How CEOs Build Managers Who Actually Scale a Business

As your business grows, something unexpected happens: you stop leading employees and start leading leaders.

And if you’re not prepared for that shift, your company can quickly fall into what we call “Middle Management No-Man’s Land”—where vision gets lost, communication breaks down, and culture starts drifting.

In this episode of The Business Fix Podcast, Josh and Chrissy tackle one of the biggest challenges business owners face as they scale: how to lead the people who lead your business.

If you're stuck in the $5M–$10M growth phase, chances are your management layer is either your biggest asset—or your biggest bottleneck.

In this conversation, we break down what it actually takes to develop strong leaders inside your company without falling into micromanagement or culture chaos.

You'll learn:

• Why the CEO must evolve from “Chief Everything Officer” to Visionary
• The Empowerment Paradox and why leaders must be allowed to fail
• How to prevent managers from becoming the hero bottleneck in your organization
• The Three A’s of Authentic Authority: Alignment, Autonomy, and Accountability
• Why being a “nice manager” can quietly destroy culture
• The Three C’s of Manager Courage: Clarity, Consistency, and Consequence
• How to use Leading by Exception instead of micromanaging your managers
• Why shared success metrics prevent departmental silos
• The operational signals that tell you whether a manager is building systems—or just putting out fires

Chrissy also introduces the concept of being a “Manager of One”—because before a leader can manage a team, they must first learn how to manage their own time, energy, and capacity.

Josh brings the operational lens with practical tools like the Leader’s Dashboard, the Firefighter Audit, and how to structure meetings with managers so you're removing friction instead of creating it.

If you want your organization to scale without burning out your leadership team, this episode will give you the framework to build leaders who multiply success instead of centralizing it.

💡 Key Takeaway:
 If your “second story” managers are unstable, the issue isn’t the roof—it’s the foundation. Leaders must be developed with the right systems, values, and accountability structures in place.

If you're looking to get help with your culture, or to help out an entire group, reach out to Josh and Chrissy today!  We would love to see how we can help you, your business, or your event. Contact us!

ClarityHR is your fractional HR team, giving you real people, real support, and real solutions. Whether it’s compliance headaches, hiring struggles, or just needing someone to take the people stuff off your plate — we’ve got your back. So if you’re ready to stop using duct-tape and hope as your HR strategy and finally get some peace of mind, head over to ClarityHR.com

🎙 Ready to Fix What’s Holding Your Business Back?
The Business Fix podcast delivers real-world strategies to grow your business, lead your team, and reclaim your time. New episodes drop weekly—packed with insights for business owners and managers who want to do better.

🔗 Connect with Chrissy and Josh at https://www.businessfixpodcast.com/ for more tools, support, and clarity.

Enjoy the episode? Leave us a review, share it with your leadership team, and let us know your biggest takeaway in the comments!

