HireMyVA Podcast

HireMyVA Podcast 120- Personal Growth and Development for Team Members

Listen To The Audio

Watch The Video

Play Video

Episode Summary

We definitely need to encourage our team members towards personal growth and development.

The big question is why do we do this? And if the answer is yes, then how do we do this? Are there questions we can ask them? Do we reward them somehow?

Part of your organization’s budget, both time and dollars, should be allocated towards having your team members grow personally and professionally.

RESOURCES:
========================

Looking for bite-size nuggets of learning for leaders and high-achievers? Go to
https://yoogozi.com/

Learn more about our course and community, and our White Glove Service:
https://hiremyva.com

Need a website you can be proud of? Let us help you.
https://prowebsitecreators.com

Looking for a business mentor that will surely propel you to success? Check out Larry's site.
https://larrybroughton.me

Learn more about Larry Broughton
========================
Website: https://larrybroughton.me
Instagram: https://bit.ly/3vXPEoT
LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/3pIXjq8
Facebook: https://bit.ly/3pKVxEU

Learn more about Dave Braun
========================
Website: https://prowebsitecreators.com/about
LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/3EpvoQe

#HireMyVA
#VirtualAssistant
#BuildingATeam
#PersonalGrowth
#PersonalDevelopment

Episode Transcription

Dave Braun
00:00:02
Hello folks! 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 personal, personal assistants with virtual assistants about breaking the bank- without breaking your bank and that’s the most important bank. All right. It’s been a little bit since we recorded one of these.

Larry Broughton
00:00:29
That’s all right. We got the important stuff out, David.

Dave Braun
00:00:32
I muffed the punt. I’m going to be benched, I guess, by the coach.

Larry Broughton
00:00:36
You’re good. You’re good, Dave. It is good to see you handsome Dave.

Dave Braun
00:00:40
It’s great to see you Larry and to do this again. So we’ve got an interesting topic, we do. They’re all interesting, but here’s a good one here. So the question is how do I encourage my team members towards personal growth and development? And this comes from one of our amazing flashpoints, and we’ve got the book that you can buy on store.yoogozi.com, or you can sign up at yoogozi.com/daily. If you want to get this and they’ll come to you every day, but this one was really, really triggered a question from somebody. Yeah. So you want me to read it?

Larry Broughton
00:01:21
Sure. I remember correctly. This came out like near the end of the year, as we’re wrapping up the year in the flash points book. So you want you go ahead and read it and we’ll get everybody on the same page. I don’t recall exactly how it was, but it was about basically about how do you get the best out of people and what contributions that they make. So, yeah, go ahead. And once you read that you got that in front of you.

Dave Braun
00:01:43
Okay, let’s do this. So here’s the title. The best contribution we can make to our communities is challenging ourselves and teammates toward personal growth and development. Now, for you guys who maybe not be familiar with the flash points, they have a title like that and then there’s about 130 words to get us to really just start thinking. It’s a flash, it’s a real quick moment in time, help you to journal, to get your thoughts, thinking about how you can improve your life or your team, you know, all kinds of different subjects. Yeah. So you want to read the rest of it. Let’s do it. Okay. Here it is. As our teams and dreams grow (and sometimes fail), It’s important to remember that we’re getting closer to our cause. Too often, we’re so caught up in our own personal and professional development and training programs that we forget to cast our eyes and energy on the development of those around us. Check priorities and ensure that the team has sufficient tools and resources to act successfully, give them ample opportunities to learn, and be driven by desire to serve others. Most importantly, ask teammates what they hope to accomplish by being part of our tribe. This would be using private one-on-one meetings, confidential surveys, group meetings, etc, then to make this their reality. So here’s the closing question in it. How can you help make the hopes and dreams of your teammates a reality?

