How To Build A Dream Team

How To Build A Dream Team

Sean: Hello, hello and good evening! Everyone, thank you for being here tonight. We have a very special guest, very special, not just to you guys here, but to me as well. She’s actually my wife, her name is Apple, and she’s going to be here helping me to ask her the questions tonight. We have a lot of questions about managing people, remotely leading people. So she is the heart of SEO Hacker, and she is really good with dealing with people. Yes, welcome to the show, darling.

Apple: Hello, everyone! Happy to be here.

Sean: Without further ado, we’re going to go ahead and answer some of the first questions. We have one from Erika. Do you have any tips on how to build an effective team? A team that does not need supervision and consistently delivers great results.

Wouldn’t we all want to have that kind of team?

Apple: First off, thank you, Erika, for your question. I believe it first applies to who you let in your team. So it’s very important how you filter the good from the rotten eggs out there. Secondly also is, well, I do this, I do this quite often. Before I allow one team member to continue on the process of being hired, I pray. I pray for this person first if he or she is really a good fit for the company. I look at three C’s. That’s chemistry, competence, and culture. So with these three, if it’s a good fit, then he or she gets to the next stage or next phase.

Sean: You have to build it from zero, meaning, you hire them one by one. And when you hire, you have to make sure that the people you hire are the people you want. They’re self-motivated. They have their own initiative to get stuff done. They have initiative to improve things, innovate, improve the process, and deliver results. These are things that a lot of business owners love to hear because there are people who are the wrong kinds of hire.

It’s either you hire them and they’re the wrong fit, or they’re not in the right position, they’re not in the right place on the bus. And what they’re doing is something that drains them instead of energizes them. And if they are drained, then you will have a team full of people who are slow moving or non-moving, and they become a source of frustration rather than a source of joy. So you have to build that kind of team one by one. That’s my answer to you. And I have a lot of episodes about how to hire the right people.

Our second question is from Clester. How do you make your employees listen to you? And how do you handle them effectively?

Apple: I believe in the verse, do to others what you want others to do unto you. So if you would like to be listened to, you first have to listen. Listen to other people. And you don’t just listen to hear, you have to listen to understand. And when you listen to understand, you don’t just listen to the words they say, you also have to listen to their eyes, basically. So you try to understand what they’re trying to say with their body language.

How do we handle it effectively is, yeah, we have a platform. We call it Teamstrr. We use it to ask questions to our team weekly. And actually by weekly, right? Yeah. So we have an end of the week feedback form and another feedback form every payday. So that’s yeah, twice a month. And we asked them how we can improve as a management, what are things that we could further enhance for their jobs or for their work, what are their suggestions for us. Some things like that.

I’m not sure if Sean already shared this in previous podcasts but the management team has weekly meetings with our team. So we keep them up to date as to what’s happening with the team, and what’s new. So our goals for the month, our goals for the next month, something like this. That way, everything is clear and the goals are set for the team to follow through. Basically, I think that’s my answer.

Sean: For me, it’s all about influence. People will not listen to you if you don’t have any influence in their lives. So the first stage of influence or the first stage of leadership, because leadership is influence, influence has to do a lot with leadership. The first step or the first level is position. When you have position, you can throw your weight around and people have to listen to you. They have to follow you because you hold the title. That is the lowest level, because as soon as you lose that position or that title, people just stop listening to you. You stop mattering to them.

The second one is relationships. When you have a good relationship with your people, they will listen to you because they know you care about them and they get along with you. If you can’t get along with them, they won’t go along with you on the marathon or on the long haul. And businesses were running marathons. We don’t see running a business for a year or two, and then that’s it, we close the shop where we sell it. Usually, we run it for a decade, two decades, three decades or more.

The next one would be production. This is all according to Dr. John Maxwell, by the way. These are not invented by me. And production is all about you as the leader producing a lot of results, having output, closing deals, or having a lot of innovations installed and running, having a lot of things going on in your life. And that attracts people. That allows people to give you more influence over them. And that’s the third level.

The fourth level of leadership is who you are as a person. So if you’re a leader, people know you, what you stand for, you’re bigger than life, your significance, then people follow you because of who you are. So there are different ways to make or to allow people to listen to you and you get to choose which ones you want to use more. Some people use position. We see a lot of that. Some people use relationships. A lot of the good leaders we have use production. And then, very rarely do we see people transcending from production to significance or to who you are as a person. But I think that is personally how I do it. That’s how at least I see I do it is through leadership.

How do you handle people effectively? I believe that if you have the right people in your team, you don’t need to handle them. You need to grow them. Handling people sounds like you need to whip them to shape, and put them in place. If you have those kinds of people, they’re probably the wrong people. And they become a source of frustration rather than a source of joy to you.

And my suggestion would be if they’re really the wrong fit and you did not goof off in leading them, you weren’t an absentee father or mother in your leadership to them, then you probably just have the wrong person or they may have grown out of it, they may have moved on mentally in their lives. Whatever it is, if they’re the wrong person, you have to shake hands and part ways in a very nice way. That’s my take on it.

So a very different approach between me and apple there, but I hope you got value out of that.