Host John Laurito has a question for his listeners: “What kind of Alpha are you driving?”
Alpha is the incremental difference in performance vs. an average leader or team. As a leader, ask yourself how your leadership impacts your people. When you have this question or mindset in mind, you tend to do things more consciously. When you lead a team, be careful not to stay too long in the “maintenance mode” because you don’t want to be complacent; instead, help your organization become better than it is now.
[0:00] Intro
[1:52] What is your Alpha?
[3:26] Leadership vs. management
[5:49] Outro
John Over the last two decades, I’ve been on a quest to learn everything I can about leadership obsessed with what makes the best leaders so good after running companies small and large for the last 20 years. Today I speak on stages all across the world to audiences who are interested in that same question. My name’s John Laurito and I’m your host. I invite you to join me on this journey as we explore this topic. What makes the best leaders so good? Welcome to tomorrow’s leader!
John All right, welcome to today’s episode of Tomorrow’s Leader, where we dove deep on all things leader-related to leaving yourself and leading others. I’m John Laurito, your host today. Beautiful October day. I just love October. I’m in Holly Springs, North Carolina, and I will tell you a shout-out to all my people up in New England. My friends, I envy you this time of year because it is absolutely the best place to be. But I love it down here. I will tell you the leaves are turning and it is beautiful. Crisp weather.
John New England has the best if you’ve never been up there up to like Vermont and New Hampshire especially and you’ve never seen, you’ve never been up there. You have never seen foliage fall foliage like this. It is unbelievable. It is like a painting you can’t even capture properly in a photograph. Do you ever take a photograph and you look and you’re like, Wait a sec that does not look like when I’m looking at someday they’ll invent a camera because even the best cameras can’t capture the beauty of the scenery around you? It’s unbelievable. And I just was in Scottsdale with Nick, my son, and we took a hike on Pinnacle Peak and it was beautiful. We took these pictures for those of You were on my Facebook, you see him on Facebook.
John They’re beautiful pictures, but they don’t do it justice at all. So in any event, that is without a doubt the place to go is New England. So I digress. Here was my message today. This is more of a question than it is even a message. The question is really having to do with as a leader, what is your alpha? And what I mean by that is alpha is a term with investments that basically is with an investment. What is the difference? The added incremental difference in performance with this investment over its benchmark in the industry or its benchmark in the investment category, rather so it’s really attributable.
John Another way to look at it is what is the portfolio manager’s impact on this fund or this portfolio? And I look at leadership the same way. So asking yourself that question, OK, if I wasn’t here in this organization and an average leader took over my role, what is the difference between what I am doing and the results I’m getting and how I’m impacting people versus the average leader? And it’s really interesting to think about what is the added incremental difference in some organizations. It could be, hey, if there was no leader here at all, maybe I’ve got a newly created position. So what is the added incremental difference by me being here?
John What am I doing that would not be done otherwise? How are people impacted? How are people challenged to do things? And what I find is when you operate with that question in your mind, you tend to do things more consciously that are going to drive higher alpha you. It’s just a way to kind of think through what you are doing and the difference between leadership and management. That’s what this all comes down to. Leaders create. They have alpha nothing to do with the alpha male or anything like that, or alpha personality leaders have and create alpha, which is the incremental difference managers maintain leaders change and enhance and help people do things that they never would have been able to do without them. Leaders leave people better than they found them. Leaders help people go down different paths they wouldn’t have gone before. Leaders helped people move faster than they would have made before. Leaders help people have more confidence than they would have had before.
John A leaders helped people step outside their comfort zone more than they would have before, or even to begin with when they wouldn’t have before. These are the things that leaders do, but it doesn’t happen unless that leader is truly leading, and sometimes even the best leaders can fall into that maintenance mode, especially if you build a great organization. You know, I used to think about this a lot because I’ve taken organizations from the bottom and turn them around and got them to be top-performing organizations, which is great. Once you get up there, though, where you have to be thinking about is OK, it’s almost easy to become complacent. Maybe you’re, you know, a sports team or whatever you’ve gotten so high and you’re now so successful it’s thinking about how do we maintain and how do we keep this going?
John And in reality, is how do we keep getting better? And what am I doing as a coach or the leader to help our organization beat out the organization that we’re currently? So if we were going to come in, what would the organization look like that would actually put us out of business? And how do we become that organization and keep pushing? And that’s the alpha that a leader makes? So again, today’s podcast is short, I wanted to put that thought or that question in your mind, I’m going to bring some other ideas over the next few podcasts that I think you’re going to add some significant ammunition to your efforts to become and actually create that alpha. But right now, it’s getting the wheels turning. Put that question in your head. So what kind of alpha are you driving?
John As always, I appreciate your suggestions for comment, for content rather and for guests. And you know, the deal like subscribe, share, go down below, give five-star reviews all that kind of good stuff and we will see you next time. Thanks, everybody. Thanks for joining us and today’s episode of Tomorrow’s Leader for suggestions or inquiries about having me, your next event, or personal coaching, reach me at John@johnlaurito.com Once again, that’s John@johnlaurito.com.Thanks, lead on!
