Dave Braun
00:00:00
Hello, folks. Welcome to the HireMyVA team and Business Building Podcast brought to you by Yoogozi.com. And 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, not my bank, your bank. And I’m Dave Braun. And again, I’m here with Larry Broughton, my fantastic friend, and mentor, my buddy, traveling through life with me. Larry, between you and me. We’ve coached a lot of folks, but you in particular have coached thousands of entrepreneurs to have success in their life and their business, Lord. So tell everybody what’s up.
Larry Broughton
00:00:41
What’s up! Same old stuff. Different day, I guess. Things are good, Dave. Things are good. It’s great to see you.
Dave Braun
00:00:48
Yeah…
Larry Broughton
00:00:50
I don’t know. It’s been a very interesting year. Hasn’t it? I can’t believe, as we are recording this, the year’s half over 2022.
Dave Braun
00:01:00
I know. This week is the last week of the quarter.
Larry Broughton
00:01:04
Isn’t that crazy?
Dave Braun
00:01:05
I was thinking, oh my gosh, I gotta do a big push this week to get some of my goals going for this quarter.
Larry Broughton
00:01:10
Yeah, yeah. Time to pull a couple of all-nighters. I know.
Dave Braun
00:01:12
Oh, man.
Larry Broughton
00:01:14
Yeah. Well, it’s good to see you, Dave. It’s great to see you every week. Thanks for doing life with me.
Dave Braun
00:01:23
Yeah. It’s awesome. Love you too, man. Love doing these things. We got a good question.
Larry Broughton
00:01:28
Right. What is it?
Dave Braun
00:01:29
Okay. Well, it’s really a very important one. And the question is, how can I create—
Larry Broughton
00:01:33
Because none of the other ones are, Dave.
Dave Braun
00:01:34
This in particular, right?
Larry Broughton
00:01:37
Okay. Alright. What is it?
Dave Braun
00:01:39
The question is, how can I create a deeper community within our team? Or how do I improve team cohesion? And I think Larry, this is one of the important ones. And the reason I say it’s important, they’re all important, right? You’re right. But in the age of how much stuff we’re doing remotely and through zoom or recording this through zoom, it’s like, we gotta double our efforts to do this. I mean, in the past, you were sitting in the office, it was so easy to go to lunch and hang out in the break room together and talk. But it’s harder to do that now. So let’s talk about how do we create a deeper community within our team?
Larry Broughton
00:02:19
Well, maybe the first question is why?
Dave Braun
00:02:21
Oh, that’s a good question. It is really.
Larry Broughton
00:02:22
Why would you do that? I mean, I have heard some entrepreneurs argue, I don’t care, whether there’s the tight cohesion or not. Just come in, do what you’re supposed to do, I will reward you for your efforts and go. And the one person I’m thinking about in particular is not doing that to be a jerk, Dave. He’s like, I don’t own you, but if you’re gonna make a commitment to me that you’re gonna show up and you’re gonna be willing to take a check for me every week, you don’t need to be married to me, but give me a hundred percent when you’re here. Now, there was the old command and control days that you did it because that’s what you’re supposed to do. Or you were from the—my dad’s generation,
Larry Broughton
00:03:12
where you committed decades of your life to an employer. Those days are behind us for the most part. So why would you do that? Well, I think Dave, a cohesive team—I can only go based on what I study, what I read, interviews I see with CEOs, high performers, my experience in the military. When you have a team Dave, that is, to use your word, the strong cohesion, then there’s higher productivity. There’s a pure sense of reaching a goal. There’s a sense of service among each other. And so the higher the level of productivity, the more efficient you are as an organization, generally, the more profitable you are as an organization, which leads to sustainability, which means you can keep people employed. That’s one of the reasons why you do it. Another reason is to give people a sense of meaning— for crying out loud— that they’re there spending a third of their life with you. Wouldn’t it be important if there’s actually some meaning about this? And so, I’m sure some of the stuff is gonna come up, feed both the meaning part of the job that also leads to the productivity part of the job because there is meaning. So I think, I just wanna spend a minute. Here’s “Why” is important. So the “What” is a different story though.
