554: Super Multipliers: How To Multiply Great Leaders Four Generations Deep with Mac Lake

(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) You have to change your mindset before you change your skill set. A lot of people go, well, I'm not very good at it.

I'm not very, well, you know what, you got to change your mindset first is, okay, I got, I'm going to do this. I might be bad before I can be good, and I'm going to be good before I can be great. But you know what, doggone it, I'm going to learn to do this because it's so valuable for me and the organization. Why do most leadership development efforts not reach the intended goal?

Well, our guest today is a returning guest, Mack Lake. He is the founder of Multiply Group. He is a pioneering force in the area of leadership development, and he's dedicated to helping leaders multiply healthy leadership within their organizations. He's the author of seven books.

And in our previous conversation, episode 461, which was three years ago now, we talked about his book called The Multiplier Effect, which is a fantastic book, which specifically spoke, he speaks to organizations. It's a blueprint for how to multiply leaders within your organization. And it's a step-by-step. And today we're going to discuss his newest book, Super Multiplier, which is one of the top, it's top bestseller now in Christian leadership books.

And that's amazing. And it's well-deserved because there's some really great material that he talks about in here that aren't in some of the other books. And it's specifically seven practices for developing leaders who multiply, and it is really speaking to the individual in the organization, how to be a leader that multiplies other leaders. So I'm really excited to have him here.

Mack, welcome back to the Leaders of Transformation. Nicole, it's great to be back with you. Enjoyed our conversation last time. So it's good to reconnect today.

Yes. I have been sharing that episode with so many Christian leaders, church leaders, church planters, but also business leaders, because this information, even though you were pioneering church planning and leadership development in that space, this is applicable to any organization. And so I really appreciate that tool, that resource to be able to share with even some of my clients and friends and so forth and saying, Hey, this is good stuff. So let's talk about, actually, I have a quote from your book.

It's in the introduction. There was so much in this book, I have to say. I'm reading your book and I'm making notes and asking questions. And I'm like, seriously, this is going to be several episodes.

If we try to get through all this material, we'll see what we can get through today. But this is what really stood out in the introduction. It says, leadership gaps aren't solved by finding people. They're solved by developing people.

And that's where most leaders get stuck. So maybe let's start there with what prevents leaders from developing others in the first place? Maybe where the barriers, the mindset, the thinking around that, which actually prevents them from getting into this conversation. Yeah.

In the book, I talk about seven mindsets that limit multiplication. And some of those mindsets are, Hey, I've never developed a leader. So I don't know how to do it because nobody's, you know, I've never done it before. And then another mindset is, well, nobody ever intentionally developed me.

So how am I supposed to turn around and intentionally develop somebody else? Another big mindset is, well, nobody can do it better than me. You know, and there's a control mindset. And so there's all these mindsets that keep us from really doing intentional leadership development.

And what happens is, you know, I ask organizations all the time, what is your leadership development strategy? And most of them say, well, we don't have one or ours is organic, which means they don't have one. And what I've discovered is really, they do have one. It's just not articulated.

And it's what I call the wait and hope strategy. I'm going to wait for a leader to show up and hope they're good enough to fulfill that leadership role I need them to fulfill. And so we just, I was so blessed because early on in my mid twenties, there's a pastor that came alongside me, saw something in me and started doing intentional leadership development with me. And that's why I wrote this Supermultiplier book.

I was like, I've got to give a blueprint so that other people can go, even if they've never been trained, they don't know how, you know, they don't want to, you know, whatever they want control. There's a blueprint that they can follow to say, OK, I believe I can develop leaders and I'm going to start making an effort to do that. And so it here I see so many organizations that are not doing leadership development. And what I always tell them, you have to change your mindset before you change your skill set.

A lot of people go, well, I'm not very good at it. I'm not very well. You know what? You got to change your mindset first is, OK, I got I'm going to do this.

I might be bad before I can be good and I'm going to be good before I can be great. But you know what? Doggone it. I'm going to learn to do this because it's so valuable for me and the organization.

