Evan Carmichael explains how to fix a fractured team: hire for shared values, not just skills. Define a single word that unites everyone's purpose. Then get out of the way and let them make decisions. He shares how his team's "Believe" mission aligned people and how trusting someone on a video project led to a better result.
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How to get your team to work together. So I got a great question from one of my YouTube viewers, love you guys, Faran, who wrote in to say, "Evan, thanks for your passion and skills. I've been walking through a few of your videos and I'm still trying to find an answer. How can I help engaging teams that are far from working together, they keep confronting while they have the solution if they stay united? Cheers, Faran." Okay, so to summarize, it's you have a team that's not working well together. How do you get them to work together so that they can find the solution? If they are united, they will find the solution. How do you make that happen? Number 1 is get the right people. You need to get the right people on the team, and quite honestly, if your team is constantly fighting and they're bickering and they're not achieving their common goal, then you need to get rid of somebody. It's not working, it's not the right team. And that may be harsh, and that may not be what you want to hear, and you can force people to work together, but when was the last time you did great work when you were forced to work with somebody who you didn't like? When was the last time that happened? And when you work with people who you love, who you're feeling a vibe with, how much greater is the quality of that work? It's amazing. So why do you want to be surrounded by people who you don't like, who aren't contributing, who you fight with, compared to people who you can grow with and create amazing things with? And so it may be painful short-term, but honestly, your best solution is you need to get the right people who will work together. Because you can, you can force it, right? You can come up with strategy, you can say, okay, let's all sit in a room and let's talk about it and let's try to understand each other, and that might help a little bit. But again, you will not create great things working with people who you don't have chemistry with. So stop trying to force it and instead get the right people on board your team. This is a classic mistake a lot of entrepreneurs make. They hire for skills and not values. I need a web programmer, so I'm gonna go out and hire a coder. I need a salesperson, so I'm gonna go out and hire a salesperson. And they look for the skills. Right? You look for, "Oh, this person has 10 years programming experience." "Oh, this person was VP of Sales at this other company and they grew it from $100,000 to $10 million in sales." Great. And so you hire that skill set, but you don't hire the values. And then what's going to happen is your team comes with all sorts of different values and they're not going to work well together. So you need to get the right team together and not just hire for skills, but hire for values. Number 2: Stand for something. Your company, yourself, you need to stand for something important. You need to understand what your one word is and build around it. And if your team all feels the same way and you know this mission that you're on, you're much more likely to be successful. Here's a quick example. So at my company, I hire for values. I hire for people who love entrepreneurs. If you don't love entrepreneurship, you're not gonna work well at my company. It's all we do, right? If you don't love what we stand for, if you don't love believing in entrepreneurs, if you're not an optimistic person, you will not fit in with what we do. You'll think this is the stupidest company ever. But if you love entrepreneurs and you believe in them and you see them as being the champions of the future, then you're gonna love this company. You're gonna love it. And so I ask everybody what the one word is, and it's a funny story. Obviously mine is believe. I usually have the "Believe" shirts on. Christina, who's my video editor, she makes all these videos, she produces them, she puts them on YouTube. Hi, Christina! I asked her what her one word is and when her birthday was, and she has the same birthday as me, May 20th, and her one word is "Believe," and she almost had it tattooed on her arm when she was younger, before she met me. How crazy is that, right? Her one word is "Believe," she's born on the same day as me. You know, is it surprising that we work well together? No, right? We have different skill sets, but we work well together because we're aligned around the same thing. And so your team has to be aligned. They have to have either the same word or sister words at least so that they will work well together. Your company stands for something important and they can align it, right? So all of us have different skill sets, right? Christina does great videos. Jason might help out with strategy and execution. Adeel might be programming, Adis might be doing some AdWords or SEO stuff, GT might be working with our authors and creating content. Everybody has their own role. We have, you know, 10 people working with us, but we're all trying to help entrepreneurs, and we just see the world through our own lens, and we attack it from different angles. We're all working towards the same thing. If your company doesn't stand for anything important, then everybody's gonna go off and do their own thing and say, "My way is the best." No, my way is the best. They're not working together. So you have to have your company stand for something important. Number 3 is empower them. You want to empower your team to make decisions and be creative and try stuff and test stuff, because you know what? Here's news for you: you don't have all the answers. So you better start listening to your team and let them get more engaged with the process and give them a little rope to play with. If you empower your team, it's a surprising how creative they can be and how much great stuff they can come up with. So here's an example. So since you guys are watching videos, I'm working on a new video project. Hasn't been released yet, haven't talked about it yet. We'll see, uh, what happens. We're in the early development stage, and I gave my early vision for it to Christina, and she started working on it, and she came back with something that was a totally different spin on it than what I was expecting. What I saw in my head, this came back as totally different, but I loved it. It's a totally unique angle, and we're working with it. And so I would have never got that. We're gonna have a greater product, a greater end result because of that. It would never have come if she didn't feel comfortable to explore with it, right? If it didn't empower her to go do it. If I said, "You have to do it this way, it's the only way we're ever gonna do things," then you're gonna get what you want, but you're not gonna get the best product. You're not gonna get the best end result, and you're not gonna have a happy team, right? Imagine you're working for somebody and say, this is the only way to do it. Zero creativity, zero empowerment, my way or that's it. You think that's gonna be a happy employee working with you? Now, they're gonna make mistakes, and there are some things that I am, you know, anal about, and I need to have it a certain way. And so, you know, we'll make it that way on some things, but for the most part, I like having my team being able to go out and explore and try stuff. And we end up with much greater product and a team that loves what they're doing. So remember, get the right people, stand for something, and empower them. Believe. For those of you watching, like this video, please support me by clicking the link in in the description. You can leave a comment, let me know what you think. If you have a question, leave it below, make a video response, and click on my face, subscribe to the channel. Thank you so much, I'll see you soon.
