There is likely no scale without a team. The power of people is assisting you for more capacity or duplicating yourself to service more clients in ways that technology cannot. To assist you is to do the administrative and other tasks, while you do what only you can do; marketing and servicing the client. To scale your service to even more people is to duplicate yourself to have more people that can directly provide the service to your clients. No matter the value of your team members, there are 4 great tips for managing them.
Begin with structure. Inviting someone into your business is almost like letting someone drive your old but reliable car. You have to tell them all the tricks and rules that make it work best. It’s second nature to you to not turn the air conditioner on when you want to go faster but you have to relay that to the new driver of your old faithful. Create the how-to, when-to, where-to, who-to, and why-to of each task and project. Create it in such a way that someone without any specialized skills can follow it to get the job done.
Success is KPIs. Beyond the how-to is the land of desired results. You cannot just show someone how to do something and not share with them what success should look like. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) help you and the team member to know what results are the goal and how to measure the path to those results. In other words, what numbers and measurements of their tasks and projects create success?
Check the structure before checking people. Expect having a successful team to be a process. You definitely want the team to be focused on following your structure to get to the results. However, most of your structure is initially built around how YOU did things. Sometimes that doesn’t translate cleanly to others doing the same tasks. When something goes wrong, before blaming or disciplining the team member, go back to the structure and make sure it set them up for success.
Development. Having the best team requires investing in their growth. You want your doers to learn the best and new ways to do and you want future leaders to be great at the process AND great at motivating the people that work that process. Continuously share your mission and vision for the business so that your team is guided by the same principles you set for the business. Connect your Doers so that the best can help others get better plus have periodic refreshers on the process and the why. Allow leaders and future leaders to shadow you to learn more about how you think and make decisions.
If you would like to talk how to better manage your team to drive your CEO vision, let’s talk. ShaCannon.info/talk