Transcript

0:30

We've talked about growth. We've talked about scaling. We've talked about how that breaks your culture and what happens as you grow in scale. You get leaders like you're like you get leaders that you're in charge of. Yes. Leading leaders. Yeah. Say that five times fast. You really are challenging me to do it. No. Okay. No, I can can you? I think leading leaders, leading leaders, leading leaders, leading leaders, leading leaders. If you want to learn how to do that, stay tuned. She's the CEO. He's the marketing and operations guy. If it's broken, you need the business fix. Chrissy just mentioned, like most of us listen to podcasts at one point five X or two X. What did that. Please let us know in the comments what that sounded like with Chrissy at two X saying leading leaders quickly. That is our banter for the week. That is. I agree that is how we're gonna banter is uh, and I am, I am so excited to hear these responses. Yeah. Um, is Chrissy a chipmunk? Yes, the answer is yes. I sound like a chipmunk at two times speed. I know that because I talk fast. I wonder if I sound normal. I think you do, because the like bring me up to a normal level. Yeah. And, uh. Yeah. No. Maybe. Maybe that's. Yeah. It's interesting. Yeah. I find it so interesting how, like, people in leadership roles completely neglect middle management. Yeah. Or lower management, whatever it is, it just doesn't exist. It just doesn't exist. Like these people should just know I am the leader. Damn it. Read my mind. And every other leader in this company should just know. Uh, have you ever, like, seen that in action? Oh, absolutely. I've done it myself. Yeah, I've done it wrong. Yeah. I've been. I've been on the receiving end too. Oh, I've been on the receiving end of that so many times where I've been in like a middle management position and it's just like, come on, really? Aren't you part of this team? And I'm like, uh, you gotta tell me what to do, right? I would be if I had the playbook. Yeah. Um, you didn't give me the playbook, so I'm just going to hang out over here and cry. Yeah. We've talked about the shift from chief everything officer to visionary. Like how do you coach a manager to lead with that founder's touch without being like, hey, here's what I did. Yeah, because what you did doesn't work. Yeah, at least it shouldn't work in the way the business is scaled. No. So important question because, you know, copying the founder isn't scaling. That's cloning. We don't do that. So cloning doesn't build leadership depth. All right. That's a great point. Yeah it is. Do what I do. No you can't. You have to do it differently. So when founder scale they have to move from being that chief everything officer to the chief energy officer. Oh right. I like that one who sets direction, not dictate style. Okay, so I coach new managers around something we call authentic authority. All right. And there are three A's that go with it. So I count five there. Oh well three A's of authentic authority is really what they are. I'm good. Yes. That's fine. Hey. No. So the first one is alignment, which is don't copy my tone. Carry the mission. All right. Managers have to be deeply aligned with values, non-negotiables and the definition of success. If they understand why we do what we do. They can lead in their own voice. And we have to let them lead in their own voice. We can have shared language, but they have to be able to lead yes, in their own voice. All right. I truly love that because that is the one thing I gotta say. Sorry to interrupt, but this to me, this is the big swing and a miss that I see all the time. Do what I did. No no no no no no. Just get to the place on the map. Yeah yeah. Here's the alignment. Yep. So we have alignment. The next one is autonomy. And this is really important. It's give them the room to lead in perfectly. Okay. This is the empowerment paradox. If you don't give them the. If you don't give them the authority to fail a little, they're never going to build confidence. Okay. Do not always rescue them. All right? I tell managers, I want you to make decisions that I wouldn't make. All right. As long as they honor the values, make the decisions. Because there are certain things that I'm not going to do. But you know what? It may work for you. And as long as we're within our values and we're working on meeting the expectations that we've clarified, that's good. That's scaling. I do not expect them to do things exactly the way that I did them. They need to have autonomy. So and then the third one is accountability, which is the big one. So it's standards. So manager doesn't have to sound like me, but they do have to enforce expectations like me. Yes. Yeah. So founders touch is touches consistency, not personality. So in the scaling trap, we've kind of talked about some of those things. I want to talk a little bit more about what the litmus test is for managers, if you'll let me. Oh yeah, we talked about that. Let's I love tests. So, um, we talk about dilution of values. And so I know you've talked about like success as a shared thing all the time. So this is the leadership litmus test and it's are they multiplying success or are they monopolizing it? Okay, so here's how I measure that. It's four questions. You ready? Oh yeah. Are they developing others big? Are they delegating authority? Not just tasks? Are they giving credit publicly? That's a huge one. Yes. And then are they protecting the standards consistently? So if a manager's team succeeds, but only because that manager's overfunctioning, that's not shared success. That's centralized control. Correct. Yeah. So in resilient operating system, we teach that leadership is leverage. So if success doesn't expand beyond the leader, it isn't shared. Oh Ooh yeah, that's a great way to put that. Yeah. A more simple way to even think about it is if your manager is the hero every week. If they're telling you how they were the hero, that team is still dependent on that person. Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree with that. Yeah. They should be talking about how the people and their team got to got to where they are. They did the thing, not I did the thing or I had to rescue them. Right? It's this person did this, this person did that. We're working together as a team. We're moving forward. Yeah. Love that. How do you handle when we're building leaders? How do you handle like the nice leader? Like, hey, everyone on my team is wonderful and I can't tell them bad news. Yeah. Can you tell them the bad news for me? No. They got to do it, too. We can maybe do it together. Like, I'll coach you on how to do it, but I'm not going to do it for you. You could measure the hesitation in that in milliseconds. Yeah, there was none. There was none. Um, so, you know, being too nice in management isn't kindness, it's inconsistency guise disguised as compassion. So we've got to make sure. So we talked in a probably twenty episodes ago. I don't even know about the three C's of leadership, clarity, consistency and care. Yep. So there are three C's to manage your courage. All right. Which is really teaching them how to communicate effectively and be brave in leadership. And those are clarity, consistency and consequence. Oh yeah. So clarity if expectations aren't clear, feedback feels personal. So nice. Managers avoid clarity because they don't want discomfort. Talk about being clear as to be kind. So explaining what needs to happen, being very clear in your communication. Consistency is where we make exceptions. You know, nice managers say yes too often. Oh yeah, that's okay. You can do that. They bend the rules, right. Every exception teaches the team that standards are optional. So we have to be consistent in how we manage. And the third one is consequence. And that is if behavior doesn't change and nothing happens, culture erodes. So when I'm coaching managers, I don't attack their niceness, I redirect it. And so I say, you know, if you really care about your people, you will be direct with them. So we role play conversations, we document expectations. We set those follow ups because kindness without clarity creates that confusion. And so it's really important that that third C of consequence is the standards that you're maintaining for the organization. They just have to be there. Yeah. That's it. Non-Negotiable. Yeah. So here's what I will say too about managers. Before they can lead other people, they have to lead themselves. Oh, so I call it being a manager of one. So you've got to be a manager. Stop it. You you have to be a manager of one first. So here are some things that you have to learn how to manage. So if you cannot manage your own calendar, manage your own emotional response and manage your own capacity. You are not capable of leading other people. All right. Scaling leaders have to be able to manage their own energy before they manage the execution of others. That sounded awful. Scaling the execution of the business with the people, not executing people with their heads. That goes back to the consequence piece. Does cause bad consequences. Goes back to consequence. Off with their heads. I'm so glad. That was fun. Um, yeah. So you gotta you gotta manage your business. It is serious business. I will say that because here's the thing. You can maintain sole, you can maintain, you can empower people, but it's really about, you know, how do you lead yourself first? And if you cannot manage your own self, then you probably shouldn't be managing others. It truly is. I want to revisit something real quick that you said earlier. Yes. Um, it's about the, uh, in terms of the leadership litmus test. Yeah. And going back to that, um, where was it? It was the autonomy. Yeah. Just the other day I was asked a question from a leader. Yeah. And like, how should we handle this? And my gut instinct was to say something, but I'm like, nope, I need to ask the question. What are your thoughts on this? Yeah. Tell me what you think. Like, how do you feel we should handle this. And it was just to sit back and listen to that first, rather than me blurting out what I thought. Yeah, I needed to sit back and be like, ah, no, this is a leadership position. I need to let them speak. Speak, and I need to let them lead. Yeah. And it's sometimes it going to take longer than if you just gave them the answer. Absolutely. Yep. But this you're playing the long game with your people. It's an investment. Yeah. Yep. Sure is. All right. So let's talk about operations. Let's yay. All right. How do you keep a management team on track without micromanaging them, which is really how do you maintain that communication that we've talked about in the last episode, becoming the game of telephone? How do we not? How do we want to eliminate bad telephone? Please tell everyone. It's funny, I have to go back to the late two thousand or whatever, maybe twenty ten, where, uh, Michael Scott was talking about like how he would micro manage people. Except it was Jim came up with the micro where. We, we, we've got, I mean, we've got standard operating procedures for the work. We need SOPs for reporting. We need SOPs to figure out like how the leader is doing. We can't just be like, ah, they're doing okay. Um, you