Dave Braun
00:00:02
Hello, everyone! Welcome to the HireMyVA Team and Business Building Podcast brought to you by Yoogozi.com. In this podcast and at HireMyVA, we help you to reclaim your freedom through hiring and thriving with virtual assistants without breaking the bank. And that means YOUR bank, the most important one. I’m Dave Braun, and I’m here with Larry Broughton -partner in all things. Coaching, business mentor, coaches me in life, Larry, we just got done with a V-WISE event, learned more from you. It’s awesome to be walking this journey with you, man.
Larry Broughton
00:00:35
Oh, thank you, handsome Dave, how are you doing? I’m doing great, man. That was a good powerful event, particularly within that’s been going on in our lives. But boy, it was a great energy recharge, wasn’t it? With the optimism there was off the charts, maybe it’s because we’ve not been out there for two years due to the pandemic for those people that are listening to this, 15 years from now. But yeah, I am just so inspired by those women who are running their businesses or they’re about to launch their businesses. It takes courage. It takes guts to do this, to be on the journey that we’re on. Launching your business.
Dave Braun
00:01:17
So many courageous women there.
Larry Broughton
00:01:19
Yeah. Yeah. I’m always inspired when I participate in that.
Dave Braun
00:01:23
And then the getting, having them get up in front of us, you know, with in the hot seat or in our jam session and being in front of everybody and talking about their issue that that’s courage.
Larry Broughton
00:01:33
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, let’s dive into this, Dave? I think we have a question. Why, why, why are we here? Why did you bring me here today, Dave?
Dave Braun
00:01:42
Well, just because I want to see your smiling face and have you call me handsome Dave.
Larry Broughton
00:01:45
Okay, hello handsome Dave.
Dave Braun
00:01:49
All right. Here’s the question? What are the five most important things that a manager needs to do?
Larry Broughton
00:01:56
I always chuckle at these days when somebody writes me these questions, why do you want five? If there might be 10, you write your questions, people, however you want to write them. What are the top things? Yeah. Yeah. Listen. There’s so many books have been written about this. And one of the things I love about you, David is you get these books and you’re like a dog with a bone and you write your own book summaries for us. And I love that, but there’s a lot of things I think I would, I want to start it with this. I want to hand it over to you because there’s a book that we’ve been, we were talking about recently – Smarter, Faster, Better, that we I’m going to guess. You’re going to kind of hit on here since that’s a hot button issue for you. I am always cautious when business owners are asking about how can I be a better manager?
Larry Broughton
00:02:49
Mm, okay. It’s like, I have this distinction. I hate it when our coaching clients call the people who do transactions with us or who fund our businesses by doing business with us, by buying our service or product, I hate it. And it’s like nails on a chalkboard for me when they call those folks customers and not clients because to me, customers are transactional, clients are relational, you know, and to me words have meaning. If you want to build a sustainable business, you have to have a relationship with people. So they buy from you over and over again. It’s very difficult to run a business if you’re doing onesy-twosy transactions over and over again. So I feel the same way about managers versus leaders. Now there are certainly people that we have to have in managerial leader roles, the people who get stuff done, who supervise the tasks that get things done. So if you’re asking about that, whoever it is, as soon as this question, what are the, you know, important traits of a manager? And that’s what you mean. I’m okay with that. But if you mean, what are the traits of an effective transformational leader who thinks strategically, who might be a business owner, that’s a different set of skills, right? So maybe what we ought to do, let’s focus on the way the question was literally written and focus on manager. And that’s my preamble to the whole thing.
Dave Braun
00:04:17
But I think some of these tips, they’re really, Larry, to be honest, I think it’s more, if you’re going to be the empowering manager, how do you be an empowering manager? Because the definition of manager is like, Hey, we manage the system to stay the way it is and the, of certain results.
Larry Broughton
00:04:34
Well, and sometimes leaders have to play managerial, have managerial roles as well. I get it. I’m just saying words have meaning, you know, and if you want your manager, here’s what, what are some of the complaints that we get from team members. Why aren’t my team members, employees, or managers, more like me, what they’re really saying, why don’t they take responsibility? Why don’t they step into the leadership gap? Why don’t they make decisions? Those are leadership traits. Yeah. Right. So that’s it. That’s all I’m saying on this. And maybe I’ve got an edge to me today. Maybe I’m looking to jump on somebody or maybe not. I don’t know.
Dave Braun
00:05:13
Well, let’s explore this. And I think as we talk about some of these traits, maybe they are all much better suited for a leadership type of position. Because really, if you are a manager, a lot of times we think of a manager as having somebody under them, you have a position of authority over them, not necessarily, but if you do then really, if you’re going to be a really effective manager, you should be thinking more leadership.