Larry Broughton
00:03:08
That is good, Dave. I remember writing these and sometimes I would write these from personal experience, you know, conundrums, I’m trying to figure out in my own head, but I remember early on in my leadership and management career and then amplified in my military career and then during my hotel career where we’d go in and take over or acquire new hotels, you look at past performance of team members. If you’re looking at it, you think, well, gosh, they’ve got a lot of capacity. Why do they continue to fall short of the stated goals, right? Or you say like, think about in, this is how this, this is what came to mind for some reason. Think about somebody who’s trying to, you’re trying to develop a basketball team. Okay. And you’ve got one basketball team who’s playing in a big college arena and they’ve got great coaches and you got the other team playing out on a dirt court and they didn’t even have a basketball, you know, but they’re just trying to, they’re running plays kind of thing.

Larry Broughton
00:04:19
You can’t expect that that team, that didn’t even have the basketball, but it’s running in place to actually get in there and really compete with the college level team. Right. Well, why, because they don’t have the tools. It’s not that they don’t have the capacity, but they don’t have the tools. And to a hotel years ago that we had acquired. And you know, you look at the online and the guest reviews and they talk about dirt on the top of fans. And this, the, the ledges of pictures in the rooms had dust on them, recurring theme over and over and over again. And then when we get there to actually acquire the hotel, cause we, we do that because we want to do some value, add stuff. How can we improve the property? The operation make more money by tweaking a few things.

Larry Broughton
00:05:03
So we go in and we meet with the team. And as it turns out, I think without exaggeration, I think the tallest room attendant was five, five. So when we started asking them, it looks, you know, we’re not judging, but we’re saying here are all the reviews. Why D why is there dust on top of the fans? Why is there dust on top of the armoire? So they used to be armoires in guest rooms on, on top of the things they said, oh, we know it, but we can’t reach it. One of the very basic tools in a housekeeper in the room attendant or housekeeping department are what we call dust wands, where they can reach up and dust those things. But the manager of that property never gave them the tools to do it. And so we, as leaders, David, as managers, we have a moral obligation to help our team members reach their fullest potential.

Larry Broughton
00:05:54
Right? This is what I believe the Gallup state of the American workforce survey bears this out year after year. One of the primary reasons team members leave their jobs is because they don’t be like they’re being professionally developed right back to us as business owners, as managers, as leaders, to be helping them become better versions of themselves. Innately, we may not have the words to articulate this, but innately, we all know that if we want to do great things, we have to be great people who want to do great things,let’s be great professionals. Right. But we don’t know how to do that. Sometimes too often, Dave, managers or leaders look at their team members as like a water well, or a cup of water, right? Imagine a waterwell, Dave, where every day you put your bucket down into the well, multiple times and you pull it back up and there’s water.

Larry Broughton
00:06:54
You keep doing it over and over again. But if that well is not being spring fed somehow, ultimately one day that, well will dry up. Right. And we need to look at our team members like that. We can’t just take, take, take, take, take from them without depositing some stuff back into them. Right. And so I think that’s one of the questions that we need to be asking here is how do we help our team members reach their fullest potential? Right. Well, first of all, why would we want to do that? Right? Well, because ultimately I think David people feel like they’re making a positive contribution to your business. They feel better about themselves. They’re going to perform better. They’re going to perform more efficiently, right? Your business is going to run more because you’re going to have higher revenues, lower costs. That’s a great business model right there to have.

Larry Broughton
00:07:43
Right? Absolutely. Also, you feel better about yourselves. I still get texts today from people I manage ladder we’re involved with 15 years ago or 20 years ago. And they say, oh my gosh, one of the biggest mistakes I’ve made was leaving your organization. You know, I should have stayed, you know, because, you know, I thought you cared about me. I felt like, you know, we were making a positive contribution, whatever it might be in that means so much, you know? So there is the selfishness that comes out of it. If I’m being, being honest, I feel good when I’m helping other people get closer to their fullest potential. Right. And we can talk about it. Like how, how do you do it? Well, I think Dave, you need to budget for it. For sure. It’s gotta be a line item in your, in your budget.

