The Truth Behind TEAM: How To Create The Growth You Desire | Annie Hyman Pratt & Joe Polish

So the number one top frustration for entrepreneurs with their team is that their teams don't think big enough, that they're not strategic enough, that they don't see the big picture and that when they're working they're not keeping that big picture in mind so that they can further that. Right. So that's the, that's kind of the number one thing that entrepreneurs can't trust their team to actually drive the big goals, drive the results.

Let's now talk about something that is one of the biggest areas of growth and thorns in everyone's side, which is how do you best build a team that works on your behalf? I've hired Annie in the past. She is awesome. Some of the top people that I know in the world, she's the go to person for them. So she's the one that is like known as the CEO whisper. So let me do an official introduction for her, then I'll say a couple of things and then me and her will have, I'll ask her some questions and we'll also do some Q and A with all of you. So for the last two decades, Annie Hyman Pratt has helped entrepreneurs build their teams, build teams that drive thrive and deliver extraordinary results. Through her leadership development program and private consulting work, she's helped CEOs and leaders develop their teams to become the most valuable asset instead of a draining expense. The rapid rate of change in today's business environment highlights how imperative it is that you have strong critical thinking, self leadership and effective teamwork in every layer of your organization. Only then can you pivot successfully and grab new opportunities as they emerge. And if you're too stuck in the weeds, you have no time to be in your genius zone and do the needed strategic thinking, creating and innovating. Today Annie's going to talk with us about the truth behind building teams, especially A players. What you need to know to create the growth and sustainable success you desire. And the way this came about was she gave a great 10 minute talk which all of you could watch on the Genius network membership site and the Q and A that came from afterwards we decided to create and I believe Tarna on my team along with Gina helped create something for a survey and it was about creating A plus teams. And we asked the question.

Of all.

The members that were being surveyed, what were the members biggest frustration? What their teams are not doing, what members think their team should be doing. The other question that we have was members say their biggest challenge managing is members think that they'd be better leaders by and Then questions that members have. And so here's, like, the top answers we summarized in these pages. And then I've drafted some questions based on everything that people gave feedback from. And so that's what I'm going to talk to Annie about. So sorry for the long rant in the beginning. Annie, welcome as always.

Yeah, yeah, no worries. Yeah. And I have. I'm looking forward to this. And I also may bring up my board here and there.

Perfectly fine. I know you love that whiteboard, so.

I do.

Every time you. Every time you sketch something out, everyone seems to absolutely love it. So. All right, so let me first ask you some foundational questions. Then we'll go into stuff related to the feedback. So how do you evaluate your own leadership performance?

Yeah. Okay, so first, I want to kind of dispel a really big myth that's out there, and that is that you could kind of hire out or, you know, bring somebody in to do your leadership. Right. That you could farm it out so that you can stay in your own unique ability. Okay, so here's the thing, though. You guys chose business, and business is a team sport. And so even though you're going to have your type of business that's going to be your genius, you still have to be a good athlete. Like, you still have to learn how to do the leadership part. And how I think of leadership, especially if you want your business to grow, especially if you want your business to not be dependent on you. So I think of leadership very much as interacting with others. So they produce results. Right? Not you interacting with others, so they produce results. And that's the big. It's a big transition that needs to happen if you want the kind of business that can, you know, really grow in scale and that you can get the life you desire, that you're not tied to your business. So then when we're. When, you know, when I'm helping people evaluate their own leadership, that's what we're looking at is like, are you leading in a way that your team, your leaders, your people can produce results with not too much of you? I mean, certainly with support, with, you know, you've got to provide resources. There's all kinds of things you provide, but they've got to do their role that you don't have to do it for them. So if you're not doing people's job for them, chances are you're doing pretty good job with leadership. But if you are still stuck in the weeds, still, you know, still feeling like my team isn't performing well, it's like, okay, you have a big responsibility in that because that's, you know, that's your part.

You know, how often have you had to. If ever. This is gonna be a weird question and it's, that's off the cuff. Encourage business owners, entrepreneurs, leaders or wannabe leaders, people pretending to be leaders or people that are just kind of in that role because their creative mind developed this monster called their business that they had to go get therapy or they had to do something really drastic because sometimes, you know, you just have bad entrepreneurs.

Yeah, yeah. I don't think of them as bad. I think of them as unable to control their emotional reactivity. Like, so if you have an entrepreneur that literally is, you know, is too easily upset, is kind of either lashes out or totally withdraws and retreats, you know, whatever some of those kind of self protective behaviors are, if there's too much of that, then they can't leave. And so, yeah, so if there's too much of that, then chances are something is riding underneath that's causing that. And I'm not a, you know, I'm not a psychotherapist. So yeah, that's not my part.

So that'll be for another discussion. Although I might smuggle a few things in here and there because, you know, I like talking about the crazy. So what are the top team frustrations and how do you overcome that? And of course you already know this, but intuitively we have this list from all of our genius network members. So can you speak to that?

