Unleashing Greatness w/ Mark McClanahan (Pro Remodeler Podcast)

Key Highlights

• Leadership is defined as influence, regardless of job title, emphasizing the importance of behaviors in shaping outcomes.
• Effective leadership development involves setting a clear vision, including team collaboration to craft shared leadership values and goals.
• Regular one-on-one meetings, timely feedback, delegation, and coaching are key tools for nurturing leadership skills within the team.
• Mosby Building Arts invests in leadership roundtables, workshops, and structured training programs to promote continuous learning and team growth.
• Succession planning and mentorship ensure company longevity.

TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome to The Pro Remodeler Podcast. If you’re a professional remodeler and you like podcasts, you’re in the right place.

Today we are joined by Mark McClannahan, the President of Mosby Building Arts, a full-service remodeling company in ST. Louis, MO.

Founded in 1947, when Sam Mosby returned from World War II, the company began as a cabinetmaking shop. They now do design-build, exterior replacement, semi-custom kitchens, and they have a small projects remodeling division.

Mark’s words come from a presentation he gave at the Pinnacle Event last June, where he spoke about unleashing greatness within your team. And not just your leadership team, your WHOLE team, from the least skilled employees to the top leadership positions. It is built on a management system that includes frequent communication, accountability, and empowerment.

Over the long term, investing pays dividends

We’re going to go deep on each of those, but Mark begins the conversation by talking about the future.

Mark: “I have a good friend who is a futurist…”

Mark’s friend is named Jeremy, and all he wants to talk about is the future—but not like crystal ball stuff, tangible future thought exercises; like picturing yourself fifteen years from now, and looking at two outcomes that result from behaviors starting right now.

The first outcome is you are currently doing the job that you’re doing now and it’s essentially the same. The second one is to think about that you’ve spent the past 15 years mentoring and developing people and what that looks like.

Given these two outcomes, Mark says Jeremy’s critical question is…

“Which person do you want to have coffee with 15 years from now.”

I feel like the answer depends on who’s buying the coffee, but that’s one difference between Mark and me. All kidding aside, though, this scenario provides the backdrop of Mark’s presentation about building a strong and sustainable company through leadership.

Leaders are developed, not born

Empowering others to think like leaders helps them understand what leadership means, how simple problems look different to leaders and followers, and why leadership decisions are made the way they are.

A lot of leaders get caught in the operational muck of their day job, so taking a little extra time to give feedback, coach, and communicate clearly can feel like a tax.

Really, it is an investment in the future of your organization.

“Myself, I feel like it is my job to develop people and produce results, and I can only produce results through developing people.”

Part of developing people is developing yourself; Mark is a lifelong student who is always reading a book, often nonfiction and frequently about leadership.

His company has 141 employees, and its leadership team consists of ten people.

But his passion for unleashing greatness in people around him did not begin inside Mosby Building Arts. It began inside a recording studio. Mark’s early career was as a recording engineer and producer, where he witnessed firsthand how empowering people can bring about amazing results.

“…and that’s where I really fell in love with working with people and helping people achieve really cool things. And since then I’ve developed a personal mission statement and that’s to call people to their greatness.

Leadership boils down to behaviors and consequences

A personal mission statement transcends your day job. It drives home with you after work, where you interact with your family. It goes to community meetings with you like PTO and city council meetings.

This episode isn’t about raising kids or participating in your community, it is about developing leaders at work.

And that begins with a definition of leadership.

“At Mosby, we define leadership as anywhere there is influence.”

They literally have t-shirts that say this, and employees regularly wear the shirts, because…

It does not matter what title you have at the company, you are a leader at the company because you have influence on anybody around you. And that influence comes through our behaviors. And those behaviors turn into outcomes.

Why that’s important is when I’m talking to individuals about their leadership at Mosby, I’m saying your behaviors matter. So if you have bad behaviors, what do you think the outcome is going to be?

