Ep #3: Who SHOULD and Who SHOULD NOT work for a Female Entrepreneur

Hey, everyone. I'm Chris Plackey, and this is how to Lead for Female entrepreneurs and Founders. Because the best way to grow a business is to grow the person who's running it. Let's go ahead and get started.

Hello, gorgeous. Are you feeling gorgeous today? I hope you're feeling gorgeous because you are gorgeous. I'm so happy that you're here. Thank you for tuning in. And today I want to talk with you about sort of an opposite way of thinking about hiring people. We have. When I work with my clients, we talk a lot about hiring people. Right. That's one of the key things that you have to do if you want to manage human capitals. You actually have to bring people into the business. Yeah. And we spend a lot of time thinking about, you know, what kind of skills we need, what kind of experience we need, you know, what is the ideal candidate that we need. What I'm really finding as I talk with more and more women and get to know you all and the challenges that you're facing.

I think we need to also have a very real conversation, not just about.

You know, who you should hire from a skills perspective and writing that job description, but I also want to really invite you to think about who should work with you and who shouldn't work with you, because there are some pretty consistent.

Behaviors and even challenges that female entrepreneurs face as managers, as bosses. And I think we just have to be honest about this instead of, like, pretending it's not there or not making it a big deal, because these can be a big deal. And so as we are out in the world talking with people who want to work with us, I think you've got to be really, really clear about what does it mean to work for me and with me and who really should not work for and with me. Okay. So I have. I have a lot of things I want to cover and get through. Some I'm going to talk about pretty quickly. But I really want you to take this podcast and think hard about who are the people in your life as you've been a manager, as you've had, people on the team that you've led and managed, and if you're new at managing, but your business is growing, but these can be people you've partnered with. These don't necessarily have to be people that you've managed, but what are the qualities of people in these support roles, partnership roles that have thrived with you, that have really, really done well, versus what I think we tend. Like I said, what we tend to think about is just okay, this is all the stuff I need. But who's really worked well with you? So let's talk about. Let's just get into it here. What am I talking about? So female entrepreneurs are a unique breed of people. Right. You. You're amazing. What I know about all of us. I mean, I'm. I include myself here. Right. So I think I'm pretty amazing as well. To be able to go out on your own with an idea, a service, a product, whatever it is, and decide that you are capable of putting that into the world and then not only making that decision, but repeating that decision over and over and over again. Right. Like every year. Do you ever just do that with yourself? You're like, wait, why am I doing this again? Remind me. But of course, there's no other option for you. You know that. And that's why you continue your business. And that's why even if things are tough for you, you continue. Because it's a way of being. It's sort of who you are. Yeah. And there are qualities about you that drive that entrepreneurial spirit. And while those become superpowers for you in terms of getting your work done and making sure things are really effective and you sell really well and you're able to connect with customers and clients and you. Right. Or maybe you get funding, whatever it is, all of those capabilities. There's also sort of the underbelly side of what. What can make you very difficult to work for. So one of the things that is very true for women that I coach is that you have very high expectations and you also have a low tolerance for mistakes. Now, and I want you to really know, I'm not telling. I'm not sharing these with judgment. I'm not saying this is right or wrong. I'm just saying this is a truth that I see in roughly 97% of my clients. And so let's just tell the truth. I have a very high expectation of people that work for me, and I have a very low threshold for mistakes. Now. Why? Because you're the one who used to do all the work. And so you. You know what needs to go into getting it done. And you're also, because it's your business, you're relentless in the pursuit of exceptional output. Right. As soon as you add a team member, it doesn't matter how amazing they are, no one will ever have the same level of commitment that you do. That's not bad. It's just a truth. Right. So we have to be able to tell people that we're going to interview and meet with who might come work for us. The truth, I'm pretty demanding.

I have very high expectations, sometimes unreasonably.

