Ask ten school owners to define leadership and you will get ten different answers, and most of them start with a pause.

Here is the thing. Almost none of us ever actually sat down and wrote our definition out. We just picked one up somewhere. From a boss who ran on fear, or a coach who used to yell, or one book we read half of back in 2014 and still quote at staff meetings like it is gospel.

Underneath whatever definition you picked up, there are ten beliefs running in the background. Five of them grow a team. Five of them shrink one. We break them down this week.

Every leader creates an atmosphere in the building. Good leadership expands the room. Weak leadership shrinks it. There is no third setting where you walk in, do nothing, and the room just stays neutral.

An expanded room runs on clarity, and on enough courage for people to actually tell you the truth. They bring you problems while the problems are still small. Somebody disagrees with you in a meeting and the room does not go dead silent.

A shrunk room runs on everybody being careful around you. People wait to get told what to do. Meetings are pleasant and useless. And here is the trap. You will read that quiet as peace, because from across the room a scared team looks exactly like a calm team. A lot of the time, what you are actually looking at is fear.

Which room you are running comes down to ten beliefs. Let’s start with the five that grow one.

A good leader wants the people around them to get smarter and more capable than they are. When somebody you developed passes you up, that is not a problem. That is the job working the way it is supposed to. That is the whole scoreboard.

The problem we see is that while most leaders do an okay job of multiplying the capacity of their team, they tend to multiply disfunction at the same rate. This comes from a lack of time investment into your team and a lack of commitment to installing and following systems.

If all you hear is how stressed and overwhelmed your team is, it starts with looking in the mirror. Are we throwing commands at them or building a strong foundation for them to flourish without making it feel like the sky is falling.

Growth needs both halves at the same time. Safe enough to take a real swing, and stretched enough that the swing actually matters.

Give people safety with no challenge and you get a pleasant team that never gets any better. Give them challenge with no safety and you get people who hide their mistakes until those mistakes get expensive.

Most schools lean hard on one side and cannot even see it. Here is a gut check for you. If nobody has told you something you did not want to hear in the last ninety days, your team has just gotten really good at reading you and telling you what you want to hear.

The people on your team are talent you are responsible for developing, not hands you are renting by the hour. That word steward matters to me. It means you are taking care of something that got handed to you, and you are on the hook for how it grows.

Stewardship means somebody else eventually owns the thing you built, and they own it well enough that you being gone for a week is not an emergency. It means you train somebody past the point where they can do the task, all the way to where they can make the call on it without you.

That second part is where almost every owner stops. We dictate what to do to our team all day long, and then we wonder why nobody on the team ever thinks for themselves.

When confusion is high in a business, clarity is almost always low. And clarity is free.

Clear direction and honest expectations are some of the most generous things you can give your team, especially when you are willing to take the feedback as well as you hand it out. Being vague feels nicer in the moment. All you are really doing is pushing the disappointment down the road. The person on the other end still walks away not knowing what you actually wanted.

Your team reads your face and your energy before you say a word. They have already decided what kind of day this is going to be and adjusted to it. You have not done anything yet and the room is already set.

A leader who cannot get a handle on their own state before they walk in is just broadcasting it onto everybody else. Sixty seconds in the parking lot deciding what you are about to carry through that door might be the cheapest leadership development you will ever get.

Now the other five. These never get said out loud, which is exactly why they get to run without anybody arguing with them. Nobody puts these on a values poster. They show up in what you actually do on a Thursday afternoon when you are tired and behind.

This one hides inside being good at your job. You genuinely do know more than your staff about most of what happens in that building, so correcting everybody all day feels like you are just protecting quality. The bill shows up later, when you notice nobody proposes anything anymore. They figured out that every idea gets “improved” by you before it is allowed to exist, so they stopped bringing you the half-baked ones. Half-baked is where every good idea starts.

You can defend this one with a stack of evidence. The time you handed off the newsletter and it went out with the wrong date. The camp somebody else planned that lost money. Real stuff, real receipts. Here is what that evidence actually shows though. You handed off the task without handing off the training that goes with it, watched it break, and then filed it as a lesson about people when it was really a lesson about how you hand things off.

The half second right after somebody questions you is the whole tell. Your face does something you did not tell it to do, and thirty people caught it. You might go on and handle the actual conversation great. Does not matter. They already saw the flinch, and next time the question just stays in the parking lot where you will never hear it.

Nobody thinks this one on purpose, which is exactly how it survives. It shows up as needing to get thanked in front of the room. Bringing up your own credentials in a conversation that did not call for it. That sour little feeling when a parent praises a different instructor by name and not you. Our industry gives this one perfect cover, because we wear our rank on our body and a title in front of our name, and then we call the whole thing tradition.

It does. For about six weeks. After that, what you have got is a team that has gotten really good at managing your mood instead of growing the school, and your best person, the one with options, leaves first. The ones with options always leave first. That is what having options means.

Line those five up next to each other and the pattern jumps right out. It is the need to be the smartest one standing there, the need to keep your hands on everything, hearing a question as an attack, needing the credit for the win, and reaching for pressure any time you want more output.

Every one of them does the same thing underneath. Each one lowers the amount of real thinking and creativity happening in the people around you, and in you too. That is the actual mechanism. It has got nothing to do with morale or vibes. It is your whole staff’s thinking quietly dropping off while the revenue on the report still looks fine.