You know, we spend so much time as leaders, you know, in the boardrooms having conversations around strategy, the the tactical things that we do to grow businesses and organizations. But what you're talking about here, even as your book is subtitled The Seven Practices, you've actually taken seven mindsets and turn them into seven practices, which, you know, is what you're talking about here is it really fundamentally is the thinking that we have around that. And and it's crazy because and I notice this like.

For leadership development in general and leadership consultants and having had five hundred and fifty guests on this show, and I was looking recently at the guest submissions and we probably have had about forty five hundred, maybe five thousand submissions for for this show. So there's a lot of leadership consultants out there that are excellent, that are doing really great things. The challenge is that a lot of them are focusing. And I've been in that situation myself as well.

Right. It's like where we focus on the behaviors and not the mindset. Yeah. And and so we were like, why are these people not doing even if we are doing leadership development?

It's a program. It's a course we hire somebody, we bring them in, they do some some workshops, maybe a series of maybe some even some coaching around it from a group standpoint. But ultimately, it's like checking a box and saying, OK, well, that's our leadership development. And so, you know, talk about how your approach is different to that, because this isn't about, OK, you need to have a whole bunch of, you know, workshops or group coaching or all of this.

You actually have a very different approach to to to the idea of actually even developing leaders. Yeah. Years ago, I was bigger. It's about small.

Yeah. Years ago, I went through a training that I was so excited about. It was a two day training. And I was like, this is going to change the way I lead.

I was so excited. I showed up, I sat on the front row and it didn't take very long to realize I'm going to be disappointed. This is not going to give me what I want, because this this gentleman stood up for eight hours a day for two days and he just dumped information. And when I left, you know, I'm sure he went home as well.

I trained a bunch of leaders, but I went home with I didn't learn anything. You know, I heard a lot, but I learned a lot. I wasn't transformed. And that's when I learned that dumping information doesn't produce transformation.

And that's why this book is designed to really help transformation take place. But one of the I think it's chapter three says you have to one of the key principles in leadership development or practices as a leadership developer is you have to mine for the golden people, mine for the golden people. There is gold in people, but everybody you meet has limiting beliefs. OK, now they're limiting beliefs are a truth that they believe, but it's a lie.

And so, you know, I told the story earlier to a buddy of mine. I said when I started my company eight years ago, you know, the week before I started it, I was talking to my best friend. He was going, I was said three times on that phone call. I said, well, I'm not a businessman.

I don't know, man. I don't know if I can start this, but I'm not a businessman. He yelled at me. It said, never say that again.

You are a businessman. You got to believe you. And I was like, whoa. And from that day on, I said, I'm never going to say that again.

And so as a leadership developer, it's not just that our role is not just dispensing information so that they can develop the competency. We also have to develop their competence, which means we have to tap into digging for the gold going. What are their strengths? What is their passion?

What's their personality type? How do they leverage that in their leadership? It's what Jesus did with Peter. The very first time that Jesus ever met Peter, whose name at that point was Simon.

OK, so he met him in the fall of twenty six. Meets him for the first time and Jesus looks at him and said, you are Simon, but you will be Peter. He renamed him. Now, when a rabbi or prophet would give somebody a new name, it wasn't like giving them a cute nickname.

OK, and Peter meant rock. OK, so when he said you are Simon, but you will be rock. You know, Andrew, his brother was probably laughing and going, you don't know him very well. He's no rock, you know.

But when a prophet or rabbi gave somebody a new name, it was a way of prophetically speaking into them something that was true of them that they couldn't see about themselves. And so Jesus saw it in him. He's spoken into him. And for the next three years, he shaped it into him.

And it was the fall of twenty nine. Eighty three years later, three years later, Jesus was standing in Caesarea Philippi with his apostles. And he said, who do you say I am? And for the first time, Peter goes, Simon goes, you are the Messiah, the son of God.

That's the first time that Simon recognized that Jesus was God himself. And Jesus looked at him and said, you are now Peter. You are now rock. This is such an important part of leadership development, because when you start to work with somebody, what you want to do is you want to dig in like you're digging for gold and go, OK, I want to discover their personality and what aspects of their personality will make them a great leader.

