In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough podcast, host Josh Hadley shares a powerful weekly habit for CEOs: a 15-minute asynchronous video newsletter sent every Monday. Drawing from his ecommerce experience, Josh explains how this tool combats team misalignment, competing priorities, and the “founder’s trap.” The newsletter follows a four-part structure: celebrating weekly wins, identifying the key business constraint, recognizing core value exemplars, and reinforcing the company vision. Josh also highlights common mistakes to avoid, such as inconsistent messaging and vague praise. His core message is that consistent, structured communication transforms scattered teams into aligned, motivated, and proactive organizations.

Bullet Points:

Timestamps:

00:00:00 Introduction to the CEO’s #1 Weekly Habit
Josh Hadley introduces the concept of a weekly CEO newsletter to improve leadership, clarity, and team performance.

00:01:50 The Problem: Team Misalignment and Lack of Cadence
Discusses why teams feel scattered and reactive, highlighting a cadence problem, not a communication problem, in leadership.

00:03:40 Why Teams Get Scattered
Explains that teams lose focus because they forget the mission, have competing priorities, and lack the CEO’s full perspective.

00:06:22 The Solution: The Weekly CEO Newsletter
Introduces the asynchronous weekly newsletter, recorded via Loom, to maintain clarity and momentum without adding more meetings.

00:07:19 The Power of Asynchronous Communication
Advocates for asynchronous updates over meetings to avoid wasted time, task switching, and to increase team agility and output.

00:08:58 How to Create the Newsletter Content
Details the process of using Loom’s transcription feature and an AI tool like Claude to draft the email content.

00:11:05 The Four-Part Newsletter Agenda
Outlines the four key sections of the weekly update: wins, the primary constraint, core value shout-outs, and the vision.

00:12:45 Agenda Part 1: Sharing Wins
Explains the importance of sharing wins to build morale and make the team feel like they are winning.

00:16:42 Agenda Part 2: Stating the Constraint
Focuses on naming the single most important bottleneck to align the entire team’s energy and focus weekly.

00:21:05 Agenda Part 3: Core Value Shout-Outs
Describes how to use specific examples of employees living the core values to embed and reinforce company culture.

00:25:00 Agenda Part 4: The Vision Reminder
Emphasizes connecting daily work back to the company’s long-term mission to create meaning and build endurance.

00:26:00 The CEO Update Flywheel
Summarizes how wins, vision, constraints, and core values work together to create belief, meaning, focus, and culture.

00:26:40 Five Mistakes to Avoid
Lists common pitfalls that can kill the newsletter’s effectiveness, such as brain dumps and only sharing problems.

00:27:48 Your First CEO Update Prompt
Provides a simple, four-part prompt for creating the first newsletter, covering a win, a constraint, a value, and the vision.

00:28:20 The Leadership Lesson
Concludes that leadership is about creating a rhythm and clarity, not just more meetings, to magnify team output.

Links and Mentions:

Tools and Websites
“Loom“: “00:06:22”
“Claude“: “00:09:51”

Key Concepts and Practices
“Weekly CEO Newsletter”: “00:01:50”
“Asynchronous Communication”: “00:07:19”

Leadership Principles
“Core Values”: “00:21:05”

Summary of the Four-Part Agenda for the Newsletter
“Wins from the Previous Week”: “00:11:31”
“Identifying the Constraint”: “00:17:20”
“Core Value Shout Outs”: “00:21:05”
“Vision Reminder”: “00:25:34”

Mistakes to Avoid
“Random Brain Dump”: “00:27:27”
“Only Sharing Problems”: “00:27:27”
“Generic Praise”: “00:27:27”
“Changing the Message Weekly”: “00:27:27”
“Making it About Yourself”: “00:27:27”

Transcript:

Josh Hadley 00:00:00  If your team is always busy, they’re a little scattered and unclear the direction the business is heading. They don’t need more meetings. They need you to step up to be the true CEO and the leader that you are meant to become. In today’s episode, I’m going to share the number one weekly habit that CEOs need to implement to be able to ten x their leadership output, increase the clarity inside the business, and get everybody rowing in the same direction so that your team maximizes their performance and output in the overall business. Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough podcast, I’m Josh Hadley. I’ve scaled my own ecommerce brand from 0 to 8 figures, and I’m actively building towards nine figures in sales. This podcast is where I document that journey and share the systems, the strategies, and the lessons learned in real time so that you can learn what actually matters and scale your own business. Who am I? My name is Josh Hadley. First and foremost, I’m a man of faith. I’m a father of four and a husband to a beautiful wife.