Yeah, and I'll summarize it. There's, there's basically there's a top two and it came out in this list as well as other times I've surveyed entrepreneurs. So the number one top frustration for entrepreneurs with their team is that their teams don't think big enough, that they're not strategic enough, that they don't see the big picture, and that when they're working, they're not keeping that big picture in mind so that they can further that. Right. So that's the, that's kind of the number one thing that entrepreneurs can't trust their team to actually drive the big goals, drive the results. That's the first. The second big frustration is I'm just going to lump it into productivity. Did they actually use, use their time wisely and get some really strong work done, move those goals forward, do the proactive things that actually are gonna make a big difference to achieving those goals. So I think of those two things as the big frustrations.

Great.

Okay, so let me Ask you about what do the most successful leaders do differently with their teams that other ones do not?

Yeah. Okay. So I think this is a great time for me to bring up my board, if that's okay.

Totally okay. So by the way, you don't have to ask me permission to do stuff. I know you're super well behaved, unlike Asprey or Jim do or certain people. You kind of have to, you know, try to establish boundaries, but you're always good.

So funny. Okay, great. Can you see my whole board? I'm still pretty small on the screen.

I can see it well.

Okay, great. Okay. Okay, great. Awesome. So. Okay, so here's the thing about leadership. Like, leadership, you absolutely must have, like, these are the three things that you, you know, that are the foundation of really of good leadership. And the first is, and this is what the best leaders do differently. The first is that good leaders, they really know how to communicate their vision, their goals, and their strategy to get those goals. Okay. So when I say communicate comprehensively, I mean so that the team really understands not only the vision of where you want to be in the future. I think of this as like your purpose, but the goals are what those look like today or this year. It's like, you know, if your team doesn't understand, can't describe to you in really concrete terms what the goals are, they can't achieve them because they don't know what they're going for. And you'd be shocked at how many entrepreneurs you easily could be one of them don't have a good perception of themselves and what they describe. Right. Like they're in themselves. They have a full, complete picture in their head. They don't have a good sense of like, you know, did I describe it so you could see what's in my head, or did I just say a few words and assume that you would get it? And so people need to know, what are those concrete goals? What do they look like? And, and then the strategy part is basically, how are we planning on achieving these goals? What's important? Like, if we are going to double our revenue this year, great, we know about what that looks like. You want to detail it out into, you know, which product lines, is that how you know, how which product lines, which types of revenue, et cetera. But then you're also going to need to break out the strategy for how we going to get there. And in this case, a bunch of strategy may be about marketing when you're talking about revenue increases. Right. So these three things have to be incredibly clear. And the way you know if they're clear or not is can your team describe it back to you? Can they communicate it to an outside vendor or to their teams if they're a leader? Right. Like this can't be only one way thing. It has to be that you have confidence because you've heard that they got it, that they know it. Okay, so that's first thing. Second thing is the leaders, competent leaders have really strong self leadership. And self leadership is your ability to stay in a strong thinking, non reactive place even under stress and challenge. And so this self leadership, it's the thing of where if you're not in a good place, you tank the psychological safety, you tank it for everybody because, and I'm going to speak to this a little bit more, but if you're not in a good place, anybody interacting with you is going to have a really hard time also being in a good place. And in fact they're going to be with you as a CEO. They're going to be obsessed about doing what they can to get you into a good place. And when they're doing that, they've stopped focusing on the goals. So I'm going to come back to this self leadership. Okay, then the third part is when you know where you're going, what you're doing, when you yourself are in a really good place and it's safe for your team to do their roles to express themselves as they need to. Then the last part is do you have the skills to effectively interact with your team?

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video and I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

Because your team, this is where these are. So all of these are learned skills. I would say that, you know, we all have different natural abilities for how much work we might need to do. But this, this one especially is really learned. Like nobody has these skills automatically. Where some people have more self leadership abilities than others have more ability to stay in a calm, emotionally regulated place even under stress, pressure, threat, right? But this one we all have to learn. And so when we're going to learn this, this effective interaction is all about.

This.

Use this acronym, ace. So when you're interacting with a team, team member, team member, leader, really anybody you want to make sure That a, you have alignment, that goal is clear. You guys are going for the same thing. And a good leader is checking and double checking this all the time because things change. You know, the plan you had yesterday, now that you've taken one action towards it, may have changed make sense. So you have to keep realigning and then the next thing is you. You're going to come to an agreement for what's happening. So it's like if you've got a problem, you're going to get realigned, make sure you're going for the same goal. You are going to talk about how you're going to problem solve, you're going to make a new decision. But the thing is, at the end of the day, that decision has to be good with both of you. Because if one side makes a demand and the other side is forced to agree, they're already in a place of thinking they can't do it. So we need to make sure that we negotiate with our team so that they're in a place of where we're constantly working in agreements. We have to keep remaking, renegotiating, but getting agreements. Because then when we have an agreement, we take a most effective action. And the most effective action is the one that is most likely to move us towards our desired results. Does this make sense?

Yeah, this is awesome.

Okay, great.

