Episode 44 - Take Your Business To The Next Level

Craig Anderson:

Hi, welcome to Q&A on Breakthrough Leadership. I'm Craig Anderson.

Lou Quinto:

And I'm Lou Quinto.

Craig Anderson:

Today on Q&A on Breakthrough Leadership, Lou and I are going to be talking about how to take your business to the next level. Leaders, that's their job is take the business from where they are to where they want to be and sometimes that means kicking it up to a whole different level of the business. We're going to talk today about three areas that need to be focused on to execute on that.

Craig Anderson:

One, is to move your helpers to leaders in the business, and really cultivate that leadership team.

Craig Anderson:

Two, building alignment. Making sure you've got your whole team in line as it grows, which can be quite a challenge.

Craig Anderson:

Then three, communicate. How to take your business to the next level and make sure your team's along with you through communication.

Craig Anderson:

So Lou, why don't you kick us off to the first piece on how do you move your helpers to leaders?

Lou Quinto:

Well, Craig, I will say this, that this is difficult whether you're a small business owner or whether you're a supervisor or a manager in a big company, and it's letting go. Not trying to do everything yourself, letting other people do it for you. That is so difficult in a small business situation, it becomes primarily difficult because it's your baby, it's your business, and to let somebody else take control of the financial books, to let someone else take control of the marketing plan, it becomes an ownership issue. But even as a supervisor or as a manager in a major corporation, letting go is, you're letting go of part of your job responsibility you feel, and what you're supposed to be doing.

Lou Quinto:

But many people, when they realize it early enough, they realize that when they begin to develop, people, as you said, from helpers to leaders, they really allow people to take a leadership role in whatever function they are, you will find that you get so much done a lot quicker, plus you're using experience and knowledge that you don't have.

Lou Quinto:

That is also one of those results of giving it off to somebody else and letting them lead, but when it comes to moving helpers to leaders, as you called it, a lot of people, if they don't let go, they're going to be surrounded by helpers their entire time.

Lou Quinto:

As someone, if that's what I know you're expecting of me, I'm just a helper, I'm just going to be a helper. So if I see something that needs to be done then, "Not my job." You really need to take and cultivate that leadership to get people to be motivated and have the enthusiasm to do something that's not on their job description.

Lou Quinto:

I remember one of my mentors early back told me, "Lou, if you want to be successful in the company, you've got to go around and look for the empty cans and constantly pick up the empty cans because those empty cans are things other people don't want to do."

Craig Anderson:

Oh great. Yeah. One way I've talked to some leaders when they're needing to let go of something, I think we should have this whole session sponsored by Frozen, just let it go. The easy way to start making those transitions is look at the things that you don't enjoy doing, or look at the things you're not particularly good at, and let those things go first.

Craig Anderson:

Hire somebody who's smarter than you in that function who can take the leadership role on that function, where it's more of a relief to have that thing not on your day-to-day list, as opposed to, "Oh man, that was the thing I really enjoyed the most." Then over time, start carving your role out as the leader of where I'm going to focus, where I need to look at the whole business, but what do I really need to focus my attention on day-to-day and where do I want to spend my time?

Craig Anderson:

Then build your leadership team around it. Bring people in who have different skillsets than what you have and bring different values to the organization, not just in what they know how to do, but how they approach problems. That's a key piece to starting to build that leadership team. Now I just can't quit saying, "Let go," letting go of this idea that if I don't do it we can't get it done.

Lou Quinto:

Should we burst into song? come on let's ... (singing).

Craig Anderson:

That's not going to be good for anybody. But yes, it's a key piece and it's very difficult to make that transition. Even in big corporations, I've seen that when the person goes from being the salesperson to maybe a sales manager, maybe a regional sales manager, they're happy for the promotion, "But no one can take care of these three customers like I can take care of these three customers," and they don't want to let those go. And so, it's really hard to do it, but it's an important piece for leaders. It's part of being a leader is being able to say, "Hey, I'm going to be above certain things responsibility wise and oversee it, not in the weeds of it day-to-day."

