Hello. Okay. So we are back with the radically simple series where we are diving in to your guys's most pressing challenges and developing super simple solutions for you to go and take away and implement this. And this week we're covering a question I get a ton, which is how the heck do I improve my team when I am drowning in BAU or business as usual?
We're about to dive into that, but first I'm going to tell you a little bit of what's been going on in my neck of the woods. And don't worry, bear with me because it's going to relate back to exactly what we're talking about. And that is that over the weekend, um, my husband went and got himself an old 1980s K5 blazer.
And this was just like, Such a milestone for our family. I Remember three years ago We had been at the point of burnout like we were both working the big corporate jobs in the big corporate city You know, we were doing the hour long commute both ways into the city just to get Home pick up our kids get dinner on the table put them to bed do it all over again like I don't even know what weekends were.
Weekends were just catching up with everything we didn't get done during the week, you know laundry, dishes And we just stopped at some point. We're like, what the heck are we doing? Like we are just living to maintain our life and we aren't actually living and so We stopped right there and we developed a vision of what it would look like if we spent more time living and Some of the things that we put on there is, you know, a smaller house.
We had a beautiful home. But it also required a ton of maintenance just to keep up with everything going on, you know, cleaning it took forever. It just was a lot. And then, you know, we were living far from family. So we were commuting to see family a lot, which was added. We spent so much time trying to maintain all of this stuff going on, that we just didn't even have hobbies anymore.
And so another thing we said is we wanted hobbies. We wanted an identity outside of work. And my husband said the hobby that he wanted to pursue was fixing up an old K5 blazer. And so he has spent years researching and just waiting for the perfect time. And here we are, having moved closer to family. We made a big move earlier this year.
We downsized our house, we're in a little one story house that we absolutely adore. There's nothing better than being able to run from one side of the house to the other and get the whole thing cleaned in like 45 minutes. Bless. And now he's got this blazer. And so I just, it's just a silly thing, but it just makes me feel like we're doing it.
You know, here we are, we're checking these things off our vision board, we're making it a reality, and it feels so, so good. But, when he got home, with that blazer, he was able to drive it up onto a trailer to get it home, and then when he got here It would not start. It's a fixer upper.
It is not like, I mean, there are exposed wires everywhere. We weren't expecting, you know, much. It's supposed to be a hobby. But we were like, oh my gosh, what do we do? We can't get it off this trailer. And it's a diesel engine, which is something new, and that's something he wanted to learn, which great.
But at this point, we didn't have a whole lot of background on what we needed to be doing. And so we messed with it. We tried all the, things that he thought I just stood there with support. And then we got to the point where like, you know, maybe we just need to like physically push it off.
Like, maybe we can just push it off the trailer and like, hope to God, like I'll, I'll run and slam on the brakes and like, hope it all works out. And then I was like, you know what, let's stop. The better solution here is for us to find somebody who actually knows diesel engines to understand What possibly could be going on to get to the root of the problem and to actually do that fix?
And so I started calling around our neighbors and lo and behold one of them dad owned a Auto mechanic shop back in the day and we talked to him. He gave us some ideas and We were able to do a few little tricks to get it off the trailer started and ready to go
And it hit me, this is how some of us are operating our team right now. We are overwhelmed. We know something's wrong, but we are just trying to push through on brute force. We are physically pushing our team each and every day to make results happen. We are a team. In the weeds, fighting against those endlessly changing priorities.
You know, the overly complex processes that are drowning our team. We are constantly having to work against our processes because of the lack of clarity. The redundant steps, the amount of, busy work, admin work, the sign offs, the approvals, and we're working against each other. Everyone's stepping all over each other, pointing fingers.
It's not a one team mentality and we don't have time to sit there and understand what's going on. So what do we do? We just push through on brute force. We get in the weeds and as leaders, we try to physically hold it all together and just make it happen. And sure for a while we do, we make it happen.