Do you guys. Let me see. Let me show hands. Do you guys like it? Yes.

Okay, great. Okay.

I don't think Jim understood it. Do you have finger puppets or something for Jim do if. And I'm just kidding. I'm just picking on Jim. He doesn't really deserve that today. It's just me being sort of hurtful towards him, but, you know.

No, he gave some great advice this morning actually.

Yeah, he did. Every, every quarter he actually says something useful. Yes. Just kidding. I don't leave up on it, so. All right, well. So Andy. Yeah. You actually answered a lot of the questions that I was going to ask you. You know, one of them was what? So let me, let me say these. Some of the things that I really. There's a lot of thought that went into because I wanted to make this as useful as possible for everyone. So what is your process for working with thinking about entrepreneurs and their teams? So anything you want to elaborate that you didn't touch on, do that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, great. I promise I don't have endless sheets, but again, I'm gonna.

I was like going, wow, you have this stuff pretty well thought out here. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah, yeah. It's, you know, I've been, I've been teaching all this stuff for a long time now. I mean, it's, it's, you know, it's, it's iterated and gotten better and better. And I, you know, listening to Brian, I was thinking for myself that it's when we can make things more simple, man, it really is easier. So that's, that's a big part of what I've been working on these last, you know, five, six, seven years. So when I think about business, I think of business as being in two parts. And most of the world really talks about the top part, the business part. Things like, do we have good goals and strategy? Are we going to execute on them? Can we actually write, achieve all this? And at the, at the bottom is the tasks, all the things we actually have to do to achieve the goals. Okay? And these are, these are departments or functions. Okay? So that's the, this is what we usually think about when we're thinking about business, like the sport of business. But we actually have something going on underneath achieving, you know, all the work we do together to achieve results. We have something going on all day, every day underneath. Because we're human. And that is, are we humans who are in secure relationship, who are each showing up, well, not emotionally reactive so that we can drop our defenses and actually focus on this? Because if we're not in a psychologically safe place, if we're in a place thinking, you know, I don't think that person has my back. Did they just throw me under the bus? Or, you know, did I just get all this stuff put onto my plate and I wasn't able to negotiate and say, hey, I, you know, I need some extra resources or whatnot. I said, I said yes to something that I can't even do now. If I do that now, I'm in a place of like, oh man, I gotta figure this out for myself. I have to figure out how to protect myself. I have to make sure that nobody perceives me as having blown it. And when we're in a place of being self focused, we're not business focused. This is my big, big thing that I want you guys to understand is that you're often working on all this part up here, but it will have zero results. Maybe that's a little bit exaggerated, but you know, very low results. If this part isn't in a good place because people can't take it in, they're not, they're not doing that. They're focused on themselves of like, how Am I going to make sure I meet the deadline? Not because I care about the goal, but I want to make sure I meet the deadline so that I don't get yelled at or so the team doesn't think I dropped the ball. So all, you know, so I'll kind of do, you know, whatever poor quality work, meet the deadline. But now I've messed up the entire team. Can you guys see it like this is incredibly important. So when I'm thinking about business, I'm thinking about all these parts and I'm starting with this part because we can't make any progress. People can't learn down here if they're in a bad place, right?

Yeah. You know what I mean? My next question is, what does it mean for a team member to be a leader? How does that relate to responsibility? I mean, there's such a tie in here.

Absolutely, absolutely. And you know what? I will put up my last sheet and then I promise to just talk. So here's the thing about a good, a really strong team member is that they stay out of self protection. And we need this for you too. And when I say stay out of self protection, the easiest way for you guys to know what that is is you're in self protection if you have any of these behaviors going on and really kind of inside yourself too, right? So if somebody's in blame a lot of judgment. If they're criticizing, they're defending themselves, they're rationalizing, they're denying, they're ignoring, they're resisting change, they're in pleasing mode or they're in overwhelm. All of this stuff is really, is the place where we need to have the ability to get ourselves out of. So I know several people here talked about in the survey, hey, I want my team to do personal growth, right? Okay. So here's where I see the personal growth hooking up with business. Because when you do the personal growth, you get a lot more emotional endurance. You get the ability to handle situations, to stay in a good place, to pause before you react, to stay out of this reactivity in more and more situations, even under stress and challenge. Can you see it? It's like this is the thing that we, you know, that we need the development of good leaders, of strong team members. We need them to be able to get themselves quickly out of any self protection, not live down here. And to do that when they feel a threat, when they're stressed. This is a process. I don't have to go through this process. But the point is that they are able to pause and get themselves on the right track, able to emotionally regulate, get out of this crap and get themselves into a good place.

