Let's assume if you are reading this that you have reached a certain level in business in which you have begun accumulating team members, employees, staff. Whatever you wish to call it. If not, let's at least assume you have accrued enough awareness to realize you will at some point in the very near future need teammates. This game can't be played alone.
But let's start first with defining what this game is. There are two types of games in the universe. These games are finite games in which a person plays to win, and at which point the game is over. This what happens in most sports games, video games, board games etc. There are also, more importantly so, infinite games. These games have no winner, no finite point at which a winner is crowned, and the game is over. In an infinite game the goal is like the name suggests, to continue to play. Playing well affords you the ability to keep playing. Playing poorly will end the game. So no winning end point, but a for sure losing game over.
These such games, infinite games, are games like life, business, and relationships. You cannot win these modalities, but you can if you are lucky keep playing. But, play them poorly as you know from your work in health, and you lose the ability to play tomorrow. These games are played with one goal in mind to advance a cause, and the longer you keep playing the greater the contribution to the cause.
Well team development is an infinite game as well. As its really just relationship building for you, its business building for the businesses game, and its life building for you and the individual because together you should all prosper.
Treating the team, staff, employees like players in the game however is trying to play to win a finite game. You will lose. Unfortunately, this is how most employees are viewed, and you have likely worked someplace at some point in your life when you were viewed as just that. A cog in the wheel. It's no surprise then that so much negative rhetoric exists around employees and payroll. Let's face it, if you have employees, they are likely one of your largest line-item expenses. Ingrates.
But what if employees are not an expense at all, and instead they are an asset? They should be. Will they cost you money? Of course. But I suspect your house does as well, and that's an asset too. The reality is that employees are vital parts of the leverage arm in which you, and your business will do great things for this world, far greater things than you can do alone, and yes create far more revenue than you can as a solo operator.
For many small businesses, the issue arises in that operator clause. As many businesses have employees, but these same businesses have only one person operating, and thats the owner. Meaning one person focused on growing the business, chasing the dream, creating. The rest are just simply working. So how do we get everyone on the other side of the fence? The creating side?
As you can imagine the first step is to understand the game you are playing. Now you understand the game is to advance a cause, and that should be easy as most affiliates are truly in this to advance others. It's much harder if you made innocuous widgets. By understanding this game, you should now start to see how important a team is. You will need help to advance your cause, your why, you vision.
The question is how to get them on the same page?
There it is again. The key issue with most affiliates is not their lack of purpose and why. It's their inability to communicate it, and as such get others on board. Mainly because for most, we just want to tell it and hope it's enough. If your team can't recite it, you've got work to do. Putting the vision and why into words itself takes work, and that practice alone is something you for sure need to practice. However, if your why is even just fuzzy it should be present in enough actions in the company to be effective. So, what needs to be done is rather than tell them the vision, we have to get them to start adding to the vision. Dreaming themself, toward your big picture.
Meetings induce more eye rolls than any word in business. Because we have all been held hostage to enough meetings that could have been an email. But, running effective and engaging meetings is a skill, one we work on directly with our coaching clients. But one you can improve on yourself if need to. It, like running a class just needs a lesson plan. The more you practice creating a lesson plan the better your classes. Same goes with meetings. We can of course help you shrink time and show you how. Just book your consultation, ask us about meetings, we will go from there.
There are three meetings that you need to practice:
This meeting is where you and the whole team dream. That's right. This isn't where you show up and tell them what the dream is. You tell them the vision; they create the dream. As in, you give them the 10-year north star and ask them what that looks like to them. The creativity flows, and the vision begins to take a team shape. Naturally, the big picture then gets broken down into yearly objectives to get there. That's the key to this meeting.
Dreams and Direction - this meeting is where you take the dreams and direction, aka the one-year goals, and break them into objectives for each quarter to meet it. While this seems obvious, the simple act of creating this gives ownership. Because if they dreamt it in the annual, and it made it to the annual goals list. They own the quarterly objective to finish it. This is how you make sure you don't look up in a year and find yourself accidentally right where you are. Which is precisely what happens to so many affiliates.
This meeting is the workhorse of your model. This is where you create the necessary action to get things done each week as a responsibility, a to-do. To make sure that those quarterly goals get to-done. For ease of example. If the goal is to make 1m in a year, you need to make 250k each quarter, which means 83k a month. You could make this the goal, the quarterly, and boil it down to a weekly revenue target. Or, you could define, we need 83k per month, what needs to be created to get to that revenue target, and those become the weekly tasks this person works on.
Again, this is an art, and one we can help with, but it's not one that you cannot do alone. The issue is that you only get 4 quarters a year, so getting it sort of right is important.
This however, like all things, is not a simple tell you what to do conversation. This is a chance for you to reflect on the team you have and the problem. Ask yourself a few key questions.
1. Do they know the vision and the why?
2. Do they know the dream, and do they contribute creatively?
3. Do you know the dream?
After you ask yourself these three questions, if any of the answers are no, you have a communication problem. That's all. It's not a huge problem. It's not about fixing coaching problems, insubordination, and lack of respect.
By accident, you stopped dreaming, and if you aren't, they definitely aren't. No one wants to be a part of a stagnant future. Start creating, never stop talking about it, get a bigger megaphone, show them they have a place in the future. Learn to create the future together. They will all be on board, or they will help themselves off the ship.
We would love to help, book a consult, it would be our pleasure to explore alternatives with you.
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