hope to a lot of people is that I think that there's a a mythology that emerges and I think some certain high profile leaders perpetuate it.
I think certain publications perpetuate it because it sells stuff. It's, it's the equivalent of sex sales. But for, uh, leadership and business of like. It, I'm gonna get Shakespearean. But you know, like, some are born great, some achieve greatness and others have greatness thrust upon them. And I think, [00:23:00] I think we believe that if you substitute gr uh, leadership in for greatness, that we think some people are born leaders, some just achieve leadership, but they already had it.
And some are just, they're thrown into the fire and then they prove themselves like. So many people think, ah, I'm never gonna be that like huge leader. I'm never gonna be this person who commands a room or, or the loyalty of, of an entire division or company or something like that. But when the way you're breaking it down, it sounds like, well, actually, I.
I've got a set of things that if I focus on and I do repetitiously and I love, um, you're talking about physical therapy. I had to go through physical therapy because training for a, uh, triathlon, uh, iron, uh, one of the half Ironmans I ran I actually tore my hamstring in several places, right where it goes into my calf muscle and I didn't do jack about it or see a doctor until two days before the race, which is stupid.
I don't advise this. But he told me, you can run the race, not do damage, just do physical [00:24:00] therapy when you get back. And the physical therapist was like, okay, it's gonna be all this really, like, wild complicated stuff. It was really small movements. Now they did stick needles in me and I didn't appreciate that, but but the movements were small, just repeated motions that brought healing and strength into my body.
And, and so I love that example or that analogy because. That would give me hope if I feel like I'm falling behind or not doing anything, is that, oh, I, I could just do these small movements. Right? I can do the, the equivalent of this and actually I could lead a high performance team. 'cause I don't think anybody who would, who daress to be a leader or calls themselves a leader, thinks I really just wanna be the poor, poorest performer that ever lived.
Practical tips for leaders
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Kenny Lange: Right.
Bart Mccollum: no, it's, this is a great point and I'll, I'll kind of tie some of these threads together. So like pretty much everything in life, there's some combination of natural ability and then there's the ability to sort of. [00:25:00] That. So there are people who are naturally good at a lot of these competencies and there are people that are not, and again, I mentioned there something like 25 or 20 leadership competencies.
If you think there's a person that's at 20, those not thing. We're not talking about a random sample, so to speak. So if you are an entrepreneur, if you've created something, or let's just say you're in thrust into some kind of a leadership position inside an organization, which is kind of what happened with me.
Um, and the book talks about that. It's a, it's a novelization based loosely upon a number of different experiences, um, experiences. You have probably some basic level of talent and some basic level ability in these things, but you are correct. There are, these are. Super trainable things that everybody can remarkably increase their competence on.
And you pick the fir, the top three that are your weakest. So if you're working with the right kind of person who can develop this, you're gonna have a plan just like you have. If you have rocks in an organization or quarterly goals in an organization, you use system and soul. Guess what? We're gonna set some [00:26:00] goals and then we're gonna be very specific about how we're gonna define those.
So we're gonna be very measurable about those things. It's the same thing with this stuff. So it is that basic. So if I had, uh, a competency where I needed to develop my critical thinking because let's just say it was really, really good at. Selling stuff and that built me, let's just say I had a marketing agency but I'm not really good at, at, at strategy.
Guess what? You can, IM improve your strategic and critical thinking and there are some basic behaviors that you can do and you can literally practice these things every day, just like you're gonna practice a golf swing and you can have your peers, yourself. And if you have access to a good, a good coach or a good advisor who can literally grade you on these things, just like you're being graded on.
Bart's favorite leadership books
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Bart Mccollum: How much did I increase engagement for my clients and my marketing agency? And would this particular change to the SEOA.
Kenny Lange: Yeah, that's, so you're hitting on a lot of things that I, I end up in conversations with my clients and it now I'm thinking through, I was like, okay, well number one, need to buy the book, which we will [00:27:00] link up in the show notes so everybody can go and buy you before me, um, on Amazon or wherever fine books are sold.