Right. And I have a low threshold for mistakes, which means I. I will probably find stuff nobody else will find, and I might lose my mind from time to time as a result. Now, as a client. Right. What I'm going to want to work with you on, if we work together, is what happens to you when people make mistakes. Like, can you tolerate that? Because really, having a low tolerance for mistakes, I think we think that means it prevents us from not doing well as a business. I think we have to be careful. What are the mistakes that matter? Some really do matter and some don't. You know, some we just have to kind of move along and fix and not get so crazy in our brain over. Okay. The other thing I've noticed about my clients who run their own business is that you're incredibly generous. I think this is a maternal thing for women. We tend to really want to recognize and reward people who work hard for us. And in some cases, that means we can prematurely set up recognition, bonuses, pension plans, you know, you name it, ways to vacation policies, ways to reward people that, if we're not careful, set us up for having kind of an entitled team. And I'm actually going to talk more about this in a future podcast. But the way that you reward people, just as a. Just as a statement, for you to think about the way that you pay and compensate and reward people has to be part of your leadership philosophy. If we're just looking at recognition and reward and compensation as a tactic, it will tire and it won't serve the longer vision that you have for your business. So I really want you to think about, like, who are you five years from now, and how do you want to be compensating your team if you're at a million now and you're making 10 million in five years, we want there to be continuity there. But the reason that matters is we want to think about the people that we hire. You're going to be generous. I know that you are. So who. Who needs to be in your circle if that's the case? The other thing I know about you is your mind changes a lot. You change directions. You're a visionary. This is how visionaries work. You might think, on a Tuesday, this is absolutely what we're going to do. And you go all in for three to four weeks. And then you think about it, you're like, wait a minute, we need to tweak it. We need to go over here. Meanwhile, everybody who works for you has spent three weeks to deploy, execute, get everything ready for this vision, and then you change your mind.

And people lose their minds when you do that.

Because their brain thinks, I just wasted three weeks of my time. Which of course they didn't because you're paying them. But we get very attached to the outcome. So employees start to think, I just wasted all that time. And then she changed her mind. So what you have to remember is if you change your mind, like, it's okay, let your team know. No, you. You didn't waste any time. You helped me realize that I wanted to move my vision over here, but we have to hire people who can handle that. I had a person work for me years ago when I started my coaching team, and we spent two days together and we had post its all over a whiteboard. And, oh, my gosh, we brainstormed the heck out of this whole manager program we were putting together, and it was brilliant. We came up with the name. We had it all down, every module. Like, oh, we were in. And so she went home that night, and she was so excited, and she was totally my integrator. She took everything and she put it into documents and a binder, and she made. She made the title, like the whole logo. She was all in. And then a week later, I changed my mind.

And she lost her brain. She was so upset. But, you know, we got. We got to something, though, that was even better, right? It just. But getting to that point was tough, right? To have my team, in that case, really understand, like, this is sort of status quo. Visionaries change their mind. It's part of the deal. Because we've been solopreneurs before. We had a team. We are very much used to doing everything ourselves. So it can be very hard to earn our trust, which means that can feel like micromanagement, at least initially. And again, we have to hire people who can tolerate that. And one of the things I say about my founder clients is, you all are swoopers. And what I mean by that is you can be flying up high in the sky and everything's great, like an eagle soaring around, looking at the landscape. And then you look down and you see something and you don't know what it is, and you don't understand why it's there, and you, like, swoop. You dive all the way down, and now you're right on the ground in the weeds, ferreting through something. You know, it's kind of like the proverbial example is I have a client who like would go into one of her locations and see that a shelf wasn't stocked right. And then before we know it, she's in the, in all the shelves, she's in the storage closet. She's ripping everything apart. Like, why does this look like this? And why does this look like this? She's totally swooped all the way from the 20,000 foot level now down to the one foot level. And everyone around her is like, why are you in the storage room? Really? Yes, really. Founders are swoopers and they always will be. We have to hire people who get that.

Right. Like, I think it's silly to tell yourself as a founder, you're never going to do that. I don't think that's a reasonable expectation of yourself. Do I think you can get better? For sure. Do I think you have to get better totally for your own sake? But that doesn't mean, I really don't think that means that there might not be a day that you're on your website and you think, well, that's stupid. And then you just start working on your website. Even though you have a team of people.

It's part of what comes with working with a founder. Sometimes we forget to say thank you.

