The end of the week can bring mixed emotions for many team leaders.

Too often we are left with uncertainty about everything that went on during the week. This results in many team leaders being unable to relax during their time off as they may be preoccupied with trying to plan the next week.

Enter in Weekly Reports.

This is an incredibly simple process that can be a huge difference maker for yourself and the whole team. Helping everyone to have a full understanding of what’s going on in the business and reinforcing team culture.

Discover more on today’s episode.

Learn more at https://www.adamliette.com

Discover how to work with me: https://www.adamliette.com/work-with-me

Transcript

I think I've said this before, Monday's my absolute favorite day, because we, I get all this emotional and creative energy that builds up over the weekend. Usually, I'm getting really good at actually taking my Sundays off. So when I come in on Monday, I'm like a bull in a china shop, I'm ready to come out and just destroy every obstacle in my way. And at the time that this episode will be being released, I'm actually be, I'll be coming back from Funnel Hacking live. So I know it's gonna have I'm gonna have so much energy on this on this day when this episode comes out, because I just, I'm already forecasting that I'm gonna come out of that thing, with just a tremendous amount of creativity and impetus to just drive forward and just keep on moving.

So as you can tell, I'm a little bit excited today, and I'm excited about our topic today, which is a daily sit rep, and why you should really consider implementing this in your business, no matter how big or small you are, I don't care, you can be just you and a VA, like having this type of interaction is highly valuable. And I'm gonna tell you why. Because we all know that feeling of not of not knowing what's going on, of not knowing where your team is in the process, how they're doing, how they're coping with their task, how they're navigating their job, not knowing it's just about the worst feeling in the world for an operator, because it's the unknown, we're used to knowing things, it's really kind of our job in the company is to know everything, and be able to push our team this way or that way or make changes or have to come up with solutions. We are solution oriented people we want, we want problems. I may have said this before, we need problems, we need problems to fix, our companies are always going to have problems to fix. And that's where one of our superpowers is getting the problems, having them come to us and be able to implement solutions be able to get things working in the right direction. So that is something that we just pride ourselves on. So why not lean into it. You know, that's how we kind of figure out all these things, lean into them, and find ways that your team can support you. So in the military, we had something that we call it a CIT rep, which stands for situational report. And basically, it's just a way for us to get back to higher headquarters, what's going on in our operations. Typically, a lot of the missions I was on our sit rep would be more of a weekly thing, because we are very geographically dispersed, and not a lot of change from day to day. But I've had a lot of success in my teams, having them be a daily thing where I would get that real time feedback on what my team was doing. And there's various different ways that we can implement this.

But you really do need to have your finger on the pulse of what's going on with your team, you need to have that open feedback. So when we talk about community communication structures, you know, as the operator, as the leader of the team, you are constantly pushing information down to your team, conveying what's going on in the company. And you can use multiple mediums to do that. I personally like to do little, you know, things on Zoom, where I'll literally record myself for two minutes talking about a problem and post the link up into Slack for everyone to see, I really like to do that method. It's worked really well for me. And it's a fast and easy way for me to get something across to the team. I just keep it very, very short, though. Like no one really wants to hear me talk for 10 minutes about a singular problem instead. An update like that will typically be in the, you know, really 60 to 180 seconds, and not much longer than that. If it needs to be much longer that then we need to get on a meeting and actually talk this through properly. But we'll get to meetings later on. So this can be a real game changer for you because you'll have that open feedback, that open loop of communication back to you. Communication structures work best when they are structured just like that. So providing that feedback, that feedback loop for you to receive information back from your team in a very systemized, organized and predictable manner. Your team is actually really going to appreciate as well because they're going to know if they have something that's on their mind at three o'clock or at nine in the morning and it's not critical, but it's something that's on their mind something that they If they need some help with or something that they're just concerned about, they know they have their CIT rep in order to push that up to you. So you end up minimizing the amount of dry by slacking from your team. And you get your reports in a concise and organized fashion, when you actually want them when you're done with your strategic work for the day. So having that feedback loop back to you in an organized fashion, is a great way to do that. And it gives your team that predictability and that stability, ultimately that they need. So it's really good on both ends, for your team to have that stability and know that they have that conduit to reach back to you on a regular and consistent basis. And for you to be able to get the real time information of what's actually going on in your teammate, team members lives and in their work, work hours back to you at the end of the day.