Larry Broughton
00:05:42
There you go, I agree. And frankly, if you want to move up in an organization or you want to move someone up in your organization, you need to be coaching, training them, mentoring them to be more of a leader than a manager.
Dave Braun
00:05:57
Exactly. Right.
Larry Broughton
00:05:58
So let’s dive into this. Shall we use kind of Duhigg’s book? This Smarter, Faster, Better as a platform. And that’s, that seems like, you know, I forget what it was called, this, this thing with Google a long time ago. Well, I speak it, and it appears that’s what happened to the rest of my life.
Dave Braun
00:06:23
You don’t work with me enough Larry. So right, folks, you can’t see this if you’re just listening, obviously, but you can imagine I’m holding up the Smarter, Faster, Better book, it’s nice, pretty orange color. And the author is Charles Duhigg, who wrote the Power of Habit. I’m a fan of his, but he goes into a lot of detail and, and he’s got multiple chapters in here of how to be smarter, faster, better. Wow, isn’t that interesting, everyone? We talked about doing this and we’ve talked about having fun.
Larry Broughton
00:06:56
That’s true.
Dave Braun
00:06:59
So Smarter, Faster, Better is an amazing book, but there’s a chapter in there that talks about, I think, managing and teams and all that. And he refers to a project that Google did many years ago. Now this book was written, the copyright is 2014. So those of you are listening to it today, Google has changed a lot, but there’s still, you know, obviously one of the most valuable companies or their alphabet is. So I think we can learn a lot from them, whether or not you agree with any politics, but this was in 2014. It was a very different time when this was written. And there Google’s research is done probably around in like 2010, 2011, but people don’t change. So I think that research is really, really valid. Yeah. So in the findings that are, he has in the book from Project Oxygen, so here are the eight things that are listed and we’ll talk about them in more details Larry, as we go.
Larry Broughton
00:08:02
Well, let’s back up though. Where did these findings come from? Right. So there’s a huge study done on the efficiency of the organization. How did things flow more efficiently? How did they they’ve measured tenure in the organization, turnover, team member satisfaction, those kinds of things to come up with. These are kind of some traits or skill sets that the manager needed to have or possess to be highly effective.
Dave Braun
00:08:31
Yeah. They, they looked at it. Yeah. They looked at all of their projects and gathered a bunch of data on what they considered was successful projects. Maybe some that weren’t successful and all of that kind of stuff. And so they’ve really spent time, several years looking at the data itself. There you go. All right. So here they are. Number one is a good coach. Number two.
Larry Broughton
00:08:56
So it’s like a highly effective manager is a good coach. Right? Right.
Dave Braun
00:09:02
Yeah. So that’s, yeah. That’s one of the characteristics or traits is a good coach. The second one is empowers and does not micromanage.
Larry Broughton
00:09:11
Oh, that’s one of the big ones. I think for, for so many people, they hate to be micromanaged.
Dave Braun
00:09:15
And Larry given our discussion earlier, that is a leadership trait, not really a management trait, so empowers and does not micromanage. Number three is expresses interest and concern in subordinates’ success and wellbeing. Number four is results oriented. Number five is listens and shares information. Number six is helps with career development. Number seven is, has a clear vision and strategy. And then number eight is, has key technical skills.
Larry Broughton
00:09:52
Yeah. And sorry, whoever wrote this question, you said, go at number eight. That’s not five. This is my point. So let’s just chop three of those off of there. Now maybe what we got to to do, Dave is go through those blow by blow and talk about maybe dissect, like what is a good coach, for instance.
Dave Braun
01:10:12
Yeah. And I, yeah, I agree. Let’s go through each one. So I think Larry, you’re really good at defining the differences between the coach, mentor, teacher, counselor, all that kind of stuff. Because when we say the word coach, a lot of times we are thinking, all right, a basketball coach, a football coach, but it’s interesting in, in baseball, they call them, you know, the manager, right? So what is the, what do you think is the difference between some of those?
Larry Broughton
01:10:40
Well, as you said, there’s overlap among some of these things, but typically a coach is someone who works with you to bring out the best in you in a certain skill set or area. They ask a lot of questions to help you find the solution. They look making sure that your elbow is in the right position on the swing. They really analyze you. And the impact of their efforts is to help you become more, more, better as what I was about to say, it’s future oriented, right? We’re looking towards the future. If you fix this, you’ll be better in the future. Mentors on the other hand, share their experiences with you. And we’re not just looking about how do I throw a better free throw, but how do you become a better person, a better executive, a better leader. They take all of their experiences; all of their resources and they make those available to you.
