Building Your Team

Most of your contributions to your company should be leveraged, meaning your work should create tremendous value without a lot of time spent.
 
Once you have your daily operations running well, you will focus your time on three primary activities:

1. Increasing Top Line Revenue
2. Increasing Profitability
3. Increasing Your Freedom from the Business

 
For number three, you will only achieve freedom from the business if you create a business that operates without you. To do this, you have to create a team that works well together, cares about your clients, and understands the values, vision, and mission you have created for the company.
 
If you don’t have a set of company values, a three-year vision, and a 90-day mission for your team... don’t panic. Most drycleaning companies don’t have this.
 
Adding these elements is a major part of giving you the freedom from the business, by communicating your desires and expectations clearly to your team. Without these elements, you will have a transactional rather than a relational connection with your team members, and that’s not good.
 
When you get serious about building your team, you will want to invite them on the journey with you. 
 
You will ask the team to take care of each other, so everyone can take care of your clients.
 
Sit down and hear out your current team members. To get them onboard with your vision and mission, you must listen first. Remember... leaders listen. Good leaders don’t come up with all of the answers and tell everyone what to do. This is called micro-managing and is not good when you are building an autonomous team.
 
Find the hidden treasures in your team. You want the right people in the right roles. To do this, it is helpful to use an assessment like the Strengths Finder. Your team will feel invested in if you focus on their strengths.
 
As Ken Blanchard said in the “One Minute Manager,” be sure to praise your team in public and criticize in private. If you are striving to be more than you are today, you will have to push your team. This means offering constructive criticism. Just remember: nobody likes to be criticized publicly. You never want someone to feel shame from public criticism.
 
While it is okay and necessary to have difficult conversations, try your best to keep emotions out of the conversation when you are sharing a criticism of someone on the team. Make sure you have the difficult conversations or you will start resenting certain team members.
 
Find more compliments to deliver than criticisms. If you do this, your team will feel safe, and will be more open to being challenged in private.
 
As the leader, when you mess up, make sure you own it and apologize.
 
Make sure to talk with your team about WHY you are doing what you are doing. Inspire your team, showing the passion you have for taking care of your clients.
 
Celebrate the wins publicly, in a meeting you commit to on a regular basis.
 
I have found the best way to reward A-players is to surround them with other A-players. You can do this if you hire slow and not reactively.
 
The last tip today for building a top performing team: Make it COOL to CARE!
 
Hopefully you received a few nuggets of how to build a successful team, that operates with only your strategic input. When you build the right team, you will not be tied to the business.
 
Have a great week!
– Dave