Josh Hadley 00:00:56  I’ve been selling in the e-commerce space for over a decade now, doing over $20 million in revenue annually. And I’m selling multi-millionaires in three different sales channels Shopify, TikTok shop and Amazon. And I’m also the host of the number one business strategy podcast for ecommerce entrepreneurs. And that’s E-com breakthrough. So let’s face it, your team is busy, they’re scattered, and they’re unclear with the direction that the business is heading and specifically the role that they play inside the overall direction that your business is heading. They don’t need additional meetings. What they do need from you is they need you to actually lead. So today, that’s exactly what we’re going to be diving into. And I’m going to share with you the number one habit that you need to adopt every week as the CEO. And that is the weekly CEO newsletter. Let’s talk a little bit more about this. This is a 15 minute habit that you can do at the very beginning of every single week. So this is something that I’ve implemented in my own business every single Monday.

Josh Hadley 00:01:50  It’s a 15 minute habit that keeps your team aligned, focused and connected and moving in the same direction, making sure that we are all building to achieve that overall mission and vision that you have established for the business. So let’s talk about what the problem actually is. The problem isn’t necessarily just like a lack of communication, because hopefully you already have existing meetings and you’ve been communicating with these team members. But what’s happening is your team feels scattered. They’re quiet. Maybe they’re a little reactive. You wish they would be more proactive in solving problems in the business. They feel a little disconnected from the overall mission. Or maybe they even question like, why are we in business? Maybe they just feel like they’re just there to collect a paycheck for you, and they’re not really tied into the overall purpose and mission that your company is serving. You probably don’t have a communication problem. You actually have a cadence problem. And getting buy in and reminding that team member of the role that they play inside of your business.

Josh Hadley 00:02:43  And here’s the problem. Most CEOs think that this, like communication in this cadence, happens through slack messages or from occasional meetings that you have, or dashboards or like an annual planning meeting. But that’s not the case. Alignment has to be done on a consistent basis and frankly speaking, like it could arguably be daily, but at a minimum, it needs to be weekly. Because here’s what happens your team gets buried in tasks. They lose sight of the scoreboard. They lose sight of the mission. They lose sight of the overall vision that you’re trying to accomplish for the business. And they don’t always know what matters most to accomplish in that specific week. And so that is what I’m solving with this weekly CEO newsletter. Let’s talk a little bit more about this problem. Why does it feel like your team members are a little scattered, or are they constantly are a little quiet or they’re reactive? You wish they would be more proactive trying to solve problems, trying to break down the next bottleneck that you need to solve for in the business you wish you had.

Josh Hadley 00:03:40  Like true leaders that were inspired to go accomplish the big goals that you have in place just as much as you want to accomplish them as the CEO of the business. Well, the reason why people get scattered or they’re not proactive or they’re quiet and they’re just kind of doing whatever you tell them to do, well, it’s because, number one, they’ve probably forgotten the overall mission or vision of your business. And if that’s something that you don’t have, that’s probably a massive disconnect for them because your team member is just there punching the clock just to collect a paycheck. Now, if that’s what you want for your business, you just want people to come in and punch a, you know, their time clock and then check out. At the end of the day, that’s fine. But like, this is why that vision and mission statement for your overall brand and business becomes so vital. Because if people feel like they are tied to a mission, they feel like they are accomplishing some type of good in the world.

Josh Hadley 00:04:30  That’s what gets them motivated to go beyond the mark, to go beyond what they like. The day to day expectations are because they feel like they are attached to something that is bigger than them, and that’s where they’re going to magnify all of their God given talents and attributes towards your business. Here’s the other thing. They have competing priorities. All of us know this. On any given day, you open up your email inbox and you’re just flooded with a whole bunch of different messaging and a whole bunch of different, like, competing priorities. And so you as the CEO need to get very clear in articulating, hey, these are the actual priorities in the business. These are the bottlenecks. These are the constraints that need to be solved. For we cannot do anything else until these get accomplished. And when you bring that back home on a regular basis and you remind them of that, you get people that actually know where to focus their time and not get distracted on random tasks or some spam message that somebody sent them that then distracts them for the next hour.

