Annie Hyman Pratt explains how leaders scale by enabling others instead of doing the work themselves. She emphasizes clear vision, emotional regulation, and developing other leaders so responsibility spreads across the team rather than staying with you.
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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 really grow and scale and that you can get the life you desire that you're not tied to your business.
Hello, this is Joe Polish. Now real quick, before you listen to the podcast, which I hope you're going to love, just wanted to let you know I spent the entire last year on a sabbatical and I've got so many insights, so many things that would be super valuable and my first official coming back event and my first public appearance is going to be February 11th through the 13th in beautiful Scottsdale, Arizona. So if you are a high level entrepreneur, you and you would like to attend in person, go to joe polishreturns.com joepolishreturns.com check it out. Hope to see you there. Now enjoy the podcast.
How do you best build a team that works on your behalf? For the last two decades, Annie Hyman Pratt has helped entrepreneurs 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 become the most valuable asset instead of a draining expense. Today, Annie's going to talk with us about the truth behind building teams, especially a players. How do you evaluate your own leadership performance?
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 a big transition that needs to happen if you want the kind of business that can really grow in scale and that you can get the life you desire that you're not tied to your business. 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. 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 their time wisely and, and get some really strong work done, move those goals forward. These are the three things that you, 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 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, you want to detail it out into, you know, know which product lines is that, types of revenue, etc. But then you're also going to need to break out the strategy for how we going to get there. And the way you know if they're clear or not is can your team describe it back to you? Second thing is the leaders, competent leaders have really strong self leadership and self leadership is your ability to step, stay in a strong thinking, non reactive place even under stress and challenge. 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, 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. 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 when you're interacting with a team, team member, team member, leader, really anybody, you want to make sure that 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. But the thing is, is at the end of the day, that decision has to be good with both of you. Because if you, if, 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. 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. 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 achieve all this? And at the bottom is the tasks, all the things we actually have to do to achieve the goals. Okay. And 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 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? Here's the thing about a really strong team member is that they stay out of self protection. You're in self protection if you have any of these behaviors going on. 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. But the point is that they are able to pause and get themselves on the right track, able to Emotionally regulate and get themselves into a good place. 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 and in a really concrete way and planning with your team together how they're going to achieve it. It's actually not all that easy to articulate goals and strategy. You've got to keep practicing 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.
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 and about different ways to stay in physical shape and different techniques and form and 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.
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. 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.
What are some of the best strategies and methods you've discovered for improving a team that you've not talked about yet?
One of 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 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. 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. Entrepreneurs, because they're so accomplished, they tend to think of themselves as being highly in control of themselves. And a lot of times it's not true at all. You know, being in not a great place sometimes in your business with your team, during those times, your thinking is bad. It's like it's totally compromised. You can't plan well, you can't interact well. And so to really, you know, take stock and take it seriously that you need to work on this part.
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