Seems like the outcome is going to be bad.

“The outcome is going to be bad.”

Ok, good.

…what do you think the outcome is going to be?”

Positive?

The outcome is going to be positive.

Yes!

And that’s why I think this definition of leadership is so powerful. The other thing about leadership at Mosby Building Arts is it’s operationalized.

We talk about it in all sorts of settings, but it’s also just about how we operate in developing leaders.

"People quit managers, not jobs"

Everyone has heard the saying that people rarely quit jobs, they more likely quit managers. And that is something that company presidents should focus on: do some managers have higher attrition rates than others?

In fact, any time that somebody quits at my company, I’m going straight to that supervisor and saying, ‘what could YOU have done better?’ 

What is it about your leadership that caused that person to want to leave?” And then sometimes that comes back to me and what did I do wrong?

It’s a rare question, and worth asking. Moreover, it is worth answering honestly. That discipline and focus is reflected in Mosby’s five tactics for building leadership within the team…

The first one is having a vision of leadership. 

This one has been super powerful for me. In fact, I will tell you in I remember when this became important to us to us as an organization. It was in 2018 and I had to fire somebody at the company. It was somebody who reported to me. She had been working for me for a year and a half and she just wasn’t working out.

And it was about a year into that before I of her employment that I realized I just wasn’t clear about what our leadership needs to look like at at this organization. So all fingers pointed to me and why she failed is because I wasn’t clear. We were not clear about what leadership needs to look like at this company cuz she was fired because she was a bad leader but she was also fired because I failed her as a leader.

Include the company when defining company leadership

Mark references the Zingerman approach to leadership and company culture. You know, the story of the deli in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which punched above its weight in customer service and employee loyalty… it grew into a whole thing.

Here’s how to visualize your vision of leadership.

You want to include others. It’s not just you as the leader going, “Well, I’m going to write out my vision. You want to include others and you want to work together. You want to brainstorm and you want to get together and picture what what does the future of us look like as a group of people?” when you somebody looks in at the organization, what do we look like as a leadership team? What is the vision of leadership at this company?

Once you have the big list, the brainstorm bucket of ideas, assign someone from the brainstorming team to draft a leadership vision statement. It can be you, it can be someone from the leadership team, it can be one of your carpenters, as long as they were in the brainstorming meeting, and are a reasonably good writer.

Then you would take a few moments for everyone to look at it, and then everyone should sleep on it. Everybody who’s been involved in the brainstorming comes back together, sits together, and then refines that statement and agrees on what you want that vision to be.

What the vision statement looks like will depend on the brainstorm bucket and the particular priorities of the participants.

When Mosby used this method to write theirs in 2018, it came out as "Being a distinguished servant-based leadership team."

These words are very intentional. Distinguish means if you were to come sit on in a meeting at Mosby a leadership meeting and s be a fly in the wall you would look and say wow they kind of they kind of stand out as that’s kind of special and the servant-based one is we work for the people who work at the company.

It’s our jobs to to remove the friction from their worlds to help them succeed in their jobs not the other way around. It’s not their job to make my job easier. It’s my job to make their job easier.

And the last part of this, which is to be an effective cohesive team, that’s stolen right from Patrick Lencion’s the advantage. He talks about a cohesive team. And a cohesive team is a team that’s built on trust, healthy conflict, commitment to what you agree on, holding each other accountable, and then the effective part becomes you get results from that.

One-on-one relationships are critical between managers and their people

So that’s step one toward developing leaders within the company: defining leadership. The next step is...

...we intentionally develop one-on-one relationships. And we do that through a few methods.

The first one, one-on- ones. That’s kind of obvious, right? Sometimes it’s not obvious. Sometimes people don’t understand the power of one-on- ones. 101 ones are the most powerful tool that you can have to develop a leader at your organization.

Every manager and every supervisor, including myself, at the company is required to have it at least bi-weekly. If not, I prefer weekly one-on- ones.