Dave Braun
00:04:42
Yeah. People these days, everybody’s looking for a little bit more meaning in their life. And like you said, it’s eight hours a day, or a lot of times more and people don’t wanna spend the great hours of their life, their prime of their life, doing stuff that just is not significant in their eyes.
Larry Broughton
00:05:05
Listen, if you can have meaning in your life through your work, that’s a great thing. But I also believe there’s honor in anyone who’s willing to work, and bust their tail to provide for their family.
Dave Braun
00:05:24
Yeah.
Larry Broughton
00:05:25
There’s meaning in that too. You gotta find out. I don’t wanna get too much down the rabbit hole with the stoic. But there’s honor in providing for your family. For sure.
Dave Braun
00:05:37
I think the meaning that we’re talking about is based upon the individual. That may be the number one thing in somebody’s mind or how they’re thinking is, I’m providing for my family, I’m raising a great family to go out and do great things. Here’s a great example, Larry. So we’ve had a gardener in the past, but we have this one person and his little business, they trim our trees and stuff like that, been coming for years. So I talked to him about his family. Well, he’s got four kids, one’s a lawyer, two of ’em are doctors, a fourth one’s like a pharmacist. I know—
Larry Broughton
00:06:17
Overachieved much?
Dave Braun
00:06:20
Well, and he came from—I don’t know if it was Vietnam or Laos or Cambodia, but his focus, his meaning in life has been, let me get my kids educated so they don’t have to bust their butts in the same way that I am doing it. And when I talk to him, he’s proud. And he should be really proud.
Larry Broughton
00:06:42
Yeah.
Dave Braun
00:06:43
Yeah.
Larry Broughton
00:06:45
All right. So how do you do it? That’s a good story, by the way. I love hearing stories about that. And you know, the sad part, Dave, is that I promise you, I won’t go down the rabbit hole, but you don’t want me to go. But I will say this, there is a level of frustration I have about our fellow Americans who have not traveled outside this country, who have not seen the misery and the pain that a lot of immigrants have coming here legally to make an impact on the lives of their family members, while a lot of us sit here and just bitch and complain about things. Boy, have we got it? We’ve got it good. I mean, we’re not perfect.
Larry Broughton
00:07:31
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.
Dave Braun
00:08:31
I was gonna have that as one of my core values, grind you down. But I thought, well, let me cross that one off.
Larry Broughton
00:08:36
The beatings will continue until morale improves. So I think that’s one of the things. You have to really cast your vision. I was gonna touch on a couple these days and we can go deepee wide, wide as you want.
Dave Braun
00:08:53
One of the things I—go ahead.
Larry Broughton
00:08:55
One of the things that kind of popped into my mind is, we were chatting there and this is gonna rub some people the wrong way, but I’ve seen it and we do it in our organizations, is that we make sure that everyone knows what each other’s responsibilities and accountabilities are.
Dave Braun
00:09:11
Yeah.
Larry Broughton
00:09:14
That tends to build cohesion. And I’m gonna use a word here. That’s gonna might trigger some folks. I think we need to celebrate the diversity of opinions in our organizations because that’s where creativity comes from. That’s really important. This is where strength comes from, is when you have diverse ideas and opinions and don’t shut people down.
Dave Braun
00:09:43
Yeah. Remember we did a couple of episodes on psychological safety? We talked about—
Larry Broughton
00:09:50
And I was triggered on that. Yeah.
Dave Braun
00:09:52
Yeah. And just search HireMyVA psychological safety and it should come up. I don’t remember the episode or episodes. We talked about it a little bit. So that’s a great way to make sure we have some good team cohesion, is to honor what people are saying and allow everybody to speak their creative thoughts.
Larry Broughton
01:10:17
Well, you better have the guts of the leader to do that though. Most don’t, let’s just be honest. Most don’t. I think that is a damn shame that you don’t have the courage to have those types of conversations. So what I would encourage you to do, if you really wanna build cohesion, you run headlong into this conflict, but you solve it or you mitigate it. That will build cohesion. There’s nothing like—I don’t know, tragedy’s not the right word, but it’s the word that’s coming to me right now. Tragedy can bring organizations together. Difficulty can bring people together if you have the right heart about it. You know, think about if you’ve been on a sports team and you just got—everybody played their hearts out, but they still got rocked. It still brings you together.