But at some point we start to feel it. We start to feel the fatigue. We start to feel the overwhelm. We start to see our team get disengaged and we end up very much in that space that I was talking about at the beginning of this podcast, where we're like, I don't even know who I am outside of work anymore because every single day I'm waking up, running into the office or sitting down and logging into the office and I'm just fighting battle after battle and it doesn't feel good.
It doesn't feel fulfilling. It doesn't even feel like I've accomplished something at the end of the day except for survive.
And we are just dreaming of that vision of feeling on top of things of having a team that has the core foundations that is set up for success to where instead of us having to go in and hold the team together physically, that they have what they need to be empowered, to own their work, to go and execute.
And that we are able to come in and lead. Not do in the weeds, but lead, you know, develop, pour into our teams, you know, have that strategy, that vision, do the parts of leadership that we love, that we got into this career for in the first place. But let me tell you. That doesn't come with just simply continuing to try to push through on brute force.
I feel like a lot of us think, you know, one day we just got to get through this busy period. We just got to get through this project. We just got to get through, you know, this level of leadership. And then it will all get better, but that's just not how it works. If we don't put in the time to understand the mechanics of our team and how to improve them, it's not going to suddenly get better.
We could have left that truck on the trailer for, you know, weeks and just hoped that it got better. Every day going out there trying to push it off and see, and maybe we would have gotten stronger over time and been able to do it, but that's not a long term solution. The better solution is taking the moment right then and there and saying, okay, we decided to do this thing and we're going to do it right.
We're going to take the time to understand how this new engine works. We're going to figure out the inner mechanics and we're going to actually give it what it needs. And that's exactly what we've got to do with our teams. We've got to understand what's under the hood of our teams, what makes good teams run, what is the engine that drives high performing teams.
And we've got to do a little maintenance check on ours. And that's what we're going to dive into here. So I have done work with hundreds of teams across many, many different functions. And across those years of work. I have boiled down what drives a high performing team to four core functions.
This is the engine of a high performing team, a team that's making an impact, but doing so with ease, with focus. And that is strategy. We have a clear understanding of the vision that we are trying to achieve. What is the impact we are trying to make here? And we actually are staying focused on that. We have clear priorities around what we need to prioritize to get there.
We are making trade offs to, focus on those priorities. And we actually have a system in place, a low lift rhythm that's just as how our team operates to make sure that we stay on track with those priorities. No, I did not say status tracker, Trello, monday. com, 70 million status meetings a week, a low lift light process, a rhythm.
So that is strategy. The next is our workflows. In order to achieve that strategy, we actually have to look at the work we're doing in our team and how work flows through our team. So in this bucket, we are focusing on Are we doing the right work or are we drowning in busy work and we're stripping away that low value work so we have more capacity for high value work.
We're looking at how work is flowing through our team from one end to another, making sure that it's effortless, that we've stripped out the complexity, the unnecessary steps, the overly complicated handoffs. We're making sure that everyone's clear on their roles in moving work through our team.
Because that's how we produce value, our vision. And if our team is struggling through our workflows each day, then it is ten times harder for them to execute on that vision. The third one is teaming. It's how we as a team actually come together and execute on that workflows. There are too many teams out there right now who are operating as a bunch of individual little businesses.
A bunch of silos. We're not working together, we're working against each other. We each have our own strategy, our own vision that we're going after. And we just kind of hope that our leader at that highest level is going to piece these puzzle pieces together. That's not how teams work. We are one team working towards one goal.
And so teaming is all about how we bring these teams together, how we are able to collaborate cross functionally with ease. Not a bunch of, you know, cross functional meetings where we're talking in circles, and then we all leave and go do our own thing. How we meet in a way that's productive, how we share information in a way that's productive.
And then last but not least, we have culture, and this is making sure that we're building that culture of accountability, of empowerment within our team. So they feel fully confident and capable and owning their work and their ability to problem solve, to try and experiment without fear of failure.
It's that building up the trust in psychological safety so we're able to tackle those elephants in the room instead of letting them fester and distract our team. These four things right here are the core four elements of a high impact team. This is the engine that allows them to succeed. But for a lot of us, we haven't even stopped to think about these things.