What is their passion? What aspect of their passion will make them a great leader? What's their working genius? What's their enneagram?

What's their disk profile, whatever it is? What is that wiring that they have inside of them? And how do I speak into that so that it maximizes the ultimate capacity that they have as a leader? This is the sad thing, Nicole.

So many businesses and by the way, I'm working with a ton of businesses now and around leadership development, leadership pipeline. But it's sad because what they do is they find a leader, they put them in place and that person is doing the role. But there's no development of those individuals and the boss, they're happy, they're taking care of the role. But it's our job as a leader over them to steward the strengths and gifts of that individual.

So I might have five people on my team that are operating at 40 to 60 percent capacity. But if I took time to do leadership development with them and lift their limiting beliefs and develop their confidence and their competence, I could get them functioning at 80 or 90 percent of their capacity. You don't even have to add any new team members to get better production from your team. Here's what I tell people.

If you want more out of your people, you have to pour more into your people. Yeah, I love this. This was actually one of the things I wanted to talk about, this relationship coming back to Jesus. When we read the Bible, we don't know, and I remember this from the last conversations we talked about it, we don't realize the time frame that it took.

We see that he invited them to follow him, they followed him, and here they are now, they're doing all these amazing things. We read a few chapters and there's a lot of time that progressed through that and a lot of relationship building that happened in that process. Talking about one of the mindsets, I think it's one of the seven mindsets that you talk about in practices. There's a lot of times we think we don't have the time for it.

We don't have the time to develop people like you're talking about, to mine for those things. We just need the job done. We need the role filled. I use Jesus as an example, even in businesses where they're not believers or whatever, they're not reading the Bible and all that.

I will use this example and say Jesus was the greatest leader, is the greatest leader that has ever lived. Three years, 12 disciples, and 2,000 years later without social media, internet, newspapers, he has billions of followers. There isn't a leader out there that's been able to do that. What did he do that created that possibility?

Investing in those 12 men. One of them, who actually was very instrumental in his brother Judas, who betrayed him. He actually knew that from the beginning. Anyway, I don't want to go down that rabbit hole, but talk about this idea of relationship.

How do leaders find the time to invest in leadership? I'm going to also couple that with another question, which you can piggyback off that, is the difference between living like Jesus, because we see his life, and how he actually led as it relates to developing those disciples that he had around him. When it comes to time, it's the funniest excuse, because I'll ask people, okay, what are some of the challenges you face? Why aren't you developing leaders?

It always comes out at one of the top three. I just don't have time. I don't have time. Well, that's one of the funniest excuses you can give, because if you're saying, I don't have time to develop leaders, then here's what it tells me.

It means you're working a lot of hours, and you're doing a lot of tasks, which also tells me that, oh, well, if I'm working 50 hours a week, that's 50-hour time slots that I can pull somebody into and say, hey, come watch me during this hour. Come watch me during this hour. There's plenty of time for them to come watch me do what I'm doing. Also, if I'm working 50 hours a week, and I'm doing all this stuff, I need to write down all those things.

This is an exercise I do. I'll give you this exercise, so your listeners can do this. I'll say, draw three lines out of a piece of paper. In the first column, write down everything you've done over the past two weeks, everything you can think of at work, the things that you've done.

Sent this email, phone call, meeting, planning, whatever. In the middle column, put a yes or no. Did I utilize that to develop a leader? Yes or no.

Then out to the far right column, what could I have done to capitalize on that to help develop a leader? For example, well, I sent 10 emails and responded to these emails. Did you copy a potential leader so they can learn how you think, so they can learn how you communicate, so they can learn how you make decisions? That's an easy thing to do.

There are times I'll send an email, and I'll copy a team member on it because I want them to learn from my response. That's leadership development. The other mistake we make when it comes to time is we think, well, I can only develop leaders when they're with me, so I have to be with them in order to develop them. Well, that's not the case.

It does require some time with them, but what I can do is I can say, hey, like my book, Leading Others, it's eight different leadership competencies, and I can say, hey, I want you to learn team building. I want you to learn team building, so I want you to read the chapter on team building, and there are some assignments in there you're going to have to practice team building. They don't have to be with me to read it. They don't have to be with me to do those assignments to practice it, and so then I can say, hey, come watch me.

