Exciting news- The Power of Going All-In is out now! This is the fifth bestselling book from our CEO, Brandon Bornancin, and it’s his best one yet.
We’ve all had the misfortune of working for some terrible bosses who micromanage your every move and are quick to serve criticism before they ever lend a helping hand.
But on the flip side, we hope you’ve also had the chance to work for some incredible leaders. We’re talking about leaders who go all-in and empower their employees to take their careers to the next level and become unstoppable.
If you ever wondered what habits set mediocre managers apart from leaders who drive massive results at their company, The Power of Going All-In: Secrets for Success in Business, Leadership, and Life is the book for you.
Whether you’re new to your management role, a leadership vet, or you’re just tired of missing your professional goals, this book has something for everyone.
20 Leadership Secrets
Keep reading to check out 20 of the best leadership secrets from the Power of Going All-in book and get an exclusive bonus or watch our quick video to get the highlights!
1. Improve By 1% Every Day
Every single day I tell my team how important it is to improve by 1% every single day. It’s one of my foundational principles because it illustrates the power of tiny yet consistent progress.
Think about it…if you were to improve by 1% for every workday for a year, by the time you got to the end of the year, you would improve by 37× from where you started.
If you want to make a 180-degree transformation in your career, your health, your finances, or your relationships, you don’t have to make dramatic changes to your routine overnight. You just have to make small goals and small improvements, and over time the returns for your effort will be tenfold.
Related: Successful Mindset in Sales
2. Don’t Expect Your Team To Work Harder Than You
As a manager, it’s crazy to expect your employees to work as hard or as much as you do.
It’s your team that you have to manage after all. Your success and your reputation are all dependent on the success of the team. With so much at stake, this is why you will always naturally be more passionate about the success of the team and you will always work harder than your employees.
When you go all-in and own your responsibility as a leader to be the hardest worker in the room, you can truly help your team maximize their potential, build stronger relationships, and have much more successful interactions.
By setting the right expectations with your team and with yourself as the leader, you can accomplish anything.
3. It’s Either a “Hell Yes” Or A “Hell No”
I’m on a mission to hire 1,000 new employees at Seamless.AI. It’s a big goal, but my VP of marketing, Jonathan, told me that if I want to achieve it, I have to remember that with candidates, “It’s either a hell yes, or a hell no.”
In other words, if you’re interviewing candidates, you can only dedicate your time to those who are passionate about your organization. If they aren’t passionate about your product, your mission, and your company culture— if they aren’t saying “hell yes,”— then it’s a “hell no.”
If they aren’t excited to work with you, then they’re either going to tell you “no” either now or later— pick your poison.
If you live by this principle, you will save yourself a lot of heartache and wasted time, and you’ll surround yourself only with people who are just as dedicated to your organization as you are.
4. Constantly Coach
A company is only as great as the revenue it drives month after month.
To ensure that your sales team is generating maximum revenue, you have to teach them the skills they need to close deals. This is why, out of all the responsibilities you have, coaching is by far one of the most important. But don’t look at coaching as a one-and-done deal or something you do once a year, where you check off that task box and move on to other priorities.
Most people forget the information taught to them within a week. That’s just how the human brain works. This is why if you want your people to retain the lessons you teach them, you need to do the following:
- Constantly coach. Shoot for weekly coaching sessions (30 to 60 minutes) where everyone on your team is required to attend. Depending on your resources and your workload, this can be tricky, but be consistent with your frequency. Employees learn the most when they can rely on a predictable training schedule. Also be proactive about your coaching. Instead of waiting for employees to come up to you with their problems, give priority to training underperformers.
- Provide training across different channels (one-on-ones, team stand-ups, etc.). Constantly reiterating key coaching points across channels makes the valuable information you share stick.
- Be smart about the coaching curriculum. Make sure you let the data dictate what you cover in training. Use data to locate the weak areas your team has and zero in on those areas during training.
5. Learn Fast And Fail Fast
You always want to encourage your people to learn and improve every day. However, you don’t want employees to take months to learn something just to have a bad outcome.
A poor outcome after a long learning cycle means you’ve wasted precious labor, time, and dollars you can’t get back. You want to instead launch fast learning cycles, where employees are absorbing educational materials, skilling up quickly, and leveraging what they’ve learned quickly.
To teach fast, put together small, hands-on instructional groups and workshops, where employees can learn and practice the essential skills needed for their role. With this approach to education, if there’s failure, it won’t be as costly to your team.
Make the phrase “fail fast” one of your team mantras because it’s always better to fail fast when the stakes and costs are low instead of failing late in the game.
Related: Overcoming Sales Objections
6. Do Not Glorify Burnout
Yes, success takes an insane amount of hard work and discipline. However, burnout is very real. And employees who burn out or don’t feel heard end up churning. The best way to avoid burnout is to encourage your people to speak up when they feel overwhelmed, exhausted, or uninspired. Encourage your people to take action when things aren’t going well.