We are just praying that this car keeps running, and if it stops, we are going to run behind it and push it. And that is exactly why so many of us feel on the brink of burnout. Instead, we need to stop pushing the car, take a beat, go around, open up the engine, and take a peek. Because if you don't care for these four things, over time they deteriorate.
They break down, they get more convoluted, more complex, they struggle to run. And for a lot of you guys, you didn't just build this team from the ground up, you inherited this thing. So this engine has had four different owners before you, and we have no idea what kind of care they gave to their workflows.
Building that culture, creating that strategy. And so for some of you guys, you inherited a heck of a mess, but we're not going to keep surviving with that engine that's not serving our team. We're going to pause and we're going to put in the work because if we actually do the work to improve this engine, it is going to serve us 10 times down the road because we're no longer having to physically push this car.
We're actually doing the work for it to run itself.
So some of you guys right now are like, Holly, I inherited that engine. That's like a complete and total disaster. And the title of this episode was, I don't got time because I'm drowning in BAU work. So what do we do? We don't need to just rip out the engine and put it in a new one. I think that's what a lot of people think is that we need to completely tear the thing out, burn it to the ground and put a new engine in.
And that's what is perpetuated in corporate culture of like, bringing consultants have these big transformation projects, these big org structure shifts, because we think that that's going to be the magic fix, but it's not. Cause like I said, engines require constant care. You can put a new, strategy, workflow, teaming culture into place, but It's going to change, right?
We live in a dynamic world of business. We constantly have new people coming in, new personalities, changing priorities, changing customer demands. And we have to maintain and adjust that engine over time to all of those changing demands. So it requires continuous care. And if something requires continuous care, we don't have time to be tearing it down to the ground and rebuilding it every five seconds.
Imagine if you know, every month you had to go into your car, tear the engine down, clean it all up and rebuild it. It's just not sustainable. So what did we do instead? We created a rhythm, a maintenance routine for how we care for our engines. We get the oil change, we put in those little maintenance rhythms that allows us to care for our engine so we don't need to rebuild it and burn it to the ground every month.
for it to continue to work for us. And that's the exact thing we need to do with our teams is how do we create this super low lift way that we can slowly maintain and build this engine back up to work at its highest potential. Without adding a crap ton of work to our plate.
The first thing we've got to do is we've got to pinpoint our gaps. What the heck about our engine is breaking down right now? That was the first thing that we had to figure out when we opened up the hood of this car. We had to say, what is going on? What is causing the problems we're experiencing?
Because right now, all those problems you are experiencing, they relate back to how this engine of your team is performing. The fact that you're not getting the results you want, the fact that you are seeing, errors, poor quality pop up, the fact that your team isn't, working together the way you want them to, the fact that your team isn't taking accountability and, owning their work.
All of those are not people problems. They are a problem with the system, the engine. Your team can only operate at the level that the engine, the system is operating at. Otherwise you put my broken down diesel engine into a sports race car and you're looking at the driver and you're like, why aren't you winning?
Why aren't you out there? Why aren't you, in first place right now? And they're like, hello, you gave me something that is not equipped to do what you're asking of me. And for some of you guys right now, your team is saying the same things. You are wanting us to own our work, but you didn't give us the clear strategy, the priorities, the direction.
the role clarity we need to do so. You want us to produce better results, better quality results, less errors in our results, yet you've handed us these workflows that are incredibly complex, incredibly clunky, that require us to go to seven different systems to do anything. So, of course we're not. You're wanting us to work together better, but we have this culture that lifts up individual performance where we are encouraged to get our individual results versus our shared results.
So, of course I'm not going to. Your system, this engine, is what drives the results you're getting today. The, pain points you're seeing today. They all relate back to this engine. So we've got to look at this engine and say, where is it breaking down? And guess what? I've made it incredibly easy for you to do that.
There's the operating system audit, which audits every single one of these core elements and gives you a beautiful, one pager showing you exactly where your critical gaps are and where your strengths are. And it's 1000 percent free and I'm linking it in the show notes. Go take it. Go take it, print it out.
