LISTEN TO THE LATEST PODCAST EPISODE:

How to Build a Team

SUMMARY

In this episode,
we are going to talk about hiring and building a team, and their talents. We
discuss on the different things to consider in attracting talent, building a
team and developing it. When it comes to scaling a business, an entrepreneur
cannot do it alone. A skilled group is required to provide assistance to leverage
a business.

These are the
things that we need to look for when building a team:

  • Skills: Skillset is the minimum price of
    entry. It enables them to get the work done. It tells whether or not people
    have the proficiency to tackle the daily work and challenges. So, do they have
    the skillset?
  • Values: It impacts the integrity and ethics of
    a business. There should be an alignment of values and it will allow you to
    keep the team members with the necessary skillset. If you have people with
    different values, it will destroy a business. So, figure out your as well as
    the individual values of team members and understand it well.

If the correct
skills are present along with the alignment of values then the next thing to do
is hire someone. After hiring, the entrepreneur has the responsibility to
continue developing the members and self-actualizing that growth.

For it to
happen, there are three things that we must look at:

  1. Core
    Functions:
    Understand
    the core functions of your business and communicate it well. Find the core
    function that each individual team member will be serving and make sure to
    communicate it as well.
  2. Critical
    Outcomes:
    State what
    success will look like for your business and for the team members. Ask the
    question not only to yourself but to your team as well. For everyone, the
    picture of success should be the same.
  3. Coaching: The people that are working with us
    need to grow. To develop them, it will take coaching, guiding and mentoring. As
    their leader, you have the responsibility to grow their skillset and make them
    feel more fulfilled.

As your team
members grow, they become more valuable. Their fulfillment will make them want
to cheerlead and support you. The outcomes will certainly grow. There will be
higher results and in that process everyone wins.


Begin Transcript —

Hey there, Mel Abraham here, the number 1 best-selling
author of the book, The Entrepreneur’s Solution and the founder of Business
Breakthrough Academy where we teach you how to design a business and create a
life: A life of financial freedom and
peace of mind.

And welcome to this episode of The Entrepreneur’s Solution
show and in this one we’re going to talk a bit about building your team, about
talent, about what it is to look for in a team or what are the different things
that we need to consider in building a team and attracting talent and
developing talent. And it may not be what you think it is. So, when we get back
after this brief introduction we’re going to dig down into that. I’m going to
give you my framework for building your dream team.

And just like every other episode, this episode comes with a
downloadable guidebook, worksheets, tools, templates. If you want to get it for
this episode just go to MelAbraham.com/session029
and you’ll be able to get that.

If you’re not at your computer or you happen to be out at
the gym and driving, do it safely but go ahead and text MYLEGACY one-word
no-spaces to 38470. You’ll get a response back with the download links so you
can make sure that you get the tools when you get back safely in front of your
computer. So, I’ll see you right after this introduction. See you soon. Bye.

Hey there welcome back, Mel Abraham here. The author of the
number 1 best-selling book, The Entrepreneur’s Solution and in this episode:

  • We’re going to talk about talent.
  • We’re going to talk about team.
  • We’re going to talk about hiring.
  • We’re going to talk a bit about firing.
  • We’re going to talk about my philosophy on that.

Now, you may be thinking about building a big team or you
may be thinking about not building much of a team but maybe looking at outsourcing
or bringing on people that will help you—virtual assistants and consultants and
those types of things. So, a lot of this will fit no matter what it is you’re
doing and where it is you’re going.

But when we talk about a business, when we talk about
leveraging a business or scaling a business, you’re going to need a team. And
the challenge, one of the biggest challenges entrepreneurs have is that they
wear all the hats. And one quick way to get to entrepreneurial burnout is to
try and do everything.

  • You then are stressed out because you’re trying
    to do too many things.
  • You’re stressed out because you’re not sleeping.
  • You’re stressed out because you’re not eating
    right.

