068: For Love of Team Foundations

Teams. Building a team. Managing a team. Delegating tasks or projects to a team member. Finding and hiring a team member. 

When you hear those words and phrases, what pops into your mind?

If you’re like most solopreneurs or entrepreneurs that have a small team, you probably struggle to get excited about having or growing a team. It may sound like more trouble than it’s worth. You may wonder if it’ll even be worth it. And, if you’ve had a bad experience before, you may question how or why it’ll be different this time.  

Which is why I’m so excited about this week’s podcast episode! 

In this episode, you’ll get:

• Why knowing the 3 levels of leaders may prevent burnout and chaos...and how you can take advantage of it today 
• Three characteristics every successful leader needs to embrace
• The four simple steps to simplify your business 
• How to evaluate your activities to know EXACTLY what to change
• What the two main roles in every business are, HOW they intersect and WHAT each one needs to take 100% responsibility for   

And, how that all works together is the solid foundation for building and keeping a team you love.

****

Connect with Winston

LinkedIn     https://www.linkedin.com/in/winstonfaircloth/
Facebook   https://www.facebook.com/forloveofteam
Instagram   https://www.instagram.com/forloveofteam/
Twitter        https://twitter.com/forloveofteam

Transcript

Winston Faircloth: 0:00

Here's a bridge to teamwork that brings both together beautiful harmony and alignment. That is a shared why either multipliers it's Winston Faircloth, and welcome back to Episode 68. of for love team. This is the podcast where leaders simplify teamwork, helping you surround yourself with others doing the work they love and simplifying your business processes so that you serve more focused on the work that you love. Last time, we wrapped up our three part series on our four love of team mantra, leaders simplify teamwork, with a focus on the bridge to amazing teamwork. And today, let's recap and focus in on the foundations of for love of team. By looking back at our journey so far, we began by talking about one of the biggest blind spots for early stage founders in building a business that they love. And I use the term level three leader to challenge founders to love their teams as much or more than they love their products and clients. The founders journey is one that is fairly predictable as you're getting started. Level One is loving the product. Because let's face it, most of us founders are idea people, we'd love to solve problems, seize opportunities, create solutions, and yet often we have more ideas than bandwidth. But there's something about seeing a solution that others cannot see. And bringing that to the marketplace, something magical about that. And that's why this love of product is such an easy place to start. Level Two is the love of clients, you finally start getting traction money starting to flow idea that you've been babying all this time is now out in the world and serving others. And our focus begins to shift to creating a client experience to be as good as our original product idea or service. And deep in our bones. We know that a remarkable client experience we know what it feels like. And we're committed to delivering that for our clients. So in level one, we are focusing on our love of product or service level two, we begin to shift our focus to the love of clients. And then what I'm offering up is an opportunity for us to be level three leaders where we love our team. Consider this, I heard someone an expert in customer service and business growth, say something like this one time, your client experience will only rise to the level of your team's satisfaction in business. That's a pretty daunting statement. But it's so true. And so surrounding yourself with people working in their gifting focused on a common mission allows you to spend more time working where you're most gifted, loving your team is should be equal to that love of product and love of clients. In an earlier podcast, I told the story about how my son when I first adopted him felt torn between loving his dad and loving me. And the counselor that day said hey, Love Is Something You don't divide is something you share. And so as you're leveling up in your business, my invitation in this podcast in our work together is that you can put love of team alongside your deep love of product and deep love of clients. So here for love of team, it really comes down to three words we talked about every podcast leaders simplified teamwork, and these are the three pillars of the for love of team framework. And this sets the stage for crafting and keeping a team that you will absolutely love working with. So let's take those three pillars apart just for a moment leaders, we just talked about how level three leaders love their team as much or more as they love their products and their clients or customers. And we talked in an earlier podcast about level three leaders have three defining characteristics. Number one, they're a B rich leader, which means that they're outward focused versus focusing on their own self interest. I use that term be rich in contrast to get rich, being rich, is that you have this mindset of love caring faith, abundance, trust, versus getting rich, which is about building your empire building