I'm going to do something with the team. I want you to watch me, and then five minutes afterwards, let's just pull aside, and I want to ask you, what did you see me do to build that team, to strengthen our connection with that team? What would you have done different? What questions do you have about it, and then what did you learn by watching me today, and what did you learn from reading that chapter, and then at some point, maybe in a one-on-one, I'll take 20, 30 minutes in that conversation and say, okay, you read the chapter.

You watched me. You practiced. Let's talk about what you learned, and so it doesn't require a lot of time. It requires intentionality and leveraging.

It's leveraging their time even more than utilizing my time. How can I leverage, so like right now, all right, I've got an employee, and my challenge for this individual employee is to write a book. I've been wanting them to write a book, so I want you to write a book, so that's the goal, okay, so last week, she's just getting started. Last week, I found an article on how to get your motivation up for writing a book.

Send her that. We had a five-minute conversation about it. Now, this week, I'm sending her an article on how to outline the book. Another few weeks, I'm going to send her an article on how to create a chapter template for a book, so I'm just going to be sending her articles, and then we'll find time to talk about it, and then I'll say, hey, send me chapter one when you get it done.

I want to review it and give you some feedback. That doesn't take a lot of my time. It takes a lot of her time because I've got her practicing the skill I want her to learn. Yeah, and it's interesting, because obviously, that gives her the opportunity to demonstrate leadership, leading herself, and taking the initiative, and if she doesn't, that's an indication to you as to where to focus and or whether or not she's even willing to develop and wants to develop, which I think a lot of people are.

More people want to develop than are being developed for sure, and then what's also interesting about that is because you talk about one of the mindsets is the control. It's one of the things that I think that the reason why we think they need to be with us is like, if I'm going to do leadership, this is the underlying mindset. If I'm going to do leadership development, then I need to control the process of leadership development, so inherent in that is that you can't just have them go off and do it on their own.

What if they screw it up? What if they don't do it right? These mindsets are really embedded. Beliefs drive behavior.

I say that all the time. What do we believe to be true? Do we believe that people are actually even capable of being a leader and thinking on their own, or do we think that they need us to have all the answers, which, of course, a lot of leaders find themselves in that situation where they're the ones that everybody has to go to for the answers. They get frustrated on that, and it's like, well, you kind of built it into your culture.

Exactly, and failure is some of the best fertilizer for leadership development. There is. In one of the chapters, I talk about the importance of modeling. You want to be able to model.

If I'm teaching you how to facilitate discussion or if I'm teaching you how to lead a meeting, if I'm teaching you how to communicate to your team, then I want to model that for people, but there are some things I'm going to be a really good model at, and there are some things I'm not going to be a good model at, but I can still model it. The key, the secret is in the debrief. There have been plenty of times, Nicole, I will tell the team member, okay, watch me, and we'll go do this.

I want you to watch me, and then we sit down and debrief afterwards. One of the first things I'll say, let me tell you what I did wrong. Let me tell you what I did wrong. I did a teaching last week, and they were all there, and they were watching, and I want all my team members to be better communicators, and so we're debriefing afterwards, and they're like, oh my gosh, Mike, that was so good.

Oh my gosh, it was so good. I said, no, it wasn't. I mean, thank you, thank you. Okay, it went well, and the audience felt like it went well.

Let me tell you the mistakes I made, and I began to break down what didn't go well in my mind, and they were like, oh my gosh, I didn't see that, but you're right, and so what it did... There's freedom in that, that you don't have to be perfect. You don't have to be perfect, yeah, and it's encouraging for them that they could do it too. There's no such thing as a perfect model except Jesus, and so because there's no perfect model, it means whenever I model something, even something I'm really good at, I'm still not gonna do it perfectly, and so you can still analyze and find the gaps and the weaknesses, and they can learn from that when you leverage it, and then when they try, it's certainly not going to be perfect, and instead of, you know, browbeating them, you didn't do that right, it's like, all right, man, hey, you tried it.