And you’re trying to juggle things and I guarantee you
something will fall. So, at some point, you’re going to need support. It may
just be a personal assistant. It may be a virtual assistant. It may be that
you’re growing a business that you’re going to need a controller or a CFO, a
CEO or finance folks. You’re going to need a sales team. You’re going to need a
marketing team.

So, no matter where you are, question is:

What do we look for?
How do we go into it?

Now, we can go really deep into some of these things and really
dig into it in a lot of deal but I want to just give you the fundamentals, the
basics and a primer of what to consider and as you move forward and we can dig
deeper in later episodes.

But one of the first things that I look at is clearly is Skills.

The person that, the person that I want to hire, whether it’s
doing my website, whether it’s doing marketing, whether it’s doing this
videoing and editing and doing these kinds of things.

Do they have the
skillsets?

Now, the challenge is that many times people looking for
jobs, looking for projects figure that the skills are all they need. In fact
even in my profession as a CPA one of the things that I see a lot, a lot of is
that, “Well I got a CPA license” or “I got a designation” or
“I got a license and therefore I have the skills” which is absolutely
true. If you’ve got a license, if you’ve got a certificate, you demonstrated
enough proficiency that you actually have a skillset.

But the skillset isn’t enough. The skillset isn’t enough
because I can get someone that is technically confident. That knows exactly how
to do the work and they can get the work done but where they fall off and this
is something that I think is lacking in a lot of organizations and we don’t
really think about it in the context of hiring is where they fall of is on the Values.

So, skillset to me is the minimum price of entry. It’s what gets me to pick up the phone and
say, “Hey, I want to interview you”. But values are what is going to
get them to stay. It’s what’s going to get me to hire them because one of the
things that will destroy a business quicker than anything else is the fact that
you’ve got people with differing values, or that have conflicting values and
that there isn’t an alignment of values in the context of:

  • How they do their work.
  • How they treat the customers.
  • How they treat fellow team members.
  • How they look at things.

And all of a sudden what that does is that in many cases it
starts to impact integrity, ethics and some of the other things that are going
on in the business.

So, one of the things that we do in some of my training—my
live trainings and online trainings—one of the first things we do is,
“Let’s figure out what those values are” because if I’m going to hire
based on values, I better know what our values are. I want to know what
organizationally:

  • What are my value priorities?
  • What are the things that are really important to
    me?

It’s what I call, “What are we going to stand
for?”

And I need to get clarity on that first if I’m going to hire
people to fit that role. So, one of the things that you need to do in the context
of looking to build a team is get you values set first. So, figure out what your
values are and then through the interview process—through the process of
engaging with them—start to understand what their values are.

So, I may ask questions about their skills. I may see it on
the resume but the majority of my questions are going to values based
questions.

  • I want to see how they respond in tough
    situations.
  • I want to see their critical thinking.
  • And what their critical priorities are in
    processing that.

And if I see that they don’t have a set of values that’s
consistent or in-alignment with how we would handle things then they’re
probably not a good fit. They may have the best skillset but if there isn’t a
value fit then I typically won’t hire them. So, when I look at this the skills
and the values is where the hiring line
starts.

So, first things first: skills got to be there. Values need
to be there. Now, we have something to discuss with respect to hiring that
person. So, now all of a sudden, I hire this person what do we with him?
Because one of the challenges that I think happens with many folks is that:

  • People need to be challenged.
  • People need to feel like they’re growing.

People, the trend is, the
natural tendency of humanity is to grow not to shrink
; to become more and
to expand in that way. And so, I think one of the responsibilities for
entrepreneurs and leaders is to continue

  • To develop our team,
  • To develop our people,
  • To allow them to self-actualize that growth.

And in that process, in that process, we get a chance to do
some things.

So, there’s three things that I want to look at putting in
my organization. When I start to build a team I want to make sure that I have
some of these things in place to be real clear with the team members, and individual
team members and the team as a whole as to how things go and if I want to get
higher results.

And the first is really: Understand
the core functions
.