Larry Broughton
00:08:30
You know, some organizations call it team. Well, we call it team member development, some call it employee development, gotta be aligned item in there every month where you’re developing you’re dedicating X, number of dollars to training professional development meetings. Whatever it is, what we try to do in our organization is every month when we have a team meeting, we do at least two skills trainings as well. One top them be better at their job or their role, but also there’s the mandatory safety trainings and that, that kind of thing. Right? But beyond that for our managers and supervisors, they want to share, you share with something with you. You’ve seen this before, but we got very intentional and we develop these I don’t know if you can see those, these peak potential packs is what we call them for our managers and supervisors. And every quarter they would get one of these in areas of their skills.

Larry Broughton
00:09:21
So if it’s like a general manager, then they’re going to be getting these boxes in the topics of marketing, finance, operations, team, member development, motivation, inspiration, those kinds of things. This one happens to be called carrots and sticks don’t work. And in it, what we would do is we put there would be a book that the topic that that quarter would be based on this month is a book called Carrots and Sticks don’t work. But then what I would do is find podcast or recordings or articles that support that. And we would put them in front and this guide here. And then what we do is we would give a summary of the podcast, we’d give a summary of the article summary of the book, but then as they go through that, there’s an action guide as well that they fill out as they go.

Larry Broughton
01:10:15
And then what they would need to do is take a little quiz at the end of it. It was our dedication to team member development. And then there was kind of a referral guide as well. We found that this is a great thing. People want to feel like they’re being professionally developed, right? And so I think it’s very important. And it’s just in the end, I’m sorry that I’m kind of monopolizing this so far, Dave, but I do believe that over the long haul, you see a lot higher levels of loyalty and productivity. When your team members feel like you are absolutely invested in their growth, most people don’t join an organization to stay in the one gig that they were hired for. Well, people have higher aspirations for themselves.

Dave Braun
01:11:04
Your rock stars won’t want to stay.

Larry Broughton
01:11:06
No they won’t. They won’t.

Dave Braun
01:11:09
So there’s a natural question that comes about with what you, you know, showed us this peak potential pack. And natural question is where can I get one of those? When the answer is you can’t. You cannot right now.

Larry Broughton
01:11:22
You’ve got to create a, you got to create your own. However, we have had people, Dave, this is a shameless plug who wanted us to start creating this like a, a box delivered like a monthly or quarterly box delivery service. And that’s one of the things we should launch, but we did this for our organization because it’s what they need, right? Your business should represent who you are, the person, you know, Dave, you and I are natural. We want, we, we naturally want people around us to be, to grow and develop. We thrive from that. Right. And we know the culture. So the books, the articles, the podcasts shared the same core values that we do as an organization. Okay. So if you’re going to put one of these together, just make sure that it’s supports your organization’s core values, your vision and your mission for the organization. Don’t just put something together, haphazardly, because you may be teaching your team members the wrong things.

Dave Braun
01:12:20
Yeah, absolutely. Well, a lot of people will also, as you are, you know, people want to take advantage of the white glove service because they want it done for them. And I would imagine people would want this done for them as well, to a certain extent. So Larry, maybe we need to step it up and do this.

Larry Broughton
01:12:38
We’ve been hearing this for years have went out. Yes. However, if you have a H a VP of HR or VP of professional development or whatever, that you call that in your organization, this would be a great project for them. I think we put a lot of months into this before it was ever launched. Right. Right. And so it’s not something you say, Hey, by next week, you could, you could. We honestly, we started with like a book club, right? We just started with that before. We kind of really rounded it out to turn it into what it is today.

Dave Braun
01:13:09
So if you want to do this for your team members, you can do it on an individual basis. You don’t have to have a formal box. And it really starts with asking them, having the conversation with them, asking them questions about what they might be interested in. One of the things that we’re doing Larry on our team this quarter is I’m telling everybody and including myself, because folks remember it starts at the top is what is your personal development goal for this quarter? Now, of course it can be ideally it needs to be related to the business. And that really should be. But what is it that you want to learn or to grow in a skill that you think will help you in, in the business, in your career as a skill, because ultimately letting the team members choose that will end up coming back and helping your company.