Yeah, this is. Let me, let me read some of the comments Andy, so you get some feedback here and sorry, this one's coming from Jim do love the business part and people part illustration. And I only reason I said that like that was just because it just keeps me congruent with my behavior with him right now. Just him. It's more everyone has a purpose in life even if it's a service. A bad example. And right now I'll be that bad example. Candy Valentino, who we're going to hear from next. This is so good and well illustrated. Akira. This is really good. So many parallels with parenting and co regulation. Same same huh? Robert Griller wrote. Thank you for this, Annie. This is exactly what I needed right now. Can you talk about how a business that is currently not doing much of this at all transitioned to a business that does this stuff without shooting shocking the existing staff. What are some of the best practices for the transition of and for implementing these concepts throughout the culture and structure of the business? If you want to speak to that.

Sure. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I'm going to flip back those for a second. Yeah, so one of the. I'm going to go back to this people part. This guy. So one of the very, very first things to start with literally is that number one skill of leadership is to get yourself communicating the goals and the strategy in a really concrete way and planning with your team together how they're going to achieve it. Right. So that it's like you, you and you keep coming back to it. So at every meeting, maybe you have a small leadership team. I don't know if you do, but if you have a small leadership team, you're going to want to meet with them every week. And when you're meeting you're talking about this like are we on track? Did something change? This is not hard to do, but it definitely takes, take some discipline, takes practice. You know, it's actually not all that easy to articulate goals and strategy. You've got to keep practicing. So. But all you need to do is start and as you do it, it will work itself out. So I think that's one of the very first things. The second thing is you can work on this self leadership. You can get this going in your company, in your culture right away. Especially if you're willing to be one of the first demonstrations of it. Right. If you're willing to put yourself forward and say you know what? I'm in a place of blame right now. I'm going to take a pause and get myself into a better place so that we can talk about what we're going to do differently and not talk about blame.

Yeah, awesome. Awesome. You know, let me mention a couple of things here. Gianluca wrote Annie's the only person I know that rocks the flip chart like a boss without killing it with content. Sachin, how can we hire someone to support our business in this area? And then Kara wrote Sasha. And I know Annie has a whole team that teaches these things. Impact is your company. I've actually hired you. Annie, you have a company that does this. So why don't you speak to that? Because as we go through stuff, I mean, look, this sort of thing, I've never yet experienced a book, a course, even hiring someone, and then it's done. This is an ongoing thing, just like those of you that are involved in physical fitness and exercise. You don't ever stop learning about nutrition, you. And about different ways to stay in physical shape and different techniques and form and, you know, endurance and supplementation and a million other. I mean, this is a octopus with many tentacles, but there are some fundamentals. And if you understand the fundamentals, you at least have enormous direction, which is the whole goal of today is to. Is to do that. So if someone wants to hire you or just get better at that, what do you recommend?

Yeah, so I have a couple programs and I am coming out with a book. It's now early next year. Hay House is publishing it and they're also my client, so they asked me to publish the book, which is amazing. And I should have an information product out later in the year. But right now I have two ways. I work with clients. One is through private consulting, so it's a custom engagement, I'll say. But the other is through a group leadership development program. So I take your leaders, your kind of key people, these key functional leaders, and I develop them for you, especially in things like self leadership and in all those interactive skills in decision making, in agreement making, in how to give really good feedback. Feedback that actually generates change.

Yeah.

So what I'd like you to do, you know, when we wrap up or when we wrap up, you can put in the, you know, how, however they need to contact you and what you want them to watch, read first, you know, anything and yeah, any stuff that you have after the fact. I'd love to, you know, distribute anything you've written that you think we should read. And if you wouldn't mind snapping I will. Pictures of all your charts then I'll have my team send this out to everyone after we're done with the meeting.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And hey, you know what? I also want to give a quick shout out to lots of other genius network members, including Sam from earlier today and Sachin Patel from last meeting. Like they both spoke to this part of self leadership, of having yourself in a good place, not in a threatened, emotionally reactive place. And it has a lot to do with your biology and physiology. So not just a mental thing.

Yeah, awesome. So Sandra wrote Annie is the best. Yeah, definitely. Compared to Jim do for sure. So I just have to keep throwing it in. It just, you know, once you get on a roll, Annie, it just kind of keeps going.

Moment in the sun, Joe, I'm letting you feel good about.

So no. By the way, Jim, do you have any questions for Annie? Because I know having you as a boss has got to be an enormous amount of suffering. So how would. What sort of way can we frame this for. For Jim to. For your long suffering staff? What questions would you have for. And I'm totally kidding. I've actually. Jim's team is quite incredible and so is Jim. So I say all this, of course, jokingly. Do you have any questions? Because you kind of earned them with all my shenanigans here.

One thing I would say is when it comes to culture, because I think we have a really good culture in our office. I do think as you go through a lot of these things about everyone understanding the goals and being unified and pulling for each other, how do you maintain that as you grow? Because we're adding employees and that's kind of a fear I have. And how do I balance how much I'm hands on and how much I let that culture kind of take care of itself.

Yeah, yeah. So it's such a good question. So remember when I said that leadership is all about interacting with others so they produce results. Okay. So and when I think about you and your business right now, Jim, you're probably here right, as the, as the CEO and whatnot. And you probably have, you know, team members, a few leaders and some other team members in your company and what you're doing, when you grow your team and adding more team members, you want to be making sure you bring people up in leadership. I think of it as like you move them up the triangle so your culture will stay intact as long as the people that are leading keep growing in their ability to take more responsibility for it. More responsibility to achieve the results. Does that make sense?

