The Profit Builder Unscripted

Best of: Result vs. Task - Your Key to Freedom

• Vicki Suiter

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If your tired of people not following through then make sure to listen to this episode!

In this episode, I break down how to shift from managing people to managing outcomes - and how to get consistent follow through!

In this episode, you’ll learn:

  • Why task-driven leadership creates lack of follow through
  • The difference between tasks and results
  • The key to getting consistent results from your employees

Simple takeaway:
Define the result. Then manage to it.

Watch the video: https://youtu.be/gxskJUJY9KQ

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Welcome back to the profit builder unscripted. Today we're talking about how do you shift out of the role of micromanager and really find more time in your day by learning some really key distinctions about how to manage your team differently. All right, let's jump in.

For anybody who's ever managed people, could probably most of us agree that we don't wake up one day just knowing how to manage people. And for a lot of people, I see that they really struggle with being a leader and a manager and trying to get people to do what they say they're gonna do, follow through, take ownership. And I was thinking about my experience of learning to manage people in my early career. And I had, I did not enjoy it. ⁓ I just had a really tough time trying to understand how to motivate people, how to get people to produce consistent results, how to take ownership. But I also had all of this stuff about this thing of I have to work just as hard as my employees do. And I have to show that I'm not asking them to do more than I'm doing. And, you know, if, they were not performing or I needed them to do something extra, like I thought that the way to get them to perform better was to buy them treats or gifts or, know, an acknowledgement. Well, I'll say goes a really long way. ⁓ I just, in those early days, I like, I was trying all these different things. 

I didn't have really great role model that I had worked for that showed me how to be a great leader and to be a good manager and how to inspire people and how to have people be able to produce consistent results. And in my early career, I didn't really want to acknowledge that I didn't know what I was doing. And so I kind of like, you know, I just sort of powered through it. And when I left my corporate career in many years ago and from a job that I was working 60 to 70 hours a weekend and I had a team of six people working for me and I just, didn't love it. I mean, I enjoyed the work part of it but I didn't love all of the rest of the crazy hours and I didn't enjoy managing people. I just found that it was really a struggle. And after I started my business about I was kind of glad that like, I only have to depend on me. It's just me having to, you know, do the work and I only have to do what I know to do. And I don't have to try to motivate or inspire or, know, whatever I was doing to get somebody to do work better, faster, whatever.

But then four years into starting my own business, I found myself back to working 60 to 70 hours a week. I was exhausted. At the time I was about to become a single mom. so I really did not ⁓ relish the whole thought of having to hire somebody. I didn't want to disappoint my clients. I really liked that my business was growing. I appreciated that but kind of in this dilemma. And I remember talking to my mom and I was complaining about like, I was working so many hours and I don't really wanna hire somebody and I'm afraid to hire somebody and what if they don't work out? And so much of what I know, I've learned through the school of hard knocks. I don't know if I could teach somebody to do what I do. And she said, listen, she said, if something happened to Taylor, my son, would you do, you know, what would you do if you, how would you run your business? Cause I didn't have the luxury of not working. That wasn't part of the equation in my life. 

And I, and she just said, you know, if you had to stay home, now understand this was many years ago, well before zoom or you know, computers were still new. Okay. And she said, you know, what would you do? if you had to do your business differently and you couldn't go out to clients all the time. And I said, well, obviously I'd have to hire somebody. And she goes, and how would you figure out how to get them to do the work? And so we kind of talked through it a bit and I was like, ⁓ okay, that was actually a really good frame for me to be able to sort of shift my mindset about it. If I had to stay home, I would figure out a different way to do it. And it made me just look at managing and leading differently. And so I started writing down all these things of what do I do with clients and how do you know, what are all the steps I take? What are all the tasks I do? And then I wrote a job description and I started interviewing people and interviewed a bunch of people. And then I met Beth and we just hit it off instantly. We really liked each other. We just kind of had this very, we actually, came from the same hometown, which was kind of funny because it was all the way across the country. ⁓ But we, you know, we, just seemed like she was really knowledgeable, had the experience I was looking for. And I thought, okay, this is a great fit. This is perfect. So she's, when she started working for me, I, you know, introduced her to all of our clients. I went through with her and like we were doing review work, financial review work at the time. And ⁓ I was like, okay, teaching her all the steps and everything I did. And then a couple of months in, I was like, there you go, off you go, you go do it now. And ⁓ as she started to work through the list of tasks I'd given her, she'd come back and then we'd sit down and go over it and...

