Within our companies there are so many different tasks that need to take place. While it’s not realistic for you to know how to do all of these tasks, you should have an understanding about what your team does for you.

Appreciating their inputs will give you a greater respect for their contribution and expectations for what they can handle.

In this episode, I discuss three methods for doing this:

1. Learning to do the task yourself
2. Learning the process behind the task
3. Done with you process creation

This process will give you a better handle on your projects and gain new respect from your team members.

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

Activate The Warrior Within https://www.adamliette.com/awaken-the-warrior

Transcript

0:03
What's going on out there smooth operators Welcome to this episode. It's been a while since I've recorded anything, because behind the scenes, I've been redoing a lot of stuff I've learned so much from your feedback from my clients that I've worked with over this past year. It's been about a year since I launched,

0:44
that it was time for a bit of an overhaul. And that required me to just take a strategic pause on the podcast. So I could redo absolutely everything. So it was not a small build by any means. And one of those things, was an entirely new website. So check it out, Adam liette.com, let me know what you think happy to hear what you think of the new site, it's still got a couple things to be done yet. So you know, if you notice something not working, yet, it's coming, I'm getting there. Just one thing at a time. As it turns out, it's a lot of work moving over an entire database, including courses, all the episodes, these podcasts, I mean, nothing was just drag, drop and repeat. Well was that but it was all manual, there was no like mass import that you get with some tools. But that led me to why I wanted to record this episode. So if you may know, I'm a huge movie nerd, and definitely a child of the 90s. And one of the best movies ever, about corporate life, it was the movie Office Space. Now I've never had a corporate job. So I just imagined that was like I've been lucky enough that the most corporate thing I've ever had was the military, which not only think about it, I've had like the ultimate corporate job. But there's this great spate place where one of the consultants Bob says, What would you say you do here? And Tom says, well, I already told you, I talked to the customer. So the engineers don't have to.

2:12
The whole point is these consultants come in, and they're evaluating everything that the company does. And Tom has no way of explaining what exactly his value proposition is what he does in the company, does he have a value? I'm sure he does. The movie really doesn't get into that. But the point is, it's kind of a danger with us, when we're looking at the company,

2:35
and what everyone else is doing,

2:38
we can have a lot of misconceptions about what exactly people do the value that they bring,

2:43
and exactly how they do it. Now there's

2:48
basically what I want to get through is that

2:51
it's really helpful if we learned the appreciate the intricacies of different jobs that happen within your company. This gives you the best way to not only evaluate someone's work, and what they're doing. But it also makes them feel more valued makes them feel more listened to. And oftentimes, you're going to see opportunities in front of you that you're like, how can we how can we best do this with the people we have on hand. And if you don't understand some of those intricacies, you can lose a lot of opportunity. Now, in particular, the reason this was top of mind was rebuilding this website. So I am not a Website Builder. By any stretch of the imagination, this is the most thorough website I've ever done myself. My last website was a little it was more than a little MVP, I kind of put it together because I had to have one to launch, but I was doing most of my selling off the site. So I honestly didn't care as much about what it looked like in total honesty. This one, I really took a look at the strategy and built it out in a succinct way, in a way that I haven't done before. And part of the reason I wanted to do this was to understand what exactly my web developers do when they're building websites for me because I have multiple websites that are being worked on on a routine basis.

4:08
And for me to appreciate what's going on in a website build whether they're talking about doing 301 redirects, or you know doing the old the old source tags or, or all image tags, or theme development like some of these things, when we take a step back and actually get our fingers in it. Understanding what is all required can give us a whole lot better perspective, not only from a management perspective, which is important for the P's and Q's and day to day tactical outputs, but also from a leadership perspective. So there are two overall fallacies I want to address for us first and foremost that we shouldn't fall into. The first is that old famous those who can't do teach.

4:53
You hear that a lot in the music, music education industry and that is outright total bullshit. Let's just dispel that.

5:00
That notion right now, doing and teaching are completely different, different skill sets entirely. I know some incredible teachers that cannot perform those tasks as well as someone, and some incredible doers that cannot teach what they do. So those are two completely different skill sets. The other fallacy is you must first do. So you hear that sometimes within talks about delegating tasks, like you have to learn how to do it first, not always the case. And I actually wouldn't recommend it for many things, especially the more complicated we get and what we're trying to accomplish. Just because you don't know how to do it doesn't mean you can't appreciate it, and understand it from a management and leadership perspective.

5:45
Because honestly, we want to hire employees that are better than us. Right. That's why you hire an employee, because you need to get something off your plate and you find an employee that's already better at it than you are. And you enable them with your vision with your perspective with your desired output, and desired outcome and let them do what they do best, which is within that platform within that task that you need done.

6:11
And in this case, my example is literally me doing it myself. Right. So that is one approach, there are two other approaches I want to dive into, just so we can give ourselves multiple tools in our toolbox on how exactly we can do this and some specific examples. So learning to do it yourself. It's a method, it's not always the best approach, there are certain things it is good for

6:38
certain things that

6:40
maybe gunk coming into it, we don't exactly know the desired outputs, we might want to get our fingers in the mess, and start like working through the process to make something happen.

6:52
But like I said, if just the thought of getting into those tasks gives you extreme agitation, or it's just a technical process that you don't know how to overcome, maybe it's best to instead lean on one of the other two ways that we can learn better to appreciate what our employees are doing for us. The second method is really to learn what it takes to do it.

7:18
So what are you talking about? How are the how those two things different different, they're actually very different.