It does, absolutely. How do you foster that in an intentional way?

You foster it by having a development culture. Like literally that the people in the companies that I work with, they know this is what's happening. Like they know that they're being developed to take on more responsibility to hold in self leadership and even more stress and challenge. Like they, they know that they're being developed to get results through others as they move up. Right. Everybody becomes less task doers, more about thinking and supporting others to get it right.

That's good.

And I think what I've seen and learned kind of the hard way is that each individual has to see a path to a better future for themselves.

Oh yes.

And I kind of just thought, hey, here's your job, Prove yourself, work hard, show me that you deserve it and I'll find a way to move you up. But people don't think that way. That's how entrepreneurs think that I'll just figure it out and someone will recognize me and I'll move up. Most people need to have that spelled out for them very specifically of here's what your future looks like and here's how we're going to help you get there. And so that was really meaning more than me. Like people need to know that. And this huge difference when you do that, how someone's energy and their excitement that they kind of see if I do these things, this is what's going to happen in my life.

Totally. And when you're doing that, there's also a really big part that's about clarifying with them, like what's your part and what's my part?

Right.

So as the team member, what's your part in really taking responsibility for, you know, growing yourself through, for using our support to actually get better at handling stress. Like it's not my responsibility for them to get better at handling stress. I support them, make sense. But they've got to do their part.

Very good.

You see how nice I was. Joe and I actually answered questions and asked good questions.

Yeah, I did. And what's funny is that Craig Hanley wrote do you think Annie can help Joe and Jim do with their relationship? And actually I think about that it's kind of funny because Jim actually is listed as power of attorney in case I'm ever like a vegetable in a hospital bed or something. Which. So I think our, I think it's actually pretty sound, probably idiotic on my part because, you know, Jim actually is in charge of like some of my money and everything. You Know, I could be like Leona Hemsley and leave it to a dog or something. But I left some of it to, like, you know. Anyway, it's a long story.

I tried to pull the plug on Joe three times. The doctors keep going, but he's fine. He's healthy.

So fantastic. I actually think this sort of stuff is funny because, you know, there's always people watching that are, like, cringing. They're like, what the hell is going on? But I just think it's amusing. So a couple of questions, Annie, based on what we talked about here, and Jim's question actually was very similar to what I was going to ask you. So I can scratch a couple of these because you answered them. So how does an entrepreneur measure the value of what a team member has to the operations of a business? This is something that was articulated in some of the feedback that we got. Like, how do you know if you got. How do you evaluate them? And I will say that Candy Valentino, who's going to speak next, she's been helping me in my own company with measurement and tracking and that sort of stuff. But how would you do it?

Yeah. Yeah, Great. So there is all kinds of measurement and tracking. Let me speak to it at a little bit more of a higher level view, though, is that team members are valuable for the value that they contribute to the organization. Okay. So I think of it as contributing value in a couple ways. One, Sorry, hold on.

I told you not to drink vodka during this, Andy.

Yeah.

That'S actually a thing that after Covid, like, I've gotten into a martini habit. Have to kick that.

That's funny.

After Covid. Anyhow, what was I saying? What was I just talking about? Oh, valuing team members. Yeah, valuing team members. Okay. So team members, they. They're gonna. You want them. You're gonna evaluate them on how much value they're bringing to the organization by either taking on responsibility, so the more responsibility they can take on, meaning that they can cause the result to happen with very little input and support from you.

Right.

They can really do their job at a high level. That's huge. That's the first way. And the second way is what are they contributing? That it could be a specialized skill. It could be some way that they do their work. That is incredible. Being a really good salesperson, that. That is a, you know, that's a classic area that you can really evaluate what somebody is bringing to the company because of. Because of the direct value that they're adding. But that's, you know, you're basically going to base it on those two things. If they're a key contributor, it's like, how are they contributing? What are they achieving? What results are they achieving with that contribution? And if they're more of managing role, it's all going to be about their level of responsibility to generate a result that you can rely on. And metrics and measurement can certainly help you do that.

Sorry, I was muted. Geez. So let me ask you this one. What are the biggest frustrations entrepreneurs experience with team performance that you've not mentioned yet?

I think it's that they don't know if the team members aren't performing well. They feel like they give them feedback 10,000 different ways and nothing changes. So I think that's a giant frustration for entrepreneurs is like, I feel, you know, it's like, how do I make them do better? They don't know how to do that.

Well, then let me ask you, Jeff Madoff actually posted this question, Annie. Do you suggest ways for the employees to relate to leaders so they are heard and the growth comes from both sides, leadership and employees?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. That's the point of moving people really up this triangle and being super inclusive about, you know, how we're going to work together to actually achieve these results. In fact, again, over time, as businesses grow and they get more complex or they diversify product lines and all kinds of things happen in the growth. The entrepreneur is no longer the expert in everything. They can't be.