One-on-ones can be almost any amount of time; it really depends on the size of the role. They are usually between 15 minutes and 45 minutes.

Feedback and coaching nudge direct reports toward leadership capability

A big part of one-on-one relationships is timely feedback…

We teach our managers and our leaders at the company is we have to provide feedback. We have to let them know whether doing they’re doing well or what they need to correct. And it’s all about looking at their behaviors, but you have to do it timely.

Timely means right now, when a positive or negative behavior is noticed, not waiting until your weekly one-on-one meeting. Timely and quick.

It might sound like this:

“Hey Bob, when you run a meeting smoothly and efficiently like you just did, it moves all of the projects along quickly, saves a roomful of time, and sets a great example for other people in the room who run meetings. Keep it up.”

Another part of one-on-one relationships is delegation and coaching: building your team's skills by giving them more challenging assignments, and helping them to develop the skills to succeed with those challenging assignments.

Delegation builds employee skills and frees up your time

I always look for things that I can delegate to people who work for me. And I always encourage my managers to look for things that they can delegate down. Peter Ducker says literally, I think he says this is something like it’s your job as an effective leader, an effective executive to do everything you can to push responsibility down. And you only do that through delegation. And it’s not because he’s trying to say you want to shuck off responsibility. It’s because he wants you to develop stronger leaders within the organization.

and then allows you as a leader to focus on bigger and better things for the for the company.

Coaching and delegation are similar but different, siblings but not twins. Coaching is an essential piece of a one-on-one relationship for a manager.

Coaching is not training. Coaching is talking to your individuals who need work on their leadership development and say, “What do we want the outcome to be? What are the resources that you need to do?” And then let’s work a plan to see you improve and talk about that over time. And through over time, we have reviews.

Performance reviews. Everybody’s favorite annual time suck

At my company, we’re required to give at least two reviews a year for the people at my company. I do three.

In a perfect world, annual reviews are a way to make sure the one-on-ones, feedback, delegation, and coaching are steering the boat in the right direction. If you’re doing a good job at the one-on-ones, feedback, and coaching, the annual reviews ought to be nothing but high fives and fist bumps.

Bi-annual reviews are a way to identify early if the boat is headed in the right direction, and tri-annual reviews are a way to turbocharge your leadership development.

Three times a year, I meet with my director ports. I spend an hour getting ready for this meeting and I’m doing everything I can to think about what can I do to help them by giving them the right type of feedback, check in on what they’re doing when it comes to the coaching that we’re doing so that we can have a solid meeting about how they’ve been performing and where they’re going.

In-company teaching and learning programs build teams up

Another pillar of leadership at Mosby is having leadership roundtables for the staff. They are 1-hour learning discussions among 12-15 people can sign up individually or managers can assign them to direct reports to participate in…

…and everybody participates. What does that mean? It’s a round table. We sit down. It’s not just me up here on stage talking to the group. We’re sitting down and we’re discussing leadership topics.

Mark typically leads the groups and pulls conversation starters and content from books, videos, podcasts, and other information sources. They create worksheets and design conversations around management topics, such as management basics.

Anything based on conscious leadership, and anything based on extreme ownership. If you haven’t read that book, that’s an amazing book. We talk about that a lot.

Radical Candor: one of the best leadership books you can read out there by Kim Scott. We talk about the principles that she talks about in Radical Candor. We talk about crucial conversations, another great book about having really, really powerful conversations. Those are some generally some of the topics that we do. We’ll bring other topics in, but those are that’s some regular content right there that we use.

A less formal teaching tool Mosby uses in workshops, which are more like a seminar than a discussion. You can sit back and listen instead of leaning forward and participating.

It’s a taste test. Instead of somebody having to go to a round table and spending every month for an hour, and doing homework, they can come and go to one of our workshops. The workshops are for individual refinement and the fact that we have these just creates a positive impact because people know "anytime I want to go and sit in one of these leadership workshops I can." 

