Team Test: Your Team Strengths

Have you completed Part 1 Yet? You need to watch Part 1: Right Structure first before you dive in to Part 2: Right Strengths.

The TEAM TEST: 3 Part Series:

• Part 1: Right Structure
• Part 2: Right Strengths (the video above)
• Part 3: Right Metrics

Goal of this section:

• Learn Your Strengths (owner)
• Learn Your Team?s Strengths

Key?Learnings:?

• Evaluate Your Team
• Assess Their Strengths
• Map it to the Structure

Action Items:

1. ?Evaluate Your Team

• Grab your Team Roster (Completed in Part 1: Right Structure)
• Rate everyone at the job they are doing now (A, B, C, F)
• Rate each role if they are doing more than one

2. Assess their strengths

• Pick an assessment
• Owner takes assessment first (self assessment)
• Team takes assessment second

Link to take DISC assessment:
https://discpersonalitytesting.com/free-disc-test/

If you?re interested in other assessments, checkout this post:

Know Your Strengths

3. Map it to the Structure

• Add your teams assessment scores to your new Team Structure

Link to How to fire an employee:

How to fire an employee

Transcript: Download

Video Transcription provided by GMR Transcription Services.

The Right Strengths

In this video, we're talking about the right strengths. You need to watch the first video about the right structure before we get here because we need to use the piece from that to come here. Make sure to check that one first.

The goal for this one is to really show you what your strengths are. More importantly, what your team strengths are. So, we are going over why the heck that is even important to you. As long as they do they job, who cares. And we're going over the 3-step process that will show you how to evaluate them, figure out what their strengths are and we're gonna map it to that structure that we've talked about in the last video.

Let me say why this is important at all, way back when I was a go getter, I bought my first house at 19. I was an overachiever that wanted to make 6 figures in corporate as fast as humanly as possible. So, I end up becoming an engineer. I've got a degree in computers. I'm pretty go with what I did and I knew I could grit my teeth and I could just do everything. So, when I get ahead and got a promotion as manager, I was all in. I was making 6 figures at the age of 22. I was like this was the track to be a manager to keep going and actually achieve what I wanted which was the C Suite piece of the company I was in. The wonderful thing about was I was driven. The horrible thing about that was project management, while I can do, is definitely not one of my core strengths. It's not one which I can go all in and be excited in planning things. I love strategy and I love vision. But doing the nitty gritty details, I hate it. And I got burn out in less than a year and I hated waking up early in the morning even though I could work from  and have a very cushy job and made 6 figures. It quite beautiful actually because I should have been really enjoying my work. It was not a bad gig in any way. But the problem that I know now because it's not one of my core strengths, it took a ton of energy to do. I could pay attention to details but I need reminders all the time. I  love planning the core pieces but following through the accountability nitty gritty was really annoying to me. So, what happened is I did it but I wasn't really happy about it all and it didn't feel like it came naturally. I was going against the current.

And this is what I want you to think about with your own team. Because you might have people in your team which aren't doing the right roles, the right jobs because it's not within their core strengths. Not that they can't do it, especially if they are over achievers and go getter. There's a great book called Good to Great by Jim Collins. If you haven't read it yet, he really talks about and my mentor has told me this many times over that you are the bus driver and your goal is to have the right people in the right seats on the bus. When we look at the structure that we have before, not only do we need the right seats, we also need the right people in the right seats in the bus.

I'm gonna read a quick little quote from that book which I think would highlight for you which you are looking for. Jim Collins said this:

"You're a bus driver. The bus or company is at stand still and it's your job to get it going. You have to decide where you're going, how are going to get there and who's going with you. Most people assume that great bus drivers (business leaders) immediately started the journey by announcing to people on the bus where they're going, setting a new direction or articulating that corporate vision that you need. In fact, leaders from companies that go from good to great start not with where but with who. They start getting the right people on the bus and the wrong people off the bus. And the right people in the right seats and they stick with that discipline. First the people, then the direction. No matter how dire the circumstances."

That's the huge, amazing quote that I want you to sink in a little bit. No matter how dire the circumstances. Even if you feel like, I can't fire somebody, even if they suck, because I won't be able to do it. But what he is saying is that this is way more critical than just hitting the subset of the goal we need to go to.

Step number 1 is we are going to evaluate your team. This is actually something you can either do in the team roster and throw away because typically you don't want your team to see; in case you rate them horribly bad. Or you can write on another piece of paper or just burn it and throw away later. What we want, it's an exercise from the book, Who by Geoff Smart which is a great book.

In a nutshell, it's taking all those players that you have, those people from the bus, and rating them at the job that they are doing now. In the previous structure that we created, if they have more than one role, rate them per each role. Because they might suck at sales but they are really at some things that they are doing. And that's where we are trying to lighten the load on what they are not good at and push them towards at what they are good at. So that way they are actually doing the strengths that are worth for them.

Go ahead and create that list from your team roster whether in a separate piece of paper or you want to print it out and write next to it. Or print out that structure that we made before. Then, I want you to go through each person, even yourself, and rate it A, B, C or F. I'm gonna give you time to do this. Imagine this is a grading system in school. An A, you know what A means. A B, you know what a B means. C - average. F - no.

Do not listen to anymore of this video til you do that. Because what I'm gonna say next is important and imperative to that piece. So, I'm gonna give you minute. It should not take you took long. One minute to go ahead and do that right now.