need a way to look at this that is operational, not just. MM, I like Bob. Yes. Um, no. So you need to be able to go from. Tell me what happened. I see the data. You shouldn't be looking at the millilitres data. Every day. You shouldn't. Like they're there for a reason. They're looking. They're able to to do stuff. Exactly. You should have access to it, though. And you should be reviewing it on, let's say, a quarterly basis. Let's say I mean on something. Check in. Correct. Like if you aren't checking in on this, then you're leading by exception. You talked about that earlier, like. Like, hey, we'll allow this this one time. Yeah. Um, no, you, you have to let the leaders lead in that. The other thing is too, is like in so many cases, people are judging millilitres by the health of the machine, um, not by the individual cogs. And if you look, you can, if you've got four different departments and with four different leaders and they're hitting their deadlines and they're all doing, you're like, this is all okay. Um, you're like, we're good, we're good. Meanwhile, in one area under one leader, you've got people that are just ready to lose their ever loving minds. You're just looking at the numbers and you're looking at the. So you're not you're not looking at the picture on that. The retention rate is the. I call this a lagging indicator. If you've got people leaving. Boy, you got a problem. Yeah. That is the largest red flag that I see ignored constantly. Yeah. In businesses. Um, yeah. We just can't find people that are willing to work. Well, everybody know your long tenured people are leaving and you cannot keep people in the seat. People leave. People exit within ninety days. I don't understand. Well, clearly we've done a great job in making sure that they either want to do the job or not know. Yeah. This to me is is a huge part of the the that people don't work. Um, where that where you the answer is for you. Correct, correct. There's always there's the end of that sentence. It's the same thing. I forget what the full sentence even is. the customer is always right was actually part of a greater sentence that someone just shortened. Um, that being said, another piece to this too is there's always the firefighter audit that you need to do. Um, the why, why are there so many fires? Is the manager resolving the root cause or are they just treating the symptom? Yeah, that is the thing that I see in so many cases, people are like, oh, we'll put a band aid on it, get it out the door. No, no, no, no, no, there is a machine back there that is smoking. Yes. It's fine. Right, right. Just give it some oil. It'll it'll be fine. Uh, that constant firefighting, if you've got that manager that is constantly stressed out and like, oh, I'm doing this, I'm doing this. I'm doing. No, no, no, no, that's a broken sop. That's a broken manager. That's not that's, that's, that's a broken leader. That's a leadership that doesn't have their SOPs in order. Either way, it is a leadership concern that needs addressed? Yes. Um, if they are putting out fires before you see them once again, you kind of need to find a way to figure that out. Yeah. If they find a way to solve it with guardrails or did they create inconsistency in your SOPs? That is what we need to look at. Because once again, if they're creating inconsistency, you need to look is it going to cause another fire next week? Um, hey, we made the exception. I believe you mentioned something about making exceptions. Yeah. Consistency. It dilutes the consistency one hundred percent. And your customers are expecting consistency. Everyone is expecting. I mean, like, everyone should know which way the wind is blowing. Yes. And everyone knows what I'm referring to. I've said that enough times, haven't I? To me, the other. The big thing is that I find when it comes to leading leaders is there's the communication friction. Yes. Um, You end up with this. The. You alluded to it and you actually talked about it is. There's this empowered decentralization. Yes. As long as they have the vision and as long as they have the best interest in mind. Great. Yes. Let them make the decision. To me, I like it. Decision. Autonomy within guardrails. Yes. Um, give them some guardrails, some financial boundaries, whatever they need to do to make some of these binary calls. But like, look, if it, if it, if it aligns with SOP and the mission, I don't, don't call me and below a dollar amount, there's a certain dollar amount I don't ever want to have to make a decision on. No, just do it. They have their budget. They know how to manage their budget. These are the things that I expect. Exactly. The other thing is too, is when you're leading leaders, you need to get the hell out of the way. Um, you are the bottleneck. Yeah. Um, as you get promoted to that position, all those jobs that you used to do, you shouldn't be doing anymore. Don't do them anymore. No, no, because. And don't take them away from people to do. Oh, I'll just help you. No, you don't do it. Why? Why are you doing that job? Um, I learned helplessness. That is not okay for your team members to have. The the way you said that, though, is it sounded like Chrissy of today angry at Chrissy of yesterday. Angry at Chrissy of yesterday. And then there's also moments where it's Chrissy of today reminding herself how to manage people better so that they don't do that. Because I have watched individuals in my organization say, well, they haven't trained someone for six months to a year, and they're like, well, I don't understand why I'm so busy. I'm like, because you never train the person to do the thing