They’re an hour long they’re they are in presentation format they’re not roundtable because the relationships haven’t been really developed so they are more presentation style and it happens six to 10 times per year.

It’s open to anybody at the company anybody wants to come doesn’t matter you can be a laborer out in the field you can be the receptionist you can be one of the managers Anybody of our 140 employees can come to these um voluntary and assigned uh and I facilitate these too. Sometimes I do delegate these to managers to facilitate but I do facilitate most of them.

He hands out a worksheet for attendees to fill out during the presentation, and at the end, everyone gets a quiz that they can use their worksheet to answer.

And by the way, I then give that quiz which they turn in and I hand it in to their manager to say, “Hey, look at this is what they learned in in this workshop.”

"Tool-up" the newly promoted

The final leadership pillar at Mosby is tooling up the newly promoted. Every supervisor or manager in the company goes through a training process, in which they learn everything we’ve been talking about.

The content is manager basics. We would talk about key leadership principles and communication skills. These are the main things that people get when they go through an orientation in a leadership role.

It is a self-directed course, and new managers have 90 days to complete it. The courses are taught by company leaders…

... and they’re always assigned a mentor inside or outside of the organization.

And what does that mean? This is an important one. Sometimes a supervisor will assign another manager to be their mentor. And that mentorship could last for 12 months, could last for six months. And anybody who is a higher-level manager, I will most likely hire an outside business adviser.

We make sure that we invest by getting people who can mentor these people in these roles. That’s another way that we tool up leadership at Mosby Building Arts.

The benefit of better management is a better company

This might sound like a LOT of time and expense to invest in people who might not even be with the company in a few years, but the point is that if you invest in your people today, they are more likely to invest their future in your company. If they make it through all this training, coaching, and success development, they are going to be worth keeping around.

Our company is thriving because of the investment that we’ve made in this. I’ve got examples all across the organization about people who have really grown significantly in their purpose and role at our organization. And I also want to share with you, I don’t know if you heard this or not.

They did not. I cut that part out of the conversation.

Scott Mosby owns this company. Scott Mosby is not here today. It’s because he built leaders underneath him and created a succession plan for him to retire. Scott Mosby is right now, well, I think he was up in Canada for a little bit traveling, but he lives in Scottsdale. He doesn’t live in St. Louis, Missouri.

He retired in 2018. And he retired because Mosby Building Arts has spent a lot of time and energy thinking about succession and how to develop future leaders at the company. So, that’s success story number one. But my most proud success story is Sarah Tobaca. She is the director of operations at Mosby. She is my right hand.

She started at the company 19 years ago, before I did. I was there 15 years ago. She started as an accounting clerk, and she’s now the director of operations at the company. She moved up through the company, and she participated in round tables. She participated in workshops. She went through all the things that I mentioned to you.

When we restructured my leadership team, which we restructured two and a half years ago, I had seven direct reports. But I decided I want to bring a director of operations in. We looked at outside candidates, and I encouraged her to apply for the position because I felt like she’d be a good candidate. We had about 25 outside candidates. We narrowed it down to three, and then she was up against three really well-qualified candidates. And through the process, she got the job. And it wasn’t just because she was there at the company. It’s because she deserved the job.

And I can tell you right now, we are more profitable because of her. Like literally, I can point to the profit that she’s brought to the bottom line because of her leadership. And here’s another thing. I’m going on a two-week trip to Scotland and Ireland in July. And that’s the first time in my entire adult career I’ve taken two weeks off in my life. And that’s because of Sarah. And if that’s not success, I don’t know what is.

The payoff is that you can free up time to think about growth. You can improve company culture, which boosts retention and recruiting success. All of this comes from some simple management blocking and tackling.

Because when you call people to their greatness, great things can happen.

Just like this podcast episode featuring Mark McClanahan, of Mosby Building Arts.