Larry Broughton
01:14:00
It is such a great point. Dave, I remember years ago at my former organization, I was in San Francisco. We offered life skills training. much of our workforce, about a third of our workforce were immigrants. First-generation immigrants. Many of them did not speak English. Yeah. Okay. So we offered language training. This is free, by the way. We offered how to go in and deal with the bank. You know, those things that would just make their life easier, the easier their lives are, the less stress they have in their lives, the better team members they are.

Dave Braun
01:14:40
Well, that’s a great point. That’s a great point. Yeah. Yeah. And, and a quick question about this, Larry is we talked about allocating money in your budget to do this personal development, to allow people to spend money on it. And you talked about it every month and that kind of thing, I think an important aspect is to allow them some time as well.

Larry Broughton
01:15:01
Oh yeah, yeah. During the training they get paid.

Dave Braun
01:15:05
So really this training needs to be on company time.

Larry Broughton
01:15:10
Yeah, this peak potential pack and our organization, this goes to salaried team members. Okay. But yes, training should be on company time for sure. Yeah.

Dave Braun
01:15:20
Okay. Well, so if you wanted to do something with a team member, you wanted to start having them do a little bit more personal development. Larry, we’ve got a few questions that you can start asking them to help them create their own plan. And of course you should be doing this in conjunction with them. Don’t leave it totally up to them, work with them on it. Because to be honest, it’s very, very unfamiliar with, with a lot of people. It’s like, wow, what’s personal development. Yeah. Any people aren’t exposed to that? So maybe like the first question would be, what do you see yourself doing in a couple of years?

Larry Broughton
01:15:58
And by the way, these are questions that start during the interview process. That’s

Dave Braun
01:16:03
A great point.

Larry Broughton
01:16:04
And then during that first, during the introductory or probationary process, then during a quarterly annual review process, this is an ongoing dynamic conversation by the way, not a one and done type of thing. Yeah, absolutely. That’s a really good question, Dave, what other questions do you have?

Dave Braun
01:16:22
Well, it’s even got a couple more. What training do you need to improve your position performance? So that’s what we talk a lot about is giving them the tools that they need. One of the things that we just had today with a client of our HireMyVA White Glove service is we had a thrive meeting and I won’t name who this is, but one of the first questions that I asked this person was, and I don’t know why it came to me, but do you have a second monitor? And the person is like, no, I don’t.

Larry Broughton
01:16:57
Computer monitor. We’re

Dave Braun
01:16:58
Talking computer monitor. Yeah, she didn’t. So it’s, it’s, it’s like part of this starts with you and I’m asking yourself these same type of questions. But the idea here is that, you know, what training do you need to improve your position performance? There’s some overall things that people can have and use that will improve their performance. And if you help them improve their performance, there’s going to be more satisfaction, more enjoyment, and you know, more development.

Larry Broughton
01:17:27
Interesting Dave, because I don’t remember which podcast number it was, but we did a podcast on how to improve efficiency and productivity in your life and that was one of them. And most people are absolutely surprised when they find out, I forget what the stat now, but how much more productive you are when you have two monitors or three monitors, one monitor, and how many times or people said I did that. And, oh my gosh, I can’t believe it. Right. And so that’s interesting that that came up.

Dave Braun
01:17:55
Yeah. Yeah. That’s cool. Well, you know, another, another question might be is what areas of learning, excite you the most, you know, and how does that work out for you? In other words, because some people, I mean, my kids, I go back to my kids sometimes to Larry, is that my Brian, my youngest son is he struggles with some online classes sometimes because he’s such a personable guy. So he likes to go in person and be there and study that works best for him. So when we talk about asking that question, what, what areas of learning excite you the most, but how are you best learning in those, in those areas? And, and you know, what are some of the parameters, do you want to, you know, take a full day to dive into it? Or is it, you know, an hour every day for a couple of weeks, how will that work for you?

