Friday, March 08, 2024
If you could quickly create a more inspired and efficient team, would you?
Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art is one of my favorite books and has really helped me to become more focused and a professional in my art.
And find ways that we can build our business to reflect these principles.
In this episode I cover 4 areas that you can start applying today to make your team more effective, more creative in their work, happier with their outputs, and more stable in their workload.
Enjoy fighting the resistance!
Links
Learn more at https://www.adamliette.com
Activate The Warrior Within https://www.adamliette.com/awaken-the-warrior
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Transcript
Adam Liette
This is the smooth operator Podcast. I'm Adam Liette, director of operations for a seven figure online business and eight year veteran of Army Special Operations. On this show begin with the tactical, nitty gritty of what it really takes to run a thriving online business. Because at the end of the day, operators, lead the way. What's up some of the operators Welcome to this episode, hope you're having a killer week, it's already Thursday, I'm actually recording this on a Saturday, which is a day I usually use just for getting through content, putting together everything for the for the week, and just overall, like I start the day with a humongous list of things to do. And I just power through things one at a time, one at a time, getting all the things that I need to get done, so I can get into the next week. With that feeling of I have everything in position, I have control, I have all my ducks lined up. And that made me think of like what we often have to do for ourselves to get through just the various things that go into our business. And so often we sit there and we think, Oh, I'm just not inspired to do this right now, I don't feel motivated to do this right now. And quite a long time ago is recommended that I pick up a book called The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. And I've read it a number of times. And usually I'll just read like one passage a day. It's one of these wonderful books where literally like one page like that's your day's reading, like it's not a book to sit down and read straight through, it doesn't really work that way. But like a big thing that's even talks about is fighting the resistance. And the resistance is just that thing in the back of our head that says, not really feeling that I'm not really motivated, I need to be creative. And Steven says, No, you are professional. And the difference between a professional and someone who's an amateur is a is a professional isn't motivated, and they do the work anyway. So they sit down and they get it done. And what I found is, the longer I've been practicing from that paradigm of I get the work done. It's amazing how we find that inspiration, and we find that I don't have to necessarily be in the mood to do something to still do an exceptional job. And the more I think about this, the more I'm like okay, well there's like the things that we can control within ourselves. Right. But as you saw so often on this show, it's about how can we take these things and put them into systems for our team. So our team can also benefit from this. Now I've bought this book for tons of people, because it's been such a big difference for me. But I can't expect every single team member from like my most senior team members to my lowest team members to necessarily, like think at that level. They're just not there yet. But will they be Sunday? Absolutely. If they keep following me and keep staying with me, I'm gonna get them there. But they're not going to start there. Right. So there are certain things that we can do from a position of leadership, that will enable our team to fight the resistance, they not know, that's gonna be what they call it, right. But they just know it as coming to work. All right. And so a couple of these things that I just want to go through here today. A lot of them are counterintuitive to what we think of with an online business and like remote work and all that stuff. But that being said, I really think they're important things to do. And if you just adopt a couple of these things, I know it's going to make a big difference in how you're applying things to your business. So the first thing this one is entirely on you. Okay, and it's probably one of the most important things and it's you, as the leader need to cast a vision. So you need to tell the team, what we're doing, what the strategic output is, like, What's our goal with this, with this project that we're doing? Let them see the end result, even just visualizing it. And that gets them excited about their inputs. And it also shows them how their inputs help contribute to that end goal. I mean, think about if you're the person who's doing the social media post, for a company at some point, that becomes a bit of rinse, wash, repeat. But it's so much different. When we have an outlook over what we're trying to do. And we can become goal oriented, we can see how our inputs contribute to that output. So that's one part of casting the vision. The other part is providing the guidance that your team needs to do their job the best. So if you need something tactical created a landing page, email, copy all these different mechanisms that go into running a promotion or getting something set up. You can't just tell someone Hey, write emails That's not good enough, you need to give them a little more structure than that. So saying, hey, I want you to write some pre launch emails. And here's kind of where I'm thinking, here's the overall theme and direction, then we're gonna write some main launch emails, and then we're gonna have some post launch emails. And my goal with the post launch emails is to get the prospects to do X. See how that's such a different way of approaching things. And it only took a couple of minutes for me to do, if you do it, right, it's a very quick process what I like to do, because I, I find typing to be like the most non inspirational thing in the world to read most times for your team especially. And you, you can't do as much personality. And so I record a lot of videos using soapbox or loom, or even zoom, I'll just record a video to the cloud, share it with the team. And that's really a way for them to, you know, see the vision or even put it like in the cards, like in Asana as so when that task comes up on their list, they can revisit the vision and come back to that. The second thing is, this is so counterintuitive, you need to have set office hours, set expectations when your people will be in the seats. And these can be different. I mean, I'm not going to say like your business has to be like 830 to 430. Eastern Standard Time us. But you do need to have set office hours for each team member. The reason for that is this becomes habit, it becomes something that people can predict to they can structure their day around. Otherwise, you're leaving a whole lot to chance, if you just let people work whenever the heck they