It does then empower you to make really rapid decisions and transitions when needed. So you can end either end the day or begin the day by reading this rep from the day before, I tend to like to do it in the morning. So if when I get sick reps from my team, I'll tend to let them sit there and I'll do digest them all in one pass. So I don't like I particularly don't like to deal with them little bits at a time. Rather, I'd rather get them all in one go be able to go through them and have the sit sit reps from my team inform what we're going to be doing in the next in the next phase of our project. So it also enables you then to make transitions when needed, you're getting that real time feedback. If you need to shift resources one way or another shift personnel one way or another, you have that real time feedback from your team in order to do that. So really recommend having that daily touch, to be able to make those transitions. And best of all, when you're pushing information out to the team, you're doing it from a very informed fashion. So one thing I like to do is name drop my people. If I get it, Hey, I heard that. So and So needs help in this area of the project. So and so if you can help them out. So what does this do? It directs your team one way or another. But it also reinforces reporting, because you are getting it, internalizing it, making the transitions, asking them and calling them out by name. And then that reinforces the whole thing because they know, I asked for something and I got it. I told my leader, my team leader that I needed something. And they reciprocated by giving it to me whole Oh, my goodness, I had a team member once tell me, you know, not only are you someone that we can vent to and bring our problems to, but then you actually fix them. When we have a problem in our work in what we're doing for the company, we bring it to you, and you find fixes. It's one of the biggest compliments I ever got in my life. Because it meant so much to hear this team member say that you fixed my problems when I brought them to you. It's so simple, but it's so profound.

When we can be the fixer. What does that do for you as a leader on the team it? It just reinforces everything we try to do with leadership. Leadership is not just telling people what to do. Do not let yourself fall into that trap that leadership is being in charge. Yeah, well, leadership is being in charge. But you don't need to rule with an iron fist. You don't need to let your authority do the talking. Let your compassion let your communication let your openness, let your vulnerability and your transparency, do the talking for you. They will reciprocate, I promise you that you're going to build those relationships, you're going to build that trust. And when you really need to cash in that check. The bank account is gonna be full when you're getting that level of trust from your team as this builds out, so right now if you're a small team, if you're three to five people, really all set reps should come to you with the operator and then you should be pushing a set wrap up to the CEO. Basically like take in what you got from the team push out a CEO only set rep to whoever is in charge of the organization or whoever your higher up is. As his builds out. When you start getting a bigger team. You can then move into departmental sit reps where everyone in the department say it's the marketing team. copywriters working on something media buyer was working on something, they all put their CIT rep up to the head of marketing, Head of Marketing pushes us at rep

up to the director of operations or the CEO respectively. So it definitely does build out from here on The bigger you get, the more people you're going to have, the more structures, you're going to have them in place of where the sit reps are being pushed to.

But be sure that it's communicated, be sure that it's clear. And be sure that then everyone knows what to do with that and where that information flows up. So then it can flow back down a couple of keys to success, one, make it light, make it simple, we don't need three paragraphs of in depth, you know, nonsense, honestly, let this be at the at the bullet point level. So the fewer words, the better, if someone does need to go into greater detail on that, get on a one to one with them, let them let the conversation build out from that point, that lot more can happen in a one to one meeting. I do like to always make it a template. I'm such a huge fan of templates. There are various ways we can do that in Slack to have workflows built out what I like I tend to do a little more low or low text, low tech, where I have a template literally in my text expander. So that's another way that you can do that is to have it in a text expander and encourage your your team to use macros or something like that, just be able to drop it in there. But the final thing is use existing channels don't create a new channel. In order to do this, I tend to like to do it just in Slack. It's where we're having our near term communication anyway. So having it in Slack, or VOCs, or whatever you're using for that interaction, go ahead and put it into something like that. So it is light, it's something very simple and right in front of them. That will make sure that it's easy, that it's replicable that it becomes part of their workflow. And by the way, then it gets to be scheduled as part of their workflow, part of their recurring task, and the checkmark that they take off at the end of the day, to close out their workday for you is to turn in their CIT rep.

Awesome. Well, I hope this was useful. There's great ways to do this. There's a lot of wrong ways to do this. So we're going to talk a little bit about getting team buy in and a couple of days. So be sure to come back for that episode. Because whenever you're implementing stuff like this, man, you got to have buy in, you got to have the team on your side. Being ready to implement things as things start to build out as we add bureaucracy and reporting structures into the team getting buy in is huge.