S2 E66: Simplify to Multiply

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.  --Hans Hofman.

In our noisy world, it’s all too easy to allow the unnecessary to gain control of our businesses and of our lives. But a big part of leadership is being self-aware and that awareness can help you see what is necessary. 

We believe that one thing that’s necessary is:

Leaders Simplify Teamwork. 

After focusing on Leaders, Leadership, and how to be a Level 3 Leader for the last couple of episodes, today we’re moving to the second pillar of Simplify.

As Hans Hofman said, we need to simplify so that the necessary can speak. In our businesses, that’s our mission, vision, and impact. 

You’ll want to grab a pen and paper to take notes as you listen in to:

• A brief recap of the characteristics you want to model to be a great leader
• The fastest way to build a team you love
• How the power of simplicity turned a recent retreat into a “wow” experience 
• The 4 steps to SIMPLIFYING your business, including a foundational evaluation that you’ll want to return to again and again as you grow and scale your business

The breakdown of the 4 steps are the perfect way to implement Leaders Simplify Teamwork so you can build an amazing team.

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Transcript

Winston Faircloth: 0:00

The greater impact income and freedom becomes you want to build a team that you love. Either multipliers it's Winston Faircloth, and welcome to Episode 66 of the for love of tea. This is the podcast where leaders simplify teamwork, helping you surround yourself with others doing work they love, and simplifying your business processes to delegate, automate and eliminate so that you serve more doing only the work that you love. Now last time, we tackled the first pillar of our promise of leaders simplifying teamwork, with a focus on what it takes to be a level three leader. And to recap, level three leaders love their team as much or more than they love their products, and their clients and customers. And they have three primary characteristics. Here's how you can spot a level three leader out in the wild characteristic number one, a B rich leader, they are outward focused versus focused on their own self interest. They're being RICH IN LOVE, in carrying in faith in abundance, yes in trust, versus getting rich in building authority, a personal brand or a bank account at the expense of others. Characteristic number two, FC 13 values. First Corinthians 13 is widely known as the love chapter of the New Testament. And since leadership is love, let's read those verses with a level three leader firmly in mind leaders or patient leaders or kind. leaders do not envy do not boast or 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 and always persevere. That's an FC 13 leader with values that you see in First Corinthians 13 characteristic number three, they're radically generous. And finally, I think we ought to go beyond the mindset of be Rich's leader. We have to be willing to demonstrate how our actions of how we are rich in our body, mind and spirit. And one of the ways I can think of is being radically generous, selfless, bountiful grace filled over and above unexpected. So those three characteristics of a level three leader, there be rich leader with FC 13 values embodying radical generosity. So that's leaders. Now the second pillar is simplify. And this is the middle pillar that will help you build a team you love faster than anything else. So as I was thinking about the word simplify, I found this quote. And I just think it summarizes everything I believe about simplicity. And this is from Hans Hoffman said this, the ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary, so that the necessary may speak. That's a pretty deep one. Let's go back. Let's read that again. The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak. Well, he was a German born American painter, Hoffman applied this principles to his creations. And as a founder, I'd say the same principle applies to our businesses. And with this pillar, we're constantly seeking to eliminate the unnecessary, so that the necessary which is our mission, and our impact can speak. Now Few days ago, I had the opportunity to facilitate a senior leadership team retreat. This was an $18 million organization and I took them through what I call a reset retreat. And they had gathered together in a socially distance manner. In a room about 1000 miles from my location, I could not see them their body language or level of engagement. All I had was my hearing to sense the room. And since they were off camera, I was off camera to now eliminating the visuals heighten my listening ability exponentially. I could concentrate on pauses on tone, you know, there were subtle inflections in their voice, and I could help discern whether they were asking a question or making a statement. And these inflections were a bit of a tell it's a card game term a tell on how certain or uncertain they were with their comments. Now is aided by a person In the room, I had asked to record comments on a flip chart, they read the foreign in the room, and they served as my eyes to help me know when the exercises I had assigned were completed or when we needed to take a stretch break. Otherwise, I was flying blind. I could not see what was going on in the room. Now I've been leading workshops in some form or another for almost 40 years now. And yet the feedback from this remote visioning session was one of the most impactful feedback of my career. Why the feedback all centered on how team members felt heard, appreciated, unified, like never before. And