But it's a lot of. And I hate this term because I think it's stupid. But soft skills.
Bart Mccollum: Yeah, exactly right. Which is why they get mapped to eh and I, and I'm as guilty as any other person. You know, it's like soft. That's what a lot of this stuff is. Soft skills, but it's soft skills. When people hear the term soft skills, they usually think it's not really measurable.
It's not metrical. I, if I am, again, if I'm selling widgets, like I know how many widgets I sold, I know I can go and I can close that deal and I know it's gonna bring X amount of revenue or x amount of margin to. For a certain kind of person, that is a very satisfying thing. Whereas the soft skills, I don't know the exact ROI on this, I don't know if it's gonna pay off.
I don't even know if we're doing it or not. It turns out you can do it and you can measure it. Now, the ROI is going to be obviously a little bit longer term because it's all about, again, what, how, how far away is the [00:28:00] vision that I'm after? Is it immediate or am I trying to build something over the long run that's sustainable?
Final thoughts & takeaways
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Kenny Lange: Yeah, the ROI isn't transactional. And it's really I think you had it enduring. You have enduring co enduring companies, right? There's that endur, there's been tons of transactional companies that they sold a bunch of stuff and then they went outta business, right? How does this play into the endurance?
Because I don't know, again, I don't know any leader, entrepreneur, or founder who says, I man, I'm hoping to be like a bottle rocket. I'm hoping to get oohs and ahs and then just be out on my butt in three months time. Three years time. So what is it about these behaviors, these traits that most people think you can't measure but you apparently you can.
Which it just fascinates me 'cause I want to dive into that. What part does that play in the endurance of a company that that lasts,
Where to connect with Bart
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Bart Mccollum: Sure. Yeah. So two things. So if you [00:29:00] do these things and do them well, and you're, you're committed to them, you will build a much stronger and much more valuable organization because again, it's not going to be all about you. It will be about your team, and eventually your team will be able to take these tools and develop the team beneath them and beneath them and so on and so forth.
So it's fractal and scalable in that, that's component to. Be doing this tomorrow and be improving immediately. So let's just say for instance, you're an entrepreneur and you're very, very successful. But let's say that you are not necessarily a great team player all the time. I'm sure this is shocking.
I'm sure nobody suffers from this problem. But let's just say you're not great at teamwork all the time. Or you know what, how about this, let's just, let's, let's take the spotlight. You're an entrepreneur and you've got an organization. Let's say you have 25 people working for you and you have an amazing, let's just say seller, and that seller isn't necessarily a great team player.
Maybe they don't work well with your customer development team and that, that sort of [00:30:00] thing, or your operations team. You can actually turn this on tomorrow. You could say, Hey, look, we're gonna work on your teamwork and on and on, building trusts. Here is a very specific prescribed simple plan that you're going to work on every single day.
You're gonna journal on it, we're gonna actually measure it. And within doing that a couple of weeks, you will see a measured improvement in those things. So you can see immediate results for someone who is committed to actually doing. Let's call it the physical therapy. You'll see immediate results of these things.
Now, of course, that those things will compound over time. And again, you'll have a much more valuable organization or a much more significant organization depending on what your, on, what your ultimate goals are, but to, but you can build immediate momentum on these things and feel that fairly quickly.
Kenny Lange: Which that, that feedback loop is something that a lot of people struggle with. I think entrepreneurs typically are okay with a longer horizon. They're willing to stick with it, but having some immediacy like just gives you encouragement for. Progress. I heard the [00:31:00] statistic from recently at a workshop from my coach and the co-founder of, uh, system and Soul Binge Miller.
Is that if, and it was not something he did research on, but he had discovered or read somewhere, if you will improve, I think it's 1.1400000000000001% every working day of a quarter, you'll be twice as good. By the end of nine, uh, of a 90 day period,
Bart Mccollum: Yeah,
Kenny Lange: which is if
Bart Mccollum: the power of
Kenny Lange: mean there's really like right
Bart Mccollum: think he probably got that from James Clear. So like you have this, you know, logarithmic scale of anything that you get a little 1% improvement on every single day or even every single week. I. This is exactly that. This is one of the things that absolutely apply that that law absolutely applies.