Larry Broughton
01:11:28
Does that make sense? Yes. So sometimes mentors do act as coaches though. Yes. Okay. Now on teachers, when we hear someone use the word teacher, we’ve all had teachers. If you’ve gone to any kind of school, right. Teachers share information and knowledge on their own, teach it from their own training that they’ve learned. Okay. So they may just be talking about a specific topic. They may not be in a, in the batter’s cage with you, for instance. Okay. But they may be talking you through the process. Counselor is very interesting. You know, I’ve been reading this two different books and watching document that I tend to be a little obsessed on the Romanoff’s, you know, the, the last hours of Russia and also I’m kind of a fan of the early stoic. And so I’m reading a lot about the, the Roman empire.
Larry Broughton
01:12:24
And, and so counselors were played important roles back then. In this setting Counselors are more like, they, they they’re reactive to things that have happened in the past. So you think about, okay, I’ve got to go see my school counselor, you know, my academic counselor, oftentimes they’re going to look at, you know, I’ve been doing Dave, I know you just failed that chemistry test for the fourth time, you know? Right. Right. Time to actually start studying my friend. Yeah. I think those are general descriptions that might accurately reflect the differences. Did we do, did we get all of them?
Dave Braun
01:13:09
So I think so. I, I know that there’s, there’s a therapist in there and sure. You know, where they’re trying to look back at the past, some of the, maybe the trauma that you’ve had to help you understand what happened in your past so that you can understand yourself for today. Yeah. And then sometimes I think when they talk about a good coach, sometimes there’s like you said, it’s all in her inner interwoven, and you may have to kind of swap between some of those roles if you’re going to be an effective coach for somebody. Because the whole idea, I think Larry is to help get the best performance out of you. And there’s times when you’ve got to do what you can in those areas. For example, Larry, I think I’m in, you know, all of our different mastermind programs and our virtual spotlight sessions, there are so many nuggets of wisdom that we share. But in particular, you share from all of the experiences in the past, that is really more in the depths of a counselor or a therapist only because of experience and understanding.
Larry Broughton
01:14:20
And failures.
Dave Braun
01:14:22
And failures, and a lot of times that’s because that is what’s needed for the person to get them to the next level of performance, or they help them get unstuck.
Larry Broughton
01:14:31
Yeah. Well, I think particularly in the mentor, counselor categories, you need someone who’s willing to be honest, transparent, and vulnerable with you. I have dummies teaching me something. I don’t necessarily need them or coach, you know, you know, telling me to keep my elbow up or tucked in whatever the sport is that I’m doing. I don’t need to know about the emotional journey that got me, got them there to make sure that the elbow stays up. You know, I really don’t. But if it, when it comes down to human interaction, when it comes down to just living, living life, trying to live a life of significance, moving closer to my fullest potential, I want to have someone that I can relate to because this journey that we’re on is going to suck our lifeblood sometimes. And oftentimes we as leaders and managers feel like we’re the only ones, why am I the only one struggling with this when the truth is, if you’ve got a good mentor counselor.
Larry Broughton
01:15:27
And again, sometimes those are people that are just one step above you on the ladder of life. If they would share with you, you know what, as you’re about to go into this season, like you’re taking over this new project, you’re launching this new business, you’re hiring this new person, be aware of the pitfalls because this, this could be what happened to happen. Oftentimes you just better prepared for the emotional damage or slings and arrows that are going to come at you. Because you’re more prepared, but you’re not going to get that from usually from a teacher or a coach. It’s more from a mentor, or that from a counselor. Exactly. And you got to keep in mind as you’re playing these roles in your organization, you’re teaching these people in your organization, how to do the same thing. Well, people are parrots, team members are parrots, where they say, you know, stuff rolls downhill, right?
Larry Broughton
01:16:14
Lead by example, you’ve heard all of these types of things. So the better you are at the more intentional you are at this, the better your team members will become at this. So maybe we want to move into this next one Dave, which it’s kind of a hot button issue for me. And it’s like that really effective manager or those folks who empower their team members and don’t micromanage them because oftentimes I think managers end up micro managing when they’ve made a bad hire. If you had to micromanage someone, that’s probably because of a mistake, you or someone else in the organization has made, or you’ve not either trained them enough or you’ve not pulled the trigger on coaching them up or coaching them out of the organization. All right, this is oftentimes not a reflection of them, but a reflection of you. That takes courage to look in the mirror and say, oh, where have I gone wrong?
