Are You Leading or Just Reacting? | Ep 289
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By the way, being reactive, you can be really good at being reactive because what is being reactive? It means you're always solving problems, right? The moment that you sense that something is going to happen, that something could go wrong, that there's a problem brewing, you are working on how am I going to prevent this from happening?

What's up guys, welcome back to Build, and today I want to talk about reacting versus leading. So I wanted to talk about reacting versus leading today on the show because it's just something that's been on my mind all weekend. I am doing quarterly planning, which means I go into a hole for usually a week and a half at a time where I block a lot of time from my schedule. I usually work all day Saturday and Sunday, and I'm constantly just

thinking about the future rather than thinking about anything that's going on in the present. And I'm usually pretty, you know, upfront with my team. Like I need to be, I need to have some quiet time, right? Like try and,

keep the fires away or keep the problems away, right? And when I was doing that, I'm looking at all the goals from the last few quarters, all the leaders and where they stand with their goals and who gets a lot done versus who doesn't get a lot done. Like the central theme that keeps resonating in my mind is this one of being reactive versus being a leader. And I'm coming with that aggressive frame because this applies to founders, to CEOs, to leaders in companies, like anyone that is leading a function, a team, a business. By the way, being reactive, you can be really good at being reactive.

Because what is being reactive? It means you're always solving problems, right? And so a lot of people are like, well, I'm a really good problem solver. And I'm like, okay, what's step 2.0 from that? Step 2.0 from that is that you are good at preventing problems.

right? The moment that you sense that something is going to happen, that something could go wrong, that there's a problem brewing, you are working on how am I going to prevent this from happening? And if you're honest, you probably already know that about yourself, right? And you probably can tell right now when you're listening to this, you're like, I am totally reacting right now. Or you might be like, I'm actually really proactive right now. Like I am totally preventing things from happening. And the truth is this, is the best leaders don't

solve today's problems, they prevent tomorrow's. And this is a mindset shift that I think a lot of people have a hard time making because they're so stuck in output being the measurement of success and solving today's problems as a measurement of success and being available to their team as a measurement of success that they can't get ahead. And

And so there were a couple leaders that actually reached out to me and they were like, hey, like I'm really embarrassed, but like I didn't hit these goals this quarter. And I was like, well, these goals you had the quarter before as well. Like, what is it? Because, you know, a lot of it revolved around things like documentation, training systems. And they're like, well, all these things popped up. And it's so funny because it's like a chicken or the egg problem, which is like,

I think people see me because I'm the founder of the company and the CEO. And they're like, well, of course you can tell people that they need to go to somebody else when they have a problem. Of course you can block time. Or of course you can...

No, I don't think it actually comes that easily. And especially in a company like mine, where I actually tell people to do those things, what it does, if you constantly make yourself available to your team, you're constantly in the weeds, you're constantly not getting above of your function, is that there's nobody to drive forward the vision. There's nobody looking out for what's around the corner. And so if you don't do it, then there's nobody to do it. And it's really insidious because it's incredibly important and not urgent at all.

It's like making an SOP for how to run your entire division or how to train somebody from ground zero. Very important, not urgent. Making a diagram of all the customer touch points. Very important, not urgent. Documenting all the change management protocols that go into the giant project that you're rolling out. Very important, not urgent. Training your team on how to use the CRM properly so that they don't have misses in the customer journey.

Very important, not urgent. But here's the thing, and this is something that stuck with me that I learned a long time ago, is that most people that don't do these things, they are not lazy at all. They are just reactive. And here's the thing about reactivity is it's so deceitful because it feels productive, but it's not because it's not in your control. If most of your days and most of your weeks feel, quote, outside of your control, you're stuck in this reactive wheel. If your week is filled with meetings that you didn't plan, tasks that aren't priorities,

and fires you didn't foresee, then you are stuck in this survival mode. And the shift that has to occur to get out of this is one that everyone has to go through. And you have to go through it multiple times in your business journey. So don't get me wrong. It's not like a one-time event. But the shift is you have to go from, instead of just working hard, you work ahead.