Kenny Lange: Which, if you think about it, like 90 days is nothing. And truth be told, it's only like 60 some odd days that you're working. You could be twice as good. Now, some people may think, you know, it's like when people say, yeah, we, uh, we [00:32:00] that two X star revenue, uh, in the last six months, it's like, well, you sold $10 before, now you sold 20.
I guess technically you're correct. It's like, you know, if it's a leadership skill, you're like I guess now I don't totally suck, but I, I'm still pretty bad at it, but at least I'm not as bad as I used to be.
Bart Mccollum: Oh, the ultimate measuring stick is yourself. So if you go from 10 to 20, like the triviality of that improvement should not be lost. You should absolutely celebrate that.
Kenny Lange: And that's where, for a lot of high performers, they're always looking at the delta between where they are and where they think they could be or should be. And, and this is where I don't remember if you and I have talked about this book, but the gap in the gain is a phenomenal book.
Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy is talking about success, uh, should only be measured looking back. What's the distance I've covered from when I started to now, not the distance from where I started or where I'm now to where I possibly feasibly, like envision myself being right? Like [00:33:00] me, Elon Musk is an eternity, but that doesn't mean that I'm like a crappy entrepreneur.
Bart Mccollum: yeah, I mean there's lots of research that shows this and I think it's probably biblical as well. Like you want the measuring stick to be self-improvement. You, you are the ultimate measuring stick, and that is what, what is truly motivating for people in the long term people is generally, I. Set your sights on other things, but largely to stay motivated for the long run and do that 1% improvement thing and get the compounding you wanna be.
You wanna be competing against yourself.
Kenny Lange: Yeah I'd be curious in, in whatever research I've done, if, if you found like people who endeavor to do this, um, improve these behaviors solo versus those that might do so in a cohort like you, you are a part of a cohort. Like is there a difference in success? If like I, I mean, technically I don't really have a cohort.
I'm a company of one. I have an executive [00:34:00] assistant and I'm grateful for, but you know, it's really just me. If I said, Hey, I'm gonna read this. I'm gonna pick my top three weaknesses, I'm gonna start working on 'em, get better. What's my likelihood of success versus, Hey, I'm gonna be, I'm gonna rope in like, five or six other entrepreneurs or people we're gonna identify this, we're gonna meet regularly.
This sounds like a leading question, but my experience has, uh, makes it not so much so what's, what's been the research or your experience on that?
Bart Mccollum: Yeah, I mean, like there's, there's tons of research and I'm sure this wouldn't surprise people around, like making something public. So if I'm gonna be accountable something, can we make it public? And again, I think for those out there who use some kind of a, a methodology, whether it's a scaling up or an EOS or a an S two, there's a reason why your KPIs and your goals are visible to everybody.
This is no different. And so inside an organization. This is what makes the difference between success and failure. Founder or the [00:35:00] owner, the C, whoever that person is. Are they the ones saying, well, we are, we are going to do this. This is part of your personal development, so if you want to be, get better at your craft and get better at these blocking and tackling things and these soft skills that are going to leverage you and make you worth a lot more money, whether it's in this organization or somewhere else, then you need to be doing this.
So that's the first thing is again, is their buy-in inside an organization. If you're a solopreneur or an entrepreneur and you want to get better, you probably, I'm guessing people like you, Kenny, you probably naturally are looking for ways to self-improve you. You certified in a bunch of frameworks, you help other people.
You're probably not gonna have a problem if somebody important to you comes to you and says, you know what? Your self-confidence, self confidence is a bad example. You got plenty of self confidence, but let's just say emotional
Kenny Lange: too much.
Bart Mccollum: Maybe in your house, you know, emotional intelligence is a competency.