Larry Broughton
01:11:18
And you go on and fight another day. Sometimes cohesion comes from defeat more than it does from victory. It all depends on how did you get there. But I think also we need to capitalize, Dav,e, on the strengths of the individual team members as well. And this is one of the things that my wrestling coach was so good at. You know, sometimes he would pull people out of the lineup just because a better wrestler was better for that opponent in order to win the match. I think that was really important to do from time to time. But I think you gotta do those things to build cohesive teams, but then, of course, there are things that whether it’s— I always make fun of people who do trust falls because some of you, you’ve seen me show videos of videos of those where they have failed, but doing things that are going to bring folks together, like serving your communities together. Right?
Dave Braun
01:12:27
Yeah. And sometimes that’s a little bit hard to do when you’re a remote team. But you can encourage people to do that on an individual basis and bring their stories back to the team and celebrate those things. I wanna go back to one of the things that you said, and we can touch on some of the services in the community. But have you ever seen that movie called, “We are Marshall”?
Larry Broughton
01:12:54
I don’t believe so. Tell me.
Dave Braun
01:12:56
So it happened in—I think it was 1970 or 71, like almost the entire football team of Marshall University and I think it’s Ohio plane crash and they all died, coaches, the whole team, everything.
Larry Broughton
01:13:14
My heart just sunk. Yeah.
Dave Braun
01:13:15
Yeah. And so the movie is about them resurrecting the program and the struggles and all that kind of stuff. And I think it was in this movie—they were back then in NCAA football, you were not allowed to play freshmen. They couldn’t play on the field, but they had to get a special dispensation or whatever, to allow their freshmen to play because that were the only people that they could get to come to their team. But one of the things that happened is, I mean, they were getting rocked a course because they’re all freshmen and maybe a couple of experienced folks against these bigger teams. But one of the things that they did is their first touchdown in a game, they celebrated. And so they were able to, in the midst of this tragedy, in the midst of all the stuff going on, there was a little victory and they all celebrated it and helped them to come together. Even though they got wiped out, they celebrated that victory and it started bringing the team together.
Larry Broughton
01:14:19
What’s the name of that movie?
Dave Braun
01:14:21
It’s called. We are Marshall.
Larry Broughton
01:14:23
We are Marshall.
Dave Braun
01:14:25
I think I may have it on DVD. When you come over, you can borrow it.
Larry Broughton
01:14:28
What is this DVD of which you speak?
Dave Braun
01:14:32
Yeah. It’s actually old enough that it’s a DVD.
Larry Broughton
01:14:34
I don’t even know if I have a DVD player.
Dave Braun
01:14:37
But it was on Netflix. Not too long ago. I’ve watched it a couple of times, the star is Matthew McConaughey, he does a great job in it. So, I think as far as team cohesion goes…
Larry Broughton
01:14:52
Tragedy brought those guys together.
Dave Braun
01:14:54
Yeah. And so even—but tragedy brought ’em together, it was threatening to tear them apart. But a great leader will find what they can celebrate within the tragedy. And I think one of the great ways to bring a team together is just to celebrate the good things that are happening, whatever it is. I mean, you guys are all in business, listening to this, you’re in business to serve your clients and do amazing things for them. Celebrate all those little victories that you’ve got. You know, you completed this for a client or they came back and they said, Hey, you know, my business has grown doubled because you guys have done certain things for us. Or, you know, you’ve taken this thing off of my plate, I don’t have to worry about it and I can go over here and make sales or whatever it is. Celebrate those things. And I think as leaders, we’ve got to look for those things that we can celebrate and seek them out, ask our clients, some of your great clients, ask them. Why did they even go with you? Why are they still paying you? So anyway, I think that’s one of the best ways to do team cohesion. If your team understands how they’re making an impact to the company’s clients, to your company’s clients, it really goes a long way. It goes a long way to inspire them.