Well, I think that's one of the biggest challenges. I mean, Dan Sullivan has his ceiling of complexity conversation. And then the rugged individualist, which all of us out as the rugged individualist because we almost have to. When you don't have the sales and you're starting out your company and you don't.

You do everything.

Yeah, you do everything and then all of a sudden you start making money. But you still have the conditioning and the habits of doing everything. I mean, I certainly know that I may. I don't know if control freak is the case because I do let go of a lot of stuff, but a lot of times I will do. It's not a really complete delegation. It's kind of like, you know, I've practiced the art of seagull management where you fly in, you crap all over everyone, and you fly out before you can hear them bitch about it. Right. So it's kind of like. So in the case of being able to let go, I let go when I feel there's. I have trust and there's a Trusted system. And like, I've pet peeves. One of my big pet peeves are being kept in the dark. I don't like being, I don't like black boxes. I don't like being kept in the dark. And when I start seeing those behaviors, then I become like, paranoid. I now, you know, I don't know if this is useful thinking, but I, you know, there's some things like this quote, you know, wherever you see one cockroach, there's many more where that one came from.

Yeah.

So as soon as I see something, I'm like, oh, shit. There's a whole bunch of other things that I'm not seen anymore. And, you know, I'd love to get your advice for, because so many of the people here, their, their growth is limited by their ability to let go. But also, you can't let go into the hands of people that are unethical, incompetent, not committed. I mean, there's a variety of things needed before you just hand your baby over to somebody.

Yeah. Yeah. So there's one thing that I think is more helpful than anything else to help entrepreneurs let go, so to speak, and that is to shift the responsibility for getting information, for being kept up to date. That right now probably most entrepreneurs are. What they do is if this is the team member, let's say this is a CEO, this is a team member that the CEO comes to the team member and they're like, hey, what's going on with this project? Tell me, you know, give me the newest report. What's, what are the, you know, how did the sales go yesterday? What, what are you, why didn't you do this differently? They come and they do a ton of talking to this person. A ton of talking. Right. Do it differently. This isn't right. Let me step in there and show you how to do it, etc, etc. Okay, so there is a limited amount of communication space between the CEO and a team member. In this example, there's like a limited bubble. The more you fill it up, the more in trouble you are, because this is all the information you already have. So what we want instead is to have the team member adopt the habit of. It's my responsibility to fill up this bubble with what's happening, what happened last week, what I'm doing differently, what already went wrong that you should know about, what I'm doing to fix it. The thing that I'm seeing, that I'm going to let you know before you find out from somebody else. Like, that's what builds trust. But if you have to come and ask all the time, ask and tell constantly, you're never going to build the trust you need these people to be, you know, taking all the responsibility for filling up the bubble. And then you get to sit back and relax because they've told you how they're doing, they've told you what they're thinking, they told you how they're gonna approach it.

Yeah, I love this. Eunice, come here for a minute. I'm going to. I'm going to do something that could be incredibly risky here at the moment.

All right?

So, yeah. Yeah. Eunice has been with me for 25 years. She's awesome.

Have a seat.

And you know. Or Stan, whatever you prefer. So, yeah, it's interesting watching this sort of thing. And I'm not. I don't want to put you on the spot or anything. What I'd like to ask is, me to put me on the spot. What do I do right. And where do I screw things up? Like, if you had your preference. More as a demonstration for everyone.

Not.

It's not. This is not like this. Oh, let's let me look like an idiot, even though you're welcome to make me. You can mention anything about me that you think is negative. That would be instructional for people here, because she's seen me in the best of places and the worst of places.

Hey, Joe, let her put something in the bubble for a second.

Yeah.

And what I appreciate the most about Joe is that I have autonomy. So he doesn't tell me how to do things. He tells me what he wants done, and then I have the freedom to do it the way that I want. Sometimes Joe's addiction, he doesn't listen so well.

No, that. Absolutely true. And part of it is, is, you know, being overwhelmed, having the ability to listen, because I've been. I've been looking a lot of behavior through the BJ Fogg behavioral map thing. You know, motivation, ability, and prompts. Right. And if I don't have the prompts, even though Eunice has said. And my whole team has said things to me, and I will flat out. It will just somehow delete out of my memory. And if there's not a daily reminder or something in some cases, and I have a really hard time adapting a new bucket, so someone's like, let's use Slack, which my whole team uses Slack. I don't use Slack. I don't. I still have not been able to adopt it. And we have. I mean, we've been through every project management tool from Trello to Asana to now using Monday. And my team uses it infinitely more effectively than I do. I sort of use these things as dumping grounds and sort of, you know. But again, so what advice would you give that we've had to go through over the years, including anything we've learned from Annie that you think would be helpful for everyone to know?

Well, I think for Joe and Joe and I's relationship, the best thing is to have the daily check in. And that's where you and I get in trouble, is when we don't do a daily check in.

Yeah.

And like everything is just floating up in the. In the air.

Yeah.