You got out there. It didn't go perfect, but let's talk about it. What did you learn, and what are you going to do different next time, and the secret's in the debrief, and that's what Supermultiplier talks about. It's just emphasizing you've got to do these debriefs in order to extract learning from it.

So I want to shift gears here. I love this, and we could dive in deeper even into this, but I want to shift gears to talk about, as a leader developing yourself, how do you know what to work on? So, you know, a lot of leaders, we go, I've had so many people who have said to me, like I say, you know, are you a good leader, and they're like, I'm a good leader, and it's like, okay, well, are you comfortable if we like test that? Should we find out in the organization what everybody else thinks, you know, and do a 360 and find out where your areas of growth are, because none of us ever arrive, and so from a personal growth standpoint, how do you identify where you, even if you want to talk about from yourself, because I know that you're very authentic in terms of, we were just talking about with your staff and saying, hey, you know, like this, this wasn't, I didn't, this didn't go well, so you can see where you need to improve, and then also, how do you help somebody else to recognize and to buy into their own personal growth who might think, like, I'm doing okay?

Yeah, yeah, you know, for me, it goes back to Psalm 139, where David says, search me and know me, try me, and see if there's any wicked way in me. What David is saying, the language that David is using is a military language, and it's the language of sending a spy into enemy territory, so what he's saying is, he's saying, God, I want you to spy out my heart and show me where you want me to grow, so when it comes to leadership development, I look at the same way. Okay, God, where do you want me to grow as a leader?

Now, here's the mistake many people make. Many people make the mistake of going, okay, I got to find a leadership competency that I'm just terrible at and try to get better at it, whereas many times, you know, if you really seek and ask God, where do you want me to grow? It is, okay, I want you to grow in the areas of your strengths, so for example, years ago, about, I don't know, seven years ago or so, I went to an organization and I taught leadership development all day long, all day long.

At the end of the day, I got my car, I got a four-hour drive home, I'm driving home, I'm going, oh my gosh, the Holy Spirit just wrecked my heart and said, Mac, you didn't say anything today that you've never said before, and I realized that I have studied leadership development more than anybody I know. I've written on it, I've studied more than anybody I know, and I would say I'm at a 401 level when it comes to leadership development, but that day, I was like, my ceiling now has to become my floor, and so my 401 level is my new 101 level.

I got to grow to a new 401 level, which means I have to ask questions I've never asked, I have to look at industries I've never looked at and talk to people I've never talked to, I've got to read books I've never read before, and I got to grow myself in this area of strength, and so I did, I began to just devour more and more around leadership development. Nicole, I speak, you know, gosh, I speak 30 plus, 40 times a year, you know, from the stage, and so this past year, January, I was like, okay, God, it's time for me to grow in my communication.

I'm a good communicator, but I could be much better, and so I started looking and studying different communicators that I've never really looked at before and extracting little lessons from them, and now integrating them into my own speaking skills and habits, and I'm like, whoa, okay, and I'm seeing the response of people, I'm going, wow, okay, because I'm trying to get better and grow, I'm seeing the fruit of it, and so that motivates me, and so what I want to do is I want to look at areas where my strengths that I can increase, and then moderate areas where I go, okay, I need to get better at this, I can get better at this, and focus on those things, and then motivating others, it's having an honest conversation with them, helping them assess and evaluate and not necessarily force them to grow in an area that I want them to grow in, because that doesn't work.

I want to see where do you want to grow, where do you want to grow, I want to give them a taste and a hunger for personal growth, and so if you could grow in any area, where would you want to grow in right now, and now I want to funnel that, I want to fuel that with resources and accountability and encouragement, and now once somebody learns to be a self-feeder and pursue personal growth, once you get a taste of it, it's hard to stop doing it, because you love it, you see the difference it makes.