Larry Broughton
01:16:15
I love that a lot because boy, is it easy for team members to curl up in the fetal position after a loss and not bite on. But one of the—this is kind of an obvious one because it’s, everybody understands the importance of it. And it gets a kind of wrapped it up in this trust fall thing, but find fun things to do—
Dave Braun
01:16:43
Yeah.
Larry Broughton
01:16:43
—with each other. Like you’re saying, celebrate the little victories in your office. Now, I was young enough to be living in San Francisco and the Silicon Valley area during the dot com boom and bust. And back then everyone was talking about, oh my gosh, they ride segways through their office, or they do put beach balls around the office or they do all these goofy things. And it got to the point where it went way overboard and people had to start reigning it back in because everyone was having fun and no one was making money. So there is a balance. But you need to identify what is the personality of your organization? How can you celebrate fun? How can you laugh with each other? How can you share experiences with each other? I think that’s really important, whether it’s the gamification of work, which happens a lot. A lot of people are finding that very successful in their organization, not in every organization, but there are a lot of organizations where they gamify everything, whether it’s sales victories or whether it’s pieces produced, whatever it is. Some people respond to the gamification of work. Your organization might not, you don’t need to put pigeonhole your organization into some—if you’re around Pega, doesn’t need to go under a square hole, but you might find that might work a little bit. So laugh a lot, gamify if you must, but enjoy yourself.
Dave Braun
01:18:12
Yeah. Another thing too, is that I’ve gotten a lot more enthused about my own company and what we’re doing. And one of the reasons is I found out I was losing something and—
Larry Broughton
01:18:26
Your soul?
Dave Braun
01:18:28
I was losing. So I’m showing everybody, if you’re listening to this, I’ve got a cup with my name on it. And then in the back of it has my top five strengths, starts off with learner.
Larry Broughton
01:18:39
These are Gallup Strengths by the way.
Dave Braun
01:18:40
Gallup Strengths. And I was missing that. I was not forcing the issue on my own, in my own time, is to learn things. And it’s funny, Larry, is learner is one of the top strengths that so many people have. And that’s very common in the top five. And then I think in my team, it’s there and with everybody. And so I’m working on figuring out, how do I embed learning within our company in a way we can all take advantage of it. One of the things I’m doing now is recording some videos of what I’m learning on certain things, having other people do that as well. One of the things that I need to share with you is, I had Daph do some research into Alignable, like, what’s good about it and all that stuff.
Larry Broughton
01:19:27
Dave, Dave, Dave, I’m laughing folks because this is so Dave, but go ahead. It’s awesome by the way.
Dave Braun
01:19:35
Yeah. Add her do some research into it and she put together a presentation and reported a video and shared it with the team. And so, I think by us doing that within our team and you guys can do that as well, sharing what you’re learning, what’s going on in your life. That helps team cohesion as well.
Larry Broughton
01:19:52
Yeah. I think that’s really good. You know, another tip, I think that might help with team cohesion, Dave—I’m sorry, I’m still laughing, so classic, Dave— is realizing that neither you nor your team members will live on forever. And so the question of sustainability or a successor plan, I think is really important, that will build cohesion. Because I can tell you, at one point you will get to that age. Let’s say that you’re 20 now, or let’s say that you’re 60 now. Some people are gonna start scratching their heads and say, what’s the next chapter of this organization?
Dave Braun
02:20:35
Yeah.
Larry Broughton
02:20:36
And we were talking about cohesion here, right? How do we keep it glued together? How do we move forward? And I’m always surprised Dave, how few people think the business that they’ve been running for 20 years, 30 years, in some cases, 5 years, they don’t even realize that they have an asset that they can sell. Do you know that most small businesses don’t sell? Do you know that they wind them down? Think about the plumbing company. Think about the deli, the dry-cleaning store. They wind them down instead of actually realizing, I have an asset here. So if you were talking cohesion, start thinking about that. What’s the next chapter of the organization look like for not just you, but for your team members. I think that would feel some cohesion.