Larry Broughton
01:17:09
That I need to keep micromanaging this person. If you do your skills-based assessments that we talk about in a lot of these, not just skills based assessment, but you do assessments, whether it’s cognitive or cognitive assessments before you bring someone into your organization and you make sure that the cognitive stuff is there, they’ve got the skills to do it. There ought to be a short period of training or a long period of training, depending on what it is. And then let them go set them free to do it. You give them parameters; you give them boundaries within which to play. And you say, Hey, here are the results I expect from you or better let them do it. And then you just check in along the way, checking in along the way on progress is a lot different than micromanaging. Micromanaging is constantly looking over their shoulder. Do you think you got to be doing it this way? You think you ought to be doing that? I think you got to do it this way because you’re setting people up for failure. And I would ask this question, have you ever been micromanaged? Most people have. And how did that make you feel, David, have you’ve been micromanaged before?
Dave Braun
01:18:13
Oh yeah. And if you, you feel, how do I say it? Do you feel like almost why bother? Why should I use my brain to think through any new solutions come up with any new products or innovative ideas when they’re either all going to get shut down or I’m going to be told exactly what to do and I can’t express my creativity.
Larry Broughton
01:18:38
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So it stifles your creativity. You feel less than valuable. Often times you feel worthless, right? You feel minimized and marginalized and you don’t feel like you’re a valuable contributor to the team. None of those things are good things, right? But to empower someone means you’re going to let them bring their best that they got to the team. And by the way, this is a big thing, Dave, you got to be willing to accept that they’re going to fail from time to time that they’re going to make mistakes. You listen, my friends, mistakes and failures are part of business without mistakes and failures, there would not be innovation. There would not be positive change in your organization. The key here is how do we respond as managers and leaders to these mistakes. Do we use it as an opportunity to do an AAR an after-action review? What’d we do, right? What’d we do wrong and how can we improve the next time? Or we just accept the mistakes and beat the snot out of somebody and scold them and dock their pay or whatever it is that some of these organizations do when they make mistakes all wrong by the way. You have to like, use these mistakes as an opportunity to learn and encourage it, encourage healthy mistakes. Now, if it’s a life safety issue, that’s a different story. Right.
Dave Braun
01:19:57
And if it, if it, if it puts something of our clients at risk, yeah, yeah. You got to be careful.
Larry Broughton
02:20:03
Yeah. Yeah.
Dave Braun
02:20:06
Yeah. We had, we had something that I was working with Daphne on and I had an idea of, Hey, this may help you to be a little bit more productive. Let’s talk about it. And I said, what do you think? And then I was just waiting on her to be able to respond to me to say, okay, yeah, I’m curious, tell me more. So we talked about it and then we implemented some of it together. Always implement some of these ideas together with your team. Then at some point she’s like, I got it. I’m going to take it over and finish it up. Cool. Yeah. Cool. Save me time. she felt empowered. Yep. And now she’s responsible for the solution going forward. Yeah. I liked that a lot. Yeah, it was. So it was great. It was great. Sometimes it is really hard. And a lot of times, Larry, when you first bring somebody on, you have a trust issue with them and you’re going to micromanage it’s, it’s hard at the beginning. You’ve got to figure out that balance of where do you micromanage at the beginning and where you don’t. And I would say like, what you said, ask, tell them, here are the results that I want or better and give them the boundaries.
Larry Broughton
02:21:18
Yeah. I like that. And by the way, you can even joke around in the beginning, say, you know, I, maybe it might feel micromanaging for the first week. It won’t always be like, this is what I want to make sure that I’m setting you up for success. So now’s the time to ask any questions from me. Like, here’s the thing. I remember a team member that had hired years ago and I was the second hotel, I think that we’d taken over until I showed them how we were doing things. And he was like taking it all in. And he said, well, I liked the way we’re doing this, but have you considered doing it another way? And he offered the way so he’s already, and it was a better way. It was already bringing value in from beginning. I was trying to give him all this information and that’s the way I think it ought to be.
Larry Broughton
02:22:02
You want to encourage your new team member to share ideas on how they can bring efficiency or productivity or whatever you’re looking for with this new person into the organization, capitalize on that fresh blood. If you don’t let them bring in these fresh ideas in the beginning, you’re basically sending a subliminal message to them that we don’t want to hear about your ideas because you really have two opportunities usually you can hire from within or hire some new blood from outside the organization. If you’re promoting, if you’re promoting from within, there’s already a bunch of institutional DNA that’s wrapped around this. But if you’re hiring someone from the outside, take advantage of the skillset and the experiences that they have from another organization to help you become a better organization.
Dave Braun
02:22:47
Yeah, absolutely.
Larry Broughton
02:22:48
Right.
Dave Braun
02:22:50
Well, I think we should, we should jump into number three. Okay. Number three is expresses interest and concern and subordinates success and wellbeing.
