MBA1813 Must Read: Profit First by Mike Michalowicz

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Hey oh. Welcome to the $100 MBA show, delivering daily business building advice every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Weaponry Ninja, an independent software company. I started my co founder back in 2014 and today's episode is a guest teacher episode. Today we have Darren Verasamy and he'll be teaching you how to turn your business into a best place to work. When your team members are happy, are feeling fulfilled and look forward to going to work every day, you will succeed. Your business will automatically build better products, serve your customers better, come up with innovative ideas and it's going to be your biggest competitive advantage against the competition. Working on your team and making sure you invest in this idea of making it the best place to work is one of the best investments you can make in your business. But how do you do it? That's why I brought on today's guest teacher. Darren Verasami is the CEO and co founder of 34Strong, a leadership consultancy. He's also the host of the leading Strong podcast. He's helped businesses and organizations like the fda, bank of America and the California Department of Health and today he's helping you. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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Today's guest teacher, Darren Verasamy is really going to dissect how to cultivate a place of work for your teammates that ensures that they are having an experience they do not take for granted. That they love, that they feel like they're growing, they feel respected, they feel like they're being heard. There's so many great nuggets he's going to be sharing so that you can build that amazing business and that amazing place of work for your team. Even if you have a small team or you are the team, cultivating this culture now is going to help you be able to stay in that culture as you grow, as you make your first, second, third, tenth higher, three hundredth higher. So I'm going to pass it on to Darren, but I'll be back to wrap up today's episode and give my insights. But for now, take it away, Darren.

Thank you Omar. I am Darren Verasamy and look forward to sharing tools that will help you to turn your business into a great place to work. You know, it's often said that people don't quit organizations, they quit their boss. Gallup has even indicated that at least 70% of an employee's engagement is tied directly to to their manager. I mean, think about it. Have you ever quit a boss before? I know I have. So I want to take you through six techniques that will help you to create a great place to work. To create a culture where people are not quitting their organization or their boss, actually. Right? So the first step is realizing that the culture that we have within our organization is going to be there. And, and we can either create it by intention or design. Bottom line is you're gonna have culture. So choose wisely. Be intentional about it. Design it. So here's some techniques that we can step into to be able to create that culture by intention and design. Number one, play to your people's strengths. Have you ever identified your own strengths and the strengths of your team. Here's the thing. Our differences can be an advantage. There's a great African proverb that says, if you want to go fast, go. If you want to go far, go with others. When we learn our strengths, not only can we get better in our zone of excellence and grow from that and step up, we can also identify where our weaknesses are and be able to manage around them, not fixate on them, which is often what we traditionally do. Our greatest opportunity for growth and excellence is getting people into their zone of strengths. Because at the end of the day, what is it that your people want? They want to be valued for being valuable. The third point that I want to make sure that you're aware of is invest in your people. And when I say that, I don't mean that you have to go through, spend lots and lots of money on them. It can very much be investing the time in them. Right. One of the programs that we've offered at 34 strong, our best manager academy, There's a question that we ask within the first 20 minutes of people being in the classroom and, and it's describe your best manager, your best boss that you've ever worked for. And we've done this with thousands of managers, thousands of leaders. And the one trait that they constantly come back to, one of several traits that is said at every single time, is the manager invested in me. They invested in me as a person. So in my growth, in the development of challenging them, they weren't always easy on them. Okay, so they challenged and, and they felt challenged along the way. But that manager had invested their time. And knowing that engagement is so tied directly to the managers. This is the next important point. If you do have managers on your team, be sure that you're training your managers to actually engage their people. Right. What we found out is there's the four T's to great managers. And 82% of the time they people are promoted into managing other people based on two of these T's. Those T's are tenure. So that's the time that you've been in a role or if you're hiring somebody, the time that they've had their previous experience and their technical capabilities. That does. That's great. Now, Gallup sites that 82% of time, that's why people are moved into manager roles or recruited into those places. That doesn't tell us anything about if they're good at managing people or engaging people, which is one of the most important pieces of their role. The other