Dave Braun
02:21:27
That’s a good one.
Larry Broughton
02:21:29
Oh, I’ve got ideas, Dave
Dave Braun
02:21:32
There’s that for sure. And another thought is Larry, we’re constantly preaching, investing in the development of your team members, giving them opportunities to learn and grow, to get new skills and all that. Because that, as you’ve said many times, and it just makes so much sense. That’s one of the reasons that people leave. Well—
Larry Broughton
02:21:56
Even an organization.
Dave Braun
02:21:57
Even an organization. Well, let’s look at it. Let’s look at this as opposed to people leaving because they’re not getting professionally developed. Let’s look at it this way, is you can have more team cohesion, and have your team members together because they are all getting developed. And they’re all learning new things and new skills and growing and helping the organization in new ways. And you’ll never know, if you don’t do this, you never know what’s gonna show up, what skills are gonna show up, what passions are they’re gonna be in some of your team members, unless you’re learning and growing.
Larry Broughton
02:22:34
I love that. You’re talking about the Gallup State of the American Workforce Survey, where they talk about people feeling like they need to be professionally developed. I remember being in the military—I don’t know why I just thought about this. When someone got promoted, at least in the units that I was in, people were proud of them. People give you atta boys, congratulations, boy was this deserved. You know, I don’t see that so often in corporate America.
Larry Broughton
02:23:02
Not always, but sometimes I see people scratching it. Why did that happen to them? Who did they sleep with? What did they do? So I’d be careful of this, and ask yourself, are there guidelines, parameters, triggers, let’s say, by accomplishing this, then I get promoted, I grow this way. But I do think that professional development is so important because everyone wants to be on a winning team. It’s like being on a sports team and never going to practice. But you show up anyway, ultimately you’re just gonna be the anchor around everyone’s ankle. Because everyone should be investing in themselves. And certainly as a leader, you should be investing in your team members.
Dave Braun
02:23:58
Yep.
Larry Broughton
02:23:59
I think, yeah.
Dave Braun
02:24:00
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that investment is not just in new skills and professional development, but part of that is in leadership. Work with them, give them opportunities to be leaders within your organization.
Larry Broughton
02:24:13
Well, who was it? Who the heck was that, that says that the primary goal of a leader is to create more leaders, —forgive me, whoever it is, who said that I’d like to give attribution. I can’t remember who said it now. But the primary role of leaders to create more leaders. Think about your organization, if you didn’t have to do it all, but you had other leaders in your organization who could help pick up the slack, who could help you chart the course for victory, who could help you strategize more effectively, who frankly might be better at it than you are. Wouldn’t that be fricking awesome?
Dave Braun
02:24:47
Yeah.
Larry Broughton
02:24:48
Right.
Dave Braun
02:24:49
Yeah. It’s so funny we do these podcasts and it just reminds me of stuff that I need to do. I see you taking notes.
Dave Braun
02:24:57
I know. I’m always thinking, oh man, I need to do a little bit more on this. And you know, maybe another way that you can have team cohesion and have people feel good about where they’re working and what they’re doing is involve them in the decision-making process. Part of that involvement is gonna be asking them questions because they’re gonna come to you because you’re the owner of the company, for example and you’re like a great problem solver and you’ll have opinions and things, ways that you can help resolve anything. But instead of us giving our thoughts first, why not ask them theirs first? Like, what would you do in this situation? Well, what’s your thought? What do you prefer?
Larry Broughton
02:25:44
Dave, that’s so important. I think two of our clients right now, both who are high QuickStarts, both who lack systems follow-through skills. So having either of those people in the organization where they are in the life cycle of their business, trying to answer questions about operations and systems is like, so up far outside their wheelhouse that they shouldn’t even be doing it. So when they start asking their team member, like if they bring on an operations person, what do you think? How could we approach this differently? What should we do? People want to be asked those questions. Many team members have been begging their longing for that, their entire career. Instead of just being told what to do, instead of just following this system or this pattern over and over again, somebody’s really asking to engage with me.