Larry Broughton
02:23:02
That’s so important. You know, I think this ties into one of the later ones as well about career development, but expressing interest in their wellbeing. You know, I might have to-do lists that I usually carry around with me. The one of the questions on here. Now there’s two people from my direct reports and there are six questions on here and I ask a couple of these. So the first one I’ll just go through with them. Number one, what decisions do you need from me? Number two, what problems are keeping you from your priorities? Number three, what plans are you making, which we haven’t discussed. Number four, what progress have you made since we last met? And the next to those ones I would say are professional, right? The next two is on a scale of one to 100. How are you doing personally and why?
Larry Broughton
02:23:50
And then the last one is in what areas can I keep you in my thoughts and prayers? Well, gosh, you know, my father has got terminal cancer and you know, I’m really distracted right now. That should answer a lot of the questions that you’re having about why, why is the TPS report not getting submitted on time, right? If you know what’s going on in people’s lives, then you can manage your own expectations of them. But also, there’s a sense of belonging. You’ve got to remember that a lot of our team members, I’m not a big fan of saying, hey, this is my family. We’re like a family here. You know, it’s great if you can get that familial feeling there, but the truth is many of these people are going to spend more time with you if you’re working inside some brick walls, then they’re going to spend with their family members. It sure would be nice to know who is it that you’re working with what’s going on in their lives.
Dave Braun
02:24:46
Yeah, absolutely. You know, we talked a little bit more in depth about this. I think in the previous episode, which was 120 and that was how do I encourage my team members towards personal growth and development. So we touched on it, but I think that you bring out an important point about the concern and care for them personally. So the success and wellbeing, when we, when we read this, it says number three is expresses interest and concern and subordinates success and wellbeing. Well, we all know success and wellbeing is not just business success. And it’s all the other areas that people have in their lives. Yeah.
Larry Broughton
02:25:24
Yeah.
Dave Braun
02:25:26
We, I had one of our of our VA’s on our team, Larry, her uncle just passed from lung cancer. Yeah. She just started with us not too long ago. So was thinking about, okay, what can I do? It’s kind of hard when they’re in the Philippines. You can’t like send flowers and stuff but contributed some money towards their funeral expenses and gave a couple of extra days off. So I think there are a lot of things that we can do as owners and managers that indicate we are concerned about their success and wellbeing, but it is and it’s so important to ask questions and to be concerned in that way. But it’s also important to show action especially when there’s, you know, a death or something like that, they’re going through something pretty tough.
Larry Broughton
02:26:18
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. People want to work with compassionate people. Yes. This is the way it is. And it’s my friends, we are moving into it. And I’ve been saying this for a while what I’m calling the relationship economy. Okay. Your workers are no longer robots sitting behind milling machines in the industrial age. Those days are gone. Okay. And they do have choices where they spend their time where invest their time, where they are in their money.
Dave Braun
02:26:46
All right,
Larry Broughton
02:26:47
Good. What’s the next one. I forgot what the next one was saying.
Dave Braun
02:26:49
The fourth one is results oriented. We kind of said this in a way.
Larry Broughton
02:26:55
Oh no. I mean, if you’re, if you’re in business dammit, you better be results oriented. This is not even if you are any non-for-profit organization, you got to be results oriented. One of my big things is what’s measured is improved. Yes. And so I think we need to be looking at that and we have to set expectations among all of our team members of what we expect from them on a day-to-day basis. And our morning stand-up call, we do two major things. One is we start with when, when it’s, someone’s turn it’s, here’s what I’m grateful for. And they list what they’re grateful for. And then say, here’s what I’m doing today. Here are the results I will be accomplishing today. That make sense. So you had to build a culture of being results oriented, and we kind of alluded to it a little bit earlier about here’s what I expect or better. Right? Why do we do that? Because if you tell people, here’s what I expect that will be this, of what they perform to people. Not all, but most people we’ve you say this or better that helps the entire organization.
Dave Braun
02:28:03
Yeah. Yeah, definitely agree. And I think it’s important to, you know, you have your KPIs for your team to track- key performance indicators. And also folks, just a quick tip, we should discuss this at some point, but some of these KPIs are going to be lag measures and some of them are going to be lead measures. Make sure you have both in your organization. That’s right.
Larry Broughton
02:28:24
Lagging indicators are those that look in the past leading indicators predict the future.
