Performance is NOT an Opinion | Ep #65

Hey, I'm Chris Placke, host of the Lead you'd Team podcast. Running a million dollar business is not easy. And whether you're just getting started with building your team or you've been at this for a while, I'm going to bring you honest, specific and clear practices you can use right now, today to improve how well you lead your team. Let's go ahead and get.

Foreign.

Hey there. Welcome, welcome. I'm super excited to be spending this time with you. Welcome to the podcast. If you're a new listener, I'm so glad you're here. If you have been a listener, thank you for tuning in. And if you are a listener, I know I don't ask you frequently, but if, if you haven't written a review about the podcast, I would love to invite you to do so if you like.

Really does make a huge difference to help spread the word and let other women know about what we talk about here and how it's relevant to you and how you lead and manage your team. So I just want to extend that to you. I am, as many of you in the process of really looking at how can I continue to support you and provide for the clients that I work with. And, and so that lends me to the topic I want to talk with you about today, which is performance is not an opinion. I appreciate that regardless of what is happening in your business, you have a lot of considerations right now. And so if your business is thriving, you might be trying to figure out how to maximize effort and production out of people on your team. And if your team is shut down or your business is shut down or you're working, you know, in a firm furloughed environment where you don't have everybody, you're trying to maximize production with less people and less clients or less customers. Which brings me to why I want to talk to you about why performance is not an opinion this week. And that's because I believe this moment in time is an incredible opportunity for a major reset in how you think about having team members and what you do with team members and why they even exist in your company. And the, the statement performance is not an opinion, I want to really dissect that so I'm really clear. Most of us, and this is not just true for, for entrepreneurs, okay. This is true for people who manage people and frankly, parents who manage and parent children. This is just true in general, most of us believe that other people's production, other people's results trigger how we feel. And so when we have this Relationship, this emotional relationship with other people's results. We have an opinion.

That means that we're having an opinion because other people's results are just other people's results. They don't invoke or evoke any feelings from us. What evokes feeling is our thoughts about their performance, which means we have an opinion because a thought and an opinion are the same thing. So one of the first, the most important things and first things I like to really work with my clients on, especially when, when you come to, you have sort of critical challenges that you're trying to figure out with the team, is to really start to dissect the difference between what's actually happening, what kind of results people are actually producing, and then what you think about them, because your opinion is irrelevant. I say that to you with love, so please don't misunderstand me the way that I'm saying that. But your opinion is.

Not what needs to drive the ship here. What needs to drive the ship is the fact that you have clear, measurable, well defined performance expectations for people on the team. We use those to measure up against what they actually deliver. Not whether you're feeling frustrated or feeling impatient or feeling annoyed or feeling let down. Okay? That is not how you want to manage and lead anybody. It's not useful. And it also can get you into trouble. Now, as we're in this great reset for so many businesses, this is an incredible opportunity for you to look with total objective perspective at every single person on your team and start to re process and like filter them through, I believe, a decision making process of whether or not they should stay. And I want for you to keep everybody in your business who is amazing, but if you have people on your team who have not been contributing, this is the moment in time to really decide, okay, I'm going to be opening up my doors or I am launching, you know, for some of you who are just exploring, floating same, right? Like either way, we're going into sort of this, this 2.0 or 3.0 version of your business. Who gets to come with you? And I think you have to really do this methodically. I know you do. You've got to get out of your own opinion of your employees now. So what do we do to make sure we're out of there? Right? So first of all, if you have negative attachment, negative energy, negative feelings attached to people on your team, you know, you have an opinion. Okay? Now what a lot of us do, especially smaller companies, is you don't even really have those measures in place to really measure against. Are they contributing in the way that they're supposed to contribute? So you're left to your opinion to assess whether or not they're a good fit or they're doing the job right, which really puts you into trouble, especially if, if they're not doing things you want them to do. But I don't know if that's because you just haven't set a good expectation. You're just not holding them accountable. Right. We don't know what the gaps are and so we really, really want to be sure that you've got those in place. And so I'm actually going to be doing a live workshop for female founders who are running seven figure businesses. This is something I, I really haven't, don't do very often. So I'm excited about it. But I, I really want you to think about if this is something that you need help with. It's going to be a small workshop. This is not a huge webinar. It will be a reasonable fee. I think. We're, we're, we're pricing it right now for registration. It's like $297. It'll be a 90 minute class with me live where I will teach you how to set up and evaluate how you're currently considering performance and what you want that to look like going forward and, and really walking through a process of really evaluating, okay, who should stay here and who shouldn't and how do we get you out of your opinion? Because as soon as you're in your opinion, you're not making strategic decisions for your business.