Josh Hadley 00:05:25  Right. And then the last thing here is the founders trap. The CEO and the founder of the business can see everything. You were the person who originally got the business off the ground to begin with. So you understand how the sales connect to what’s happening in the customer service department. You understand how things how that all interacts with the supply chain and how supply chain is going to impact your buy box availability on Amazon or all of the above. Right. You see the full picture. Your team does not see the full picture. And that’s the mistake that gets made on a regular basis, is that you can sit from a higher, different perspective, and your team is in very narrow categories or roles that they don’t see the bigger picture at the same time. And they need you as the leader, as the visionary to cast that vision and to let them see, to poke their head up above the weeds, so to speak, and be able to see the role that they play and how it has downline impacts on the overall organization and business.

Josh Hadley 00:06:22  So this is why the solution, the number one habit that you can implement as a CEO is this weekly email newsletter. So what is this weekly CEO newsletter look like? Well number one, this is something that I send out every single week to my team. All right. And what I do first and foremost is I’m going to record a loom video. I use the Chrome browser extension for loom. And then instead of recording my screen, I just have it record my face and I’m just talking directly to the camera. And I’m doing this as though I am hosting a zoom meeting, or as though I were there with them in person in the same conference room. I’m talking to them as though they were present. But I’m doing this asynchronously, and this is the important aspect. This is what maintains clarity and maintains like just speed and momentum in your business is not just adding an additional meeting. It’s this asynchronous communication that keeps everybody aligned and on the same track. I’m a big fan of asynchronous communication for the following reasons.

Josh Hadley 00:07:19  Number one, if I were to do this in like a zoom meeting, right, and say, hey, every Monday morning I need everybody to log in. 8 a.m. the CEO is going to do this rah rah like cheer, cheer us on and give us the overall, you know, perspective of the business. Here’s what happens. Well, some people are naturally going to show up late. So you’re waiting 2 to 3 minutes and then you’re doing this kind of like song and dance of this small talk while you wait for everybody to join, and then you get everybody to join, and then eventually you can kick off this call, and then some people are going to ask for your time afterwards. So what ultimately ends up being like something that was only 30 minutes on your calendar turns into 45 minutes. And guess what that does to your team. Imagine if you have 20 team members, 50 team members, or even 100 team members joining them. Guess what they had to do? They had to stop what they were doing originally.

Josh Hadley 00:08:06  Join the zoom meeting, and then they’re going to burn their time waiting for everybody else to show up, and then they’re eventually going to have to task switch at the end of it to get back to what they were doing before. So rather than doing that, asynchronous communication just says, hey, when you get into your emails and when you are not in deep work, here’s an update for you for the overall business. So I’m just a massive fan of asynchronous communication. I think it allows teams to run so much faster and be so much more agile, and you get like ten x the work output from just like people bouncing from one meeting to another, having to like, constantly task switch. All right. So that’s number one I’m going to start with this loom video. One note on that. This is 15 minutes max. So I make sure that no video goes over 15 minutes. And ideally the video is only like maybe seven and a half to ten minutes long where it’s just like it’s long enough to, like, give people perspective and to, like, be filled with value.

Josh Hadley 00:08:58  But it’s not too long to where it’s like, oh, boy. Like, I’m tuning out halfway through just because, like, there’s just so many updates. So 15 minutes maximum, ideally 7 to 10 minutes is like the sweet spot in my opinion. Now, the last thing that I’m going to do, and this is the main reason why I use loom number one loom has an excellent transcription feature that as soon as you’re done recording it, it’s got the the transcription of all of the words that you said, I’m going to take that, I’m going to copy it, and I’m going to go to my LM of choice, whether it’s Claude. And ideally, Claude is one of the better copywriting AI tools that are out there. So I’m going to use Claude, and I’m going to dump that text in there, and I’m going to say, hey, create an email newsletter for my team based off of this loom video that I just created for my team. And then it’s going to format it nicely and then guess what I’m going to do? I’m not just going to copy and paste the output and then dump it into my email and blast that off to the team.

