Real-World Leadership Under Pressure: Building Teams That Execute with Christopher Hossfeld

0:01John Lee Dumas:Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, brought to you by High Level, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. Today we'll be breaking down real-world leadership under pressure. We're talking building teams that execute. To drop these value bombs, I have brought Christopher Hossfeld in the EO Fire studios. Christopher is the founder of Barrel Strength Leadership, is a 20-plus year U.S. military veteran who helps executives build resilient teams through practical leadership forged in high-stakes environments. And today we talk about leadership under pressure, the replaceability test, barrel strength, thinking, why teams still fail, and oh, so much more.

0:40John Lee Dumas:And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Christopher and our sponsors. If you are building a real business, you need real infrastructure. High Level gives you website hosting, funnels, email marketing, automation, calendar booking, payments, and course hosting all on one platform, plus award-winning 24-7 support. Get a 30-day free trial and my full bonus stack that includes a 15-minute private call with me and much more at highlevelfire.com. Highlevelfire.com. Christopher, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

1:19First up, what's up? Not everyone disagrees with, but has a hard time understanding is that challenges and failure are actually an important part of your journey to being a successful entrepreneur and leader, whether it's in personal business or other, such as my experience in the military.

1:45John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, real world leadership under pressure. We're talking building teams that execute. And yes, Chris spent some serious time in the military. And we're going to be talking about some of that today, specifically about leadership under pressure. I mean, what did combat infantry leadership teach you, Chris, about leading people when both resources and uncertainty are limited. I think the most important thing I learned as a combat leader is it's about the investment in your people. That in and of itself is what makes successful teams come together. It's what makes successful teams happen under pressure and in uncertainty.

2:33The training, the investment that you've had, the development of personal relationships, Those things are incredibly important to understanding the strengths and limitations of those that are on your team and how you, as the leader, can best adjust the formation, the organization, the resourcing in order to maximize the opportunities and mitigate the risks as they come up in crisis.

3:02John Lee Dumas:Let's talk about the replaceability test because you like Chris to ask executives if their organization could function without them. Now, I know myself, I was an armor tank commander in Iraq and you were in infantry. And, you know, the reality is sometimes the platoon leader gets shot. Sometimes the platoon leader is out of action for some reason. How is your team going to execute when that happens? So what do their answers, when you ask these executives, reveal about leadership gaps? That they are uncomfortable with that. And many of us are. I mean, you as an armor officer can understand that there are times when you are uncomfortable giving away or delegating authorities and responsibilities to subordinates, especially when you're unsure of what's going to happen next.

4:02and if you haven't defined what they can and can't do without your permission all of a sudden the organization grinds to a halt and a lot of them haven't thought about that because either they're coming from being an executor themselves where they're right on top of it and they can do it and they can answer it and they're the best engineer in their organization well suddenly when you're at the enterprise level you can't do that anymore and if you're expecting to make every decision, the entire organization is going to grow into a halt to make that happen.

4:35John Lee Dumas:Chris, I like using real world examples. I mean, just like, you know, in the military, we train in as close to real world scenarios as possible. I mean, live firing, training exercises, like actually getting out there, getting our hands dirty, our faces in the mud. Give us an example. Give us an example of a time that you took an executive, maybe out of their comfort zone, out of the leadership, out of contact? And how did that team function? Like what actually happened? What's one of your favorite examples around this? My favorite examples are actually in the fact that I take them to the battlefield.

5:15I take them to Normandy. I take them to the Netherlands Market Garden, a bridge too far, if you will. Bastogne, Hawaii, Gettysburg, Italy. and when you take them out of the conference room, they become very uncomfortable. And so getting them out of there and immersing them in it and thinking about the problems that can be well-defined in time, the resources required and whether or not they achieve their objectives, what they got as an end state and the resources either wasted or the problems that come up, They become very uncomfortable at first, but then by the end, when they're seeing the people picking up the pieces that they've been trying to save for potentially years to their team, and suddenly the person's eyes light up, they're like, oh, why was I so uncomfortable with this?

6:20Because they actually do get it. They just needed to hear it in a different way.

