learning how to succeed through people

Summary

you cannot scale a business past your own two hands without succeeding through other people. this was the hardest skill for me to develop. the Air Force gave me the foundation. the businesses forced me to actually use it.

the three-part framework:

1. align the team to the mission. say the goal out loud, repeatedly, in plain English. let people contribute to how they hit it. if your team cannot explain in their own words what the company is trying to do this quarter, you have an alignment problem, not a performance problem.

2. communicate constantly, both directions. celebrate the wins. flag the misses without flinching. employees who get one or the other but not both either coast or burn out. they need the whole signal.

3. support without holding their hand. give them the resources, then get out of the way. autonomy means letting people make mistakes and learn from them. that’s the only way they become the operators you actually need.

reflect on every leadership swing you take. the wins teach you about your style. the misses teach you about your blind spots. the goal is a team that runs the company when you’re not in the room. not a team that needs you there to make every call.

Transcript

introduction to the importance of leadership in scaling a business

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. How do we succeed through people? This is the Better Human Business Podcast. I’m Jerred Moon. And really, if you want to scale your business, you have to learn this, this skill set. It’s leadership. It’s management.

You have to learn how to lead and manage. And if you want to scale your business to any sizable real company, you have to have a team or else it’s just you always doing the things with a bunch of people who can manage some tasks. That’s not where you want to be. Even if you have employees, there’s a big difference between I am succeeding through people.

discussion on aligning team goals with business objectives

I’m scaling my company through people. There’s a big difference between that statement and I own business and I have some employees who do things I don’t want to. Just think about that for a minute. Which one are you? Because there’s, like I said, there’s a very big difference in the skill sets because you could hire somebody who’s more of a transactional based, you know, employee, just do my tasks and I’m done for the day that might have higher turnover and you’re just constantly hiring that person.

But if you’re wondering why you really can’t scale, well, it’s people. And I have a lot of experience managing people, leading people. Not perfect by any means. I mean, this is the skill set I’m just gonna have to master for the rest of my life or try to master, do my best to learn and grow and develop in this area because I know it is the lever.

It’s the lever I need to pull to grow the businesses that I’m a part of. But I do have a lot of experience, not only in entrepreneurship, going all the way back into college. I did ROTC and what a lot of people who are not a part of the military and have never done a program like, you know, Reserve Officer Training Corps in college is from the outside you might think that’s just a program for, you know, kids learning how to march and do physical training and wear a uniform.

tips on effective communication and fostering autonomy within teams

But that’s really not the purpose of the program. The purpose of the program is to learn leadership. They put you in a lot of different leadership scenarios. They actually put you in leadership positions to lead other people in the program and then they give you feedback. It’s really great. And I didn’t think it was great at the time, but now I realize that’s a lot of people don’t get that.

And then after that, I was a military officer in which I led teams throughout my career there. And now as an entrepreneur leading teams. And so this has always been something that I study and want to get better at and I’m always like, when I make mistakes, I want to reflect on them. But as an entrepreneur, and you might be a lot like me, what I know that I need for my team is I need them to be completely autonomous or nearly autonomous.

They’re going to need me for direction. They need my leadership. But I need them to be able to go do things on their own. And I need them to know what those things are without me always having to say every single day, here’s what I need you to do. And if I don’t have that team member, you know, they won’t survive the team for very long because one of two things will happen is they’ll either learn that how to be autonomous and they’ll do awesome or they’ll take advantage of that, you know, kind of the freedom that I allow.

insights into supporting your team without micromanaging

But once I realize, hey, you’re you’re utilizing all the freedom, but you’re not making any progress, then you can’t be a part of the team anymore. So if you want to know how to succeed through people, to have kind of this autonomous team that is able to continue to move forward without all your input, and so you’re actually succeeding through people, you’re scaling through people.

How do you do it? Well, there are three big things that I’ve kind of identified that I think will help you down this path. And the first is to align your team with your goals. A lot of people are kind of scared to do this, scared to communicate it because maybe you have a financial goal or maybe you don’t want to share all your goals with the employee.

Just go ahead and start sharing those. Find a way if you don’t want to if you don’t want to share the monetary side of it, then just think of a different way to do it, as opposed to we want to earn this much this month. How many people do we want to help this month? You know, you can you can help employees understand what the overall mission is, and then you can chunk it down even further if it’s like, hey, we need to get this many leads in the door.

strategies for building a supportive and accountable team culture

You can do these kind of things. You can still communicate their goals, but people want to know on their side, like if you want to keep people around, like keep them engaged. They want to know what we’re doing, where the ship is going. So make sure they know that. But on your side, you actually want employees who are operating towards a goal.