We are all human, and bringing your people up when they are down is one of the greatest keys to success.
7. There Are Two Things People Want More Than Money And Power
It’s recognition and praise.
Give recognition and praise early and often with new employees because the people who are constantly being built up are the people who achieve more. And the people who are constantly being torn down are the people who achieve less.
8. Stop Micromanaging
Think about the most tired or uninspired you’ve ever been at work.
It probably wasn’t when you stayed late or when you came home from a long vacation. Chances are you were the most uninspired when you had someone looking over your shoulder and watching your every move.
This is what micromanagement is.
Micromanagement is the best way to kill innovation and happiness at work. Micromanagement involves hiring wonderful people and crushing their souls by telling them what to do every single hour of the day.
The most mentally fatigued people are those who feel they have no freedom to execute their jobs to the best of their ability. If you are the kind of leader who micromanages (be honest with yourself here), you may be afraid to loosen up the reins.
But the upside of eliminating micromanagement is that it allows the entire team to scale the efforts that make the greatest impact on the company’s bottom line.
There is only one solution to micro-management, and that is to trust. Trust that your people will perform and serve the company mission.
9. The 40-Hour Work Week Is a Myth
Let’s say you have an employee who is a total rock star. They produce quality work, and it doesn’t take them long to crush their goals.
It’s Thursday at the office, and by the time lunchtime rolls around, they are done with all the day’s tasks.
As a manager, what do you do?
A. Do you give them more work to do, so they’re putting in their eight hours for the day?
Or. . .
B. Do you let them get off early?
If you answered “A,” you’re wrong. The correct answer is “B,” and here’s why: the reason “A” is the incorrect answer is because you don’t want to be a micromanager.
Micromanagers think small. They would rather have an employee spend half the day playing around and take an entire eight-hour shift to complete their work than grind and complete the day’s tasks in half the time.
I urge you to stop worrying about subjective rules like the 40-hour work week. If you have a rock star who is working smart, reward them for their hard work.
This is only going to motivate them to continue driving big results in the most time-efficient way.
10. Every Employee Is a Diamond In The Rough
Not everyone on your team is going to be a rock star, but the way that you get your people to become the best versions of themselves is by looking at every employee as the next great superstar at your organization.
What happens time and time again when you take this approach is that the employee ends up living up to your initial expectations, and they actually do become a rock star.
This always happens because when you see your employees as diamonds in the rough, you start treating them as such, giving them expert guidance and creating a space where they can take risks and push themselves to grow and flourish.
So, whenever you have a new employee who comes on board, expect them to become the next great rock star at your company and focus on providing all the resources and mentorship you can provide to empower them to live up to your expectations.
11. Pay More Attention To What People Do, Not What They Say
If you’re just starting out in a management role at a new organization, focus more on what is actually getting done, not what people tell you.
People will always tell you what sounds good, but they won’t tell you about the bottleneck pains the company has had for months, unspoken priorities, or how to successfully collaborate with your team. These are all things you have to observe on your own.
Get into the habit of paying close attention to what people do and ask the right questions:
- What are deemed successes and failures? How is this measured?
- How do my team’s goals align with the company’s larger goals?
- Who are the key stakeholders?
When you ask the right questions and make constant observations, you’re going to quickly pick up on what your company sees as valuable and where you can make much-needed contributions.
Related: Motivational Sales Quotes
12. Show, Do, Be
Lead your team to success using this secret SDB leadership framework: returns between paragraphs.
- Show up every day giving it everything you’ve got.
- Do the work without complaining.
- Be positive about the opportunity regardless of what the critics say.
13. Everyone Is A Leader
A lot of people think that leadership is all about a management title or directing a big group of people. True leadership is never about authority and power. It’s about caring for the people you serve and helping them grow. Anyone in any position can do that.
A leader is someone with a desire to help influence and positively impact others. If you help inspire someone to do something that they thought they couldn’t do or if you believed in someone when they didn’t believe in themselves, then you are a leader.
If you help serve others, you are a leader. You don’t ever need a title to be a leader. We are all leaders.
14. Teach Your Team That It’s “You vs. You”
If you want to go all-in and become the best that you can be, you have to get laser-focused on your mindset.
Why? Because your mindset is the one thing you have absolute control over. If you have big goals for yourself professionally and personally, guess what could come between you and those goals? It’s not any one person or any one thing; it’s a negative mindset.
Ask your team today to think about whether they have a positive or negative mindset. Do they fill their mind and network with positive thoughts, people, actions, and beliefs or negative ones?
It’s so important to reflect on your mindset because no matter what happens, it’s always you versus you.
Surround yourself with the positive.