Josh Hadley 00:09:51  No, no, no, what I’m first going to do is I’m going to take that that output from the AI agent, and then I’m going to take that and I’m going to wordsmith it, and I’m going to now add my personality into those words. And some of the words maybe make sense. Maybe some of them don’t make sense. I’m going to refine that. So it’s still my voice as the CEO, not just some copy and pasted AI text that is the biggest. Like watch out for this. If you just think you’re going to, like, copy and paste a bunch of AI content, guess what? Your brand and your style as a CEO, you’ll you’ll basically become like personality less, so to speak. Right? And your team, they’re going to notice that there was a study that was actually done, I think it was a Harvard study. And what they found is like, I think it was over 75% of people could detect AI written context because, like, it lacked emotion and it just wasn’t the way that people naturally speak.

Josh Hadley 00:10:43  And if if you’re if your team is used to communicating with you, I can assure you they know the difference when something comes from an AI bot that was just like copied over from ChatGPT versus something that you actually like, crafted yourself. So again, use AI to get the bulk of it done, but then wordsmith it. Make sure it’s you. So that’s like the biggest like takeaway that I want you to understand as we dive into this. Now you may be asking, well, Josh, what in the world do you include in these, like, loom video updates? Are you just kind of like rambling on a weekly basis? Hey, guys, this is what we’re doing. Like what? What’s the agenda? What am I actually covering in this? So that’s what I’m going to share with you. It’s a simple four part agenda here. So number one I’m going to go over the wins from the previous week. Ideally I’m covering like three specific wins. And I’m going to give some very specific shout outs.

Josh Hadley 00:11:31  And we’ll go into each of these agenda items with some examples and details. But that’s first off I’m going to kick off this video with sharing like at least three actionable wins from this last week. Then the next agenda item is I’m going to state the one constraint that we are trying to solve in the business right now. And guess what? This is going to be repetitive because oftentimes it takes you at least a quarter or maybe six months to actually unlock a specific constraint in the business. But I’m going to be repetitive, reminding people this is the constraint of the business. The third agenda item is I’m going to dive into like core value shout outs. So number one, please make sure you have core values in your organization that kind of guide people’s like thinking and principles and what they live by in your overall culture and organization. But then you’re going to kind of give some shout outs to people that have actually emulated those core values. Okay. And then last but not least, I’m going to wrap all of this back to what is the vision, what’s the mission for the business, and how do all of these wins the constraints and these core values? How does this all connect back to the overall vision? What is the brand trying to achieve, and what role are those team members possibly playing in a much bigger ecosystem to, you know, hopefully make the world a better place? All right.

Josh Hadley 00:12:45  So let’s dive into section number one. So agenda item number one is the wins. So I want to ultimately show the team that progress is happening. And here’s why. People want to feel like they are on a winning team. If they only hear about problems or fires or missed targets, the company starts to feel like it’s just like heavier than it needs to be. Okay wins. Remind them that we are actually making progress, and I think anybody that’s played sports, I know that for me, like what’s more fun being on the winning team or the team that’s always getting their butt kicked? Well, guess what? If your interaction with your team members is only the aspect of they’re never doing enough or they’re always missing the mark, or they they’re they’re just not right. Rising up to your standards, so to speak, that’s very demotivating. They are going to feel like they are constantly on the losing team that’s getting their butt kicked day in and day out. Okay. Well, on the contrary, what does it feel like to be like a championship team? Right.

Josh Hadley 00:13:40  A team that’s always in progress. If you want to attract a level talent in your organization, a level talent wants to go play on the best teams because they want to go compete for a championship, right? I love sports. I mean, think about LeBron James, Michael Jordan, all of some of the greats in the NBA. Kobe Bryant right. The reason why they stayed with the organizations that they’ve stayed with or they’ve moved organizations is because they wanted to go join an organization or team that they felt like they could actually win, contribute their time, their talents, their abilities to something where they could actually go achieve the big goal, winning that championship. Likewise, that’s the same thing that your team wants to do. But deep down inside, they’re not calling themselves professional athletes. But deep down inside, every single team member has God given traits, talents and abilities, and they want to magnify those. And it’s your job as the leader to be able to architect the system, to get the right butts in the right seats, to build the overall bigger vision.

Josh Hadley 00:14:35  And so again, sharing those wins helps them know that they are on a winning team that can go compete for a championship, aka go accomplish some big goals and do some good in the world. All right. So let’s talk about like what are some examples of like wins that I share with my team. Number one I’m going to go through like revenue momentum. So did we get any new products launch that have made a significant impact. Or we’ve started generating sales for brand new products. Have we seen an increase in our overall market share, where we start to take a steal market share from some of our top competitors, or have we had record breaking weeks or days? Those are things I’m going to call out. I’m going to call out product wins. Whether it’s a new product idea that we found, a new product that’s been developed, maybe a patent or a design patent, a utility patent or a copyright that we’ve been able to actually achieve and get approval for. Okay, or just different milestones that we’ve hit for product development.