Lou Quinto:

So let's jump into the second topic there, Craig, since you were on your soapbox there, and let me ask you about building alignment.

Craig Anderson:

Well, the challenge with any time you start having to execute through other people is you've got to make sure that things are in alignment. As much as I said, just a few minutes ago, there's value in people who approach things differently and look at things differently, there has to be a core set of values to your business. There has to be a core commitment to the vision for your business. There has to be a core value to the culture of your business.

Craig Anderson:

It's one thing to say, "Oh yeah, they have a little different attitude towards this thing," as opposed to, "We have a value that we treat our employees with respect," and the way this person gets it done is just by berating them and dragging them down every day. Right? So it's getting people who you can build alignment with on your leadership team, who can carry your message to the rest of the organization as a whole.

Lou Quinto:

Even you're talking about just teams, again, I'll go back and do that distinction between whether you're a small business owner or whether you work for a major or a large company, that if you're working on a project, aligning the different groups within a project to that goal that needs to be accomplished, what's our deadline? What are the deliverables that we need to deliver on? Who's involved? What domino needs to fall first in other words, for another group to be able to do their work?

Lou Quinto:

That's all part of that alignment going forward. So it's not just looking at a team, it's within a project or within a specific task where you've got different people together. What is that, and we've used this term before, what's the beacon? What is that milestone or that goal that everybody's shooting for?

Lou Quinto:

In order to make sure that you're building that alignment, you've got to have those goals because as business grows, if that alignment isn't there, you're going to have some people, they see something shiny over there and you've got one group running over there, or one group sees something shiny over there and "Ooh, that may help us and we're going ..."

Lou Quinto:

No, no, let's focus. Let us focus on what needs to be done and bring everything into alignment. Part of that alignment goes to the third part that we're talking about here and that has to do with communication. Communication, I think we've seen, particularly during this COVID situation, communication is probably more important than it's ever been. Hopefully, everyone's got refreshed in their communication skills and they've gotten better at it because they just can't lift their head up and look over the wall and say, "Hey, Craig, I need your help,"

Lou Quinto:

Now they've got to get on Zoom. They got to make a phone call. They got to send a chat. They got to send a text message or something like that. So hopefully we're becoming better communicators. But you know, as part of this whole thing, when it comes to communication, real estate agents say there's three primary criteria in real estate, location, location, location.

Lou Quinto:

Well, in business, it's communication, communication, communication, and we've got to become more honed on our skills in communication, whether it's a formal standup presentation or whether it's just a one-on-one where we're talking, to make sure at the beginning of the meeting, what you want to do is, "Here's our objective for this meeting." Say it out loud so that not only is it written on your agenda, but it said out loud, "This is our objective," write it on the board.

Lou Quinto:

Then at the end of the meeting, you want to make sure communication is wrapped up by saying, "What did we agree on? What are the tasks? Who's going to do those tasks and when are they going to get it done by?" So that you are constantly keeping everyone aligned with the same message and the same communication.

Craig Anderson:

Absolutely. Communication is such a core piece of it. If you wonder why three levels down from you or two levels down from you, people don't understand it, it's probably because you're not communicating it effectively as a leader. So it's banging that drum, as much as you're sick of hearing yourself say it, it's important that you're really underlining, here's who we are. Here's what we do. Here's where we're going, and continue to hammer those points home so everybody is aligned with you.

Craig Anderson:

You mentioned in your leadership team, it's great, we had a rule in my leadership team that we could reach maybe 80% agreement, but it was 100% agreement as soon as we walked out of that meeting room because you've got to have your leadership team on the same page. As soon as somebody walks out of that room and says, "Well, yeah, we did this," and then kicks up the eye roll, you're doomed. That's when you start getting a lot of factionalism and you start building more silos as opposed to the whole team.