Step number 2 of this process, and again if you haven't done it - stop right now and go do it. I know some of you don't do it. If you're gonna watch and take your time to do it, make sure you are taking actions to the things I say. So a friendly slap so that you do it.

You've probably heard, you should really be slow to hire and quick to fire. Most entrepreneurs, in general, kinda suck at that. They need someone right now so they're gonna hire faster than they probably should. We got a whole piece for that also. And when they want to fire somebody, they let it go too far because they've got all the reasons in the world; personally they're my friend, they're kids are sick or whatever those things are that they have empathy for them, which amazing. Or, I don't know how bad it is, at least we've got someone in there doing 80%.

But what I want you to do right now is I want you to take a look at that structure or the ratings that we just did and realize how important A players are to your business. You know what an A player is. You know you can give an A player something and they can run with it and get it done to the level of expectation that you have. Not saying that we can't train people into that. 

But what I want you to do is look through and find all the Cs. I want you to find the Cs because I know you did not put any Fs. If you put any F, then you would have already fire them. If you are waiting to fire them because you are not sure, you'll put a C. So most likely, you have no Fs in your team structure or team roster. For all those ones that are Cs, because you probably have a few of those, you might even be in some seats where you were a C. Well, the book talks about firing them. That's one of my favorite things because for me, it is easier to say but for you, it is way harder to do. I totally understand that. We actually have some videos on how to fire someone that we can link to. But I think the thing that is important to know is that they are dragging your company down, no matter how nice they are. No matter how amazing humans they are. If they are not doing a good job, you need to let them go and know that when they do have a better company that they like or they are doing the right role, they will flourish. Make a list of those people you need to fire.

Now, those Bs. Take a look at those Bs, those Bs, I want you to ask this question for each one of the people that have a B next to them, "Can you train them to be an A?" If you can train them to be an A, keep them. If you can't, fire them. The reason why is, sometimes it's the training side. Don't get me wrong. They can actually be an A-player but what you want is that potential for those A-players. If they're a B and they'll always be a B and they will never change. Technically, you should fire them. I know most likely you are not going to because they are solid B.Solid Bs are kinda hard to find too. That's fine but I want you to go through and make a notes on who you can actually put in the A role by training. If so, what that training might need to be, in order for them to hit an A.

Does that make sense? I know that's a lot. So that's all for step number 2. So I'm giving you another minute to make sure that you go through. So we have an action plan for what needs to happen for that structure. You can get the right people in the right spots in your org chart. That might also mean that you need to fire yourself for some things. So either there's somebody on your team that good for that or it's someone you might potentially hire. Or, one of the great pieces is I know a lot of great business owners are not great at finances and so you can hire a part time CFO or bookkeeper or CPA that can really keep you accountable for that stuff. If you suck at that, please make sure to find somebody who is better. So that way, you don't have to do that stuffs that you are not good at.

That's all part 1 for strengths.

Part 2, I want you to have them some assessments. Not every assessments is perfect. What I would do is really try and figure out what assessments that you like best. Take them yourself first, before you give them to your whole entire team. Typically, a DISC assessment is pretty simple and it's actually free online. You can have your entire team take that. It's really eye opening because for the DISC assessment, just so you know and you can learn a lot more about this through the website. A D is very driven. An I is very interpersonal and loves people. The S and C are more of a steady characteristics, the stable... the details, that sort of thing. I am very much a D and I, that's one of the reasons why I'm not very good as a project manager.

What I want you to do, there's a ton of assessments, I'm gonna a few right now. Kolbe assessment is another one that has a highly valuable insight. Because, sometimes, when we are watching our team, we don't know what exactly what they're best at. I highly recommend taking at least one assessment to do yourself and then give to your team. Then, what we want to do is take what those strengths are, I'm a DI if you decide to use the DISC assessment, and put those in the structure. The team structure that we just created because we want to make sure that they are in the right role. Beside your evaluation on A, B, C or F. We wanna see if they are the type of person that is good for this role because they might be an overachiever and grit their teeth and bare it and do what it need to be done. And they might be going against the grain. They might not be enjoying it. They might burn out really fast. They might about how crappy it is. They hate their work because of one piece in their job which is not their strength. That's what we want to look at as an overarching view to find out if your team is doing what they are best at or not.

Please make sure if you do want to do the assessment, you better go do it. Put it in your project management software like, "Make my team take this." Go ahead and take the DISC assessment. We have the links in the PDF for you. Don't worry about that. But please make sure that you do this. If you took the time to listen to this entire video, I want you to hopefully by now know that strengths are extremely important. If you don't take action on this, it's not going to change. So, hopefully you know why it's important and you have the 3 steps to self evaluation to evaluate for you and for the rest of your team. So, you'll know what the best place for them is on the bus.

Now, it's time for you to take action. Have an amazing day.

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I hope you enjoyed that. That's video number two of the series. There's one more coming out on Friday and if you stayed all the way through - pat yourself on the back. Consuming content is one thing that I want to take action on this also.

And I just want to let you know that we have a webinar coming up next week. So, you can mark your calendars. You can go to EventualMillionaire.com/webinar. It's on Thursday, May 3rd. It's all about cloning yourself and creating those systems that will help you scale. And which ones to do first because there's a million that you could and you're a small business owner and only have so much time.

I'll be there live and I wanna see you there too. So, check it out EventualMillionaire.com/webinar.

Thanks and have an amazing, great day!

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Hi I’m Jaime. Each and every week I bring you the top business advice from the people who know best.

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