two T's are talent for managing people and training. Have they been trained on how to engage their people? You've got to train your managers to engage their team. And if you think it's expensive to train your managers to engage your team, try not training them. We have higher levels of of employee disengagement. And when people are disengaged or checked out, they're showing up to work, collecting a paycheck, you're not going to catch them on the extra mile. They're not driving productivity, they're not driving profitability. They're not going to be on that extra mile and creating that impact that you know you're capable of creating, that your organization is capable of creating. Okay, so the next component is calendar your one to ones. This sounds so easy, right? And if you have people that are managing others on your team, make sure that they are calendaring their one to ones. Why is this so important? It's easy for us to get under pressure, to get stressed and to push off. We've got this new project that's coming, so I'm going to just push off my time invested with my employee. I'm going to kick that down the road. And what ends up happening is week by week by week, that person gets further and further pushed off. Now what that does communicate is I'm not that important. That starts to erode trust. Okay, that starts to erode trust. There's the foreign needs of followers as identified in the book Strengths Based Leadership. And one of the needs is trust. Right? If people are going to follow you, they need to have trust. And that is the most foundational need. And if we're feeling as if we're not made a priority, maybe expectations aren't clear of what you're wanting your people to do and we're falling short on that side. We can fall into the trap of eroding the trust. Right? And those one to ones create that marker for us. And this is oftentimes very unintentional. So one simple technique is make sure that you're calendaring those one to ones and that you're protecting that time because it's signaling to those that you're leading that you're managing, you're worth my time. And when we go back to the previous point, I'm willing to invest in you, I'm willing to coach you, I'm willing to get to know you, what makes you tick and what drives you. Now this brings to the final point, which sounds very easy and it's very challenging at the same time. And it ties it all together. And it's okay that it's challenging because I have a tool for you that's going to make it much, much easier for you to do. Set clear expectations. And you're probably listening to me and saying, darren, why set clear expectations for my people all the time? Maybe this sounds like you. I know I've been here. I tell them what I need to do. I lay it out in an email. I've spoken to them. I've given them very clear directions on what needs to happen. And all 10 of the people that report to me, I don't understand. They just don't get it. If that sounds like you, here's what we have to realize. When we're managing people, we're in a role where there's people that are reporting to us and we're working to create a great place to work. Managing people can oftentimes be very much like playing a game of telephone. You remember playing that game as a kid. You remember playing that. You whisper something into somebody's ear and it goes around the room to 20 different students. Maybe you said milk chocolate, right? That sounds good, but maybe you said milk chocolate. You started off at whispers. It goes to the 20th student. And what do we come back with? Blue jays climbing on a light post in a palm tree. Wait, what? How do we go from milk chocolate to that final statement? There's disconnects that go through. And the reason for that is because we have to individualize our communication to each team member. And there's some simple questions that we can do to identify different learning styles. Two key questions that you can ask that will help shore up that foundation of trust and set clear expectations, which, again, is the foundation of trust in organizations. First question is you can ask, what's the best way for you to learn? What is the way that you learn best? Just think about that. Oftentimes when we set expectations for others, we do a great job of setting expectations for ourselves because we set expectations for others the way that we would do things. And that is not always in alignment with the way that they learn and and receive information. Oftentimes, my friends, there's little micro tweaks that we can make in the way that we're presenting an expectation and understanding that certain team members are going to need a moment to think about what was said, maybe look through some of their notes, and then they're going to say, hey, can I come back to you later this afternoon and ask some questions? There's going to be other team members that we're going to say it, and then they're going to need to spout off and ask 20 questions. And I can feel as if they're questioning you. They just need to get that context sometimes of, well, why are we doing this? So you're going to see a whole bunch of different ways that perhaps you can create little pivots that can impact the way that people are receiving that. The final question out of those two is, how do you like to receive praise? What's the best form of recognition that you have? How do you like to be recognized? And I encourage you to dig a little deeper on this. This is going to be an area that can open the door to capturing exactly how people like to be recognized. Sometimes we get clear on how to set expectations for people. They're getting the work done and we don't go back and recognize them. So guess what? We've never done. We've never