that you were supposed to train them on. They're waiting for your capacity, right? Oh, right. I see them over there playing solitaire. Yeah. They're waiting for they're waiting for this. Well, and we had a, I had a conversation, um, this week because we're working on some hiring things within our organization. And I have someone that's saying, okay, I'm training this person now. I think we need more people to do this job. And we're like, time out. We're not hiring more people to do this job until this person is trained to do this job, and we know that they can do the job and they don't have like and they have excess capacity or not. Right? So it's again, that space of like, it goes from holding the boundary around, you know, who needs to be trained to do the job versus holding the boundary around. I am not doing the job. So you've got to be able to kind of keep paying attention. It it's a great point you bring up because once again, just saying, hey, I used to do this. Here's how I did it. It's not training. No, no. And the same thing with we have an SOP for that. You just have to read it. Not everybody is a is a reading learner. Some of them are touchy. They're tactile, they're auditory. So you've got to be able to present it. And just as a reminder, it takes people ten times usually to master something or truly understand it. So you have to repeat it more than once. Correct. Do not give them ten videos, lock them in a room and say you're trained. No, I've received that at so many businesses that I've worked at where they're like, here's a bunch of videos, go like a week's worth of videos, go watch these. And now you're trained and there's retraining. There are times where you have to get back in the same room and go, okay, you know what? We've done it this way. Let's make sure that what we have documented is the same way that we're doing it. If it's not, then we need to have a conversation about does the process need to change or does does something else need to be documented? There's a reason why a few years ago, Starbucks shut down their entire operation one day and retrained everybody on how to make a latte, because nobody was making it the same way Chipotle did it. On cutting lettuce. Exactly. Yep. It happens. Yeah. Retraining is a part of just it's part of your organization. And you need to. And I would say you don't have to revisit them constantly, but I would say at least twice a year, maybe quarterly, depending on how fast you're scaling, you revisit those SOPs. Oh, definitely. I always say at least give it a read through. If you've got a twenty page manual, well then obviously you should be splitting that up between the people that are actually enacting these and working with these? Yes. But yeah, no, you should be reading, rereading those. And does it need to change? Correct. Asking the question the two times like a little bit off, off topic here, but to me that I always say is whenever we ran into a problem, and this is why I always love the SOPs, because whenever we ran into a problem, I'd always be like, okay, is this a one off situation or are we missing something? And do we need to change our process? Exactly. You cannot get any better if your process is just whatever it takes to get it done. Exactly. That's not a standard. It's it's never going to get it better. Uh, the other thing that I find too is encouraging directness. As a manager, um, yeah, people like, look, if people aren't, aren't direct, they're going to have a tough time working for me. Yeah, I can see that. Um, if you're not direct and you want to work with me. I would suggest a helmet and earplugs. Um, that's, uh, Chrissy usually has your plug. She's got earplugs under her headphones right now, so. Oh, and I just need you to tell me. Tell me the thing and tell it to me. Generally tell it to me quickly. So correct. The other thing is, so the some of the things that I look at from a manager level, like there's the, the eyes test, the spark really is like when you ask someone how their day is going, do they look at you or do they look away? Yeah, that's a very good one. That is very telling. And you won't notice it in some cases unless you're paying attention to it. Yeah. Um, if you see the eyes go a little bit dim, you're like, uh, oh yeah, I have a leadership issue. Do they seem excited about what they're doing? Correct. Um, in so many ways, if you talk to the employees, that will tell you how the leader is doing. Yeah. If, if you look for the spark or the dimming in an employee. Hey, how's it going? Now, there's always going to be that one guy that's going to be like, hey, great, Josh, how are you today? Just happy to be here. You're like, okay, drug test for you. Yes. But once again, talking to those employees that are under those leaders. And once again, it's just a hi. How's things going? If they turn, look away. If they get dim, if whatever it is. Yeah. You can learn so much from walking the floor. Oh, wholeheartedly. Yeah. Leadership by wandering around looking lost. Yes. Last thing real quick. Operationally operationalising the lead the leader meetings. So I don't ask people, what did you do today? It's once again, it's what are the bottlenecks that I can remove for you and your team? How can I help? Yes, the how can I help? I mean, every single time. Here's where we're headed. How can I help? Once again, how can I help? You have to show up for them. This, to me, is just no matter what. If there's no offense, you can forget your alliteration. You can forget all those other things. You have to show up for your leaders the way you want them to show up for the other