even a consultant in the room was texted me to say, you know, how are you doing this? Well, this is the power of simplicity. Once I've recognized that the circumstances are such that I couldn't see them, they couldn't see me. I dialed up my listening skills, and not having those visual cues in front of me or searching the room for other kinds of feedback really dialed up my ability to, to hear them, and reflect back what they were saying. And creating space for them to share simplicity, stripping away the unnecessary, so that the necessary can speak. Gosh, I just love that definition. Now, as founders, this can feel like an overwhelming assignment. Often we're, we're wearing many, if not all the hats in our business. So how can we simplify our businesses? Well, here we believe in a four step process to help you simplify your business today, and prepare for your team in the future. Step one, let's take inventory of our business activities. Now this is a process that I do about once a quarter, or a couple times a year at the outside. And like most of what we teach, we recommend that you do these exercises regularly. Now why? Why can't we just do an exercise once and leave it behind? Well, because every time we come back to a foundational exercise, you are at a new place in your business, you've become a more experienced leader with more inputs and understanding of where you're going with your team and where you're going with your business. Now, this is not a financial inventory, rather, it's a time inventory. So over a two week period, I'd like to ask you invite you rather to take note of the kinds of tasks you're doing at work, reading and answering emails, scrolling and posting on social media. Maybe you're creating content, such as newsletters, or a podcast like this, designing and delivering services, prospecting for new clients paying bills, well, you get the idea, capture each of these tasks on a sheet of paper. And also as you're doing these tasks, just captures an estimate of the time that you're spending on each task. And I'd recommend that you do this for at least two weeks because there's some tasks are going to naturally fit into a particular week that don't fit into a second week or third week in your month. So Expand your horizon a bit as you take inventory of these business activities. Now, once you've recorded and taken this inventory, now you're going to get curious. And that leads us to step two, evaluate your time investments. So next, we're going to look at how you spent your time at work. And are you seeing with your eyes of curiosity, any patterns on a second sheet of paper, let's rank your activities in high to low in terms of the total time that you've allotted to these types of activities, list each task and activity and next to it write down the overall time per task. And if you want to just for fun, multiply this times two for a monthly perspective. Now that you've taken this inventory, and you've begun this evaluation process, I'm going to invite you now to consider how do you feel about performing each task. And so I'm going to give you four ways to evaluate and see how you feel about each of these tasks. And I'm going to cover this twice. So don't worry if you miss it on the first pass. I'm gonna give you these four categories two times. The first category is novice so you can put it in next to these activities. And these activities are things that you can do, but it's something that you're probably pretty uncomfortable doing it. Now with more training or time to research. You could probably find a better way of getting these tasks done. But these are grind to do. Unless your gift is being a researcher and a Fact Finder, that's novice, you can do this activity. But it's something you're pretty uncomfortable doing. The second category is skilled. Here, we'll put it s next to these, these activities. And hey, you're pretty good at these kinds of things, you can get it done in a reasonable amount of time. It's not your favorite. But you can get it done in a pinch, if absolutely necessary. You've got the chops, you've got the skills, you're pretty darn good at this, you can get it done in a reasonable amount of time, but it's not your favorite, you can do it as a pinch, in a pinch hitting type role. The third category is excels. Now, this is where a lot of us love to spend our time here. Because we're really good at this work, you've got it down, it's something you routinely and easily can do. It's also something you can teach others how to do if you absolutely had to. And you're probably spending a fair amount of time in this category. But here's the drawback. This is not your highest and best work. And yet, if you had more access to resources, you probably wouldn't even do it at all. These are important tasks. I'm not talking about the importance of these tasks, or the criticality of these tasks to your business. Just asking you energetically. How do you feel about it? Is this something that you excel at, you can routinely and easily do it, you can teach others if you had to, you're probably spending a fair amount of time here. It's not your highest and best use of your time. And then finally, the fourth category is gifted. These activities come so easily and naturally to you that you'd want to do this almost all the time, regardless of compensation. People come to you asking for advice and help and how to do it. Or you can talk endlessly about this topic. And you're always discovering ways to get better and better at this work flow zone. You've heard these kind of terms before. So gifted the G are activities that come easily and naturally to you. You'd