Josh Hadley 00:15:28  Overall, I’m going to call out different like sales channel growth. So maybe we increase sales on XYZ platform or maybe our rankings increased on Amazon. Or maybe we had a video go viral on TikTok or any partnership breakthroughs. Right? We had some retailers that reached out to us. Those are the wins that I’m going to share with the team, and then I’m going to also share some like customer success stories. Right? It could be, hey, I actually had a customer personally reach out to me as the CEO and say what a meaningful impact the product has made in their life, right? And then I’m going to tie that back to like how that impacts our overall vision and mission and letting people know, like, see, guys, this is the level of impact that we’re having on people. That’s a massive win. And then any team breakthroughs. So these could be things that, you know, maybe we’ve been up against like a specific obstacle, or maybe there’s been a seller support case that has been like the bane of our existence for the last like month.

Josh Hadley 00:16:20  And we haven’t been able to crack that nut until eventually this last week. A few people actually solve the root cause of the issue, right? Those are wins to call out to the team. And so those are just like some of the different talking points. But again, I’m not going through every single one of these points. I’m just going to call out the top 3 to 5, 3 to 5 high level wins because I want them to be quick. I want them to be actionable. And ultimately, I just want to show the team that we are actually making progress. All right. Section number two is I’m going to identify and reiterate the constraint in the business over and over and over again. All right. So I’m going to name that one bottleneck that we’ve been trying to achieve. So this is the most important section. Most teams aren’t lazy. Okay. Your team members aren’t actually lazy. They’re just unclear. And when the CEO or the leader names the actual constraint in the business every single week, the team knows exactly what to aim for, where to think, what projects they need to accomplish, the decisions that they need to make, and the level of urgency that is around that.

Josh Hadley 00:17:20  Okay, so let me just bring this back home for like a really specific example, because you may be thinking like, oh, well, I’ve got somebody in supply chain, but my constraint is like, we want to scale off of Amazon. We want to increase sales on TikTok shop. Well guess what. Supply chain still plays a massive role in that right? And supply chain needs to be the person thinking through. Hey, does it make sense to actually ship directly into TikTok shop or like for fulfilled by TikTok? Or should we use a 3PL or should we be using Amazon mix? It doesn’t matter what it is, even the accounting and the finance team, they need to know that, hey, the constraint is us being able to scale the business on TikTok shop right now. So everything you guys do, I want you to think through how how could we apply this to make our business better on TikTok shop? Okay. And then likewise, if they’re focused on Amazon and PPC, it could be, hey, how do I set up my PPC campaign so that when something does go viral on TikTok shop, I’m able to capture that traffic and then I’m able to exploit it and make sure that we gain increased market share whenever a video hits right.

Josh Hadley 00:18:24  That’s the like the simple principle is like you’re trying to share. Here’s the constraint, guys, and here’s how all of you play a role in trying to solve this. It’s not just me as the CEO, you all play a role, although some of them may be smaller than others in trying to achieve and kind of crush this bottleneck in the business. So let’s talk about like some examples of what this constraint may look like. It may be like it may be a product issue, whether it’s you don’t have new products coming in, or maybe you have way too many products and you need people to focus, right? Or maybe you just need to expand your product catalog to be able to increase the lifetime value of your customers. Okay. Next, it could be scaling on a specific sales channel, i.e. getting onto TikTok shop or Shopify generating your own demand. Okay, it could be inventory or supply chain bottlenecks. It could be, you know, a Covid situation where it’s like, crap, our our vessel has been sitting in the water now for shoot, 120 days and we can’t get our inventory right or it’s tied up in customs.

Josh Hadley 00:19:22  That is the constraint we need. Everybody from, you know, hey sales team, slow down the velocity of some of our products because we’re stuck. Inventory is not moving. Or maybe we have too much inventory and we need to liquidate it. So what does that mean for everybody. Right. That’s going to change your sales priorities. And the same thing on finance. Don’t be alarmed when we’re pushing on marketing because we need to move a lot more products because we’re way too heavy on inventory, right? It could be that you’re trying to hire for a key role. So you’re specifically calling out and reminding people if you have referrals, if you know of somebody, please send them our way. This is the next role that we need to hire for that will unlock growth in the business. Okay. And then last but not least, it could be a cash constraint in the business, which is hey guys, the number one constraint is like we don’t have enough money to like fund additional POS. We know the new products we want to launch.