Larry Broughton
01:18:48
Well, that Dave, kind of leads to another question that I think naturally comes up is if you’re the manager or you’re the leader asking these questions, you need to ask, how can I help? Or how can I facilitate this learning? Right? Because they may have all these great aspirations, but if you’re not giving them the opportunity to do that, that’s going to be a problem. But as you had mentioned earlier, this needs to be kind of a co-created process with them and not just them driving it or just you drive in it.

Dave Braun
01:19:20
Yeah, absolutely. And, and one of the things that’s also important is you got to give your team members certain options and make sure that they feel comfortable choosing those options. Because you may say you can purchase a course here or buy a book here and we’ll pay you back. But they may be thinking in their minds, I don’t want the company to spend that money. So I’m just going to look at the free stuff that’s out there on the internet. You may have to double down on emphasizing to them that, yeah, there is this budget. We want to spend it on this purpose. Yeah. Especially in the Filipino culture, they, they, and they want to do everything they can, a lot of times to please you. And they think, well, I’m not spending that money. If I’m saving them that money, then you know, they’ll think better of me, but that may not necessarily be true.

Larry Broughton
02:20:09
Well, David’s a good, that’s a good reminder at sometimes you have to spend money to actually see the results saving money, it’s only one part of the, the computation when it comes to running an efficient and profitable organization. Sometimes we have to actually invest money into our team members to see increased productivity. No one saves their way and all you do is safe to say, you don’t save your way to wealth.

Dave Braun
02:20:44
That’s all right.

Larry Broughton
02:20:45
You have to understand that there’s gotta be an investment either in time, knowledge, tools, something. Just saving money, not spending money is only one ingredient in the recipe.

Dave Braun
02:20:59
Yeah. And Larry, the business climate continues to, oh my gosh, it just continues to change the expertise that you need in certain areas continues to grow. And so you’ve got to develop your team. If you want to add a minimum, if you want to stay current, to stay where you’re at, if you want to, if you have aspirations to really grow, really got to invest the money to do that. and the time. Great. Yeah. I agree. One of the things though, that’s, I think they want to end with on along those lines is if they’re going to be doing this, you’re going to have them do it and there’s responsibility on their part, you really would like to have them put that into a smart goal.

Larry Broughton
02:21:45
Yeah. Yeah. Talk’s cheap. You can sit there and talk all day long about what you’re going to do, but if you don’t actually put some parameters around it that I am going to do this by that date, usually it doesn’t happen. The can just gets kicked down the road and then a year later, you’re still wondering why, why are we not making improvement in this area. And the great thing is in our program, we have tools and how to develop and write smart goals. Isn’t that shocking?

Dave Braun
02:22:15
Well, you know, and guess what’s going to also have to happen is somebody in your organization has got to monitor the progress and you guys had in the peak performance pack, you had a survey at the end or a quiz. Well, somebody needs to monitor the fact that they need to take this and there’s gotta be a little bit of follow-up. Because if you don’t inspect, what is it? You say you don’t inspect.

Larry Broughton
02:22:43
You have to inspect what you expect.

Dave Braun
02:22:45
That’s it. All right. I’m going to say that. So I remember that you have to inspect what you expect.

Larry Broughton
02:22:52
Correct.

Dave Braun
02:22:53
Okay. Anything else that we want to talk about on this topic, where we’re talking about, how do I encourage team members towards personal growth and development?

Larry Broughton
02:23:01
Yeah. I, I don’t think you can put enough emphasis on this. I think it’s really important. I belong to a, a couple of social media platforms that have team member forums for certain industries that I’m involved with. And it’s amazing how they people go on there and just bash their managers, leaders, and business owners. And if you want some good insight, go to those types of things and see what are people saying behind your back. Right. And a lot of it comes down to this kind of stuff. Those people that get on there and actually speak positively, they oftentimes talk about, Hey, I just got back from this training program for the, or my manager just referred me to, you know, to read this book. They feel better about themselves, but it’s the ones who feel like they’re constantly being used as a resource, you get used as a resource they get the most bitter and resentful.