Here is the part I want to sit with you. Your team could already write your five out for you. They have been arranging their behavior around them for years. The only reason nobody has said it to your face is that you have not built a room yet where saying it survives the week.

Score yourself on the first five, honestly. Then hand those same five to one person on your team and ask them to score you. The gap between your number and their number is your leadership plan for the rest of the year.

You did not choose your five beliefs. You picked them up somewhere. And everybody who works for you is already living inside them.

Gilbert, Arizona. November 5 through 7 at Kiln Gilbert. Two full days of hot seats with the four Impakt coaches, real work on enrollment and retention, and time on developing your leadership and your staff. Friday night we run a social for the whole team, because the conversations that actually change something usually happen after the room breaks up.

Miami. February 19 and 20, 2027. Same format, same fifty seats, and it lands right at the point in the calendar where most owners are staring at a January that underperformed and deciding whether they are going to fix it or explain it.

The hot seat is the part that matters here. You put the thing that keeps breaking in front of a room of operators who are running their own schools this same week, and they tell you what they see. Nobody in that room is selling you a plan. Every one of them is going home to a schedule and a team on Monday, same as you.

Both tickets include admission, materials, meals during the sessions, and the post-event playbook. Fifty seats per city, and Gilbert is the one with a deadline on it.

Self-scoring on the five is usually where this dies. You give yourself a 4 across the board, feel good for a minute, and change nothing by Wednesday. This prompt makes that harder, because it will not let you keep a score until you put real evidence on the table.

Paste this into Claude or ChatGPT.

You are a leadership coach for a martial arts school owner. I am going to rate myself 1 to 5 on five leadership beliefs. Your job is to make me defend every score.

The five beliefs: 1. My job is to multiply capacity in others. 2. People grow when trusted and challenged. 3. Leadership is stewardship rather than control. 4. Clarity is kindness. 5. My emotional state sets the room.

Ask me for one score at a time. After each score, ask me for a specific example from the last 30 days that proves it, with names, dates, and what actually happened. If my example is vague, hypothetical, or describes an intention instead of an event, say so and lower the score yourself.

When all five are done, give me these four things.

A. MY REAL SCORES, adjusted based on the evidence I actually produced.

B. THE ONE BELIEF costing me the most right now, and the specific behavior of mine that keeps it low.

C. ONE ACTION for this week that would move that belief. Something I do, not something I decide. Include the day and who is involved.

D. THE QUESTION I should ask a team member to check whether any of this is landing.

Do not encourage me. Do not compliment my self-awareness for doing this exercise.

Then hand the same five beliefs to one person on your team and ask them to score you too. If you can stomach it, do that part before you look at your own numbers.

Callen Faulkner broke down what AI can actually do inside a business and somehow made it entertaining, which puts him ahead of basically every webinar you have been invited to this year. Most AI content aimed at owners is a guy in a hoodie reading a feature list off his second monitor. This is the one you will actually watch to the end. Then you will open a new tab and go try one thing, which was the whole point.

Watch the reel →

Less theory than most of these conversations, and a lot more of what I am actually running inside my own companies right now. If you have been waiting for somebody to stop describing the wave and just show you the boat, this gets closer to that. Fair warning, a couple of the examples are going to make you a little annoyed about how long you have been doing something by hand.

Listen to the episode →

A short breakdown on building a martial arts empire from a guy who has the receipts to back up every word of it. Watch how little of it is actually about marketing. Forty years in and his advice still lands on people and standards, which is either a coincidence or it is the whole answer.

Watch the reel →

Gallup dug into engagement scores across a huge pile of business units and found that managers account for at least 70 percent of the variance in employee engagement. The data under that number covered roughly 2.7 million employees across about 100,000 teams.

(Source: Gallup, State of the American Manager, 2015)

Almost everybody who repeats that stat gets it a little wrong. It does not mean a manager controls 70 percent of how engaged any one person feels. It is a between-team variance number, which is actually a more useful thing to know. Drop it into your building and it reads like this. Two schools with the same pay, the same schedule, the same curriculum, and the same square footage will still produce completely different teams, and the biggest single reason for the gap is who is standing in front of them. It comes down to the leader far more than the market or the pay scale you keep quietly apologizing for.

Then you have got the cost of getting this wrong on repeat. SHRM puts the average price of replacing an employee at somewhere around six to nine months of that person’s salary once you add up recruiting, onboarding, the empty seat, and the ramp before the new hire is even worth what you are paying them. Gallup’s range runs wider than that, landing anywhere between 50 and 200 percent of annual salary depending on the role.

Now run your own math on it. Three people through one position in three years. Call it a $40,000 role. You have spent north of $60,000 replacing what was really the same problem the whole time, and that number does not even touch the parents who quietly stopped booking that class, or the strong instructor who watched all three of those exits and drew their own conclusion about which of your ten beliefs is actually running the building.

None of that money went to a hiring problem.

The uncomfortable part is that none of this is new information to the people you lead. Your team ran this exact assessment on you a long time ago, without a worksheet, and they have been quietly arranging their behavior around what they found ever since. The only person in your building still working off the old definition of leadership is the same one with the authority to change it. That is you.