Dave Braun
02:28:29
Right. Yeah. Okay. Let’s see. Number five is listens and shares information. I know we had a podcast, I can’t remember the exact episode, but I know we had one where we talked about how vulnerable do we need to be as leaders. So that kind of relates to it, but you know, not exactly. I think this is a lot more towards the information you share as you know, from a company basis. Oh yeah, here it is. We have, we talked, it was episode 48. I got to read my own notes. Okay. All right. That’s when we, we talked about it. So listens and shares information. And I think one of the things that’s important for us to say, well, what does the listening really really mean? And I know I’ve heard several times when people talk about the drive by listening, where you’re like, you’re going through a fast-food drive through and drive by listening or drive through listening is when, you know, you’re repeating your order. I want a hamburger fries and a shake and they repeat back to you. Okay. You want a hamburger, fries and shake? No, that’s, that’s not the kind of repeating that you want to do to show that you’ve listened. You want to be, to tell them back can kind of gist of what they had said.
Larry Broughton
02:29:46
Yeah. Yeah. So you want, you want to get the gist, but also I think what does this mean? You can help them articulate. So what this means for the organization or your efforts is this so you get really super clear on it. You can do this during your four corners walk. If you have a physical facility, I’m a big believer of what the hell say called walking, the four corners. And that’s like walking through the entire organization and just the management by leading around, you know, in the restaurant business, we call it touching tables where the manager ought to be coming out. If you’re at a good restaurant, you’ll notice that a manager of company, they have a literally touched the table subtly because they want to be that close to you. How are things going? Is there anything we can do to help improve your experience with us?
Larry Broughton
03:30:31
They’re listening to you. Well, we need to do the thing that, the same thing with our team members. And I think a common mistake, Dave, that people make, that managers make, when they’re doing what somebody, some people call it, performance appraisals is they sit down and you just talk at the potentially employee for a second instead of making it, which ought to be about 15% of that performance appraisal meeting, the other 85% ought to be talking about the future. How can we help you develop? What are our goals for the future? Could you co-create these things and people will feel much more listened to much more appreciated and much more valued in the organization, but ask open-ended questions, I think is a really important element of being an effective manager.
Dave Braun
03:31:23
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It was interesting Larry at the conference that we went to the V-WISE conference, and we went to this restaurant, remember when we were ordering, and we were trying to figure it out. What happened? The owner in the back, he came out cause he was listening. He was listening. And he heard that we were a little bit confused, or we were new customers and he came over and he said, he said, here’s the pictures. Here’s the pictures of what the menu what’s on the menu that might help because they weren’t above on the, on the, on the screens as well. Yeah. And that, and that helps. So he was listening to what the problem was and he came up with a pretty quick solution.
Larry Broughton
03:32:10
Now they have been open for a couple of months, and they are so good.
Dave Braun
03:32:13
Yeah. That’s so good. And I wish he would have told his team member who was standing there. Why don’t you help them bring the screen up?
Larry Broughton
03:32:21
Well, we don’t know that he didn’t do that afterwards. Right. But yeah, that’s right. Yeah. The other element that though, this Dave is not just listening, but it’s sharing information. It’s one of the complaints that we hear oftentimes in organizations when we’re doing our consulting and you’re going to start talking to the team members, I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know the health of the organization. I didn’t know that we got a group coming in. I didn’t know that we have this had this order. I didn’t know that I had this client who was pissed off about the quality of our product. Managers and leaders need to share information. That they need to be an aggregator of information and a disseminator of information. Okay. So that that’s really important.
Larry Broughton
03:33:04
And back to the listening now, listening is only effective if you’re then applying what you’ve heard or correcting what you’ve learned. I think I shared this with another podcast with you recently, or someone recently, we acquired a hotel several years ago and we’re going through all the online reviews and everyone’s like over and over again, dusty mirrors, dusty ceiling fans, dusty, dusty armoires. And so we get there and I think the tallest room of time, that was five foot two. And they’re all very short little people. And, and so after we took over, we said, Hey, what’s going on? Why, why is this, you know, if you don’t know in the hotel industry, we have what we call dust wands. There are long wands so you can dust on top of things. And the room attendants said, we’ve been asking for dust ones forever and we just don’t get them. And so we can’t get up to good. They’re not allowed to get on ladders in the rooms. And so what was the first thing we did? We got them dust wands, and all of a sudden, they feel good. The quality of the product jumps, they feel better about their jobs. They feel better about themselves. They feel better like they’re a better team member. So you have to act on what it is that you’re learning while you’re on, you’re listening toward.
Dave Braun
03:34:18
Right. Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. All right. Well number six is helps with career development. So important. Yeah. I think when it comes to career development, I think it’s going to start with asking, where do you see yourself in a year, two years, three years, five years.