So you trade hard work for a head work. And that's the thing that I think took me a while to realize, especially in my last company is like, if I don't work on the things that are coming, nobody will. And we're actually, we're never going to get there, right? So if you're not working on the things that are going to continue to happen in your business, are going to happen next in your business, are going to create the future of your business,

Who is? Nobody. And so if you really zoom out and think about it, this is the mentality I want you to embody is that proactivity is literally self-leadership. Your future is a result of past planning or past neglect. And so if you want a better future for your business, if you want a better future for your team, your division, your function, you have to lead yourself better right now. So I want to give you guys a little bit of a breakdown of if you're a senior leader, if you're a founder, if you're a CEO, if you're an operator,

where should your time go? Because a lot of people say, they're like, okay, I get this. How much time should I spend planning and thinking forward? And we'll get to the next piece, which is like, you're like, what does that even mean? Forward thinking and planning, I'm going to say at any point in time, it should be between 40 and 60% of your time. So if you look at your week and you're a senior leader, you're the head of that function, and you're not spending 40 to 60% of your time in the future, there's a problem. Now I would say another 20 to 30% is probably execution and oversight.

10 to 20% is probably team development. And then 10% or less is tactical or very reactive work. So if you're not spending at least 40% of your time thinking ahead, building, creating, anticipating, then you are managing and you are reacting. You're not leading. So what does that 40% of your time go to?

Because people are like, "I don't actually know what to do." And this is actually a huge piece of it, which is a lot of founders, a lot of CEOs, and a lot of leaders actually just don't know what it means to build something to get ahead. They're so good at being reactive, they've never even learned how to do the other thing. So what does that mean? It means you're building systems. Do you have the right tech stack? Have you integrated AI? Do you have the right systems to make work easy for your team? Have you audited the org? Do you know that you have the right players?

Have you scored everybody and decided, I need to train these people up? I need to train these people. I need to manage up or out. Like, are you constantly assessing people in your team? Have you designed strategy? What worked a year and a half ago definitely won't work today in anything, whether it be sales, marketing, customer success, finance. There's things that change all the time. So are you designing the strategy for today, not the one that worked yesterday? Are you reviewing hiring plans and forecasting what you're going to need next?

Are you auditing the org to say, you know what? I don't know where this next constraint is going to come. And I actually need to bring in a consultant to help me figure this piece out. That right there is the work that actually builds a company, right? It builds the machine instead of being the machine. And so I want to give you guys a framework that I use that helps me think about this when I find myself feeling a little too entrenched in like being reactive. I call it look up, look around and look ahead. Okay, so first is you want to look up. Am I too buried?

in execution to see what's coming? Am I so involved in reaction to fires and I'm so in the day-to-day that I haven't even thought about next quarter? So I want you to ask yourself this question.

When's the last time you thought about what's going to happen six months from now? When's the last time you thought about what's going to happen in a quarter? When's the last time that you thought about what's going to happen in two months? The shorter your time horizon and the shorter you can see into the future, the more entrenched in the day-to-day reactive you are. And this can feel very counterintuitive for people who are actually great leaders and managers because you're like, but I need to be there helping my team. I need you to fucking break that mindset for a second because your team should be strong enough that you not being in the day-to-day, it functions like a fucking well-oiled machine.

So like, let's just bat that out of our brains right now because I know that's what's coming up for so many of you, okay? If you're too buried in execution to see what's coming and you can't actually look up because you're so entrenched, it's a problem. The second thing is you want to look around. So once we're like, no, I'm not too buried in execution or I've unburied myself, I have relinquished myself with the chains of misery. You look around, right? Which is what are the bottlenecks or inefficiencies? And are we solving the root problem or symptom? So one of my favorite things to do is...

come into a team meeting when they are solving a problem. Because one of the things that you will notice is that when people are entrenched in the reactive mode, they're just solving today's problem, this week's problem, et cetera. They're not thinking holistically. And so they're not thinking about all the other functions in the business. They're not thinking about the landscape of the market. They're not thinking about all the other factors that could contribute to the problem. And so oftentimes what they do is they solve problems that didn't need to be solved. Right?

right? They could have just done nothing, and maybe it was actually another department's fault, or they could have done nothing because there was a root issue that until you solve the root problem, you're just going to play whack-a-mole with all the little branches that have branched out from it. And so for me, if I am not able to diagnose the root cause, and I find myself in this perpetual problem-solving mode, then it means like I'm, again, too entrenched to look around. Now once you've looked up and you've looked around, the last thing you do is you look ahead. What's going to break next?