So that way, you know exactly where your gaps are. Some of you guys right now are like reading books or listening to podcasts like this and you're like, oh, that sounds like a good idea and you're taking it forward and you're slapping it onto your team when that might not be what your engine needs.
Like, we could've opened up the hood of this car and been like, Eh, let's just start throwing things in it. But a lot of the times, we're doing more damage than good. Because, one, we're wasting our effort. We don't have a lot of capacity, yet we're just throwing things at our team without being strategic about our efforts, and every single time we add a new thing, we're adding complexity.
Oh, well, maybe they just need an SOP. Maybe they just need a RACI. Maybe we just need a, you know, a better Status tracking like project management workflow type system like Trello. Maybe we need a new role. Maybe we need more management layers. And we're just throwing all these things at our team and we're making it more and more complex.
We're making it harder for this engine to run because we're just piling more on top of it. What they need is for us to get in there and think strategically about where this engine is breaking down and make those targeted improvements. Once we go in and we understand, we've done that diagnostic on our engine and we know where the gaps are and where the things are that are operating.
Okay, because here's the thing, those things that if you take the diagnostic, it will break it down by like critical gaps, which are red, yellow, which means they're functioning, but they could be better. And green, which means it's a critical strength or a core strength. Those things that are yellow. We're not going to worry about right now, the things that are green, we're not going to worry about right now because our engine can only operate at the level of the things that are red.
So if we have an awesome culture, an awesome teaming, we have okay workflows, but our strategy is horrendous. Then it doesn't matter that our culture is that awesome. Our team will only operate at the level of the lowest element in our engine. Because we have a great culture, but we have no idea what we need to prioritize or where we're going.
So that's why they're struggling, is because the entire engine has to be optimized. So once we understand where those gaps are, the next thing we're going to do is not go overhaul the engine. We're not going to stress and say, we got to burn this thing down and go do all these things.
No, we're going to look at that red area with the lowest gap. So what is the one that got the lowest percentage? And if you have two that are tied, okay. Pick one. Pick one. It's fine. Trust me. Just pick one. And we're going to say, how can we make just small improvements to this? We're not going to go overhaul, let's say, a strategy.
We're not going to go overhaul our strategy overnight. We're going to say, how can we make just 1 percent improvements every single month? Every single month. And some of you guys are like, Oh, it's just not even worth it. You know, if I'm not going to put in this big overhaul, like why would I even care about these like little 1 percent improvements?
It's never going to be enough. It's never going to make enough of a difference. Well, guess what? You can sit there and keep trying to push this car, or you can make a 1 percent improvement this month. You can make a 1 percent improvement next month. And those things compound. And as they compound, they build momentum.
So now you no longer have to make 1 percent improvements because you've built momentum, you freed up capacity. So now you're making 5 percent improvements, 10 percent improvements. It's becoming a way of how your team operates. They're able to spot these gaps. They're getting involved. They're starting to bring forward solutions, and now we're making, you know, 20 percent improvements, momentum compounds, and I always like to equate it back to high performing athletes.
And teams like that. So if you think about high performing athletes, they don't just show up one day and they're like, I'm ready to win this race. I'm ready to win this race. So, you know, I've never, I've never run a day in my life. Um, so I'm going to go and look for some, you know, magical quick fix solution.
And then I'm just going to come run this race and like, make it happen. No, they don't just expect that they can do one thing, one big transformation and like suddenly they're able to win the race. It takes time and dedication to their craft and your craft is leadership. That is your craft. So we need to understand just like a runner does.
They sit there and they say, what are the core elements of being a good runner? Okay, I gotta build stamina. I need a condition. I need to take care of my body. I need to be healthy. I need to be eating right. I need to be getting the rest I need. Um, I need to be looking at my recovery routines. Am I resting and recovering my muscles the way I need to?
We can even get us specific to like aerodynamics and like the types of things I'm wearing when I'm running. Is it allowing me to run faster? The types of shoes I'm running. They study their craft and they say, how can I fine tune this over time? How can I push a little bit faster?