And pretty soon, like I realized that the amount of time that it was taking for me to check her work wasn't really saving me much time from what I had done. I was basically micromanaging her. And then I also noticed that there was this like this, like she would come to me with problems and she would say, well, here's the situation. And then I would have to figure out a solution. And then she would go and do whatever it is that she did to fix that problem or investigate an issue further. And then I also started to get some phone calls from clients that said, know, hey, doesn't ask me as many questions as you do. Are you sure she knows what she's doing? Like you and I would talk about things and we don't talk very much. And so that kind of got my radar up. I'm like, like, you know, is she looking at all the right stuff? And so I sort of doubled down at that point and I was like, maybe I need to spend more time with her. Maybe I need to check her work more. And so all of a sudden, now I was really back to spending, like she'd spend a couple hours at a client. I'd spent an hour and a half with her going over what she had done. And again, a few months passed and I'm like, I am no further ahead. I'm still working these crazy hours. And because I'm still in the mix of all of this with her. And I thought, maybe I just need to let her go. Maybe this isn't working out.

Maybe it was just a bad idea. And it was around that time I was listening to, was on tape while I was driving along, I was listening to Stephen Covey's, Habits of Highly Effective People. And he was talking about what motivates people and about empowering people as a leader to take ownership. He was talking about this whole idea of how do we treat employees and how do we manage people? And do we treat them sort of like tools or?

Do we really give them the opportunity to have ownership in their job? it just like the lights went off for me. And I started to realize that like with Beth, that the issue was me and with all those people who had worked for me in my previous corporate career, that the issue was me and how I was seeing my role as a leader, first of all, and second of all, how I was operating with them.

It's just like that light bulb went off and I was like, I need to learn more about being a leader. I need to learn about being a good leader. And I started studying some of the great thought leaders on the topic, like Jim Collins and Michael Gerber and reading all of these books and listening to tapes. And I was like, ⁓ my approach of how I was doing things with Beth and how I'd done things with other employees was to give them a bunch of tasks. And really I'd been treating people like helpers as opposed to treating people like they were completely competent and capable to own a result and not giving them really the whole picture. And the analogy I use is I work with predominantly construction industry, right? And I use the analogy that it's kind of like, Imagine that you don't give your employees the blueprint or the schematic or a budget of how to do a project. You just go tell them the scope, you know, the details to do. And then what you end up is you end up having a bunch of people who are helpers and things are inefficient and it takes a really long time and everything goes through you. Like there's gotta be a system to know where you're headed to what the result is. You would never start a project without being clear about what the end result is. But we do that all the time with employees. We're not really clear about what the end result is. 

And even if you look at job descriptions a lot of times, what they actually are is more like task lists as opposed to what are like, what's the big picture results that we're going after. And when I started those, realization started to come to me. I looked at how I'd been operating with Beth and then I'd given her this long list of tasks to do. And I oriented her to, you do this task, this task, this task. But I wasn't orienting her to what's the result? What's the blueprint? What's the end thing gonna look like when you're done? And how, and then, so that was the first thing is I started to shift her job description, which I now call position agreements.

⁓ because I hold them that they're in agreement about what are the results of that position. And I rewrote it and I sat down with her and I went, let's talk about what's the results that we're after in this job. And then what are some better tools that we can give you for you being able to give me feedback about what happened when you're out there working with a client and that instead of you coming to me with questions, I'm gonna invite you to come to me with questions with a solution, potential solution, like how do you think it should be handled? And so we started slowly shifting that relationship and shifting for, instead of me micromanaging what she was doing, her being really clear about what the result was. If she didn't have a question, she'd come ask me. She had started to do some different reporting and feedback to me to let me know what happened as opposed to me sitting down and working with her for an hour and a half to figure it out and then call the client. Well, we worked through this over several months. And as I started to see change happening, our meetings went from an hour and a half to about 20 minutes to 30 minutes.

