How to get your team rowing in the same direction

Hey, Marti here from The Professional Builder.

What I wanted to go through with you today was how do you get your team on the same page and rowing in the same direction and how do you make those tough or necessary decisions simple?

They’ll never be easy, but they become more commonplace as your business grows because more pressure comes on your team and your systems, or your lack thereof.

Firstly I would like to touch on values, as these principles are the North star or the guiding light on how we do business around here. And if you think it’s basically your inner moral guiding compass, but physically, logistically, where’s the company heading? How’s it going to get there? And how’s it going to get there is by following the principles and the values that you hold dear. And your business is just a reflection and extension of yourself.

The easiest way to be in alignment is to have a business that typifies what you see as important. If you don’t have any values, how on earth are you making decisions each day? If you have values and everyone agrees on them, everyone’s going in the same direction and it’s much easier to make decisions and to take action quickly.

So how do you go about doing this and more importantly, installing them into your company so that they’re not just the thing on the wall that sits there and no one has any idea what they are, how they impact the business or how to apply them each and every day because they’re meant to be a living, breathing document that the team uses every day. Here are some quick bullet points that you guys can use to do this.

The first key thing is to list out all the points that are important to you. Some of ours are world-class, PSR – problem solution recommendation, speed of execution, systems run the business and speak your mind (but don’t be a dick)

Once you have listed out all your important values, then have a sit down with the team and get their input. Jot these down on a board and you might get anywhere from 10 to 20 different values/principles.

There’s a saying, “People don’t have business problems, they have life problems that transfer over into their business.” So if you can’t stick to a diet, if you procrastinate on doing the important things, if you don’t structure your day and have a default done, you get pulled in 101 different directions, and didn’t do the core thing that was to drive your business forward.

If you don’t want to get up an hour earlier, if you don’t set a bedtime alarm, then guess what? You’re not going to reach your potential. You’re going to have challenges. So by having your values and then living them and integrating them into your day to day calendar and into your team is going to make life and decision making a truckload better.

So where else are you going to put your values? Start with putting them in your office, website, information pack and induction pack for your new members.

How do you ingrain this into your team? Well, it needs to be from step one, hiring. So when you’re hiring, we actually have our values on our website so people can go and see. Within having the interview, we ask people to list out the top five values that they live by.

In the interviews, we give them our value sheet and we ask them to rank which of these are most important to you? Because the number one thing is we want to see is this person a good culture fit? And culture is basically how do we do things around here? How do we think? And how do we act? And is this person in alignment?

So you can have the greatest strategy, but if you’ve got people who aren’t on the same mission, aren’t on the same vision, aren’t on the same page and not engaged, won’t work like a man possessed and also be rewarded for it, then it’s not going to work because you can teach them the skills, but you can’t teach them the attitude and culture fit.

So you’ve got to give them every opportunity to get up to speed and repeat the values each day. How do we do that? Well, every 90 days we have our assessment tools. We review our team and assess how they went on their projects? And then we rank them on the value.

How to get your team rowing in the same direction

Hey, Marti here from The Professional Builder.

To see more tips and tricks watch the video above

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