your authority, your personal brand and your bank account at the expense of others. Characteristic number two, I call first Corinthians 13 values or FC 13 values. And this is the love chapter that we've heard about in many, many weddings, special occasions. And since leadership is love, let's read those verses with a level three leader firmly in mind and I'm going to replace the word love with leaders, leaders or patient leaders are counted. leaders do not envy, do not boast are not proud leaders do not dishonor others are not self seeking are not easily angered. Keep no record of wrongs. leaders do not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. Leaders always protect always trust always hope always persevere. Man, every time I read that and see that imprint, it makes me reevaluate, am I living up to these kind of values as a leader, these are very high standard, it's really hard to do that on a day to day basis when we're tired and pulled in many different directions. But leaders need higher standards. And this is one of the highest standards I can think of. And then characteristic number three, be rich mindset, FC 13 values and characteristic number three, being radically generous. Now characteristic one, we talked about the mindset of being rich versus getting rich. But here we get to demonstrate, we are going beyond that mindset, and we're going to actions. So being radically generous means we are willing to demonstrate by our actions, how we are rich already in our mind, body, and spirit. And some of the best ways I can think of being radically generous. Are these descriptors. selfless, bountiful. gracefield, over and above unexpected, radically generous is a state of mind matched with actions. So that is our pillar number one, leaders. pillar number two is the term simplify. And as I was preparing for this, this pillar, I found a quote that just really captured the essence of simplify in the way I think of business. And this comes from Hans Hoffman, who said, the ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary can speak. Oh, my goodness, knowing that the necessary may speak means we have to trim we have to prune we have to get rid of the unnecessary. And so in our earlier podcast, we went through four steps to help simplify your business. Step one was taken an inventory, a two week inventory of your various business activities, and just capturing those on a blank sheet of paper and estimating the amount of time that you spend on these different business activities. And see if you begin to have some dots that you can connect step two was now that you've taken that inventory, maybe you've even multiplied that by two to see if you've got a kind of a monthly average. Now it's time to look at these time investments with a critical eye. And so I gave you four ways of evaluating these time investments. And the four ways were novice where you put it in next to these kinds of activities where you can do this activity, but it's something you're pretty uncomfortable doing. And with more training or time to research, you could probably find a better way to get this done these tasks or a grind to do unless your gift is being a factfinder researcher. The second way to categorize these activities is the word skilled, you put an S next to these and these are activities you're pretty good at you can get these done in a reasonable amount of time, air quotes, reasonable, these are not your favorite task. But you can do these things in a pinch, if you absolutely had to. They're not your favorites, you can do them, you may have to do a little bit of research from time to time because you've gotten rusty on it, but you got skills, not your favorite third is excels. Now this is the area that most leaders most founders struggle with in terms of how they simplify their business. Because these are tasks that you understand you've got it down, you can routinely and easily do this work, you can also teach others how to do it if you had to. And you're probably spending a fair amount of time here, even if it's not your highest and best work. Yet, if you had more access to resources, you probably wouldn't do this work at all. And what I find with most leaders is they spend way too much time here, when there are opportunities to be resourceful and figure out another way of doing it. And then finally, the fourth category of activities is gifted. And these are activities that you know, hurt being in the zone or being in flow. This comes so easily and naturally to you. You want to do it all the time, regardless of whether you're compensated or not. And people are coming to you all the time asking for advice or help in doing these kinds of tasks. Or you could talk endlessly about this topic. And you're always just intrigued and curious and discovering new ways to get this work done at a higher and higher level. Step one was taking inventory step two is evaluating these time investments. Step three, especially for the task of excelled or skilled is that you begin to document future simplifications now, especially if you're solopreneur. This is an area of where it's just the idea of documenting a process just for a person overwhelmed already is not something that you're very interested in my take on that is just do a screen capture of a process that you're doing on a repeating basis, you're just documenting it, you're putting it