And then there's a lot of, of it depth and emotional intelligence that Daniel Goldman wrote on. He was kind of one of the followers onto the McClellan research. Maybe let's go to a [00:36:00] domestic example. Maybe your spouse. I'm just like, you know what, again, I'm not, I'm not saying anything about you. I'm saying in general, let's, you know, maybe you're not a very present father right now, and you could be more or vice versa.
Guess what?
Kenny Lange: Has my wife been talking to you?
Bart Mccollum: Not at all. It's, it goes both ways. But you know, again, these are we are all the same, the creature. So like, this is all about being better with people, lifting people up, pouring into them and developing them and getting greatness out of teams of people. So again, it doesn't exclusively apply inside an organization.
Um, it works again inside your home. It works inside your community. It works inside a nonprofit or your church or whatever. Again, we all have the same software. So if a person like you has decided, you know what, I really need to focus on certain kinds of emotional intelligence, self-awareness around my kids.
Let's say for example I suspect a person like you with the accountability of maybe your spouse would, you could sit down and say, Hey, we're gonna set a goal for ourselves and I'm gonna do this every single day, and [00:37:00] you're gonna hold me accountable to it. That is absolutely a thing that individual people can do, and they will see success.
You know, Has little a DD and you're like, I've got this and I'm gonna do this for a while, and then I'm gonna kind of fall off of it. Having some peers that will hold you accountable for that sort of a thing is always valuable. It's, there's nothing special about this from that perspective.
Yeah, you need accountability and wherever you can find it increases the odds that you're gonna stick with something like this.
Kenny Lange: Gotcha. Just so long as you're
Bart Mccollum: Did I touch some there? I saw some expressions.
Kenny Lange: Dude, I'm, I'm really starting to wonder, I'm, I'm about to go eat lunch with my wife. I'm gonna ask her. I was like, Hey, have you been talking to a guy named Bart, by chance?
Bart Mccollum: Well, I said these things because everybody has these things, right?
Kenny Lange: But it sounds like so long as you. Can have enough self-awareness or at least a, a trusted individual in your life who can sort of like, hold up a mirror, ref, reflect some reality with kindness to you.
Then you can figure out [00:38:00] like what would help me be, what are the guardrails I'm gonna need? Because willpower is rarely, uh, enough,
Bart Mccollum: Yep. You want these things to become habits, and I know you're probably an expert on habit formation. This is no different than anything else. And so if you can have outside accountability, that increases your odds of success, just like anything else.
Kenny Lange: Sometimes you need a kick in the butt. Sometimes you need a hug, and it's great if you have somebody who can do both.
Bart Mccollum: Now, I will say with these things, let's just say you're focusing on something. Once you do this for 60 days. And I mean, let's figure out what the exact behavior is for the, each of these competencies has different levels and they're all distinguishable from the from each other. So we use these to recruit people as well.
So if we're looking for a certain kind of a leader, we'll pick six or seven key competencies, and then there's levels within those. And these are all explained in the book, and you can actually find 'em on the internet. This is not stuff that we came up with. This is, again, 60 years of research. You. What level a person is at with these specific competencies, and then you can give them a [00:39:00] development plan to get them from level three to say level four.
So this is the, it's the same principle. You're going to pick something, you're going to do it, you might journal on it, you might get feedback from your boss, or you might get feedback from your business partner or from your spouse, or from a friend, or from a. You do that for 60 days, it will be a habit.
So it doesn't require willpower after X amount of time. It just becomes a thing that you do, and that's kind of what we want, where we want this to go. This does rewire your brain, so if you aren't doing a specific behavior or you're bad at something, if you do some focused training and practice at it for a couple of months every single day with feedback.
Training your golf or anything rewire. And it a, that's the purpose of this. The purpose of this is you nature.
Kenny Lange: You, you're progressing, you're, you're intentionally progressing through the four stages of learning to where it becomes
Bart Mccollum: That's right.
Kenny Lange: unconsciously competent. Now, it might be exhausting and it [00:40:00] typically is when you're in that consciously competent stage 'cause you're, you're applying something new. But the repetition and, and I love that you said the feedback.