7:25
There are many technical things that happen within our companies, that there's no way we're going to master. But we can at least gain that understanding. one specific thing is custom integrations. It's something that's recently fallen into my plate. More and more, I never thought I'd be doing these kinds of things overseeing these types of projects. And yet, here I am, because life's funny that way. But if we need to get data passing from one dataset to another, or one platform to another, if it's Zapier, I got it all day and night, I've done 1000 times. That's far different from custom integrations that required just a whole different skill set and oftentimes custom coding. But there are many certifications that you can take. In particular HubSpot has many integration certifications that will walk you through what data integration looks like how you can plan it from a leadership and project management perspective, without necessarily having to get your fingers into the coding, and what it takes to actually do the requirements. But you get to appreciate the coding that is required. So let's say you're doing a custom data integration, and you want 27 points of data pass through.

8:41
Well, each of those 27 points of data then has all this custom coding that falls on the back end. Well if you learn the process, then you also learn like the data migration, tools and decision making that happens before we even get into the coding. So it helps you to better plan helps you better lead that project. So we're only doing what's necessary. From a from a tactical and strategic perspective. Instead of throwing everything at our custom coders. Then wondering why it's taking them forever, we gave them too much to begin with. So that's like just one example. There are also many YouTube tutorials that will show you the process of building something out

9:18
you know, often, you know compressed. So you'll see like theme development

9:24
tutorials on YouTube for various WordPress themes. Show you had to really customize the theme. And those videos typically are like three to four hours long. So for watching something that's really long like that, you have to almost anticipate two to three times that length to actually do the task because they're stopping, pausing doing all those things for content, just for it to make the video more palatable and more consumable. So keep that in mind when we're watching tutorials is that those are always going to be more compressed. So like plan for double the time that they're using on this tutorial, but there's

10:00
tutorials on everything from putting together various medias from editing videos, I mean, you can find tutorials all over the place. So just get an idea of watching tutorials what exactly it takes. And the final really is the whole SOP creation process. So if you have your team member that's going to be doing something on your behalf, and you want to know how it's done, have them create the SOP and you're in a proof checking

10:28
seat during that process where you're taking what they're giving you, you're helping them organize it into something that's reasonable, that's logical that someone else can follow. And by doing that, you're going to understand the process.

10:41
So that's learning what it takes to do it. The final one, and this is probably your more mature one, and something that you're going to need the right team member to do it with, really, it's done with you process creation. So if we're if we're doing something new that we don't have a process for,

10:59
create the process on the fly while you're actually doing it.

11:04
And for many of our more technical oriented people that are doers, or tactical people, this can really hamper what they're doing. So enabling them and working with them in that process. So where they they not might just be doing and documenting as they're doing, we're actually organizing the SOP. So they're not having to do that whole left brain, right brain thing, they're able to stay within their tactical orientation. And we're then helping to build the process on the back end. And like with anything testing, asking those questions, if we really need to do that, or why did we do it this way, we'll all be very valuable to really cement that SOP going forward.

11:42
Overall, there are going to be things that happen in your company that you have no idea how they're doing, or how they're doing those things.

11:51
That's the inevitable. Don't let that dissuade you from thinking from having that leadership and having management over those things.

12:02
One particular thing that I found useful is when I'm assigning tasks to team members, is just asked a simple question, hey, if I were to ask you to do X, and give them as much information as possible, how long do you think that would take? So if we're doing video editing, like, Hey, I have a three minute video all in it edited, I'm going to send you five pieces of raw footage, I need you to do that up. Also, I need background music, I need a voiceover like give them as much information as possible and let them come up with the estimate. They'll look at it and be like, Oh, it should take me about four hours to do.

12:40
Okay, so now you have an understanding going into it. And they also have an understanding of what time they have to conduct the task.

12:48
And at the end of it, hold them accountable. If it takes them way longer than you thought or they thought just asked a simple question, hey, this took a lot longer than we estimated, Did something go awry or was something amiss?

13:02
And again, we're not looking to punish, we're looking to understand, give them an out be like, hey, you know, this was our first time doing something like this or first, your first time doing it. What was what was it about this project that took longer? And can that be anticipated moving forward? If the answer is yeah, I just underestimated. This probably will always take six hours. Okay, no problem. Now we have an understanding, okay. And throughout the process of them doing something like, Hey, if you're off target, or if you're off task, you're taking a bit longer, just let me know. Just let me know, this might not be ready on Monday, this might not be ready on Tuesday. As long as you're communicating, we're going to be good. It's when you go dark that I'm like what's going on? Why isn't this task being done. Opening those lines of communication through these tasks that aren't necessarily in our wheelhouse, will make your life so much better, make your work so much more enjoyable, and ultimately, help your employees stay happy, satisfied and wanting to work for you. I hope that helped.

14:07
It's been a particularly inspiring month going through all of this. And so I'm just so geared up on releasing this to the world. I do hope to hear from you. And with that we're also starting to host what I'm calling operator happy hour, where we're all going to join up on one Friday a month, have some adult beverages, and just get together break bread and talk about the things that we're encountering in our lives and our companies and our marketing. Everything that you can imagine it's completely free, zero sales pitch, I promise and if you show up and you think you're just going to spend your whole time pitching to other people, that's not going to be allowed either. This is just a time for us to come together, to have community to have connections so we can all move forward. I'll put a link to the first operator Happy Happy Hour happening in just a couple of weeks. Hope to see you there and until next time operators lead the way.