Before you get mad at the title and unsubscribe, keep reading to get a full understanding of why a title doesn’t make you a great leader. John Maxwell has a framework on leadership with five levels. Level one is the title. You own the school. Your name's on the lease. Everyone calls you Sensei or Master or Coach. People follow you because they have to, because you sign the checks and control the schedule, not because you've done anything to actually earn their loyalty.

Here's the thing about level one: everyone starts there. You cannot skip it. But the trap that catches most martial arts school owners is that they stay there, sometimes for their entire career, and never realize it.

What level one leadership looks like from the inside: things mostly get done. People show up. Classes run. But there's a low ceiling on everything. Your best instructor never goes above and beyond. Staff meetings feel lifeless. Turnover is a constant leak you've accepted as normal. You feel like you're managing children instead of leading professionals. And you've told yourself the problem is them.

It isn't them. It is you.

Consider this. If you had a drone following you around every second day, broadcasting everything you do and say to your staff and your students, would they still see you as a leader? Not based on your title. Based on your actions.

That question is worth sitting with before moving forward.

When you hire someone, there is a mental shortcut your brain takes. You hired them. Therefore they are capable. Therefore they should be able to figure it out.

So you point them at the job, hand them an SOP if you're organized enough to have one, and walk away. Three weeks later they're underperforming and you're already questioning whether you hired the right person.

Here's what actually happened: you never trained them.

Not showed them once. Not handed them a document. Actually trained them, the way you train students on the mat, with repetition and presence and correction and patience, until the standard becomes second nature.

I've done this wrong more times than I can count. Early on at my first school, I hired summer camp coaches and gave them almost nothing. I told myself the job was simple enough that they'd figure it out. A week in, they were already drifting from everything we stood for as a school. Standards were slipping. Kids were running the room. I had to let people go and restart, and when I actually sat down and trained the replacements properly, most of them stayed with us for years.

The pattern shows up more times than not when I do site visits. An owner furious with a staff member's performance, and when I ask them to walk me through the training that person received, the answer is some version of "I showed them what to do and they should have gotten it by now."

That's not training. That's wishful thinking.

The frustration you have with your employees is almost always a receipt for the investment you didn't make in them. The underperformance you're seeing is not a character flaw in your staff member. It's the natural result of someone who was never given what they needed to succeed.

For the first ninety days of any new hire, the mindset has to be: I am their brain. That is not an insult to their intelligence. It means they don't yet know the specific expectations of your specific school at your specific standard, and it is your job to transfer that knowledge through repetition until it sticks. If you go into a new hire assuming they should already know, you will be disappointed every time. And every time, it will be your fault.

Think about how you teach a student to do a reverse punch.

You don't show them once and walk away. You demonstrate. You have them try. You correct the stance, adjust the hip rotation, watch the chamber, give feedback, have them try again. Next class, you do it again. The class after that, you do it again. Weeks go by. The technique starts to become automatic. That's how skill gets transferred.

Now think about how you train your staff.

Most school owners train staff the way they would never in a million years train a student. They show them something once, maybe twice, hand them a sheet of paper, and consider the job done. Then when the staff member does it wrong, the owner is genuinely baffled.

The only difference between training a student and training a staff member is you've decided that patience and repetition is for students, and staff should somehow absorb the standard through proximity.

They won't. They never do.

Train your staff the same way you train your students. Repetition. Demonstration. Correction without frustration. Clear expectations stated more than once. The assumption that the person in front of you needs time to internalize what you already know by instinct.

If you can stand on a mat with a seven-year-old and repeat the same basic combination for forty-five minutes without losing your patience, you have every tool you need to train an adult staff member properly. You're just choosing not to use them.

"I just don't have the patience to train people."

I told myself this for years. It's a lie.

Every person reading this has stood on a mat with a group of seven-year-olds, taught the same technique while kids fell over their own feet and forgot everything from last week, and done it without losing patience.

Because you decided the work mattered.

