I hear the same sentence in almost every room I walk into. An owner or a general manager looks at me and says, “We bought a fifty thousand dollar sales course and nobody used it.” And then they ask me why a leadership program would be any different.
That’s a fair question. And I respect the leader who asks it. That leader spent real money and has nothing to show for it. So let me tell you what I think happened to that course.
The course was probably fine
I was talking to a guy who was selling a high ticket program. And he told me something I’ve never forgotten. He said, “Our leaders launch a new system every month, and I never follow it. Because I know within two weeks it’s not going to be a priority to them anymore.”
Think about that. His leaders had failed to follow through so many times that he lost trust in them. He didn’t believe a launch was real anymore.
This happens all the time. And it costs companies a ridiculous amount of money, time and wasted energy. A lot of companies spend fifty, sixty, seventy thousand dollars on a program. Then they send everybody a login and say, “I want you to go watch one video a week.” And then they wonder why it never gets executed consistently.
What was missing was a rhythm
A program doesn’t install itself. Somebody has to build an operational rhythm around it. And that somebody is the leader. Putting it on the calendar is the leader’s job.
So when I launch anything with a team, I run it through four tests.
One, everyone knows it. Every person on the team can tell you what it is and when it happens. It’s Monday morning at eight o’clock, or it’s a weekly call at a time somebody picked on purpose.
Two, everyone does it. And the way a leader makes that true is by building the time into the schedule, so the team does it together. Whatever a leader prioritizes is what that leader gets more of. And the calendar is how a leader says out loud what the priority is.
Three, it gets the result it was built for.
Four, everyone protects it. If it starts at eight, it starts at eight. And when somebody misses it, somebody notices and says something, and it isn’t always the boss.
Now run that fifty thousand dollar course through those four tests. Could every person tell you when it happened? Did the team do it together, on the schedule? Did anybody say something when a person stopped showing up? Those three questions will tell you what happened to it.
A standard without a system is just a speech that people have the option to follow.
What you’re really buying
Your standards become your culture. And your systems are how those standards survive when you’re not standing there. A standard without a system is just a speech that people have the option to follow.
So when a company brings me in, leadership development is the first thing we install. But what that company is really getting is the ability to make anything stick.
That’s why the first thing we install in Lead Elite Academy is the rhythm. There’s one video a week, and it runs ten to fifteen minutes. Every video ends with one assignment, and every leader runs it with their actual people that week. Every leader posts what happened in a shared thread. And once a month, the leaders get in a room for thirty minutes and debrief what they ran.
So by the end of the year, your leadership team has launched a system and kept it running for fifty-two weeks. And once a team knows how to do that, they can do it again. They can do it with the next sales program. They can do it with the next software rollout. They can do it with any process they need their people to follow.
So my answer to the owner who got burned is simple. You were right to be frustrated. And what fixes it is a leader who knows how to install something and keep it alive. That is a skill, and it can be trained.