'cause I think a lot of people skip that. They just do something. They have no feedback for how they did either to themselves or, or from someone else. So that they can't like, continue to improve that. I, there's a lot here, a lot more. My brain is on fire now, so, thank you. I'll be distracted the rest of the day with my a DD like, Hey, I don't wanna think about this.
But mark if somebody's listening and they're like, okay, I'm bought in on this. This sounds doable. This gives me hope that I can improve my leadership. I'm not a lost cause, or I could be better faster than I thought. It's not some way, some far off. Never, never land. What's something somebody could do in the next 24 hours?
Spending little to no money to make progress towards leveling up their leadership behaviors and, and skills.
Bart Mccollum: Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, you can Google this stuff and a [00:41:00] lot of it's available online and you can find one specific leadership competency. I would Google leadership competency that you feel like you're weak in if you happen to use a. Or a GPT or a Claude, you could go in and say, Hey, look, I've heard about Dr.
Robert McClellan's research. I feel like I'm weak in this particular area. Identify a competency for me and give me, uh, a daily journaling exercise that I'm going to share with a person. And they're going to hold me accountable for this and I'm going to do it five minutes a day every day for the next 60 days.
Like that is little, as little a commitment as you need for this. It difficult, one of those things. Have to do. It's kind of tedious, but it's not difficult. That would be the cheapest way. The second cheapest way would be you could buy our book, you can get a. So that would be the second cheapest way we wrote this book, because there's lots of books on this topic.
Again, this has been around a very long time, but it's not something that's focused on very much. This book is written like a novel, so it's very entertaining. So if you've ever read The Five Dysfunctions of a Team or any of the other [00:42:00] Lencioni books, those are always written in parable form or in story form.
This is written in Story is a novel.
We had a lot of help with that from our publisher on how to get it that way. So you could be reading that and then at the end of each chapter there is an exercise or there's a co that goes with, would be the second thing I would.
Kenny Lange: Gotcha. I think those are two great options. Buy buying books and, and using ai. I mean, you've got my attention. So, if somebody wanted to know more about you and Dr. Hanna's work, uh, or the McClellan research or anything, like if they wanna connect with you, ask some more questions. Where do they go?
Bart Mccollum: Yeah, the easiest way is probably LinkedIn. You just look up no bar. I think I'm the first Bart McCollum, just like you're the first Kenny Lang. I don't know. You can go to our, we have a, a website for a book called You Before me book.com, or you can just go look for it on Amazon. Um, you'll see us, I think I account, but I don't tweet. So that's I also, you can MCC gmail um, I'm [00:43:00] discover, are interested in.
Kenny Lange: Okay. Excellent. We'll link all of that up, uh, in the show notes. So whatever your preferred method, you can get ahold of Bart a, ask him some follow up or even share with him if you picked one of the competencies or something like that. Just I'm sure you'd love to have his inbox flooded with people saying, Hey, I took action on this and, and I'm growing as a leader.
Bart Mccollum: I wouldn't mind it actually, I, I like it when people take steps to improve themselves,
Kenny Lange: 100%. That's a huge, uh, huge reason for this podcast. But thank you so much, mark. I look forward to having you back in the future. We'll, we'll nerd out on some more stuff and, and figure out some more fun analogies. Maybe by then both of our hards will have healed from the Luca trade. But, thank you listeners. Uh, you spent part of your day. I hope that you got some education out of this, but also some entertainment, right? I, I want this to be fun and enjoyable to listen to 'cause nobody needs more dry businessy bs. I. But if you did get value to the from this, I encourage you like rate, review, [00:44:00] subscribe, whatever the right button and and engagement tool is on your platform of choice.
I would deeply appreciate it. Plus, this gets this out into the algorithm so that more people like you can discover this content. You never know what conversation may unlock someone's next step in their leadership. That's a free and easy way to pay it forward and just be a good human. And it's an easy way to be a leader too.
There you go. You're helping people make progress. But until next time, change the way you think. You'll change the way you lead. We'll see you.