people. Yes. If you don't, it's not going to happen. We've talked and we've we've talked about this in so many other ways. I mean, when we talked about the I love the example that you gave. It's a husband and wife that run the company that says no dating at work. Yes. We model what we mandate. Yeah, we have to. Yeah, it totally is. So what happens when what happens when we go from accountability versus autonomy? Like there's how much flexibility do you give leaders? How much like do you like, when does it become inconsistent? How do you look at that as like, okay, they don't lead like me, but we're still on track. What are the things you look at? So I think autonomy becomes dangerous when it turns into unpredictability. Ah, I love this. I mean style can vary. Standards cannot. So leaders have to define, you know, what's non-negotiable. So how feedback is delivered, how conflict is handled, how performance is measured. And I mean, I tell managers, you have the freedom in your tone and approach, but not in the values or the standards that we have. So our four core values, you are going to be keeping our purpose statement. That is, it's not changing, but how you have the conversation, you can approach it differently. So I think when you give autonomy without guardrails, you create culture drift. Sure. But when you give autonomy inside guardrails, you build leadership depth. Sure. I and it's interesting, I like how you say it's guardrails and not a box. It's not a box because once again, you do like, can you imagine if your company had just was filled with XRS? Oh god no. It's terrible. They really don't need more than one. Sometimes I think one is the lost ones a lot, depending on what's going on, and they'll probably tell you that too. They're like, oh crap, she's in the office today, right? What new idea are we going to be doing? Headphones on, headphones on, headphones on, headphones on. Accuracy or it's questions around, you know. Hey, we're doing this with this client. What do you think. So I love. I love getting to talk to them about some of the things that they're working on. But there's times where it's like, no, I couldn't imagine having another person like, I'd be tired all the time. Yeah, yeah. No, I, I mean, can you imagine if there was two joshes? No, I cannot. That would be some funny, short, angry conversations. It might be fun to watch for a short period of time. Yeah, for a short period of time. Uh, how do you how do you incentivize managers to carry about. To care about the return on investment in the organization, not just their department's silo? Oh, not just themselves. I like at the truck dealership, this was so hard to untangle because sales was incentivized to sell trucks. They didn't care what service did. Service was incentivized just to make as much money as they could, so they didn't care what they did to throw parts under the bus. And parts was like, whatever. Yeah. Um, how do you keep the how do you keep that from happening? I think there's a couple of things. First, everyone has to know what the shared vision is of the organization as a whole and how they share their portion supports the whole. Yep. Because otherwise, I mean, I have seen departments, I mean, they protect their budgets like kingdoms. So especially in other organizations that we manage, we deal with, I mean, and that's a leadership design issue. That's not a personality issue. So, you know, incentives for managers, I think they should always reflect some form of collaboration if marketing wins. But sales struggles, that's not shared success. So it's really about, you know, shared success has to be visible. So that's why I think that managers need access to company level metrics, not just their slice. And so that's, I think it's something that can be heavily debated because people are like, oh, well, they only need to see this component of how the organization works. I'm like, no, it's really much better for those managers, especially when you're leading across big teams that can see the whole because transparency drives ownership. It does. Yeah. What do you think? It's funny for me because the I always feel like the incentives in so many ways are misaligned. Yeah. There should be an incentive to like for just profitability. Yes. Um, overall and it should be pretty close to where like to, to the same amount that your department is. Yes. Um, and once again, most people still aren't going to sacrifice one for the other, but it gets them closer to it. Yeah. And if you've built the right culture of trust, that's the other big piece to it because I have seen it in so many cases where this manager's going to stab that manager in the back, because they just want to throw the blame game around, or we're competitors instead of collaborators. Correct. Because once again, it's the if I can blame service, then I'm not going to get yelled at. Well, no, that's that's not the case. It should be. Hey, what can we do to take care of the problem? Not. I'm afraid of getting yelled at. Yeah, that's that's an issue. But I would say to if you are the leader of the organization, you cannot play favorites between departments. No. And that happens a lot. Oh. Because when you do that, everyone notices. So you have to model as a leader, cross-functional thinking how do we all work together? Yes, I've seen and I've seen it to the point where like, people have asked questions like, do they have pictures of the owner in a compromising position? Um, because like the favoritism has been that bad and you're like, um, yeah, this and you see how it just completely hobbles it can the entire