Craig Anderson:

So the communication is something that the leader has to take very seriously to make sure that the messaging is going all the way through the organization so everybody knows how we're going to do it. It's not something that you can just easily do. It's important to get on, maybe you have to get in front of the whole group and even in the biggest corporations today, and we're seeing it now with COVID right, you can get in front of a whole lot of people pretty easily, and you almost have to?

Lou Quinto:

I'll just expand on what you talked about as far as, not only do you need to tell everybody it needs to be the same message.

Craig Anderson:

Right.

Lou Quinto:

It needs to be a consistent message. It can't change from group to group, to group. "Well, this group doesn't need to know that so we're going to leave this part of the communication out." No, no, no, no, no, everyone gets the same communication. So that this way, if I work in one department, you work in another department, I know we got the same message. The other thing you talked about was you can never say the same thing too many times.

Lou Quinto:

In fact, when I was working on political campaigns and talking advertising, political ads, studies show that in order for a candidate to really register in someone's mind, there has to be at least 12 impressions. So that means you run a campaign ad at least ... well more than 12 times, but the viewer has to see it 12 times until that message, that candidate name really starts sticking in their brain.

Lou Quinto:

I know that things have changed significantly because of social media where that impression rate has really become exponentially greater because we're being bombarded with so many messages. It's not like the only time we're getting them is when we look on TV. Now, when we go on Twitter, when we go on LinkedIn, when we go on Facebook, when we go TikTok, all of these ads that when we're scrolling through Google, we're just getting bombarded with information. And so, don't be afraid to repeat the same thing more times than your brain says, "Doesn't everybody know that?" No, you don't know if they know it. It may be the first or second time they heard it. So don't be embarrassed by repeating the same thing over and over.

Craig Anderson:

Absolutely. By the time you're completely sick of hearing yourself say it, you probably have to say it about 10 more times and then it absolutely will get through.

Lou Quinto:

That's the benchmark. Yeah.

Craig Anderson:

Yeah. The last point I will make on this is, I want to reinforce what you said about consistency because you've got an audience out there watching you and as soon as you start becoming inconsistent, they're going to be all over it and they're going to know what's going on and they're going to hold you accountable to it, which we just talked about in another episode.

Craig Anderson:

So yeah. All right, Lou, what are your big takeaways from our topic today?

Lou Quinto:

When it comes to taking your business to the next level, my key takeaway from this whole thing is alignment, is getting people aligned on one particular mission or vision, so that this way they know why they're working and what they're working for when it comes to taking your business to the next level.

Craig Anderson:

Absolutely. Lou, I'm just going to echo what you said, alignment is the key, and that ties into the communication piece, that ties to the vision and mission piece. It's all about being in alignment and getting everybody kind of focused on that North Star and the sculling analogy, right? When you see all those people pulling in the same direction at the same time, they put so much effort to get everybody going in the same direction at the same time and that's how you win. That's how your business is going to go to the next level is when you get everybody focused in the same place, heading towards the same goal and understanding what their role is in it. So I just want to echo your alignment piece.

Lou Quinto:

It's like that motivational poster of the crew team when they're rowing in the same direction and at the same time at the same pace, that's when they become successful. It's when one guy is screwing everything up because they're off keel, then you're not going to get anywhere fast.

Craig Anderson:

Okay. All right. Bring this home.

Lou Quinto:

Well, we hope you've enjoyed today's episode of Taking Your Business to the Next Level. If you've enjoyed this, please like it, share it, subscribe, so that this way you know when the next episode of Q&A on Breakthrough Leadership is going to take place. If you want to also, and you get bored while you're running or walking the dog, please go out to your favorite podcast platform and download Q&A on Breakthrough Leadership as a podcast. So until next time, keep your hands washed. Keep your distance. I'm Lou Quinto.

Craig Anderson:

And I'm Craig Anderson.