Patience isn't a personality trait. It's a decision about whether something is worth your discomfort. When you say you don't have patience for training your staff, what you're actually saying is you've decided their development isn't worth the inconvenience.

That inconvenience is the whole job.

Leadership costs something. The leaders I respect most sacrifice things that never show up on a spreadsheet. Time with their team that came out of time with their family. Conversations they'd rather not have. Showing up to a training session when skipping it would have been easier.

We got into this business talking about freedom and building something meaningful. None of that comes free. Developing the people who make your school run is what you signed up for.

When I do site visits, I can usually tell which instructors have the messiest cars before I've talked to them. Just from watching them on the mat.

The way someone carries themselves on the floor, whether their uniform is clean, whether they walk past a student who needs a correction, whether their energy is present or somewhere else, all of it is a direct read on how they manage their life off the mat.

Your team reads you the same way.

Before you open your mouth when you walk through that door, your staff has already assessed your posture, your pace, your expression. They've already made a decision about what kind of day this is going to be. And they adjust.

If you walk in carrying stress you haven't dealt with, the message they receive before you say a word is: careful today, don't bring problems, this isn't the moment. And when your team doesn't feel safe bringing things to you, they stop. They hold it. Eventually they leave.

One of your most important leadership responsibilities happens before you open your mouth.

Before you walk in, ask yourself: what am I bringing through this door right now, and is this what I want my team to absorb today? If the answer is no, you don't go in yet. Five minutes. Breathe. Set your intention.

When I was instructing, it was tying my belt. Every time, before stepping on the mat, I went through a specific mental reset. As an owner, you need the same ritual. The last thing you do before you walk through that door sets the tone for every person inside it.

"I don't have time."

Go to your phone. Open screen time. Look at your daily average for the last seven days.

When someone made me look at mine, I was at eight hours a day on screens. A full-time job spent looking at a device. And I was telling myself I didn't have thirty minutes for a team member.

The time exists. You don't have a system for protecting it.

Everything that actually matters in my business is on my calendar. Not just meetings. Morning routine. Workouts. 1-on-1 time with my team. Time to review what's actually happening in the business. If it's not on the calendar, something else fills that space and the week ends before I notice.

If you run your life without a calendar, you will always feel like time is the problem. It's not the problem. Your relationship with your time is the problem.

The thirty minutes to sit down with your team member this week exists. It's in your phone right now, getting eaten by something that won't matter by Friday.

Three things. Most owners have done all three for extended stretches without realizing what they were communicating.

Canceling trainings. Every time you cancel on your team, you're telling them this was never actually important to me. Standards drop one cancellation at a time. Your team stops preparing because you've shown them preparation isn't really expected.

Meetings with no agenda. I have one rule in every business I run: no agenda, no meeting. If you show up without a written agenda, no one has to stay. That's the policy. My parents used to run staff meetings on Monday nights at 9PM with no structure. Two and a half hours. Nobody left feeling like it was worth their night. When you show up prepared with an agenda, a clear outcome, and a time limit, you're telling your team their time means something. When you don't, you're telling them the opposite.

Walking into class without a plan. Your students can tell in the first five minutes whether you came prepared. So can your staff. When you stand in front of people who are counting on you to lead and you're clearly improvising, the message is: you weren't worth my preparation.

Calendar prep is Sunday work. Every class gets a plan. Every meeting gets an agenda. Every training gets an outline. That standard starts with you.

The single shift that changed more about how my team operates than anything else in the last ten years: I stopped giving commands and started asking questions.

Every time you hand someone the answer, you take a rep away from them building the muscle to find it themselves. The next time a similar situation comes up, they come back to you. Then the time after that. You've trained them to need you instead of think for themselves.

Ask questions that lead them to the answer and something different happens. They think. They own the solution because they built it. They handle the next version of the problem without you.

This matters more in martial arts schools than almost anywhere else. Most of our staff are our own students. People we spent years conditioning to say yes sir, yes ma'am, to execute without questioning.

That is the worst possible employee. Someone who only complies won't bring you problems when they see them. They'll wait for a command, and when one doesn't come, nothing happens.