And really dramatically impacted the amount of additional time I had. And she started to really be more accountable to, all right, what am I, like, what's really my job with this client? It's not doing these tasks, but it's to make sure that these things happen, right? Like she started looking at where have I, have I achieved the result we're after? And if not, then she's asking questions of the clients, she's asking questions of me.

We're talking about things. And as I started to see the change with Beth, I started to implement what I was learning with clients. And I was starting to talk with them about the importance of position agreements that are results driven versus task driven. And I started to see a dramatic change in their businesses and how they led their team as well. And the thing that it did is not only has it built a lot of really great leaders and managers, but also business owners and leaders who are now not micromanagers. you're out, you know, I can see how they've shifted from being in the middle of everything to managing the big picture with their team and managing for results versus managing all the particles and pieces. That has resulted in, and it did for me. So in those next two years with Beth,
remember, I was ready to fire her, right? ⁓ In those next two years, I ended up moving from working 50 to 60 hours a week to working an average of 35 hours a week. And I was very detailed and meticulous in those days about tracking my time and how much I was working, whether it was in the office or with clients. 

 And in those next couple of years, I had made more in those next two years than I had in any of the four years prior and I had a better quality of life. I was able to spend more time with my son. I was enjoying what I was doing more. She and I had much better communication and a much better relationship. She ended up working for me for almost 10 years. One of the best employees I ever had loved working with her. And it just, that experience taught me so much. And I've seen this time and again too, as I've worked with clients on how do you start to shift that relationship from having your employees be helpers to actually having them take ownership for a result. There's several videos ⁓ on YouTube that you can check out of mine that will kind of digs deeper into how do you develop a position agreement or how do you get clear about what those deliverables are. 

And ⁓ I think probably I'll be sharing some more in the podcast about that journey and how I did that. But I wanted to share that with you because, you know, I just see people, you know, we struggle, like we don't wake up one day and just know how to manage and lead people. when, what I love is when we can start to make those distinctions and learn how to empower people to own a result versus a task. It does this amazing thing because fundamentally as human beings, all of us want to have a sense of contribution, value, belonging, mattering, right? No matter what you do, I don't care if you're the labor, the janitor or the president, like we all fundamentally as human beings have that desire. And the thing that I've learned is that when we can tap into that with our employees,

I don't mean like just like I've told you what to do now, I abdicate it. It's really, you know, so much of being a good leader and being able to support your team and being successful is having good feedback and good data. That's, it's critical. So it's not like you just have a conversation and then it's over, right? It's, took Beth and I a long time and we worked through a lot of the kinks and, and you know, feedback. One of the things I say if it can't be measured, it can't be managed, not by them and not by you. So data and feedback is critically important. But when you do that and when you invite people to step up to their next greatest level of potential, it is a gift that we give people. And I don't mean like throw them out there and let them figure it out on their own, like probably you and I, you know, lot of us did along the way, but how do you mentor and guide them? the thing I found with Beth is that when I got really clear about what the result was, like the lights went on for her. And then we started having a different kind of conversation. Cause now we were managing to that blueprint of what's the criteria for success. 

So anyway, I hope you have found this to be helpful. ⁓ One thing I would recommend is, well, two things. First of all, I would ask, if you found this to be valuable, please share it. Share it with somebody else that you know who is a manager or leader who could maybe use ⁓ some advice or some help. And then secondly, make sure to check down the resources down below. ⁓ My course, and I'm not trying to sell my course, but if you wanna learn more, by all means check out the Build Your Dream Team course that I offer.

It's got some great, it really walks you through sort of all the details of what I learned all those years ago and what I do have been doing with clients for 30 years now in helping them build great teams. All right, ⁓ thanks for being here today and I'll look forward to seeing you next time on the Profit Builder Unscripted.


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Vicki Suiter

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