The Biggest Mistakes Business Owners Make That Cause Their Employees to Underperform with Annie Hyman Pratt - Genius Network #80

Do you know the biggest mistake business owners make that causes their employees to underperform? What would it feel like to get your team firing on all cylinders and achieving the results and growth you desire? Annie Hyman Pratt is an accomplished C suite operating executive and business consultant with more than 20 years experience. She works with entrepreneurial companies undergoing large scale changes, often to the business model, rapid growth and organization. She took Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf from a Mom and Pop seven store chain to a highly prized international brand. If you would like access to the complete presentation, the show notes, the links and the special resources for this episode, please visit geniusnetwork.com 80 that's geniusnetwork.com 80.

Think of the people you work with. Are they proactive and fully engaged in achieving results and playing all out for your business? Are are they telling the truth about what's really going on, taking responsibility and offering solutions that they then acted on? Or were they covering their butts, making excuses and trying to manage your perceptions of them? Have you been thinking too often, oh shit, I have team members who are incompetent or that I don't really trust to do great work and now it's all falling on me. Anyone ever felt like that?

Yeah.

If you're in the latter category, you're not alone and it doesn't have to be this way. Annie Hyman Pratt is going to show you how to create the foundation to get your team firing on all cylinders and achieving the results and growth you desire. After serving as CEO for seven years, she took a chain of seven stores called the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf with 60 employees to an international company with 70 stores and 1200 employees. After she and her family sold the business, Annie went on to serve for over a decade as a management consultant and rapid turnaround expert for dozens of companies. She now works with small business owners, entrepreneurs and management teams in diverse industries, with leaders and teams in group settings and as a private consultant. Her title is the Biggest Mistakes Business Owners make that Drains Their energy and Causes their teams to underperform. Please welcome Annie Hyman Pratt, who's awesome.

So people come to me in a lot of pain about their teams and that pain generally falls in two categories. The first is that their team isn't productive enough. And what they say to me, including even over these last couple days, is that they think their team isn't clear enough on roles that they don't do what they're supposed to do. Maybe they don't even know what they're supposed to do, that they don't Prioritize. Well, they work on the wrong stuff. That they aren't motivated to really go after the vision, that if they were motivated, they'd be ready to do 10 times more in a day than they're doing now. And they're thinking that their team needs more systems and process because it's taken just too damn long to get the simplest shit done. The second big category is the category of competence. The people don't think their teams are skilled or competent enough. They also think that their people might not demonstrate the right values, that they aren't being service minded enough, they aren't being open enough, they aren't demonstrating integrity sometimes, that they have kind of a bad attitude and kind of bad behaviors. And not only are they thinking, I don't even know if my team is competent enough, but they're thinking, maybe my entire team isn't competent enough. Anybody here think that about or know that about somebody else's thinking about their team? Okay, so here's the thing. All those things are important. You need good, competent people and you need the right systems and processes in place. But there is something that underlies all that that is more important than those things. And in my opinion, it's also the ultimate productivity tool. It's the thing that lets you attract, retain, and really motivate team members. And that is psychological safety. So psychological safety is the belief that one is safe to tell the truth, to share an opposing opinion or an idea, to reveal something vulnerable about themselves, including that maybe they made a mistake or that they need more skills and competencies. When people feel threatened, they tend to spiral. I mean, you know, like when we're feeling unsafe and feeling like others are judging us, we tend to spiral. We tend to lose our way. We tend to have our mind engaged in things like, especially if my boss has just criticized me, thinking things like, oh, my God, how can I get out of the doghouse here? Or thinking, how can I escape? I know that when I've been criticized by my boss, I'm also thinking, that guy's an asshole. I think I need to check my Facebook right now. So the thing about psychological safety that I most want you to know is that it comes before accountability that people need to be safe, to take a risk, to generate, to really go for the big results. Now I had to learn about psychological safety the hard way. I was the CEO of the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. We were growing really fast and our resources were stretched to the hilt. And my CFO came in to tell me that we had just lost Three key people. But more than that, she shared with me. Annie, I think more people are about to quit because they don't want to work for you. You have crazy high expectations. And when they don't meet your expectations, you're really quick to blame and judge that. You micromanage them on the things that they can do, and you abandon them on the things where they really need help. She said, we can't tell you the truth of what's really going on here. When we try to tell you the truth, you can't take it. You get emotionally reactive, you turn it around, and it's a huge problem. And I, at the time, I was so upset, thinking, all right, well, if other people are ready to quit, fine, because I think they're all incompetent anyways. But after I thought about that for a little while, I understood. I'm growing a big thing here. I can't do it without my team. I really need to make it safer for them. I knew that I had to start by putting psychological safety in place. And we did that. It took a little bit, but we did that. And we were able to grow three times faster from that point. And I didn't lose any more team members from them. And because we were doing so well, we got a reputation that others wanted to come work for us. So I got some of my best people then. And because we had such a strong team, we were able to sell our business for probably double what we would have been able to sell it for without such a strong team. The new buyers kept my entire team happy to say. So I have worked with dozens of companies with helping them with their leadership and team, putting in place good strategies, working on all those systems and processes you guys all want, and putting in place the psychological safety. And what I have found that's been surprising is how many of those companies were in the same place as I was in Coffee Bean, where people were on the verge of quitting. And most of the time the entrepreneur didn't know. And if they didn't know, they didn't know what to do about it. So there are many ways to increase psychological safety. I have a handout that is going to give you five, and I am going to share with you now one, the one that I think is the most important. It's about you taking more personal responsibility, more accountability for generating a safe environment for your team. You, as the business owner, have the greatest impact on how safe your team is to go for the outcomes. Right? So when you break down safety and you break down safety by either blaming or judging. Or sometimes you do it in a way that's implied. Like you roll your eyes or you give a little comment, like really? Or what were you thinking? A little bit of attitude in it, right? So those kinds of things your team is really sensitive to and it can break down safety. So when you do that, the very first step to repairing it, because we all are going to have times when we break it down. We all are. So the first step in repairing it is to recognize when you're doing it, Recognize when you're blaming, judging and criticizing. Recognize when maybe you're abandoning your team. The second step is to own that you have a responsibility to do something different to repair it. You don't have to be perfect, but you got to take responsibility to repair. And then the third step is to forgive. And I think of this as the most critical step because it's the one that allows you to do the rest. And forgiving is all about applying compassion. Applying compassion for your team, knowing that they're doing the best that they can, applying compassion for yourself, that sometimes you create an environment that makes it harder for them to perform. And with that compassion, you start your way to a really good amount of safety so that you can connect back with your people, so that they can no longer worry about what you're thinking about them, how you view them. I want you to think about yourselves and how you perform, how well you think when somebody blames and criticizes you in those times, how good is your thinking? How able are you to be super productive? Right? What kind of good actions do you take? So know that your team is suffering from the same thing. So when you notice that it gets unsafe, recognize what you're doing that may contribute to it. Own that you need to do something different and forgive yourself for getting into that, for breaking down the safety. The next time that you're thinking, oh man, my team is totally incompetent here, or you're thinking, I just need another system or process. I want you to stop and think first. Have I made it safe enough for my team? Because safety comes before accountability. People need safety to be willing to risk dropping their self guard and really going for the outcome instead.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Genius Network. If you would like to learn more about the Genius Network annual event, please visit geniusnetworkevents.com that's geniusnetworkevents dot com if you would like access to the full presentation, the show notes, the links, and the special resources for this episode, please visit geniusnetwork.com 80 that's geniusnetwork.com 80.