1. What are the core functions of my business?

  • Sales,
  • Marketing,
  • Delivery,
  • Customer experience,
  • Financial.

All of that become core functions. Then alternatively
looking at each individual, each individual team member and saying, “This
is the person that I’m going to hire for this position. What are their specific
core functions?” They may be part of the sales team but now we need to
break it down into some of the other elements, the smaller elements and task
oriented things

  • That are their core functions.
  • That they need to master.
  • That they need to grow in.

> To be part of that sales team. And when we understand
what the core functions of our business are and we communicate that well and we
understand what the core functions of that individual team member or the person
that we’re looking to hire is and we communicate that well. Now we have a basis
of foundation of where to build from.

The next is: To understand what the critical outcomes are.

State this in other ways,

What does success look
like?
What does success look like for my business?
What does success look like for this team
member?
What does success look like in the team member’s
mind and ask the question?

Working here or working with me or doing these kinds of
things, “What does success look like for you?”

But then also ask yourself the question, “In order for
this team member to be a success in your eyes, what does it look like?”

And make sure that there’s a communication there because if
you’re expectation from your team member is different. Your picture of success
is different than what the team member’s is, the team member’s working,
working, working and they’re putting their heart and their soul into it and
they look at it and they’re evaluating based on their success criteria and they
say, “God, I’m doing well. I’m really doing well.” And then all of a
sudden they get blindsided because your success criteria is different.

So,

What are the critical outcomes that you want
that team member to achieve?What are the critical outcomes that this team
member is going to contribute to for the business to achieve?

Ask those questions, get clarity on those answers and then
communicate them well to the team member that you’re looking at hiring.

And then the last piece is this—Coaching.

Remember, I said as an entrepreneur and as a leader one of
your tasks, one of your jobs is to develop your team. To develop the people
that are working for you, supporting you and working with you and to develop
them. So,

  • That’s going to take coaching.
  • That’s going to take guidance.
  • That’s going to take mentoring.
  • That’s going to take working with them.

If you truly want to develop a team, it’s never really a
hands-off. There is some interaction and transaction that goes on between you
to help develop them. And so, if we’re looking at developing skills, they came
into the game. Remember I said, “The price of entry is their skillset”.
So, they came into the game with a set of skills. They have a set of values
that was in alignment with ours.

  • We hire them.
  • We communicate the core functions of the
    business.
  • We communicate the core function of their job
    and their role.
  • We communicate the critical outcomes of the
    business.
  • We communicate the critical outcomes of their
    role in that which is really the success criteria.

But now we need to coach them because we need them to grow. As they grow, they become more valuable to us.
They feel more valuable to themselves and they feel more fulfilled. Many,
there’s study after study after study that shows that people aren’t there for money
alone.

And I think that if we start to look at society once their
fundamental, this goes to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs but once their
fundamental financial base is taken care of, they start to look at other things
and one of those things is personal growth, professional development. To be
able to be more, to see that they have more in life, they have more to
experience in life and part of our responsibility as the entrepreneur, as the
business owner, as the leader is to coach them, to grow them.

I got to tell you. I look at some of the things that I’ve
gone through in my life and some of the people that I’ve been fortunate and
blessed with to have as mentors and coaches in my life. And they’ve developed
me. They’ve coached me. They’ve taken me through the hard times. They’ve given
me difficult choices. They’ve certainly turned around and said, “Man you’re
so way off base on that” and I have been beaten up one side in the other
at times and well deserved.

But that’s what got me to grow. That’s what’s gotten me to
be who I am. To understand at the level I do. And trust me, I got plenty of
more learning to do and I’m growing each and every day. That’s why I still have
coaches in my world. I still have mentors that I work with. I still have
colleagues that I work with.

But when we take on the responsibility of someone coming
under our umbrella that we say, “We want to employ you”. Whether it’s
a contract worker or as an employee or as a team member, we take the
responsibility in some senses:

  • To contribute to their life.
  • To make a difference in their life.
  • To make their life better.

And we have that ability. They’re going to spend one-third
of their waking hours or possibly more running for us and fighting for our
mission and really champing our cause. Well I think in return we owe it to them
to be their cheerleader, to be their champion, to give them the tools that they
need to grow, to know that by working with us, by working together as a team
that ultimately they develop new skills. That we know that when we develop new
skills in our team; when they grow we grow. And we end up with higher results.

image

And so I think that what we need to look at in building our
team, in building our dream team and looking at these things is to understand
that it’s not about hiring someone in the salary you’re going to give them.
It’s about hiring someone that fits, that fits the culture; that fits the
values.

I can give you a for example. Many of you may know when they
changed the rules for the Olympics, the US put their dream team together for
basketball and they went in 1992 and they just dominated. I think the average
point spread was 40 points. They just dominated from 1992 until 2004. And these
were the best players of the NBA. That was the best players in the United
States playing on that team in the Olympics and they beat team after team after
team.

In 2004, they came back together to play again and they did
awful. They didn’t , they were sloppy, they looked embarrassing at times and
they didn’t do well. And they brought in new coaching, they brought in a new
philosophy and they told the team, they said, “Those of you that are going
to be part of our dream team need to make a 3 year commitment.”

And the reason for that is not about the commitment itself;
it’s about realizing that if we’re going to really develop a business

  • It’s about the team.
  • It’s about the culture.
  • It’s about everyone in alignment.

And unless they were on, if they were simply going to play
their couple of games in the Olympics and that was their sole focal point then
there was no way that they were going to create

  • A culture of success.
  • A culture of commitment.
  • A culture of dependency on each other which is
    what a team does.

And so, that’s the reason that we need to look at this
culture, the way treat them, the value system. We’ve to remember the core
functions giving them the critical outcomes, giving them coaching to develop a
team in an environment, a culture that fits their values so they can grow and
become more and in the process the byproduct; in the process the byproduct is
our own success.

So, by us serving again, I mean an entrepreneur always from
a place of service. They’re serving their customer by changing their lives, by
transforming their lives with their products or services and their offerings. But
they’re also changing their team members’ lives:

  • By giving them a place to work.
  • By giving them a place to be something.
  • A place to grow.
  • A place to live their dreams to allow those
    things to come to fruition.

And when they feel that energy and that coming into their
life:

  • They’re going to fight for you.
  • They’re going to scream for you.
  • They’re going to champ you.
  • They’re going to cheerlead you,
  • And they’re going to keep fighting for you.

And in that process
everyone wins
. So, that’s really it. I think that if you look at it at the
fundamental of if we get this right; get the skills, get the values, core
functions, critical outcomes, give them coaching, help them develop their new
skills so they feel like they’re growing and your results will become the by-product.

So, hope you found this of value to you. Again, if you want
to get the downloadable guidebook that talks about how to hire people based
upon values go ahead and go to MelAbraham.com/session029.
And if you’re not at your computer go ahead and text MYLEGACY one-word
no-spaces to MYLEGACY to 38470. We’ll give you the download link.

And if you found this of value, why don’t you share it with
a friend? And subscribe to it if you haven’t done so already. Make sure you
subscribe because we’re doing these things on a regular basis. It’s the only
way I can be your entrepreneurial mentor. It’s how I can be your advisor and
your mentor in your back pocket as you’re trying to build your business.

And if you have questions for me or things that you want to
discuss about business, success, wealth; any of those types of things, go to AskMelNow.com. Leave me your question and
we’ll make that sure we get it answered on one of the upcoming episodes.

And until we get a chance to see each other in the next
episode,

May your vision be
grand, your journey epic and your legacy significant!

See you soon. Cheers.
Bye!!

— End Transcript —

++++++++++++++

Like this? Please share it and help a few
more people bring their dreams out of the darkness and give life to them
again.  Cheers, Mel

++++++++++++++

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Mel is one of the smartest business people I know. I don't make any decisions without him! "

Brendon Burchard
#1 New York Times
Best Selling Author

"

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