Train your team to work through problems before bringing them to you. What have you already tried? What do you think the best solution is? What could go wrong? You offer your perspective last, not first.

I had a vision day with my leadership team recently. They called me out directly. I'd been scheduling events every single weekend, week after week, and they were burning out. Their question: are we a school that transforms lives or a school that puts on events? Because right now it looks like the second one.

That was hard to hear. The only reason they felt safe enough to say it is because I built a culture over years where that kind of conversation doesn't get punished.

I do site visits at schools and sit 1-on-1 with every team member. Almost every time, I hear things the owner has never heard. The team will tell a stranger what they won't tell the person who signs their checks. Not because they don't want the owner to know. Because they don't feel safe telling them.

That is not a staff problem. That is a leadership problem the owner created and has no idea exists.

Every problem in your business is your responsibility. Every win belongs to the team.

The title isn't the credential. What you do when no one is watching is the credential. Your team already decided which one you are.

Two questions worth asking every person on your team in a 1-on-1 this week.

First: "What is the hardest part of your job right now?"

Don't ask what you can do to make it easier. Most people will minimize to avoid looking weak. Frame it as the hardest part and they'll actually tell you.

Second: "What is one thing I do that makes it harder for you to trust me?"

You have to not be defensive when you hear it. It's going to point back at you. The best leaders ask this constantly. Not occasionally. If you want to know where you're failing your team, this is the question.

Paste this into your AI tool before the conversation:

"I'm going to have 1-on-1s with my team this week. My goal is to understand where I'm failing them as a leader and what's making their jobs harder than necessary. Give me 5 follow-up questions I can use when they give vague answers, and coach me on how to receive critical feedback without becoming defensive."

Full marketing report in the inbox at 5AM before I'm awake. Email drafts in my brand voice, ready to edit and send. Weekly debrief built automatically. Social content for the week pulled from a scan of my transcripts. At the school, Josh running scheduled AI workflows while he's on the mat coaching kids. The line that actually matters: "I stopped asking it questions and started giving it jobs." Most owners are still using AI like a smarter Google. The ones pulling ahead are using it like a staff member who never calls in sick and never needs a reminder.

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Jadi Tention sat down with his students and their parents to talk about what competition actually feels like to a child. An honest conversation about pressure, expectations, and where that pressure is really coming from. Worth watching if you have competitive students. Worth watching twice if you've ever wondered whether the weight your kids carry on competition day is theirs or yours.

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"The school owner who wins is not the smartest. It's the one willing to take action while still figuring things out." The idea is right. It got buried under so much parallelism that the actual point never lands. Confidence opens the door, competence keeps it open, action creates confidence. That's three sentences that sound like wisdom and evaporate in thirty seconds. The thought was good. The delivery didn't do it justice.

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Reformatted quotes from a book published in 1963. 107 shares. The consumer isn't a moron. If it doesn't sell, it isn't creative. Tell the truth but make the truth fascinating. None of it new. All of it still being ignored. The industry keeps needing to be reminded of things Ogilvy figured out before most school owners were born. That gap between knowing something and actually doing it is where almost all the money in this industry is sitting, unclaimed.

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46% of employees who quit cite their direct manager, not pay, not workload, not culture, as the primary reason for leaving.

(Source: Gallup State of the American Workplace Report, 2023)

That number should bother you. Not because it's surprising, but because of what it means for your school specifically. Your best instructor isn't out there looking for a higher hourly rate. Your front desk person isn't leaving because the schedule is hard. The people who walk out of martial arts schools walk out because of the person leading them. And in most cases, that person has no idea. They blamed the economy, blamed the student's schedule change, blamed anything except the thing the data keeps pointing at. You are the reason people stay. You are the reason people leave. Those are not separate facts.

The title came first. The respect has to be earned separately. Most school owners never figure out those are two different things. You've spent years building technical skill nobody can take from you. The people who work for you are watching every day to see if you apply that same standard to how you lead them. Some of them have already decided. The ones still deciding are giving you more credit than you've earned.