Sometimes we're so wrapped up in our work. Again, if you're used to being a solopreneur and then you're working with people, it's like you're just not used to having, like even acknowledging it's not because you're rude or mean or ungrateful because you, you don't think about it. And that also is coupled by you can be very direct. You don't have time, you're busy. Like, why do we have to flower everything up? Let's just, it's just waste time. I don't like this. Do this again, please. Can you not ever do that again? Why did you make that decision? That didn't make any sense to me. Right. We can be, we can be direct, which again, we have to be honest with ourselves. Like, then what is the person that needs to work for you if that's the case? We move so fast. You are always 100 miles an hour. And so there've gotta be people on your team who can keep up with you. And if the work isn't going to get done, I willing to bet a hundred times that you will finally you'll get in there and get it done. And so team members can get pretty alienated by that. And I think at some point, as the Founder, CEO, principal, president, whatever you call yourself. There has to get to be a point where you don't get in and do other people's work, because that's why you're getting burnt out. But if you don't trust your team, this becomes, as you might imagine, a cyclical, negatively reinforced cycle, right? If you don't trust them, then you do the work. But then they can't ever learn how to do the work if you don't trust them to do it. So it's this negative thing. So if these things are all true, then what? So here's what we need to really look for. We have to hire people who have what I call a maturity of spiritual.

They have to have evolved as a human to be mature. And I don't just mean that, I don't mean by age, because that I think is irrelevant, frankly. I've had people work for me who are twice my age who are less mature than people who were half my age. So age is irrelevant. What we're looking for is maturity of spirit. We need to know that they're competent. We need to know that they are resilient and that they are emotionally stable and that they are emotionally resilient. So if you swoop, they don't take it personally. If you tell them you don't like what they did, they don't take it personally. If you tell them.

That they've made too many mistakes yesterday, they don't lose their mind and go cry in a closet.

We need mental toughness. No pouting.

No drama, no passive aggressive behavior. You don't have time for that. And I'm going to tell you what I think. That's hard to find. I think that takes work to identify these people. And you need people who are confident. And then lastly, we need people who have enough independence who will take action without consulting you on every decision, right? Because that drives us crazy and however, enough humility.

To be told that what they did isn't right and to do it again. So it's this beautiful cocktail. So when we're hiring, because I coach people who also work for the founder, right? And I spend a lot of time helping them understand who it is that they work for. Because what happens is if I work for a founder who is all the things we've talked about, and I'm really unhappy and I'm really frustrated and I, I feel like I can't ever get anything done because they change their mind all the time and they, they, their direction is confusing and you know, they're so in their head. And, and so then they're miserable because they're resisting the person they work for. Right? It's like the Byron Katie book loving what is. Right? Like we, we get into resistance of what is and we really instead have to say, this is what, this is who you're working for. So now what? Right? So as you're interviewing people, as you're evaluating people's fit with you, that's why a trial is so important, is we have to make sure there is this, personality characteristics, behaviors fit.

Because what I see in so many of my clients who are the founder is there is a mismatch with key people on their team. And what that ends up sounding like from your perspective is I feel like I am dragging people with me. I had a client just say that to me yesterday. I don't want to drag this person with me. Well, guess what happens when we drag people. It slows us down. And it's okay if the person who started with you is not the person that needs to continue the journey with you. You didn't know you hired your best friend, you hired your sister, you hired your, your neighbor.

You weren't thinking about all this stuff when you were making $42,000 a year. Now that you're making $1.7 million a year, you have to think differently about your human capital. And you have to just tell yourself the truth. Who am I as this leader and who needs to work with and for me, like, let's just be honest about it and tell them, right? But if you're not sure, like this is, I think this is why everybody needs a coach. Because our lack of self awareness, most of us are clueless about how we're showing up in the world. That's why a coach is super powerful. Because we can talk about this frankly, it's not, we're not going to take things personally and we're going to be really clear about design a human capital plan that reinforces and supports you and what you're trying to achieve. Right? We need this business to be successful at the end of the day. And if you're successful within the business, then we know where that's going, Right? Because we know that you, your brain, your time is your, those are two of your biggest assets. But if we're wasting your brain space and your time on dragging employees because they can't handle working for you, then that is causing, that is a detriment to your business. And it's time for that to stop immediately. Okay. All right. So hopefully I've given you a few things to think about today. Thank you so much for tuning in and I will look forward to talking with you again soon.

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Sam.