aside for later. So when you start to bring your team members on, you can say, here's how I'm doing it today. And why and I love screen captures, I think they are a great tool and standard operating procedures. They're just kind of your beginner version of it. And remember, as you bring team members on who are really gifted in organization and streamlining processes, this is their superpower. There are people who love this kind of work, your imperfect process captured once is better than no process or something that has to be documented later. And then finally, step four is to as you look at those activities, and you've put them in those buckets, can you begin to think about through the filter of your why and being in business. Which ones of these activities are candidates for delegation, automation, or elimination, just so that we're clear on definitions delegate, this is an activity that's so important to creating the impact income and margin in your business that it's worth finding a person who to help you perform this work automate is an activity that has high value but is repetitive in nature, and is worth seeking Process Automation support that could be in the form of a workflow, or a potential software service so that these tasks can be performed at some point with little human intervention. And then finally eliminate can we ignore combine or eliminate tasks because they don't create impact income margin and our business and one of the things I learned the hard way and starting out was a lot of times founders spend more time doing the work of looking like they're in business than than serving people. And so that's a real that's a real challenge at the beginning of your of your journey. It's so important to not get hung up on logo designs or websites or things like that when you can really be serving people. Finally teamwork. This is the third leader simplify team. Teamwork really comes down to a couple of important questions, leaders, you own the answer to the question, what is your business? What's our mission? What service do we bring to others? What do we do next? What brings the most value what team members do we need as you bring more people on? Yes, you're going to be collaborative but ultimately there's one decision maker on this question of what and if we can stay focused there we will do every part of our organization product client and team a great service team members we bring on to to answer and own the question how because the decisive well considered what deserves a how managed by people who love doing that work that who who has the skills, abilities and desire to deliver the results you seek. And this is so hard for leaders we want to set we want to be in the world of how and yet this is not our gifting for many of us even those of us who are really organized and here's the other dimension of it a plus players that we want on our team do not want to be told how they want to contribute and their contribution is figuring out the hell with their within their gifting these these eight plus players focus on purpose and their burning desire to make a difference so if we micromanage them we won't keep them very long. And so if leaders are responsible for the what and team members are responsible for the how there's a bridge to teamwork that brings both together in beautiful harmony and alignment and that is a shared why now as leader it's important that we make the what is clear as we possibly can and by adding an equally compelling why this is the rocket fuel that sets that team that team of a players on fire to make the our desire results not only possible, but inevitable. This why fuels purpose provides context and shows the larger benefit of why we take this what on and for a really strong player a strong what and a compelling why unleash their creativity on the how. So leaders simplified teamwork three simple yet powerful Words, which provide a solid foundation for building and keeping a team that you love. Now I'm curious, I really want to know where you are on your journey of building a team that you love. And if you have questions or comments about this recap of the foundations of her love of team, I would love to hear from you. I believe this is the path to multiplying your impact your income, your margin and freedom and business, a world where you are surrounding yourself with others doing the work they love, and simplifying the business processes so that you can serve more focused on the work that you love. So here's how we can connect, I have a text number, it's 1-754-800-9461. That's 1-754-800-9461. There's no bots, no autoresponders on the other end of that number, it's just me, not my team. And I'd love to hear from you about your name your story what's going on with your business, this us text number again, 1-754-800-9461. Or if you prefer, call and leave a voice message. I'd love to hear from you. 1-754-800-9461. And if you're enjoying the new season, season two for love of team leave us an honest review on whatever platform you're listening to. By the way, we've just joined audible as one of our options to catch the podcast and we're on most every player you can imagine. But it's actually kind of cool to be on Audible. I'm a big audible fan. And finally, remember leaders simplify teamwork, multiplying your impact income margin and freedom and business. I'll catch you on the next episode.