And remember, I know if you're a podcast listener, you've heard me say this, if you hire people in your company, you are hiring them to deliver a result. But, and I know all of you hear me say that and you agree with me, but what I also know is true is so many of you do not have those results clearly defined. So then what happens is you have it in your head, which has not been very well communicated to the employee. And they're not delivering, they're not delivering on the result that you want, but have you actually put it in, out there in the world so it's easily measured and verified. And I want you to know you can do this for both production, so actual tangible results, like how many widgets somebody makes, how many calls somebody makes, how many customer service tags they review, how much time they work. Like there are very measurable things that people do. And then we can also do this for behavior, which is 90% usually of performance issues. 90% of the problems I coach my team on, or excuse me, I coach my clients on, are performance issues related to behavior, not production.

Because that's the tricky stuff, right? Like, how do I tell someone they're negative? How do I tell someone they're they don't show enough initiative? How do I tell, how do I deal with that? That is, that is a process that can be integrated into how you lead, that makes this so much more objective, that we get you out of opinion and into focusing on measurable results, whether it's production or behavior. I promise you, both of those are processes you can have. And at a time right now where you are reevaluating everything. And even if you, again, even if your business is thriving, I know you still have to be thinking about how you're going to address what's coming. And I know without a doubt, unless you are a unicorn, every single woman listening to this podcast right now that has a team has at least one person on that team that you are not 100% confident in. And my feedback to you is, if you're going to do this work right now in the world, after everything that we all just went through over the last six or seven weeks, how about we do this work with people that we are all in on and who are all in on with us. No more half assing it, no more tolerating. I'm done with that for you, I'm done with it for myself. But you need criteria and I think all of us need help through this. Because the other half of that is, I would bet that a lot of those people who are on your team who you would say is that one person has also worked for you for a while and you don't know what to do and you don't know how to do it because you guys are tangled up together, you've worked together too long and I can help you with that. Performance is not an opinion. It is objective and it is measurable. But it's up to you to put it in place. So again, that's why I'm going to run this one day course. Limited enrollment. We're going to put the link here in the podcast notes. I will also be sharing this information to my list. So if you're not on my list, you can certainly go to chrisplackie.com forward/connect and join and then you will get notified of these things even before they're on the podcast. Because we are going to cap this. Because I want to work with everybody who comes. This will be a personal.

Live, interactive conversation around you, your business, and really looking at everybody on the team and making some very clear assessments about what needs to happen going forward and how to do that, both from a production and a behavior perspective. Because what I want most for all of you as we get this thing going again through the second quarter, you gotta go on all cylinders for the balance of the year and performance issues are the biggest hang up for so many of my clients.

And it doesn't have to be that way. It doesn't have to be that way. This is solvable. So we can look at what are the production measures we need to have in place, what are the behavior measures we need to have in place. We dial those in, we communicate them, we clarify them, and then we rock it out and we hold people accountable to them.

That's our job as the leader. Right? So I'd love to invite you to come on in and join me for the class. It's going to be available the week of May 18th. We'll have a start date and a time that we'll be releasing to you. We haven't nailed that down yet, but that will all be made available. So if you're interested in that, you can also always just email hello at Chris Plackey and say, I want to get into that class. The link will also be in the show notes, so let us know. I'm going to certainly want to know what are the challenges that you're facing when you come into this, but I know that there are people that you have managed or are managing right now that really get to you and emotionally you're just very frustrated and it doesn't have to be that way. We can make performance a neutral part of your business. We don't have to have the anxiety and agita over what to do. I really do believe this is true because I've watched so many people go through this process and they get there okay. So I'd love to see you in the class. Thanks for tuning in today and have an awesome day.

Hey there, gorgeous. Are you ready to take everything I teach you in this podcast and put it to work in your business and really learn how to master leading your team? If so, I'd love to have you as a client in the Founders Lab to learn more about how we can work together? Head over to Chrisplackie.com.

Join there. You'll see everything you need to know about the Founders Lab and how to get started. See you there.