Larry Broughton
03:34:38
Yeah. I think that’s an important element, but I think also just helping them be better at the job that they’re currently in. We, I shared this stat all the time. I’m not going to bore you with the detailed where the stellar, it comes to bear every year when Gallup does their state of the American workforce survey, most people leave their organization because they feel like they’re not being professionally developed. Both team members expect that their current employer is going to help them become better at their job and set them up for the next promotion. If you’re not doing that, that’s what that will contribute to one of the reasons why people are leaving your organization. Yeah. People want to feel like they’re on a winning team. Winning teams are constantly practicing, getting better at what they do anticipating what the next challenge is going to be.
Dave Braun
03:35:22
Exactly. Yeah. Well, and one of the things you can do as a leader, as a manager has to make sure you understand, or have developed some type of a educational reimbursement type of a program. There you go. I like that idea. You can do it from all the way from helping them reimburse portion or all of them going back to school at a formal college, or you could say, Hey, I’m going to pay for you to take three Udemy classes this quarter, something like that and give them the freedom to select, but make sure you understand how you’re going to be able to reimburse them and what the options are. Because a lot of folks won’t because of money. If you’re going to pay for it, that will help. That will happen. And the kind of folks that you hire, remember Larry, we talk about motivation, integrity, and capacity. If you have somebody who has a high level of motivation, they should be wanting to continually improve them. So they’re going to, they’re going to jump at the chance of taking something like that. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be exactly within their career, but hopefully, hopefully it will be.
Larry Broughton
03:36:25
Yeah, it doesn’t have to be them. Right. I think there is. I remember correctly, we got into the number, looking at the book when you mentioned this is those effective managers, leaders were talking about how to have a clear vision and strategy for where they’re taking either the department or the company. We talk about this heavily in this Victory book, the V is for vision, right? And so it’s so important that not only are they developing a vision, let’s say that you’re a departmental manager, the vision for that department needs to support the overall vision of the organization. All right. But let’s say there’s a manager for the entire organization. That vision is only as good as the people who know it and work towards it. So what does that mean? You need to be communicating this. You need to be an evangelist of the vision and the mission.
Larry Broughton
03:37:14
And then making sure that you are a strategic thinker, which means I am getting up out of the weeds, you know, trying to get maybe not a 30,000 foot perspective, it depends on where you are in the organization, but at least get a 5,000 foot perspective what’s going on in the battlefield. So I can start moving my pieces around the chess board here a little bit. Right. But I do see a whole lot of managers who get so stuck in the weeds. They they’re so stuck on the tactical part of the job that they don’t even know what the ultimate vision is for their, their department or for their business or for their organization.
Dave Braun
03:37:50
We’re going to talk about that in the next episode a little bit. Okay.
Larry Broughton
03:37:52
All right. Good, good. But believe me, your team members are watching. They know whether you’ve got this or not. Yeah. Okay.
Dave Braun
03:38:01
And I think the, the clarity of your vision is, it’s critical but then helping them to be clear on it as well. You may be clear on it in your mind as a leader or as a manager, but you’ve got to help them be clear on it. And one of the best ways to do that is to give them examples, success stories about how you are accomplishing your vision along the way. Because you should, there should be some nuggets. There should be some customers or client success stories. There could be team member stories. You should have some successes not, you know, every day, but when you have your regular meetings, bring those things up to reinforce that you are accomplishing what you’re setting out to. Yeah.
Larry Broughton
03:38:45
Yeah. Th that the chapters, while frankly, this whole book Victory is really good for anyone who’s, who’s interested in. How, how do I actually define a vision for my personal life and for my professional life, you know? So shameless plug get the Victory book. It’s a number one on Amazon, bestseller. Yeah. It’s an awesome book. It’s an amazing book on Larry Broughton happens to be the author in case you weren’t aware.
Dave Braun
03:39:09
Who is that? I don’t know if I know that guy.
Larry Broughton
03:39:14
That was seven. I think?
Dave Braun
03:39:15
So number eight, that’s a wrap it up. That’s been great. So number eight is, and this is an interesting one. It says has key technical skills. That’s what they say. And I think that’s very interesting because, and I don’t recall exactly what they talked about when it has, they say key technical skills, but I can kind of imagine a little bit what they’re talking about. And I think they are probably talking about that you’ve got some technical, I don’t know, hutzpah around the area just a little bit so that you can help them solve some problems. It doesn’t mean you have to have it in every area, but if you actually are managing a particular area or leading a particular area in the company, you’ve got to have some intimate knowledge about what’s going on there.