How can I try these new running shoes and see if these make a difference? They're constantly experimenting, experimenting and fine tuning their craft to get things a little bit better, just 1 percent better every single day. Leadership is your craft. Strategy, workflow, teaming, and culture are your core components of that craft.
So your goal as a leader is every single day, how can I get 1 percent better at doing those four things for my team? And that's not just going to improve your current team. That's going to serve every team you lead. From here on out at every single level, because you are fine tuning your craft. You're not just showing up at the starting line and saying, you know what?
I hope I can run this race. I've done zero work to, train. I'm just going to effort through it and hope it works. That's what some of us are doing right now. We've got to do the work. I'm not talking about giant transformation projects. I'm not talking about go develop this massive project plan to overhaul your team.
I'm saying focus on those four things and say, how can I make it 1 percent better this month? So let's get tactical. Looking at that. Audit that you did the OS audit, you have your gaps in front of you. It takes five minutes. Pause this podcast, go take it unless you're driving. Don't do that. But come back to it.
So looking at your gaps, let's say your gap is strategy. So two things you can go do is one, get a vision. If you don't have a vision, a end state in mind for your team, what is the impact we're trying to do? Let's go get that down, say if our team could only achieve one thing this year, let's just keep it to this year.
What would that one thing be? That's our vision. And then go and look at all the things you say are a priority right now, list them out on sticky notes and force rank them. What's the one at the top that's going to drive us closer to achieving our vision down to all the way to the bottom. Now the top, like three to five, those are the only ones we're focusing on right now.
This quarter, we're going into Q2. Those are the ones we're focused on. Everything else, those are a trade off. We're putting them in pause. How can you make a 1 percent improvement? Something little. It does not take you more than 45 minutes to bring your team into a room and talk about what's that one thing.
It does not take more than 45 minutes to force ranker your priorities. We just have to desire to do the work, to improve our craft. Let's say your biggest gap is workflows. Bring your team together. Give them a pad of sticky notes and say, What is the number one process preventing you from doing your best work?
Have them write them down on sticky notes, then group them up on a whiteboard. You'll start to see patterns. Everyone's writing down, you know, this process. Okay, let's go look at it and say, what is one way we can simplify this process? Maybe it's taking out one step. Maybe it's removing just one little sign off.
Maybe it's, cutting out one meeting that no one's getting value out of. Then go try it. Do it for a week or two. Then bring your team back together and say, what's one more way we can do it? 1 percent improvements. This is what we're doing in Radically Simple Workflows right now. They're mapping out their processes and we are making these small, fine tunes, tunements, what is that a word?
Um, to their processes to just get them a little bit better, a little bit easier. To execute and create that value. Let's say your teams are struggling to work together. Let's bring the ones who are struggling to work together in the same room and have them answer this question.
In order to be successful, what do you need from me? And have the one team answer and then say, in order for me to be successful, here's what I need from you. Have a conversation around it. Pick two or three things that we're going to agree to do moving forward to support each other. Maybe it's not that your team is struggling to work together.
Maybe they're struggling for over collaboration. Everyone needs to be in everything. We're CC'ing everyone on all the things. We're having a billion, million meetings. Do a meeting audit. This month, audit your meetings. Bring your team together, have the conversation. This is the thing you'll notice everything I do is with them, not to them.
We're always doing it with our team, not to the team, because one, that's your change management. You don't have to worry about change management plans if you design the solution with your team, but also it's 10 times faster. Too many of y'all are sitting there trying to understand the engine of this car and develop these solutions and build these plans on whiteboards.
Figure all this out and make it perfect. So you can roll it out to your team. You know, a faster way, go talk to the person driving the car every single day. They're the ones who knows what's going on. You don't have to spend four weeks, doing super intense process maps to figure out like the analysis behind which process is taking the longest time and blah, blah, blah, go ask your team, which process is a pain in their butt.
They're going to tell you in 30 seconds. Cut the analysis. It's a waste of time. Go talk to your team. Go talk to your team right now and say which meetings are a waste of your time. Give them the sticky notes. Have them write them up on a board. See where they're grouping together. If it's your weekly team meeting, we're not gonna get our pride hurt.