want. You'll get a lot of inconsistency, a lot of missed deadlines. So I'm a big, big proponent of everyone having set fixed office hours. That doesn't mean we need to go all corporate and fortune 100 and say, Well, if you're not going to be there in those hours, be sure to tell me why that's not going to work, especially in our remote circumstance. But having expectations that hey, most days, here's your office hours, here's when you'll be available, right? And it's agreed upon thing that you go that that you work out with your your your employees, especially, especially if you're hiring like part timers who are going to be working 1015 20 hours a week for you like having expectations of when they're going to be available. That is good for you as well as the business owner because now you know when to reach them. And it's really good for them, even though they might fight you on it at first, I promise you long term, they're going to enjoy having more stable hours, and they're going to have better output for you. So lead with that though in the hiring process and get buy in from the outset and you will be in a better position. The third thing is to have checklists and templates. I'm a big fan of this as if you've been in one of the operating systems that I've set up, you know, this, I think about everything can be checklist double. I use this podcast as an example. So often. Podcast is a very clear process. It's brainstorming, it's outlining, recording, editing, all these things happen in order and they happen the same way every single time. So having that checklist actually reflected in your project management system is really good because it lets your team member just go with the flow, they're able to then execute without providing that oh, what's next? Oh, what's next that we so often we'll see, when it's not a clear roadmap. I also really like to have templates. So again, this podcast and example, I have a Google Doc for every single episode, that Google doc has the main heading areas, it has all the stuff that needs to happen to publish it, including like the meta description, the main description, the links that I'm posting, like all these things are organized within a template. That way, when it's time to create one, all I'm doing is I'm duplicating the template, and I'm working from there. That way, you're always working from a common operational picture. You don't have to worry about all the admin and the details and that stuff, you're just filling in the fields that need to be filled. And that makes the whole process a whole lot easier, especially for your team because they don't have to go create things all you know, the creative is focused on where it matters, versus having to think is that the right kind of heading should I do an h1 or an h2? Should I make a box here, like all these kinds of decisions you don't want your team to have to make when they're in the flow, and they're trying to get things done. Alright, the fourth and final thing you need to have very strict deadlines within your company in a really kinda depends on what type of planning system or use if you're on more of like a waterfall or a week to week like a scrum type of Sprint system. projects and tasks need to have deadlines to them. I found in the online world, it's really really tough to say I need this by Wednesday. So this can happen on Thursday. So this can happen on Friday. You can do those things
Adam Liette
But you have to be like overly communicative communicative of them when you do, okay, I'm not saying you can't, but just be aware that the communication is going to be leveled up about 10 levels higher for that to really work. So, like, what I tend to really just subscribe to is like an end of day Friday type of thing. And if they Friday, I need this, and you will do this, and I will do this. And that really just helps overall, just make sure that people know when it's going to be done. The second part to that is you need to put time limits on how much how much should be allocated to a specific task. If it's two hours, three hours, four hours, you know, I'm not going to tell you what takes what amount of time on this, you know that better than I do within your business. And if you don't, that's something you have to uncover, because you need to know like what types of inputs go into certain activities. And to say that every activity is well, it's whatever it takes them, you're setting yourself up for failure. And more than anything, you're setting yourself up for your team to have unlimited time to do whatever they're assigned. That's not going to lead to anything happy. I promise you that. Because you're really fighting against human nature. And, you know, there's, there's a law out there called Parkinson's Law, which states that a task will take as long as we give it. So if you are supposed to write a blog post, and you say, well, I should be able to write this in two days, it'll take you all two days to do it. Versus this is a four hour task and you have four hours to do it. Like that. Deliberate crunching of time, helps in a tremendous way to get people moving. Because now they're on a time limit, they have that timer, staring at them right in the face. And that has a way of just, you know, building that inspiration, getting stuff done, make a decision already, because otherwise you're gonna sit there and lomana. It's not good for anyone to have unlimited time and no firm deadlines. So there we go. Those are four things you can do to fight the resistance with your team, they will not know that you're helping them fight the resistance, they will think that you are helping them organize their tasks, get things done, and be happier in work, it will ultimately make everything in the company much more efficient, the employees will overall be happier. And you're going to see a lot more collaborative and teamwork opportunities come out of this, because again, everyone's operating from the same type of system versus whatever they feel like doing on that particular day of the week. This is really a long term play. That being said, when you're creating all this if you don't have any of this in your cadences right now, it's a coke collaborative process to create them, you're not gonna be able to rule this by edict. So just be aware of that. And before you go too far down that rabbit hole, jump on a call with me, I'd be happy to help you take some of these initial steps to make sure you can successfully do this in your business. Thank you so much for joining me this has been an absolute blast to go through these topics. I hope that really helped. And before you jump, please go over to Apple podcasts and leave a review for the show. I can't wait to see you next time and until that next time operators lead the way. Hey operators, I believe that within each and every one of us lies a warrior in waiting this warrior is able to conquer any obstacle that comes their way to discover how to awaken your warrior spirit and conquer what's holding you back. Go to Adam liette.com and join awaken the Warrior Within
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