Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 242: What Travel Advisors can learn from Past Entrepreneurs & Rulers
Transcript
- Rachel: welcome to the Travel Agency in a Year podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K, travel advisor, travel agency owner, helping travel advisors become the CEO. This is an episode a day thing. We are on day two hundred and forty-two. If you're brand new here, congrats, you have two hundred and forty-one episodes you can binge. I wish I had like a really good ASMR e voice, so people would be like, Yeah, I'll binge this and take a nap. Okay. Today's episode is all about leadership styles in action, citing some entrepreneurs and some rulers over the lifetime of the world or human beings. I don't know. Okay. So yesterday we outlined leadership orientations. And you don't necessarily have to pick one. You're probably gonna be a blend of one or two, and as you grow and evolve, and as your business grows and evolves. Your leadership style is going to grow and evolve as well. And that's totally okay. Today we're going to look at some real examples to give you some inspo from both business and from history in general. So these styles feel less abstract from yesterday and more like something that you can actually recognize and connect with. All right, the first one from yesterday is the visionary Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs is widely remembered as a visionary leader, intensely focused on a specific standard of design and user experience, often demanding and exacting, but with an unmistakably clear sense of direction that shaped everything that Apple built. This style can produce extraordinary results, though it's also widely discussed as the more intense. super high standard approach that isn't the right fit for every team or every leader's natural temperaments. You catch what I'm saying here? Sometimes the visionary can be Yeah, not fun to work with. for the relationship first leader, Sarah Blakely. She is the founder of Spanks. She's been widely described as building her comp company culture around encouragement, personal storytelling, and genuine relationship with her team. Famously emphasizing failure as normal, even celebrated. Are we f did we just become best friends, Sarah? Sorry. Failure is normal, it's only feedback. Anyway, failure is celebrated. We are the same person, it's fine. And it's a part of growth rather than something to be afraid of. Her leadership style is often held up as an example of building loyalty and performance through psychological safety and connection rather than pure authorta. Then we got MaFave. Ma Fave, the one I reference all the time. Not one I aspire to be, but I'm just like, if he did it, we can all do it. Ray Kroc, who built the old McDeees, the system's first leader, into a global franchise system, not even for the purpose of selling burgers, but for real estate. That's like 4D chess he was playing. It's often cit he is often cited as an example of a systems-first leadership. His focus wasn't being on personally present at every single location, but on building standardized, repeatable, rinse and repeat systems so consistent that it could scale far beyond any single leader's personal involvement. This is close to the Reload, not rebuild, from the coaching episode from 220. Systems that you can rinse and repeat. That is the f I believe I'm a I don't think I don't know if I'm a total systems first leader. I feel like I'm a little bit of all of them. Ooh, the next one's one of my favorites. But that's why, like, I'm a huge fan of building the systems out and getting the systems in place. It's the first step to scaling. Like, you can be super duper hands-on and handwrite every single email, or you can create a system. Which one are you doing? Well, it depends on how much money you make. If you're making 20,000 commission off of a booking, great. You only need like 10 bookings a year to do just fine, and you can handwrite every single email. Okay. The philosopher did I miss some of these? Looking at my show notes here. All right, Marcus Aurelius is next. I love Marcus Aurelius. I read Meditations. I had to think of the name. I have it on I'm like, it's on my bookshelf. I bought a copy from my son, but I read Meditations back in like 2016. And it blew my mind. And it was just like his personal handwritten journal. other people writing things in notebooks. While he was dealing with some crazy stuff and I was like, Well, if he can go through this stuff and still have these same fears and thoughts and still do it, I can do this too. So historically, Marcus Aurelius is a Roman emperor and he's remembered not just for his political leadership, but for a deeply reflective and disciplined ro approach to leading himself first. His personal writings that were published into Meditations, his Gurnal Journal, it is a reflect on an ongoing, honest self examination of his own conduct, his patience and lack thereof, and his duty to He's often referred as an early example of the self-leadership principle, but applied at the highest level of public responsibility. And I please, I highly recommend. It's like a big foundation for like stoicism. it's an important read for that. And I didn't know that when I picked up the book. I was just like, I'm gonna read Marcus Aurelius Meditations and be a pseudo intellectual. But then I read it and I was like, holy shnikes. He is thinking the exact same thoughts that like he was thinking this I don't even remember how long ago he's alive, thousands of years ago. And it's the exact same thoughts going through my head. Except he's like running an empire. So even if it's also a nice little thing to read because even if you build the empire, you're still gonna have these thoughts. You're still gonna have these. Things to carry with you and have to process. Don't be scared of Take along. And then there's Winston Churchill. He is frequently studied my neck as an example of leadership through like clear, direct, emotionally resonant communication during genuinely difficult circumstances. I mean, if you know who he is, you know. And he can rally people not through detailed operational control, but through consistent, honest, and steady public voice during times of uncertainty. You know that guy went through some stuff as a child if he could calmly step in and be like, here's what we're doing and we're doing it now and get over it and be happy. so which one of these do you connect with? Just her little refresher, Steve Jobs. Sarah Blakely, I mean, you know Steve Jobs, I'm not gonna be like from Apple. Sarah Blakely, Spanx lady, Ray Crock, Mickey D's, Marcus Sorellius, Winston Churchill. If you had to be one of these, which one do you feel like you resonate with the most? And if you don't know, I might have no Dang it. I had a tab open on one of my other windows for a book all about Winston Churchill that I was like, I'm gonna put this in my Amazon cart and then I never did and then I closed out the tab. Well shoot. Maybe I can go in my history. Anyway, there's a book about him you can get on Amazon. Well a lot of books, but there was one in particular that had to deal with leadership. So if you resonate with all of these, almost all of these Leaders. Have a book about them. or movie or both. So if you connect with any of these, maybe do some research more on them. And not necessarily their personal life, because some of these people may not have been the nicest people in their personal lives. But maybe just like get a little bit more into their brain and see why you guys connect with each other and see how you can leverage their understanding of life. For your understanding of life and how you're going to lead. Okay? Cause you're not supposed to template them and copy them. They are mirrors. Which one felt the most like a description of how you would naturally want to show up? I know most of you are gonna be like, Sarah. Sarah or Ray, maybe Marcus Aurelius. I feel like you should be going for him because he was running an empire. Do you want an empire? Anyway. But that instinctive poll, I'll read them one more time, and what do you feel invited to connect with? Who do you feel invited to connect with? Slash what does your gut say? That poll that you're gonna get here in a few seconds is worth paying attention to as you build your own leadership approach. Okay, recap one more time. Steve Japs, Sarah Blakely, let me give you a few seconds to think about her story. Of Spanks, Ray Croc, McDonald's, Marcus Aurelius. Winston Churchill. Which one feels most like a mirror to you? Study them. All right, let's get back down to Earth tomorrow. and we're gonna talk about how your leadership style applies to how you work with your clients. Because you can't take someone else's exact like I said, even these leaders, they are not templates for you to copy. It is a mirror. And if your leadership style doesn't align with your workflows and your communication style because somebody else told you how to do it their way, we need to do a little workie poo on that. Have a wonderful day. I will see you tomorrow.