Josh Hadley 00:20:10  So here’s what we’re doing right. We’re reaching out to bankers. We are trying to improve our cash conversion cycle. We’re negotiating with our manufacturers. Like and then what’s the role that like your finance team could obviously play in that. And what’s the role that your supply chain team and your PPC team. Maybe they scale back PPC budgets for just a month in order to maybe lower your overall tacos or total advertising cost so that you can go free that capital up to go launch those new products. Right. So you can see how this just paints a bigger picture. The CEO’s job is to simplify the noise into the one thing that matters most. One clear constraint gives every team member a shared target, and it aligns energy without even a single meeting. And you’re going to repeat this like a broken record. Repeat the constraint until the team can say it back without even thinking. That is when it becomes a cultural priority and not just like a talking point. Okay. All right. Let’s dive into section number three.

Josh Hadley 00:21:05  This is like the core value shout out. So here’s where I’m going to praise the behavior that I want repeated. Okay here’s the problem. Shout outs are more than praise okay. They’re more about like this is actually how you embed culture. And I know everybody always talks about like, oh, you want to have a cultural interview. You want to make sure that, you know, they meet the culture of your team. And oftentimes I would hear that and I was like, what is culture even mean in a business? Like, yeah, I want people that are hardworking and honest. It’s like, is that really what I want to like, say in my core values? So I’ll share with you. Here are the three core values for our business. And here’s what I think. Like these have made a massive impact in our business. It’s a massive lens that we hire through now, and we ensure that anybody that we hire, like they’re going to crush it in these core values because we want to just constantly raise the bar for what these core values look like.

Josh Hadley 00:21:53  So number one, we have extreme ownership, right? This is people. These are people that are proactive. They go beyond the mark. Like sometimes they’re working weekends or they’re working overtime because they’re so committed to accomplishing their specific role. Core value number two is relentless innovation. Just because we’ve done something one way doesn’t mean it’s the best way to do it. With AI tools that are changing every single week at this point, we want people that are on the cutting edge and testing new things and trying new things. They’re experimenting. And guess what? That also means that they’re failing regularly, and I’m okay with that. They can fail as long as they learn from those failures and they’re going to be making progress even faster. And then third, last but not least, it’s integrity above all. Okay. I want people that have integrity in the business. They say what they’re going to do and then they actually follow through and they’re not going to cheat around the system. If they’re not meeting their KPIs, they’re going to own it, and they’re going to tell you and they’re going to be honest in that, and they’re not going to try to hide things.

Josh Hadley 00:22:48  Okay. And obviously in accounting, they’re not fudging the numbers. Right. You don’t want that in your business. So here’s what we do when you give shout outs. Here’s a secret tip. One of the things I do for all of my directory reports that then they have multiple direct reports underneath them. I ask each of them to find one person from their team that has displayed or emulated one of our core values and send it to me first thing Monday morning so that when I do this, this kind of a CEO update video, I already have like 3 or 4 different examples across the team of people that are emulating our core values. It’s not like I have to really scratch my head and think long and hard about this. Like, leverage your team to help identify those people that are doing amazing things in your business. But here’s the key thing. You can’t just say like, oh, you know, Sophie did an amazing job last week. Great work. It’s no, you’re going to be extremely specific.

Josh Hadley 00:23:40  What did Sophie actually do and how did she display extreme ownership? Okay. And as an example of this, we had our supply chain manager that went like above and beyond the call of action with like the tariff refunds. Number one, I never gave them instructions to say, hey, we need to go file for tariff refunds. Guess who did it on their own? The supply chain manager set up everything, got us the refund. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. And it’s like that was all done without me having to tell that supply chain manager one single thing. I never gave them that, that directive. That’s what extreme ownership looks like. And I shared that with the team. And guess what? When your team hears it, guess what they then do? Oh, that’s what that looks like when you say extreme ownership okay. So in my role, what am I doing to go above and beyond the call of duty? What am I doing to push the envelope to think about problems that I can see, but maybe the CEO doesn’t see, and I’m not just going to wait around until the CEO tells me what to do, or my manager tells me what to do.