6:23John Lee Dumas:Let's talk about barrel strength thinking. First off, what is barrel strength, the barrel strength philosophy, and how does it translate military decision-making under pressure into modern business leadership? So it combines two of the things I love. I'm a bourbon or whiskey drinker, so unfiltered whiskey, right, is barrel strength. And sometimes in the army, you know, that's some of the best conversations that we have had is when our guard has been let down and we're sharing our favorite beverage, whatever that may be. But then the other part of it is that the barrel of a rifle or a tank provides direction and purpose to whatever is sent in that from that tube or that barrel.

7:13And I think that power, when given a better direction, the right rifling that makes it go further, faster, more efficient, and having an unfiltered look at leadership, that is a powerful combination that actually cements learning for an organization.

7:34John Lee Dumas:Give us a real world example of this. We can obviously leave out names and specific circumstances, but I want to paint a picture for Fire Nation, for the listeners right now. When you applied this to a specific situation, what was that situation how did it work out why was it a good thing the example i will use is gettysburg right we're coming up uh in july um i'm also you know normandy's also got some great ones but uh at gettysburg um because it's so accessible here in the united states rather than something in europe they have seen it they've heard it they've heard about it but when they walk a crock across the field that is picket's charge and i do a very interesting version of it i actually start with the last day and then we can ask who thought that this was a great idea and no one wants to raise their hand everyone shakes their head and then we could go back and we can look at all the decisions the thing the relationships the resourcing things like cognitive bias and suddenly the things that they've seen as a problem or a challenge in their organization, they realize it's actually a timeless problem and that they just may need to look at it slightly differently.

8:57And so you see throughout the day that the people who have attended this really become invested in the story and they get invested in what made the things successful and what are the problems and the challenges that come up in those types of crisis? And they start asking themselves, is my organization prepared for this? I absolutely love those moments. And you can see it because some people have it almost immediately. Some people it takes until the very last stand, but everyone comes away thinking that way.

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12:39John Lee Dumas:Visit highlevelfire.com and start building your something today. Chris, we're back, and I want to talk about why teams still fail. I mean, why do strong teams of talented individuals, you would think there's nothing but success, but why do they still fail when leaders don't collaborate? Collaboration is an awesome thing to discuss because it's the collaboration actually means that you have to give up some control. Oh, that's scary when it may be your bottom line, the dollars that are being spent uh those sorts of things and it's that giving up of control that a lot of leaders and teams fail it's i need to be seen as successful well the minute it you know there's no i in team as soon as that get roots itself in the organization it becomes every dog for themselves.

13:47And it's not about collaborating to achieve the desired outcome. It's about your own survival. And I think the teams that see each other and have feel that they're invested in each other, those are the ones that overcome those initial failures or those, you know, not mitigating the risk of because someone hasn't been trained or someone doesn't have the skills or the resources, the team can anticipate those problems and then seek out unique answers for it.

14:24John Lee Dumas:Let's talk about delegation that works. I mean, this is something that when you're in the military, you realize, man, delegation is part of our day-to-day because we can't get done what we need to get done, especially when we're training for battle, for war, when we're training to deploy to Iraq, Afghanistan. You need to delegate to get done what needs to get done. And you use, and quote unquote, I give you the ingredients, you decide the recipe approach. So how does that work in practice? And when is it most effective? Get detailed. I think where it is the most effective is in providing a leader on the ground in a location.

15:06too many things that they can do, right? There's all the things that need to be done, all the things they want to get done, and all the things that they could get done. Until they start being able to identify that there are things that only they can do and that they can give up some of that control to somebody else through the delegation and holding them accountable, those are things that are really important. And so by providing them an example of too many things to do in a short period of time with incomplete information and giving them multiple examples of it, or even when the information, even better, even when the information is incorrect, that they didn't plan for the flexibility, if they didn't plan how to be able to have the team be able to respond to that, but giving them multiple examples suddenly that it something something starts to click that um i i can't do it all i have to know my team well enough to know who i can give those things to and then sometimes they realize that they've they've been riding one horse really really really hard and that person is burned out if they don't recognize it or don't have the process to recognize that, again, then the team will fail.