Larry Broughton
02:26:50
Like, how do I see this play out? That would be awesome if I could do that every day. So you aren’t able to do that as a leader though, if you don’t know how you’re built from a cognitive perspective. Unless you’ve done kind of personality assessments. I think everyone knows my favorites are both the Kolbe A Index, and the Clifton Strengthfinders. And then I really like the Octagram, that kind of molds those two together. But listen, if it’s a diSC, if it’s Myers Briggs, if it’s any of these personality assessments, at least you have some information about how your brain works compared to the rest of the world. I think it would be so important if we could just get our brains around and just ask yourself, ask your team members. Hey, if you are the leader here, how would you suggest that we build a stronger community among our team members? How do you think we ought to be building a more cohesive team and then just zip it and listen and see what they have to say. It can go a long way.
Dave Braun
02:28:00
Yeah. And especially there’s no reason why you can’t identify somebody on your team. Assuming there is somebody and likely there is who would jump at the chance to lead this effort or to give suggestions.
Larry Broughton
02:28:16
Yeah. Historically we’ve done it. It’s our head of people services. Who’s been responsible for helping build the culture and defining that kind of thing. But I think you’re right. You’re gonna have to find someone in the organization to do it.
Dave Braun
02:28:28
Yeah. Well, we talked a lot about team cohesion. Let’s see. A couple of things that we talked about, have fun, laugh as a team, celebrate the little victories, look for how you can have significance in your communities. And even though you’re remote, bring that together in and celebrate that. We talked about professional development, more professional development, give them opportunities to lead and train them. And then we talked about making sure you understand yourself so that you can ask the right questions of folks. Did I miss anything else?
Larry Broughton
02:29:11
We start rifting and I dunno. There’s probably a bunch—
Dave Braun
02:29:14
I know. I think I missed something.
Larry Broughton
02:29:18
I’m sure there are a lot of things, but you both get. Go back and re-listen to this, listen this over again if you miss some tidbits. But as an entrepreneur, you’ve got a great opportunity to serve your community, serve your family, break those multi-generational change of poverty that have cursed you. Create a place where people feel dignity and respect. Boy, wouldn’t that be awesome, so that people loved coming to work with you.
Dave Braun
02:29:48
Yeah.
Larry Broughton
02:29:49
It’s a real honor. It’s a real honor to be able to do that.
Dave Braun
02:29:52
Yep. That’s awesome. All right. Well, thank you everybody for being with us today and listening to us. We talked about a lot of stuff about team cohesion. Like Larry said, go back and re-listen to it. Take your notes there. Just take one little aspect away from this, just one thing, like one of the things that I’m gonna do is I’m gonna work a little bit harder on creating better leaders in my organization and actually working with a couple of folks that show a lot of promise and guiding them, correcting and working together with them. That’s one of the things that I’m gonna do. What is it that you’re gonna do? Put that in a comment below this video, if you’re watching this on YouTube or send us an email, you can do that at Hiremyva.com if you want. But remember folks, building a team is the way to reclaim your freedom.
Dave Braun
03:30:41
It’s work. It’s not easy. We’ve talked about it that here, but it is the best way to get your freedom back. We’re here to help you, of course, with our Course and Community, our White Glove Service, where we find the Rockstar VA for you. We’ve got our podcast. So three things we’d love for you to do right now and we’d really appreciate it. Number one, subscribe to the podcast, if you haven’t done so already. And then number two, give us a rating, preferably five stars, or leave a comment below this video. Any comment to help us get the word out. And then number three, go to Hiremyva.com for more information on our Course and Community and our White Glove service. We’re helping a lot of folks through our course, community, our podcast, everything that we’ve got going through Yoogozi, Victory, HireMyVA. Just go to Hiremyva.com for more information, send us an email, we’ll guide you in how you can be helped by us. So go to Hiremyva.com for more information.
Larry Broughton
03:31:41
That’s it. All right, Dave. Thanks for doing this. Thanks for being on the journey with me. All right, my friends. God bless you. God keep you. God hold you. All right. Go get ’em. See you later.
Dave Braun
03:31:50
Bye. Bye folks.