closed the loop. So they're still unclear on if they've hit expectations or not because we've never gone back and recognized them. Which cost you What? Nothing. It's free 99. As some of my friends have said, it's free 99 to share that with somebody. Recognizing them in a way that is meaningful to them is going to provide a lot more weight and importance than just recognizing in a way that's meaningful to the way that I would like to be recognized. There's those differences. Little shifts create massive difference in our culture and in our habits. Not to worry. I've got a tool for you that we'll be sharing to take you through to be able to set clear expectations. I want to recap though, before we get to that. So what do we cover? We talked about create culture by intention. Remember that is a choice that you are in control of. Next. Play to their strengths. Play to your people's strengths. The next point is invest in your people. Spend the time and invest time in them to grow them. If you have managers, be sure to train them on one of their most important roles, which is to engage people. The next point is calendar your one to ones. Calendar that time and make sure we're not moving that frequently kicking it down the road. And the final point is set clear expectations. All right, everybody, this is Darren Verisamy. If you want to continue to learn more about how to turn your business and into a great place to work, visit 34strong.com and download the Set Clear expectations guide that provides you 10 simple questions that you can use to build trust by setting clear expectations with your team. You heard two of them in today's episode. You can get all 10@34strong.com. Thanks again for joining me today. Back to Omar. I'm out.

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So many great insights in that lesson by Darren Verasamy. I love that he starts with creating a culture by intention. You're intentionally trying to build something purposefully and just setting that out from the start can really help. For example, in our business, one of the most important aspects of our culture is we embrace disagreements. But with respect, disagreements are good for a business. They actually allow you to come up with new ideas. It means that something is happening. If every time somebody comes up with an idea and everybody just says, oh, great idea, let's do it, you're not really digging deeper, not really figuring out how to polish that idea. So sometimes you're going to have disagreements. But one of the things that we instill and really reinforce, and it's our job as the leaders of the business, myself and my co founder Nicole, to remind everybody, hey, when we disagree, this is a good thing, but we got to do it with respect. We got to make sure that we're listening to everybody and it's not about right or wrong. That means sometimes I will be wrong. As the leader, I'll have to say, you know what, my idea is actually not the best idea. This other idea that we heard in the discussion is actually where we should be heading. And this stems from the idea that we got to do what's best for the company and not our egos. Now, when you build something like that, like you build a tenant in your culture, this creates the feeling amongst the team that, hey, I can share ideas, I can contribute, I can actually make an impact on what this company's doing and creating. And what this does is that it gives meaning to people's work. Your employees can work anywhere, they can make money anywhere. But so why your company? These are the reasons why. Because they are fulfilled and respected and just like working for you. Darren also talked about investing in your people highly, highly recommend you carve out time for professional development days, even if it's just an afternoon once every six months where your team can do a bit of show and tell you actively seek out ways for people to improve. It could be a book of the month like a reading club. It could be online courses. You could even be just sharing blog posts that are interesting. The point here is that you need to invest in improving every teammate because better they get, the better your business gets. Just like when you improve, your business improves. So imagine you're scaling that to everybody that works for you. Incredible guys. Thank you so much for listening to the 100 MBA show and thank you Darren Verasami for the great guest teacher lesson today. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe right now so you don't miss a beat and hit. Also, don't forget you can check out all our show notes on every episode, including today's. Just head on over to100mba.net and head on over to the show menu. Up top in the navigation menu you'll see everything you need to know about the podcast. You can go to every single page or every single show notes page for every episode. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. One of my favorite things about being an entrepreneur is being able to build something with other people. I realized early on in my entrepreneurial career there's only so much I can do by myself. If I want to create something great that's really going to impact people at a larger scale. I need to do this with other people. I need a team. Because I can't be a master at everything. I can't be an expert at everything. But if I find great, hard working, talented, good natured people that I can work with every single day and learn from, that's exciting and allows you to really leverage your ideas. You can implement them faster, you can implement them better, you can improve upon them constantly. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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