Dave Braun
02:24:00
And that’s not what we want. That’s not what you want.

Larry Broughton
02:24:03
Yeah. That’s how I’d wrap it. Yeah. Okay.

Dave Braun
02:24:06
Well, let’s wrap this one up where everybody thank you for joining us today. And remember building a team is the way to reclaim your freedom. And we’re here to help you with our course and community and of course our White Glove service, where we find a Rockstar virtual assistant for you, three things we’d love for you to do. And we’d really, really appreciate it. Subscribe to this podcast if you haven’t already done. So either on your phone, your iPhone or Android phone. And then of course on YouTube at the subscribe button and clicking on the little bell next to it, hopefully you get reminders. And then number two, give us a rating, preferably five star, or leave a comment below this video. Any comment or a question, maybe your ideas of how you yourself had been personally developed, how you learn, what skills that have made a big difference in your life that will help the, get the conversation going.

Dave Braun
02:24:57
And that will help others. The more you talk about how successful you’ve been, or even where you failed, it will help others. And it will help us to get the word out. And then number three is going to Hiremyva.com for more information on our course and community and our White Glove service. Remember even without experience, you learn how to prepare for hire and thrive with virtual assistants. Larry, we got more people signing up for our White Glove service, excited to work with them on it. It’s making a huge difference in their business. You want to know more about all of this stuff? Just go to Hiremyva.com.

Larry Broughton
02:25:32
Yeah. Hey folks, I’m going to keep it really brief this week. God bless you. God keep you, God hold you. Alright my friends, go get them. Have a great week. We’ll see ya.

Dave Braun
02:25:41
Bye everybody!

Check Other Great Episodes

HireMyVA Podcast 141 How to Improve Team Cohesion 1

HireMyVA Podcast 141- How to Improve Team Cohesion?

No country is perfect. Boy, if we got opportunities here that put places around the world, they just lock them. So how do you do this, Dave? I think one of the first things we need to do is we have to act—they call it vision casting. You gotta cast your vision of what does your organization look like to your team members into the world? And then you have to pound it into everyone’s head. This is why we have this dynamic business plan for growth in our organizations. This is why you should post it on bulletin boards. This is why it should be part of your recruiting efforts. Who are you as an organization? And what do you want to be? Now, I would not suggest that if your corporate culture is to grind people down at every opportunity, you know, no vacations, no benefits. Those probably aren’t the values that are gonna attract the sunshine lollipop and rainbow people.

HireMyVA Podcast 34 How do I determine how much I should pay my VA 1

HireMyVA Podcast 34- How do I determine how much I should pay my VA?

I know that you have kind of a rule of thumb and you can expand on it in a bit. But I would think, like for us in the Philippines, we use them from everything from general VAs to graphic designers, to web developers, to researchers, and pay anywhere from $4 to $9 an hour. Generally, I think it’s a fifth to a 10th of what we would pay here for a similar role. And I know some of you are gasping at that, but you have to know the cost of living is a lot different in the Philippines than here.

HireMyVA Podcast 14 I doubt Ill be able to find someone as smart as me 1

HireMyVA Podcast 14 – I doubt I’ll be able to find someone as smart as me

Oftentimes when you feel ground down, when you feel burned out, when you just lose motivation, it’s because you’re not working in your strengths. And imagine if every VA that you hired, every person in your team was working in their strengths as well. You know, everything would just be buzzing. It’d be a great experience. So I would just caution you about being fearful of bringing on people only because you think, oh, you know, I’m not going to find anybody as smart as me. You know, there probably are, like I said, I’m glad that you have high self-esteem about it.