love to do this in a higher and higher percentage of your work time. Regardless of compensation. People are coming to you asking for help and advice. And you could talk endlessly about this topic. And you're always discovering ways to get better and better at this kind of work. So you categorize these four activities in those four categories, novice skilled, excels or gifted. Step three, is now you're going to start to document future simplifications. And so you take a look at these groups by letter, just look at how many there are each category, how much time you're spending at novice how much time you're spending at skilled how much time you're spending, because it excels how much time you're spending it gifted. And when I did this exercise the first time and it actually almost every time, I'm a little disappointed that I'm not spending more and more time and gifted honestly, and this is what brings you joy and freedom in your business, the more time you can spend in that gift category. Let's think about becoming more resourceful here. What if you could spend more and more time in your gifting? Can you begin to think of ways to spend more time there that one simple way is to begin to capture how you're doing the other things today. And the more you push into this feeling into this question, the sooner you remove yourself as the bottleneck in your business, then achieve your massive breakthrough. And so the next time you perform a novice skilled or Excel task, this is a great opportunity for you to do a screen capture video or recording of your process step by step. And as you record, make sure to capture the why this process is important, what it means for your business and how you're doing it today. And if you don't have a team at this point, file these videos away. And when you're ready to hand this off to someone else who is gifted in that task, let them take your process and make it better. Now these represent what I call a draft one of your future standard operating procedures or slps. And remember, they're only representing how you're doing your work today. Now another reason I'd love to take this step, even if I'm time crunched is because just by documenting my current process, I can easily see ways to simplify even these tasks. So finally, step four, you begin to filter these activities into new buckets, where we call them delegate, automate and eliminate and we'll cover more about this next time. Think about your future team members as the who capabilities needed to simplify your business who are the who's help you simplify your business. All of this is done with the with the purpose of freeing you up more and more to move away from task where you excel. Now, this is the key category. Remember, these are things that you're good at, but they're not your passion. So the more we can free ourselves up from what we excel at, so we can spend more time at what we're gifted at. This is when we are in the flow. This is when we're in the zone. And the greater our impact income and freedom becomes, you want to build a team that you love. And as we begin to design future team roles, we take a look at all the tasks in your business activity inventory to see if there are a candidate for one of these three buckets, we want to see if this is an activity, we can delegate delegate activities are so important to creating impact income and margin that it's worth finding a hoot to help us perform this work. automate tasks are activities that have high value yet are repetitive in nature, and are worth thinking process automation support maybe that's in the form of a workflow creation or potential software, so that these activities can be performed with as little human intervention as possible. And then finally, eliminate can we ignore combined or eliminate these tasks because they don't create impact income or margin in our business? Now, here's the key part of this. You need to filter all of these decisions through what you value most in business is income, impact margin freedom, whatever your value statements are in business. When you filter these decisions, whether this is a delegation on automation or elimination, through that filter of what you value most, this is the most liberating part of the simplification process is really necessary. So the four steps again to simplify your business and prepare for your future team. Number one, step one is to take inventory business activities. Step two is to evaluate your time investments. Step three is to document future simplifications. And step four is to filter activities, verse on the scale of delegate, automate, or eliminate and in our next episode on leader simplified teamwork, we're going to talk about ways to foster amazing teamwork, even if it's just you and one other person. So friend, I'm curious about where you are on your journey of building a team that you love. This is the path to multiplying your impact your income, your margin, your freedom in business. And imagine a world where you surround yourself with others doing the work they love, and simplifying your business, eliminating automating and delegating so that you serve more doing only the work that you love. I invite you to text me right now at 1-754-800-9461. There's no autoresponders or bots on the other end. It's just me, not my team. Share your story and your name, because I want to hear from you. This us text number again is 1-754-800-9461. Or if you prefer Collin, leave me a voice message. That's 1-754-800-9461. And finally, remember, leaders simplify teamwork, which multiplies your impact income margin and freedom in business. I can't wait to see you on the next podcast.