What's going to break next if nothing changes? And what do I need to do now to prevent it from breaking? I'm constantly, when I'm in planning mode and I'm in reflection mode, thinking to myself, what needs to happen now to prevent problems later? I think a lot of this is just, it's the difference between accepting that short-term chaos and creating long-term clarity for yourself. And here's the thing, nobody's gonna do it for you.

This is a skill that every leader needs to know and need to understand. And if you're listening to this right now, and maybe you're not a founder, you're not a CEO, but you're a leader in a company, and you're thinking to myself, well, gosh, I don't do that. Well, then you have a skill deficit and you can fix that. But if you just continue to do what you're doing, eventually, I'm just telling you, like, they're going to have to bring in somebody who can do this. If you can't get ahead, they're going to find somebody who can. So let's talk about behavior. Behavior leads emotion.

So that means you do not wait to feel like a proactive leader. You start acting like one today until that identity catches up. Okay, emotion follows motion. So if you start acting, if you're like, I'm going to start acting like the leader that Layla's talking about in this podcast, what does that look like, right?

If you want to feel in control, calm, strategic, if you want to be that person, then you have to plan even when you don't feel like it. You have to. I can't tell you the amount of people that tell me, oh, I was doing Monday hour one and then I stopped, which is my planning, you know, weekly planning. Oh, I was, you know, I got so behind, I didn't get to spend much time doing quarterly planning. I'm like, well, that's your job. If you're a leader, your job is to plan. If you don't plan and you look at your department and everyone in your department isn't planning, everyone in your department isn't properly documented, everyone...

your department is a reflection of you. The fastest way to find out what your constraints are as a leader are to look at the people that you lead. So here's the challenge, right? For you guys that are listening to this. I want you to look at your last week. I want you to audit your calendar and I want you to ask how much of it was planned by you versus taken by others. And how much of your time went towards building the future versus fixing something in the past?

Reactive leadership feels urgent. It feels very need to happen right now. It feels chaotic. It feels stressful. You feel that cortisol like where you can't turn off. That's reactive leadership. Proactive leadership is calm. It's collected. It's in control. And now how do you build that? How can you tactically do that? One, locking time in your fucking calendar and not allowing people to schedule over it.

I'm gonna keep saying this forever. If you guys hear me repeat something a lot, I want you to know I repeat a lot because it's fucking important and I mean it. And I just, I don't know how else to say it to get it through people's brains.

It's like if you block time to work on the future and then you're like, oh, I couldn't because, you know, I had to take care of this fire. It's like, well, then if you don't, sure, maybe you have to move the time sometimes, like you have to move it to a different day or whatever, but you can't cancel it. You can't not do it. This is a part of your job. The second thing is delegating the tactical decisions. It's like oftentimes we put people in positions underneath of us and we delegate tasks, but we don't delegate authority.

And if you're not delegating authority, aka decision-making ability, then they're just going to come to you with every decision. So if you can build frameworks that people can use to make decisions, you can get out of that so much faster. And then the last thing is training people to think instead of training them to ask. My favorite thing to do when somebody asks me a question is to ask it right back to them. Well, what do you think? I'd like to know what you think before I answer. And what I'll see a lot of the times is that they just actually haven't thought about it. I remember one of my mentors told me, this was, gosh, I want to say eight years ago. She said,

I just want you to stare at a wall for 10 minutes every time you have a problem. I was like, why? She's like, because then you'll be able to solve it. Like, you don't need help. You don't need to ask this person. You don't need to do this. You don't need, like, you just need to stare at a wall for 10 minutes. And that, like, really resonated with me because every time there's a problem in the business, I just spend 10 minutes

staring at a wall, essentially, to think through what is the problem? What do I actually need to solve? And like, what am I actually solving for here? The lesson I will leave you guys with, right, if you're a founder, a CEO, or a leader in a company, is that if you don't lead your time, your time's gonna end up leading you. And your job as a leader, it's not to be available,

It's to be intentional with what you're doing. And it's not about fixing things faster. It's about designing a better system so you don't have to keep fixing it. So I appreciate you guys. This is just my Monday morning, 6 a.m. rant. I hope you get ahead rather than feeling behind this week. And I will catch you on the next one.