You don’t want to have to like have this secret plan that you keep in your back pocket. And then it’s like, hey, I need you to go do this thing. I can’t. I don’t really want to tell you why. But like you go do it. OK, you go do that thing because I know I secretly know it’s leading me toward my goals.

But I don’t want you to know that thing or I didn’t communicate that to you. So just be very open about this. Have a quarterly meetings, weekly meetings where you talk about the goals of the company, what direction you’re going. Make sure everyone’s in alignment and the more that someone if you have a really good employee and they know the goals, now they can start to brainstorm storm on their own.

They can be like, OK, I know what the goal is here. These are Jerred’s ideas. But like, I’m also going to think of other things. I’m going to come up with some of my own ideas and I’m going to I’m going to go down this path. So that’s the first thing, making sure that your team is aligned with your goals and you communicate that clearly.

And the second one kind of in line with that is communicate, communicate, communicate, communicate. OK. I would say if you are newer to leadership and management, you cannot over communicate. You really can’t not if you’re new, like you could get annoying. I would rather some good annoying with how much communication there is.

And I’m not talking about micromanaging. I’m just talking about pure communication. If someone did something that you didn’t like, you’re a bit frustrated with it or annoyed with it. You need to communicate not in, you know, not you don’t have to be a jerk, but like small spot corrections when someone’s not doing something or someone does something that rubs you the wrong way or it’s not up to the standard that you expect any of those things.

You need to communicate the negative things. You also need to communicate the positive things. So anytime someone does something great, they’re doing hard work, they’re doing work that you is up to your standard, up to the standard of the company. Communicate that. So it’s not only communicating the big stuff like, hey, what are the mission?

What’s the mission of the company? What are the goals? Where are we going? You also need to communicate the little things, communicate every single thing to your team. What are we doing today? What are we working on? Those kind of things are great. But also, hey, when you said this in the meeting, it was kind of inappropriate, made someone else uncomfortable.

Don’t do that. You don’t have to have those kind of conversations. You just have to. You have to immediately do that. Or, hey, you didn’t really come to the meeting prepared. I want to talk to you about that. You know, I expect a certain level of preparation. Communicate the negative things and also communicate the positive things.

Never forget to communicate the positive things. Sometimes it’s easy to only be negative. But hey, you were so prepared in that meeting. Awesome job. Great, great work on your preparation or great work on that project. So making sure you communicate. And then the last thing, this kind of goes along with the I need an autonomous team support, but don’t hold their hand.

That’s the third thing. Support your team, but don’t hold their hand, OK? I have made this mistake to where it’s almost like the team cannot move or make a decision or do their job if I don’t do something first. That will never work for me. You might be different than me, but for me, if I have to do something in order for you to do something and that’s like just how this relationship is going to work, that’s going to be a big, big problem because I move things around in my calendar.

Sometimes I have time to focus on a project. Sometimes I don’t. And so I don’t need somebody who’s like, I’m waiting for you on this thing. It’s like, well, I’m not doing that thing right now. I’m doing that later. But you still need to be doing something. So you want to be able to support people, but not hold their hand.

And so when I say hold their hand, you don’t want to be like tied at the hip to where everything that the person does is dependent on you saying something or giving exact instructions or micromanaging or doing anything else. You don’t want to have to hold their hand to that level. But you also the mistake you can make in trying to run an autonomous team is just leave them out in the woods on their own, not really knowing what to do at all and have no support.

So give them the educational resources. Give them the meeting. Give them your time. Give them the direction and let them go make mistakes. That’s okay too. Like go make some mistakes, but try your best without me having to get in there and train you on every single thing. Like you can figure some of this out.

Go try and figure some of it out. So I’ll support them always. I’ll get feedback on when they did good job or bad job and then I’ll try to provide any training that I can. But ultimately I don’t want to hold their hand. I don’t want to be dependent on, you know, every day when they show up to work, okay, what’s Jerry going to tell me to do today?

That’s not the employee. I want, I’m sure it’s not the employee you want either. You want to support them. Don’t leave them out there lost, support them to the best of your ability, but don’t hold their hand to where they are completely dependent on you to be able to do anything. So those are the three big things that I’ve learned in trying to succeed through people.

Always happy to cover leadership topics. This is really just the tip of the iceberg of things I’ve learned in leading and managing people as an entrepreneur. But I do know one thing to do all these things, like to really get good at leadership, you got to try harder.