We're gonna cut it. Or we're going to improve it,
get the things that are preventing them from doing their best work out of the way. Maybe it is culture. Your team is displaying some behaviors that are not serving each other. Bring them into a room, have a conversation, ask the question, what behaviors are serving our team? What behaviors aren't?
Decide right then and there what behaviors we're no longer going to tolerate maybe it's that They're terrified of failing. They're so terrified of failing that they're constantly, you know Coming to you to look at everything and they're just so scared of acting of Owning their work because they're terrified of failing then how can we celebrate radical failure every single week?
In your meetings, let's talk about one way we failed this week and what we learned from it. And let's celebrate the fact that we learned from it and how we're going to do it differently next time. Improving your team is not some massive transformation. It is not some massive or structure shift. It is not bringing in a bunch of new roles or management.
It is not doing some massive, you know, process improvement plan. It is not some massive change management plan with like a bunch of fancy, you know, communications that we've all stressed about every single little word. Cause we don't want to take anyone off. Improving your team happens in the day to day.
You're drowning in BAU. You're so focused in the business. Fine. Continue to do the work, but do it a tiny bit differently. Just 1%. You're already having the meetings. So why can't we just strip out a few? You're already doing them while you're sitting in there. Sit there and say, is this meeting driving us closer to our vision or not?
Is this meeting productive or not? Audit it while you're sitting in the meetings. You're already moving through the processes. So just tell your team this week as we're moving through the processes. We're putting a bounty out. I want everyone to come to me with their idea for how to, we could improve one process.
They're going through them anyways.
Improving your team is not this massive add on, it is simply improving how you do it. Like that runner, they're just improving how they run each and every day, just with small simple shifts. That's it. That's how you actually drive real change. Change that sticks, change that actually transforms behaviors, change that actually transforms how you work.
And this is 100 percent why I built Liberated Leader. Tonight we're about to jump on our quarterly planning call. We do this every single quarter because I'm all about simple rhythm, so every single quarter we come together. We look over our four areas. They have a checklist. So I go deeper into each one of these four areas and what you need to strengthen that area.
And we look over their checklist about where their strengths are, where their gaps are at that deeper level. And we look inside the liberated lab, which has hundreds of solutions like these small little fixes, just like I went over some of those with you today. And we say, what are the ones we're going to focus on this quarter?
And we set an intentional maintenance plan for our team's engine, and then they go execute. And they've got me every step of the way through those hot seat calls, every month when they're running into struggles, Hey, this isn't really resonating. Hey, I'm not really seeing this, bring the improvements I'm wanting.
So then we get in there and we customize and we build something that works for their team. We're not slapping bandaid fixes on things. We are actually making shifts to the way their team works because that's real change. So right now, my challenge to you, get off this podcast, go take that audit, figure out where your number one critical gap is, and get in there and say, what is one way I can make this just a little bit better this month, just this month.
One little step in the right direction. Bring your team in, ask them, and then go implement. But put some check ins on your calendar. So if you're listening to this live, we're about to get into Q2. So I want you to put a check in at the end of April. So it's mid March. So at the end of April, put a check in.
At the end of May, put a check in. At the end of June, put a check in. And at those check ins, you're going to say, Okay, strategy was my biggest gap. I decided to do this 1 percent improvement for the month of April. How did that go? Is it working? Is it not? Where can I make a 1 percent more improvement? If it's working, how can I double down, make it bigger, better, faster?
If it's not working, how can I shift and try something different? Move through May, you already have your check in on your calendar. It alerts you. You're looking at it and saying, okay, again, what's going well? What isn't? How can I make 1 percent further improvement? You've got to hold yourself accountable to maintaining your engine or else that's how you're going to end up in this place of having to push it physically and hold it together.
Let's go do the freaking work and then blow up my DMS. I want to hear how it's going. I want to hear what you're trying. I want to hear about those experiments. You've got it. Y'all.