I'll tell you one thing that me and Eunice started doing. Annie is like Keith Cunningham with his thinking time. And again, she's way better at it. I will miss and stuff is when we do literally 10 minute thinking. 10 minute thinking time. Because we're getting frustrated because it's like we're not sitting down for an hour and doing thinking time. We're like, why don't we do it for 10 minutes? And then you talk to me about your thinking time, I'll talk to you about my thinking time. Fricking game changer. But that's a form of a check in.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, and it makes it. It's like by doing that daily check in, you're constantly doing this. You're constantly getting realigned, because as things happen during the day, you do fall out of alignment. You have to talk about what happened and then get realigned and then, you know, get on the same page and then you guys go and do your thing.

Yeah, yeah. And by the way, she's still here. She just moved to a different sort of way to get away from me. Well, let me do this, Andy, because just for timing purposes, I want to ask you a couple more questions. And then I'm almost thinking at some point, would love to do a, like a Facebook Live if you. If you're down with it to the Genius Network group. Kind of like just. We can do that in the next, I don't know, couple weeks or month or whatever. Would just like take all these questions and stuff and just do a live Q and A with you, with everyone on, you know, live. We can do it on Zoom and then we can beam it to the Facebook group if we want. And what I'd like for everyone, if you didn't have a question that's answered today, go ahead and post it here or you can even. We can start a thread on the Facebook group. And you can do that. And I would love to do that because there's so much value here. What are some of the best strategies and methods you've discovered for improving a team that you've not talked about yet?

That I've not talked about yet. Oh, gosh.

And if you have, don't worry about it, because I know you've covered fundamentals. I just want to make sure.

So it's, I think, one of the habits. One of the. I think of culture as your habits of behavior. Right. Okay. So one of those habits is inclusive decision making. Okay. So what that means is, like, anytime you're going to make any kind of meaningful decision, you have to have all of the people that are involved and impacted there. Because entrepreneurs, they're fast decision makers, and they tend to make a decision with one other person. It'd be like, you know, Joe. Joe would make a decision with Eunice, and then Eunice has to go run to the team and say, hey, this is the decision. And the team's like, wait, we can't do it that way. So then. Then it has to go back up to the top. Right. For a new decision, then back down. And it's like, wait, we can't do that either. So instead of doing that, bring all those stakeholders together, bring all the people that are involved and make the decision together. It's just so much faster.

Yeah, yeah, totally, totally. Sam has a question here. How can we balance being decisive and seeking team agreement?

Yeah, you know what? That's a fabulous question. I will say that it's something that happens over time. It's kind of like. Okay, I don't mean to make this analogy exactly this way, but it's kind of like your team starts out more as kids. Like, they don't know a lot to start. They don't have all the context you have, but as they grow and they learn more and they take on more and more responsibility, they become a lot more competent in decision making. That's when you should be switching over to including them. And by the way, when they're competent, they're also going to be faster at that decision. So if you are trying to have the team help you make a decision, and it's taking a really long time, and the points of view are kind of like in every direction, like, they're not ready.

Yeah.

That's the time to be decisive.

Awesome.

I'm going to ask you just two more questions because just for timing, I'll end up running super late today if we don't. Man, I'D love to go for another freaking two hours on this. There's so much stuff here, so I appreciate it. Jdev wrote, have you incorporated the Colby assessment as part of your process for building teams? And if so, could you talk about its impact it's had on your approach? And so, yeah, I don't know if you use Colby. Colby, but if you.

I don't, but I have like another what I call defense styles and in some ways it's more like disc than it's like Colby. But I think the what's great about Colby and a lot of the personality tests is you get to know much more what your natural reactive behaviors are. And by the way, they're usually also your superpower. So if you have the ability to bring people together to make a lot of stuff happen, to be super decisive and move everybody towards a vision, if that's your superpower, chances are your defense style will be to shut people down, to get demanding, to tell them what to do and. Right. Can you see it? So having that self knowledge will really help you to work on. How can I see more clearly when I'm in that self protective spot so I can get myself out?

Gotcha. Okay, great. So Nick Sonnenberg, I don't know if you want to speak up on this Nick or what Annie would think. Hopefully you shoot Nick down because he thinks he's smarter than he actually is. But it says for decision making. We've been using and he's the, you know, he's with his companies. Get leveraged calm. For decision making. We've been doing design thinking sessions using is it miro.comm I R O and it's changed how we operate. So miro.commiro okay, I don't know anything about Miro. What is it?

Hey, any. Great job. Awesome, awesome talk. Miro is like a digital whiteboarding tool. So especially while everyone's remote and you don't have like the whiteboard where you can get together with your team and start drawing things out and brainstorming. This is. Imagine a collaborative digital version of that with, that's infinitely large with sticky notes and you could do all of the brainstorm together. So when we in the last few weeks when we get stuck on a problem, will pause and we'll say, okay, let's put on the calendar a one hour design thinking session and we'll pull up Miro and we'll start putting sticky notes. And they have all these templates too. I think the only limitation.