Yeah, so communication, you mentioned it's a great example, you know, you want to improve your communication, but you're already a tremendous communicator, so you prayed about it, you identified that communication was the area, now you go out and you model, you look at other people and you see what they're doing and how you can incorporate that, so I just want to go on another level deeper into that process that you went through, you know, for yourself, is how did you identify the things to incorporate and the things to not incorporate, because otherwise you can be like trying to be, you know, it's like too much, you know, you've got too many strategies, too many things, at some point you've got to make a decision on what's moving forward, without at the same time staying comfortable in who you are and saying this is the way I do it.

Yep, so what I did, I used the framework that's in this book, and so basically it's self-development using it this way, but it's the same process I use when I'm developing somebody else, so it's what I call the 4T process. The 4T process starts with think, all right, I choose the area I want to grow in, so communication, I want to be a better stage speaker, so I've got to think, so I've got to find content that I can read, listen to, or watch, so to get me thinking about that specific competency, and all my book, my lead others, lead leaders, lead yourself, lead department, lead organization, all of this is, all those books are built around this framework, and so what I did is I was like, okay, I got to think about communication, stage communication, so one of the ways I want to do that is I want to find some communicators that I admire, and so I wrote down three communicators, I thought, okay, I don't listen to these people a lot, but boy, they're really, really good, and so I found 10 clips of each one, short clips, I mean Instagram short reels, okay, so I searched them on Instagram, find places where they're speaking, and I created 10 links under each one of them, and so then I just started watching and listening.

Each one of these videos is a minute, minute and a half, maybe, and I'm listening, and I'm watching, okay, what are they doing that I don't do, so then I started categorizing, oh, okay, this guy uses what I call the rule of threes, okay, so every time he punched, punched, punched, gosh, I don't do that, how can I integrate the rule of threes into my communication, and so I just went through and began to identify principles from that, then started looking for articles and stuff like that, that reinforce those aspects of communication, and a great one, oh, I can't pronounce his name, but there's some guy that teaches on YouTube, so I found some of his content, and I was looking for some of what he teaches, and well, okay, he's reinforcing some of these things I'm discovering, so I'm watching him and listening to him, I'm looking at these examples, so that's think, okay, so I either read or listen to or watch to learn that competency, second is try, try is okay, so what I did is I pulled up one of my keynote talks, and I knew I was giving it three weeks from that point, and I went through, and I just took the rule of threes, that was the only one, I'm just going to integrate the rule of threes, and so I integrated the rule of threes in about two or three spots, and when I spoke that day, I did okay, I missed one of them, I messed one of them up, and one of them I nailed, and so I learned from it, so okay, I'm just going to keep trying to do this, and so that's try, and then a third is talk, so then I would talk to my team and say, okay, here's what I tried, here's what I'm learning, it's better when you can talk to a mentor, but I was talking to my team, hey guys, I tried to integrate this, did it land, did it not land, you know, Mike travels with me, he listens to me speak all the time, so I debrief with him, and then the last one is train others, and so I haven't done that one yet, because what I'm doing is I'm still in the learning process, but I do a weekly training, it's called multiplier circle, it's an inner circle of people that I'm developing, and so this fall, I'm going to take everything I learned from this self-study, and I'm going to teach a three-week series on improving your communication to my inner circle, so that's how I will complete that personal growth plan for myself.

So I actually have a whiteboard in front of me, and I've got different things that I want to remember, and it's on there, think, try, talk, train, I think it's brilliant, simple, easy to remember, just to walk through that process, one of the things that as I was reading your book, a takeaway for me was I build leaders, and leaders that build leaders, but how far does it go, you know, like we talk about the four generations, in your book, you talk about four generations, the Bible talks about leaving inheritance to your children's children, it's not just the one generation, it's two generations, and there's actually a lot of areas where he talks about into two, four generations in the Bible, so that's where I've been challenging myself, and saying, okay, so I'm building leaders, developing leaders that are developing leaders, what are those leaders able to develop leaders, and how well am I doing that process, can they replicate it, they have to figure out their own development plan, you know, and or am I giving them something that is actually replicatable, and that's what I love about that, so I have that on my whiteboard there to remind me.

There are four categories of leaders, and this is a good self-assessment for your listeners, okay, there are some people who are leaders that really are doers, they have the leadership title, but they do everything, they do all the work, you know, they get everything done, the second category is team builders.