- Positive thoughts
- Positive actions
- Positive people
- Positive habits
- Positive beliefs
- Positive reinforcement
Never forget that the number-one reason people succeed or fail is their mindset.
It’s you vs. you.
15. Good Is The Enemy Of Great
Where you are now as a team is the sum of the decisions you’ve made as the leader and the actions you’ve taken. If the team’s performance isn’t where you want it to be, your mindset needs to change. Stop tolerating mediocrity, and expect nothing short of greatness.
The amount of success you create, the money you make, and the results you drive all depend on your tolerance. If you tolerate mediocrity, you don’t improve your circumstances. But if you only tolerate greatness, you empower your team to elevate themselves and your company. Good is the enemy of great. Tolerate nothing less than greatness.
16. Make Room For Risks
Whatever industry you’re in, I can guarantee that what it looks like today is different from what it looked like a month ago.
Every industry goes through constant change that you have to anticipate and account for. Plus, to add to the stress, if you work for a small startup, you’ve probably had slim quarters or even slim years where you’re not raking in much profit.
A company that thrives through all this instability is one where the leaders make their people feel protected from these pitfalls. This means building a space where employees can be creative and take risks without fear of punishment or losing their job.
Back in 2020, when the world was in quarantine and a lot of companies were laying off their talent to save their bottom line, we made it a policy at Seamless.AI to make our people our number one priority, and we didn’t lay off anyone that year.
In retrospect, not only was 2020 a record-breaking year for Seamless. AI, but we earned the loyalty of a lot of our employees.
Take that little anecdote as a lesson that to build the greatest team, you don’t have to put together a dream team. All you have to do is make your people feel protected and they will go all out for you.
17. Embrace Your Vulnerabilities
No leader is perfect, so showcase your flaws to the team. Let them know that imperfections are completely OK and don’t get in the way of pushing the team’s success.
The reason I stress this is because people embrace leaders who are vulnerable and human, just like them. When you embrace your vulnerabilities and show your team how human you are, it becomes easier to connect with them.
Being transparent about your weaknesses breaks down the wall between you and your team.
18. All Employees Fall Into These Two Categories
There are always two types of people on your team regardless of the industry you work in:
1. The person you give a task to and you still have to think about it or follow up to make sure it gets done.
2. The person you give a task to and you never have to worry about it getting done. They complete it at a level far greater than what you could have ever imagined.
Here’s how to get the most value out of both types of employees:
- Person #1: Coach them up or out of the organization to become person #2.
- Person #2: Give them more recognition, pay, and promotion opportunities ASAP. This type of person is invaluable to the growth and success of your organization. Treat them like the gold that they are.
Related: Why AI Won't Replace Salespeople
19. Seniority Doesn’t Mean Anything
People think that because they have seniority, they are owed something. Could you imagine if LeBron James showed up to a game and said, “I’m not going to play today because last year I won the national championship”? LeBron James would get traded in two seconds flat.
Too many people think that seniority means they can be lazy, but seniority doesn’t mean that. What you did yesterday is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is what you do today.
Don’t rely on seniority to demand respect and money because you’re only as hot as your last win.
20. Unlock Your Employees’ Greatest Motivators
Everyone goes through stages of life where what motivated them five years ago doesn’t motivate them now.
When I started my career, I just wanted to learn. In my early 20s, my goal moved from learning to becoming financially secure. Now that I am in my 30s, I cherish servant leadership and spending time with my family.
As an exercise, list the following motivators, and every year ask each team member to rank what motivates them to go to work every day, from most important to least important.
Here is the list that I use:
- Money and compensation
- Benefits
- Time off
- Learning and development
- Recognition and praise
- Career growth opportunities
- Remove pain or problems
- Team camaraderie
- Mission to serve customers and employees
And when you think about inspiring, rewarding, and recognizing your people, always leverage this list of priorities for each individual so you know what motivates them because you can’t help someone if you don’t know what they want.
We hope these secrets gave you some wisdom and motivation to conquer the rest of your day. And if this advice made you rethink what it means to be a leader or helped resolve a problem you’ve been dealing with– that’s fantastic!
For more strategies like these, pick up a copy of the book. The Power of Going All-In has 300+ daily strategies, secrets, and frameworks to supercharge your leadership skills and unleash your potential.
Order your copy at Target, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, and Amazon (Amazon also carries the Kindle and Audible versions).
We also have this exciting bonus package for readers who leave an Amazon review!
In addition to The Power of Going All-In, Brandon has also written other business books including Sales Secrets (2020), Whatever It Takes (2021), and The Ultimate Guide to Breaking Into Tech Sales (2023). With over two decades of experience as a serial salesperson (generating $100M in sales deals) and a two-time entrepreneur, Brandon is the ultimate sales expert who is obsessed with helping you maximize your potential.
If you want to learn more about Brandon Bornancin or his other bestsellers, check out his social media:
