How To Manage A Team

Your job with the team is to constantly coach. Are we moving forward fast enough and are we moving forward fast enough and caring for each other and having fun and making an impact and creating relationships here, it's super hard. But if you don't do this, the time management of the company falls apart. I work with so many startup founders with small companies, and they're. They can't understand it. Like, their teams keep falling apart. They're like, what is going on? And it's a constant challenge for them. But I also coach so many senior executives in the Fortune 50 now who literally have tens of thousands of employees, and they're always thinking about this, like, okay, how do we move forward faster? How do we make sure this is a great place to work? I think this most important four points if you're trying to manage team or family, frankly. Right? So family or team? We'll just. I'll just say team. But your team might be your family, Your team might be paid employees, Your team might be people at work. Number one rule if you're the leader is this. You got to establish the rhythm of the company, the rhythm of the family, the rhythm of the team. What does that mean? It means everybody on your team needs to know what they should be doing every single week. That's the job. What should people do? That's their week. These are the major activities that they should be doing each week to maintain sanity, order, revenue, operations. Your rhythm is like your maintenance rhythm. It's like this. This just has to happen. This is the bare minimum we all have to do every single week. And every person on every role should know their rhythm. There's just. There's a rhythm. It, like, that's your meeting cadence that you set up for yourself or for your team. It's the output cadence that you're setting up for yourself or your team. I just call it the rhythm. And everyone should know what their rhythm is, and they should know what their counterpart, their team, their others. Like, what are we all doing here? The more that you can establish that rhythm to meet the objectives of the team. Again, that's whether your family or your team that you're at with work, the better. So you always start with, what are we trying to do? Right? What are we trying to do? Let's build a rhythm for that. Once we know what we're trying to do and there's a rhythm for that, everything starts to fall in place. You got to learn to establish and manage the rhythm. Second, I think with team management, you got to hire high performers who Drive. Oh, I use singular there, but let's use plural. You got to hire high performers who drive, or you got to have somebody in your life, a high performer who drives. And this is important for those of you who are like, Brendan, you don't understand. I'm creative. Don't make me manage a schedule. I am successful without any calendar in my life ever. I'm like, awesome. I don't want you to, like, if. I don't want to take away freedom from you. But if you are successful already without ever having done any of this, imagine where you'll be when you just add this component. So if that's not your quote, unquote style or preference, one, please realize your style or preference has nothing to do with what your big goals or objectives in life might be. My style and preference wasn't to be a motivational speaker at all. I wanted to write and make an impact in people's personal development. I needed to become a writer. That wasn't my style. I wasn't a natural writer. It was my style to do video. It wasn't my preference to talk on stages. I'd rather throw up. In fact, I famously threw up behind stage and on stage. So I'm not somebody who feels like you. Your style, your strengths, your preference, your natural abilities, those are all great, but that doesn't mean they're sufficient. You need to hire a driver, an integrator, an operator, somebody in your life who drives the agenda for you, who manages you right, who literally keeps you accountable, who builds the calendar and the rhythm and the structure for you if you're not going to do it, because then the job is get somebody to do it. All right, some of you, you're the visionary. You're the creator. You need that operator, that integrator, that person who's going to actually get down to the details and manage the process. This is so important. So important. So recap here. If you are not good at all of this, you need to hire somebody who is. You need to get that executive assistant. You need to get an accountability partner. You need to delegate it to the responsible child. You know, somebody's got to be in charge of driving the agenda. I want you to write that phrase down. Would you do that? Find somebody to drive the agenda. Third big idea, and I think this is really important. Third big idea is you've got to push harder. If you are leading a team, you have to push harder. And I know people are on team, like, don't. Oh, my gosh, don't say burn out. Your team? No, we're talking about teams, time management. There is no team in the world that has 100% perfect time management. And as a leader, what happens is you believe you've hired higher performers, everyone's managing their time. And what you don't realize that organizational theory shows across, like, I think all of research effort, let's just go there, that there's a lot of slack in the system. Meaning that most people who say, yeah, I'm slammed, I'm 40 hours all week, they're not, because they tend to focus on things that might not matter. Your job is to push harder about time optimization and the needle movers. So catch me. I'm not saying burn out your team. I'm saying most teams are incredibly inefficient. And as leaders, we often don't think about making them more efficient. But maybe, what, once a quarter, twice a year, we have the conversation. If you're a leader of a team, you actually have to have this time management conversation all the time, right? All the time. Like literally monthly. It has to be a conversation where you ask people, is there any bandwidth? If, if someone on this team has bandwidth, would you raise your hand? Would you let me know? Would you tell me? Because often what happens with teams too is people get too much bandwidth. They got an extra four or five hours a week, they're not doing anything. And at some point because of that, they become more and more disengaged and as a team, less and less high performing. So there's got to be someone on the team. Sometimes that's the manager, right? Or the supervisor who's just checking in. How are you doing? What were your goals this month? Did you fulfill them? Did you have any extra time? How's it going? This type of question is so important. Okay. It's about you giving yourself permission to push harder about time optimization with your team. Very hard to have that conversation for many people because they're like, well, I don't know, is that rude? I'm like, no, that's responsible if they're on your team and they're wasting your time. If you're an entrepreneur, that's your money, right? If they're wasting time, they become less engaged, less fulfilled. They feel like they're not contributing as much. So now they're just like kind of there, but not really all in. So you have to find that balance, which is hard sometimes. Again, you have to hire that driver of the agenda who helps you do that. Right? You can't be all things, all things to all People that's really important to know. Like, I'm someone who's probably terrible at that piece, so I have to have the other leads on the team to do that more than me. Like, I just can't. I'm doing too many roles. So, again, if you're the visionary, you're the creator, you're the entrepreneur, this is where you get support and in team to manage those schedules, to manage those details, and to keep pushing the thing forward versus waiting on you. It's super hard. There is no right answer. And I've never met anybody. That's why I can say universally to everybody, you got to push harder on this front. You got to push harder. Okay, last big idea. And this also complements it, is that you've got to coach for speed and culture. And sometimes they're two different things. Right. Not every culture is oriented towards speed, and not every time do you have things going really fast. Is a culture maintained? And so your job with the team is to constantly coach. Are we moving forward fast enough and are we moving forward fast enough and caring for each other and having fun and making an impact and. And creating relationships here, it's super hard. But if you don't do this, the time management of the company falls apart. I work with so many startup founders with small companies, and they can't understand it. Like, their teams keep falling apart. They're like, what is going on? And it's a constant challenge for them. But I also coach so many senior executives in the Fortune 50 now who literally have tens of thousands of employees, and they're always thinking about this, like, okay, how do we move forward faster? How do we make sure this is a great place to work? How do we move forward faster? How do we make this a great place to work? They say it like, it's like a rhythm in their head. And they're constantly trying to coach their senior executives to this. And I think if you're in a company where the time is not being managed well, it just needs more coaches on the field helping people understand how to do those things. And that is where a lot of the time management structures of productivity come into place.