How Do You Get the Right People Doing the Right Things Right?

The 3 Pillars of Team Management

If you want to grow your business, at some point you need to make the shift from Operator Owner to Leader-Owner.

That means the results don’t come from your hands anymore. They come through the efforts of others. Your job is to lead your people through what to do, how to do it, and what good looks like.

In other words, you need to get the right people doing the right things right.

So how do you do that?

There are three pillars: strategic direction, your people strategy, and your management strategy. Let me unpack each one.

You can watch the video or scroll down for the text version.

Pillar One: Set the Strategic Direction

Strategic direction is about getting everybody on the same page. Four things make it up.

• Vision
• Mission
• Values
• Strategic Plan

Vision

Vision is the big picture of what we’re trying to do.

Here’s a great example:

“I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” – Martin Luther King

MLK expressed it personally, but he was articulating something every one of the hundred thousand people at the Washington Monument already wanted for themselves.

That’s what a vision is.

Not some high-falutin’ statement, but a picture of the future everybody can buy into.

Mission

Mission is how we get there and why.

You’ll recognize this one:

“Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Her five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.”

Where you’re going is the vision.

How and why you’re going is the mission.

Values

Values are the standards you don’t debate.

Why are the Ten Commandments written in stone?

Because we don’t argue about them.

“Thou shalt not kill” is a core value, a standard we agree to hold ourselves to.

Zappos built its whole point of difference on its family core values, and ten years later sold to Amazon for $1.2 billion.

The founder will tell you those values were the cornerstone of it all.

Strategic Plan

A strategic plan is your picture of where you’re going over about a year.

Most people think the purpose of a strategic plan is to create a grand vision of what we’re building together. (And that IS part of it.)

The real purpose is alignment.

A strategic plan is 1% vision and 99% alignment: getting everyone pulling in the same direction.

So, the first pillar of Strategic Direction: how do I get everybody pulling in the same direction and on the same page agreeing on what results we’re expecting to achieve?

Your people strategy is how it gets implemented at the level of individuals.

Pillar Two: Build your People Strategy

This pillar includes these:

• Org Chart
• Position Descriptions
• Performance Appraisals
• Performance Incentive
• Team Mtg. Rhythm

Org Chart

An org chart tells everybody how they fit together.

Most owners picture a traditional hierarchical, military model. But that’s often not the right one.

Org charts can be fluid. What they always do is answer: “How do I fit in? What part is mine? Who am I next to?”

For example, I worked with an owner who went from solopreneur to eleven people in two years.

He came to me with that military model in his head, but he’s in software, where teams form around six-week sprints.

Once he saw other examples, he realized his model didn’t fit.

Position Descriptions

A position description is the bottom-up view.

It lets an individual know what they’re expected to do, what results they’re expected to produce, and how they’ll know they’re doing well (without depending on their boss for every bit of feedback.)

Performance Appraisals

Performance appraisals tell people whether they’re on track.

They’re meant to give people the kind of feedback that helps them understand: are they doing well?

Where do they need help?

Where does their contribution need to improve?

Too often they’re rigid and stiff.

If that’s how yours work, you’re doing it wrong.

Nothing in a performance appraisal should surprise either of you.

An appraisal is just the formal confirmation of the performance conversations you’ve already been having all year.

Performance Incentives

Performance incentives mean some part of everyone’s pay depends on delivering against an agreed standard.

Say someone earns $25 an hour and wants $30.

Design it so that extra $5 is earned by delivering the results you’re after.

Then add room to reach $32 if they exceed the standard.

If they’re only making $26 because they’re not delivering, that’s on them.

You owe them guidance and training, but if they can’t or won’t do the work, it’s probably time for a decision.

Team Meeting Rhythm

A team meeting rhythm turns the annual plan into day-to-day coordination.

Monthly, weekly, and daily.

The daily huddle takes about fifteen minutes.

Everyone with an area of responsibility comes ready to answer three questions.

1. What’s up? They tell you what matters to them today, and you compare it against what you’re expecting, closing any gap before they leave.
2. Where are you stuck? Maybe parts are short, maybe someone’s sick.
3. By what measure do we know we’re delivering?

Pillar Three: Management Strategy

Now: how do we actually implement all of this? That’s your management strategy.

• Action Plans
• KPI’s
• Operations Manual
• SOPs/Checklists
• Dashboard

Action Plans

Everybody’s action plan rolls up, so the sum of them delivers the strategic plan.

What are the steps of a great action plan?

First, you’ve got to know where you’re going, with measurable goals.

You’ll also need a list of activities to get there.

Those activities often look like projects, and projects are big schemes that need to be broken into component parts, or actionable steps.

You need deadlines, accountability, an agreed-upon finish line and finish date.

KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)

KPIs give everyone a measure to judge whether they’re delivering what’s expected.

Operations Manual

An operations manual (your playbook, your SOPs and checklists) sets the agreed way you execute.

Dashboard

The dashboard is a mechanism we can refer to in our daily, weekly, and monthly meetings so everybody knows what’s on track and what isn’t.

A simple way to look at this is to use a traffic light system: what’s the green light, what’s the yellow light, and what’s the red light?

If there are 92 things happening in an organization and 80 of them are working well, all 80 get a green light.

They’re fine, so there’s no need to pay attention.

Say 10 of them have yellow lights; those need further guidance, instruction, or help.

And two are red. These are extreme circumstances where something needs to change immediately

When you get the right people doing the right things right, wonderful things happen (but they might make you feel nervous).

I have a client who owns a nursery.

One afternoon around two o’clock she thought, “I’m done for the day. I think I’m going to yoga.”

Then she caught herself: “I can’t go to yoga, it’s April.”

And then she realized she could. Everything was in place. Everything was working.

There’d be things to handle tomorrow, but she wasn’t handcuffed to the business. Because everybody knew what they were expected to do and what good looked like.

When you get to this place in your business, many owners feel nervous. “Why isn’t my phone ringing a hundred times a day?”

But that quiet is confirmation that you have the right people doing the right things right.

You can go to yoga.

And you’ll finally have the time to do the big-picture work: to architect, to design, to build the business.

Want help getting the right people doing the right things right in your business? Coaching is the fastest way to get there. Book a complimentary 15-minute call to see if it’s a fit: Book a Call with John