Larry Broughton
04:40:06
I remember one of the first restaurants I’ve ever had a equity interest in, I’d always worked back at the house with the exception of the McDonald’s. I’d worked all over the place and was a manager there. But I mean like the first full-service restaurant I was at, I could jump on the line and those types of things, but I’d never opened a bottle of wine publicly before, and we were slammed. Right. And so here I am trying to open a bottle of wine table-side and it was very humorous. I just had to make it, make a joke about it. And so guess what the first thing was after, you know, I tear the foil off the neck of the bottle and it’s just an absolute mess. I went to, one of the team members okay, show me how to do this. I’ll never do this.
Larry Broughton
04:40:52
Never happens again. It takes courage to go to a quote unquote, subordinate and say, I don’t know how to do this. Train me up on it. Yes. They love doing that. Yes. Yes, exactly. And, but you got to make a, if, if you can make a little bit of a joke about it, be a little bit self-deprecating, you know, because they, they, know these people who are doing the day-to-day jobs, they can watch you and they know whether, you know how to do it or not. So if you’re faking it and pretending, you know how to do it, that’s just going to cause negative banter behind the scenes. Just admit when you don’t know something and get the skills to actually perform effectively. You don’t need to do everyone’s job that you do as professionally as they do, but you need to know the major ins and outs of their roles to see how it all fits together.
Larry Broughton
04:41:47
So one of the things I love like in the hotel industry, I love working with night auditors and promoting them through the system because these night auditors there, they may not have worked front of the house. You may have done these things, but they see how all the pieces fit together because they understand how the pieces fit together. I can teach them, or we can train them on the other elements of the operation. So there are some key technical skills you must know, but you don’t need to know the minutia of most of the jobs. This is why some of these, if you’re a strong manager, just those managerial skills are transferable to different industries. If you know how, how to ask the right questions. Yeah.
Dave Braun
04:42:28
Right. Yeah. Yeah. There’s, there’s a, there’s a quick hack way. And this is what I discovered to get those key technical skills that you need a quick hack way to do it is if you’re because I was managing a group of engineers in a semiconductor company doing verification and Silicon chips, and some of the stuff that my guys were doing, well we had all guys in the group, some of the things that they were doing, I just, as like, wow, I just didn’t even like, I didn’t have an appreciation. So what I did, Larry is I said, okay, the next chip that comes in that’s, you know, not as super high priority, it’s kind of lower on the priority list. I’m going to lead that particular verification effort. So I was working in the business and not on it enough on a lower priority project so that I could get an appreciation of the tool set and what they struggled with. And I remember, I remember asking a good friend of mine now, you know, teach me this stuff. He was more than happy. We had a good time. He’s a great teacher. And that’s what I discovered. Wow, he’s a great teacher. And so that really, really helped me understand what was going on, what their difficulties were and where in our tool set our chain, et cetera, that we should be looking at and protecting as well as making it better. It helped me do my job as a manager, much better with that understanding.
Larry Broughton
04:43:52
Yeah. And it builds bond with your team members too.
Dave Braun
04:43:52
Yeah. So I think that’s what they mean by the key technical skills, knowing enough to where your team members come to you and say that there’s issues or problems, you can ask some good questions to help them.
Larry Broughton
04:44:02
Yeah. I like that. That’s a good way to put it. Good. So that was a, I’m sorry that, that wasn’t five. So you can throw out any three that you don’t want or, or just accept them as bonuses, free gifts.
Dave Braun
04:44:13
Yeah, free gifts. There you go. All right. Anything else, sir?
Larry Broughton
04:44:17
No, I don’t think so. Let’s wrap this thing up. Let’s take it home.
Dave Braun
04:44:20
All right. Well, thank you everybody for joining us today. And remember building a team is the way to reclaim your freedom and where to help you with our course in community. Of course, our podcast, as well as our White Glove Service, where we find a rock star VA for you. So three things we’d love for you to do right now. And we’d really appreciate it. Number one, subscribe to this podcast, if you haven’t already done. So if you’re on your iPhone or your Android phone, and then of course on YouTube by hitting the subscribe button and click on the little bell next to it, to get reminders. Number two, give us a rating, preferably five-star or leave a comment below this video, a question, anything, because it will help us to get the word out. YouTube will rank our videos a little bit higher because we want to help more people. And the more people that see it, the more people we’re helping. So number three is go to Hiremyva.com for more information on our course in community and our White Glove service. Remember even without experience, you learn how to prepare for hire and thrive with virtual assistants. Larry and I have helped a lot of folks. We’d love to help you too. So just go to Hiremyva.com for more information.
Larry Broughton
04:45:29
I’m just going to remind you folks, go out and do something significant today my friends. God bless you. God keep you. God hold you. All right, go get them! We’ll see you the next time.
Dave Braun
04:45:39
Bye! Peace out.