16:33So I think it's about ginning up that conversation to get them excited about knowing their people, how their team can function, what their team's really good at, and being able to delegate the authorities and the responsibilities of things that that team member can do while only doing the things that only they can do based off of their experience, their time, their resources, or their expertise.

17:03John Lee Dumas:Let's talk about training for chaos. Because I mean, we have a saying, especially in the US Army, especially when it comes to being a tank commander like Audie Murphy, like what can go wrong will go wrong. So how do you use historical scenarios and leadership training to prepare teams for unpredictable but real world crises? I use the battlefield example, something very, very discreet within something they know about, or they may have an idea. Let's talk about Saving Private Ryan. That's the Veraville draw where Rangers and the 29th Infantry Division National Guard unit lands. well there are things incorrect about what they see there in the movie and they come in with this perspective and so you have to be able to say okay what happens when your radio guy gets shot what happens when you land in the wrong place what happens when and suddenly you can see it and that visceral feeling that you've got in the movie combines with what you actually see or you know a television show band of brothers whatever and it comes out in a way that they can kind of start understanding it's not going to always go the way i planned i've got to have some flexibility I've got it.

18:40What is my reserve? Right. In the military to talk about reserve. If you've already tasked the reserve with something, it's not really a reserve. If you've tasked that and you could talk about that in the form of budgets, people. Other resources, time. Then your organization is going to have a have an issue with uncertainty. And so, again, I think it's about the more times you can give them opportunities to look at it from different perspectives, they can then bring it back and it becomes a framework that they can use within their unique organization.

19:16John Lee Dumas:Chris, you have a lot of leadership value bombs to share and a lot of principles that I know that you really truly dig deep on and think hard about and apply to your life. So what would you say is just one, just one leadership principle that Fire Nation should adopt if they want to perform better under both pressure and uncertainty? How they communicate. And I mean that how do they receive information and how do they give it when they're not sure of what's going on? How do they want, what types of information do they need to make decisions? If they can figure out a way to communicate that with their team before you get into the ambiguous, complex, volatile or uncertain sort of situation, the team's going to then be looking to you to define it for them.

20:16You've got to do it before you get there. You've got to set your team up for success rather than mitigating the risk while it happens.

20:27John Lee Dumas:Chris, if Fire Nation has been listening to this and they're like, man, I got to connect with Chris. I got to learn more about what he has going on. What is your call to action for our listeners today? Invest in your people. Find a way to know them, to figure out ways to give them opportunities where you can mitigate the risks of what new opportunity you're giving them, right? It's kind of like the training evolutions that we would have in the military. You keep going and giving people more responsibility, more reps and sets on something, you now can't anticipate how they're going to work, how the team is going to come together.

21:11When are you going to have to stand in? If you invest in your people, you will not be disappointed.

21:19John Lee Dumas:And how can Fire Nation connect with you? I'm on LinkedIn, Christopher Hossfeld. You can also follow Barrel Strength Leadership. We're on Instagram, Facebook, BarrelStrengthLeadership.org. All one word is the website. And we would love to come and help make your organization better or make you the better leader that you've always wanted to have leading you. Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with CH and JLD today. So keep up that heat. And for links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com. Just type Chris in the search bar.

22:01John Lee Dumas:The show notes page will pop right up. And Chris, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute your brother and we'll catch you on the flip side. Absolutely. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Chris for sponsoring today's episode. And Fire Nation, are you an entrepreneur on fire who's looking to share your amazing message with the world? if yes, we are now accepting applications for EO Fire. So visit eofire.com slash guest. I'll catch you there or on the flip side. If you are building a real business, you need real infrastructure.

22:36John Lee Dumas:High Level gives you website hosting, funnels, email marketing, automation, calendar booking, payments, and course hosting all on one platform, plus award-winning 24-7 support. Get a 30-day free trial and my full bonus stack that includes a 15-minute private call with me and much more at highlevelfire.com. High Level Fire. dot com