Sorry, sorry. You're cutting out a Little bit, Nick. So it says the only limitation was the last thing we heard you say.

Oh, sorry, I have bad service limitations. How creative you can be with using the tool. And I'm happy to share with you a few ways that if it's helpful, few ways we've used it. But we were stuck on like what CRM to choose, right? So that problem, by creating sticky notes of all the different requirements we were looking for, and then we put icons of all the different companies we were evaluating on the sticky notes. So in a visual way, we were able to clearly see who the winner is, or we were able to quickly establish new role and responsibilities rather than having old school job descriptions. We created two by two cards of all the different things looking for in each role. And then we create sticky notes. And in a collaborative way, everyone just put sticky notes on what they thought they should be doing. We went over it together. We created a parking lot where it wasn't clear who was responsible for certain things. So then we have a parking lot of sticky notes and once a month we clear out the parking lot and assign the sticky notes. So those are just two quick examples like, of how we were stuck on a few problems and we were able to quickly solve things that otherwise would have taken probably weeks.

Yeah, yeah, that sounds great. You know, and I think that, you know, you had a couple things going on there. First of all, you can do that for this section, but it sounds like when you're doing problem solving, you're generally doing execution, right? It's like we had a plan, we know what the goal is, we're trying to work out how to get there, and there was a problem, problem, or we don't know what to do, etc. And so bringing all these people together, I think that was kind of your first thing of like, let's bring together the stakeholders and really think through what we're going to do. And you used a structure, this board, or this, what do you call it, Miro, which is awesome. I love it. And to help this go so much faster, I love it. The thing to know how I think of structure, systems, process is, yes, they're important, but if you don't know where you're going and you don't have people that are showing up in a good place, no amount of structure, systems and process will fix it. But Nick, it sounds like you have strong people. So then using a structure like Miro to collaborate and to just, oh my gosh, to coordinate, it easier to keep everybody's voices at the table, to not have the conversation get confusing. That's awesome.

Yep. No, that's great. That's great. So Annie, what I'll say, last thing I'll ask you then is what didn't I ask you? Or what did we not discuss that I should have. What has not been said that needs to be stated.

I think the thing that I wish I could get across to entrepreneurs is how important this self leadership part is. Just that when you that entrepreneurs, because they're so accomplished, they tend to think of themselves as being highly in control of themselves. And it's a lot of times it's not true at all. And that being in not a great place sometimes in your business with your team during those times, your thinking is bad, it's totally compromised. You can't plan well, you can't interact well. And so to really take some stock and take it seriously that you need to work on this part, it'd be like, I think of it again as like the athleticism behind a sport. So it's like you're playing basketball. Yes, you have to be great at shooting the ball, but if you can't run a whole quarter, you're toast. So this is how you, you know, this, this part is you running four quarters.

Yeah.

Awesome.

Well, you know, one of the things, the whole, you never step in the same river twice saying one of the things that I've heard, and I'm thinking more and more of this as we go along here is, so you've given several presentations at Genius Network and I think after having heard Annie today, if you went back into the membership site, which I would encourage you to do, a lot of people just don't. And some people have watched every presentation. I remember when Sean Stephenson first joined Genius Network, he literally spent about two months before he came to his first meeting watching every single 10 minute talk that was posted on the Genius Network membership site at the time. And that was, you know, I don't know how many years ago that was. And I remember him saying, you know, he even did a video testimonial to this saying, you know, I got my $25,000 worth many times over just watching what's on the membership site. And if you went back and watched Annie's talks, it will have a whole other layer of context than if you actually had seen her before simply because of what you have now. So this is like anything else. If you want to have expertise in something, it's, it's just a matter of going deep with it versus going shallow. And the more I learn Annie, even there's things that you said today that you've even shared with me when I hired you that for some reason, I didn't comprehend them like I'm comprehending them now. And, you know, so, I mean, a lot of this is simply just exposure and, you know, set and setting and the mindset that I'm in. So this is incredibly useful. Is there anything else that you would recommend before we go?

No. Just remember that you're playing a team sport in business.

It's true. It's like, I want to build a team, but if you're not a team player, good luck. Right. And also, I think it would be really fun to turn this into a drinking game. It should be cards against humanity. Should be cards, CEOs against their team or something. We should come up with a twisted version of it. But I actually think we would have a really valuable thing if we did some live Q and A and we take. I almost want to take one of your past talks or even take this and say, okay, everyone watch this again and then come back with questions and then have you speak to it all.

Happy to.

And then, so if people want to hire you, where do they go?

They can email me. Annieadingedgeteams.

Nie. I'll have someone from my team or someone that's on. Just post it. Annieadingedgeteams.com Yep. Wonderful. It's okay. The email is sitting there. Annie, thank you so much.

Yeah, you're so welcome. Thank you. Thank you, everybody.

Give everyone a virtual. Give her a virtual. Whatever you call it. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome, click here. Go ahead. They're over here. Do it now. Come on. Thank you.

Watch them.