company. Yes. Um, because you've got one thing that's trying to hum along, but it doesn't because it gets all sorts of favoritism and passes and goes outside of the culture while the other departments are like, well, there is no culture because this department isn't doing there. Yeah, exactly. It just turns into a giant, giant, giant mess. Um, to me, one of the big key takeaways on this is stop answering and start asking. When you get like when someone comes to you and says, what should I do about this? They probably know the answer. Yeah, ask them for it. Don't tell them yours. Exactly. And I would say work on building that authentic authority, alignment, autonomy and accountability. Wow. That's, that's I still, I'm, I'm always impressed with how you're able to get these multiple words out. This is how my brain works. Yes. The, this is why we co-host this because once again, and I always talk about this, I love this because we typically get to the same spot. Yeah. The road that we take to get there very different, very different, very different. Um, to me, the other thing that I, I've seen this so many times too is in leadership. I would have leadership come in and tell me about their like they would, they would tell me about their project updates, like, here's what we're doing, here's what we're doing, here's what we're doing. And then they'd leave, they'd be like, but, but, but, but but, but I have questions. Yes, allow for those. Allow for those. Ask them. As a leader, your number one priority should be to ask yes. And the people that you're leading, you still need their leaders. Yeah. But you're leading them. You should ask them. Yeah. I would say last for me, it's the three C's of that manager. Courage. So clarity, consistency and consequence in parentheses because you care. That's why you have consequence. Yeah. No, it's it's the you can't be parental but it's the same thing. I am looking out for your best interests. Yes. As long as you do other things to make sure people know that you're looking out for their best interests, it's great. The other thing to me is the foundation check if your second story managers are shaking up, if they're collapsing. Don't build your house on top of it. No. Fix it, fix it, fix it, damn it! Yes. Have we talked about fixing that type of stuff? The other thing is, too, is I. As I'm looking at this too, you said clarity again. I believe that seems to be once again, it's a theme. It's y I mean, come on, you name a company clarity. That's important. It's clarity is a big deal. Uh, is it better to hire a leader from the outside or promote from within during a growth spurt? So it depends, I love this. Yeah, it depends on the gap for me. So if you need new perspective and structure, fast hire outside. If your culture is strong and someone internally is ready, then you promote them, but you never promote without development. I wholeheartedly agree with this. There's. Yes, if you've been working on someone and developing them for this wonderful. Yes, the timing is just. Hey, look, the. The champagne will rain down from the heavens. The angels will. Ha. Yes. And everything will be good. Yeah. What can I ask you? I'll ask you this question. Oh, okay. Go ahead. Okay. What's the red flag? That a manager is actually a culture killer. Grumpiness. Know when? Okay, it actually is. Because you'll see their team perform, but they're they do it begrudgingly. Um, you'll see the high turnover. You'll see the like I said, the look. How's things going? Fine. Okay. Mhm. Um, you just achieved this? Yeah. We did. Right, right, right. How's your week? Uh. It's Thursday. Um, that's the answers. When you start hearing those answers, you got to knock on that manager's door and have that conversation. Yeah. Um, definitely, definitely a big one. Uh, what, uh, what is the one thing that you think people miss the most when leading leaders to lead themselves first? Makes sense. That makes so much sense. If there is nothing you take away from the Business Fix podcast, it should be that you need to develop yourself and you need to develop your SOPs. I'd say that we've probably talked about that. The most out of all the things. Is that the theme? Yeah, it's like, do the stuff, do the thing, do the things for you so that you can do the things and then document the things. Yes. Yeah, yeah. But they don't lead them and they think that they don't need to lead themselves. They don't need to to learn more. They don't need to develop more. Yeah. They don't need to grow anymore. I noticed something this is episode forty eight. Is it really? Yeah. Wow. Um, first off, congratulations on keeping what little of your sanity you have left at the end of this. I love this, it's fun. No, it truly is. It truly is. Um, that being said, we're coming up on episode fifty rapidly. Yes. We're thinking about doing an HR nightmares episode. Yes. Um, to me, I think like I have some stories that I've been involved in. Um, we've had a couple of people submit some stories that we've reached out to. I would love to hear your HR nightmares. Um, I know Krissy would too. Sure, Krissy. Here's them every week. So she's probably going to be like, I heard that story. That's not bad. Uh. It's nothing. We would still love to hear it. I've got a great one about, uh, someone that got fired, um, for their disability by an HR manager. Oh, no, that sounds expensive. They were the HR VP, and they got fired by the head of HR. Oh, that sounds really expensive. That's a great story. That being said, do us a favor. Take care of yourself. If you can't take care of someone else too. We will see you very, very soon.