Josh Hadley 00:24:37  I’m going to go accomplish these things on my own, because now I’ve heard every single week I get stories of what relentless innovation looks like. I get stories of what integrity, above all, looks like. I get stories of what extreme ownership looks like when like stories tell and sell more than you just having talking points. If I were to just rattle off my core values every single week, they don’t mean a darn thing. But when I share them with stories and context behind them, that’s when it changes behavior on my team. Okay, now last but not least, this is the most important one vision reminder. Keep the bigger story alive. And why this is so important is that people cannot stay aligned to a mission that they only hear once a year. The vision reminder helps keep the business from becoming just tasks, tickets, deadlines, or trying to achieve KPIs or attending meetings. The work feels fundamentally different when people know what they are building, okay? And hopefully it’s something that they feel like they’re a part of that’s even bigger than them.

Josh Hadley 00:25:34  That’s doing something good in the world. Okay. And why does the vision need weekly repetition? It’s going to connect what they do in their role to the overall mission and the impact it’s having in the world or into people’s lives. Okay. It creates meaning. It gets them excited. This is why they want to work for you and your business rather than somewhere else. Right. Because there’s unlimited businesses that they could go work for. Why choose yours? And a level talent can go work anywhere in the world. You need to give them a reason as to why they want to keep staying with you. And vision build to the endurance. Teams can handle hard weeks when they believe that the work that they do actually matters, and the destination is worth it for them. All right. So that’s the overall like that’s the CEO update flywheel. That’s the newsletter that I send out. It’s wins, which creates belief in the business that we are actually doing. The thing that we we have set out to do.

Josh Hadley 00:26:26  Vision creates the meaning around why we do everything that we do. Okay. The constraint creates the focus so that people aren’t just often left field doing random things that aren’t tied to the overall like goals and focus of the business right now. And last but not least, the core value. Shout outs actually create the culture in your business, period. Full stop. So here’s the five mistakes that will kill this like newsletter update that you send. Okay so these are the five watch outs. Don’t just do a random brain dump. Don’t just hit record and then just start rambling on. Right. Like turning that update into an unstructured stream of consciousness. Like loses the team immediately. Number two, only sharing problems. If you’re just sharing problems like a constant diet of fires and missed targets creates heaviness and erodes morale in your business. Number three just generic praise. Great job. Just it teaches nothing. Vague recognition fails to reinforce your culture. Number four changing the message weekly. If you’re constantly changing. Hey, here’s the constraint this week.

Josh Hadley 00:27:27  Here’s the constraint next week. Here’s the new constraint. It’s like the team just gets so distracted and there’s not a clear focus on where things are going. And don’t just like make it about yourself. Number five the last watch out. This is not an area for you to just be like, look how cool I am or how much money I made or anything like that. This is for you to connect everything back to the overall vision and mission for the business. Okay, so ultimately, your first CEO update, a simple prompt for you. Number one, what did we like? What? Where did we win? Share one meaningful win that shows how the team made progress, and progress is actually real. Number two. What is the constraint in the business? Name the single bottleneck that is holding back your business right now. Number three who has lived the core values in your business? Call out one specific person and exactly what they did. And number four where are we going? Reconnect your targets and the team to the overall vision and mission that you have set out for your business.

Josh Hadley 00:28:20  Here’s the overall leadership lesson for you. Leadership is not just about saying something once. Leadership is creating a rhythm that people can follow. It’s inspiring them. It’s getting their God given talents and magnifying them. It is your job to make sure that they are excited, that they see, that they are winning, that they are growing, and they are developing as people. That’s what good leadership looks like. It is magnifying and tensing the output from every single person. And this one weekly habit of creating the CEO newsletter is going to ten x your leadership ability. Okay. You’re going to have ten x the impact that you would otherwise in your business. Your team does not need more meetings. They need more clarity. So start this week. Stay consistent and watch how your team will begin aligning and making some massive progress in your business. If you enjoyed this week’s episode, make sure you hit that subscribe button or you follow us here in whatever platform you’re listening to this on. And most importantly, if you got value from this, the biggest kudos that you could give me is by sharing this with another operator or entrepreneur who needs to hear the same message and then drop it in your slack community or Facebook group or mastermind that you’re a part of and share it with somebody else.

Josh Hadley 00:29:29  That’s how we spread the word. Until next time. We’ll see you later.