Stop Team Overwhelm

As entrepreneurs, when we're asked when do we want something, the answer in our heads is always yesterday. When it comes to running a team, sometimes we can ask for too much. We can encourage them too much.

We can motivate them so much that they get into a place whereby a combination of what you've committed to do and what you're trying to do, your team becomes overwhelmed. When that happens, you have to get them out of that feeling immediately because your company is at risk.

I'm Alex Charfen, and this is the Momentum Podcast made for empire builders, game changers, trailblazers, shot takers, record breakers, world makers and creators of all kinds, those among us who can't turn it off and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy, and we are obsessed with creating momentum so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution. Sure, we pay attention to their rules, but only so that we can bend them, break them. Then rewrite them around our own will. We don't accept our destiny. We define it.

We don't understand defeat because you only lose if you stop, and we don't know how. While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo, we are the minority, the few who are willing to hallucinate. There could be a better future and instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real. We are the evolutionary hunters, clearly the most important people in the world because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent, positive human evolution, and we always will be. I wish I understood team overwhelmed when I was younger and running a business because here's what I used to do when I was younger. Our team would make commitments to things. We would come up with outcomes. We would create some type of a plan, certainly not anything like what we train people to do today, but even back then, I had some type of a strategic plan for my business. Then we would commit to it and then something would change. Something would happen in the business. It would require my team's time, but we had already made a commitment to the plan, and my team would immediately get overwhelmed and that is when I would push harder. That is when I would elevate. That is when I would check in more often because I knew if they were overwhelmed, we weren't going to get anything done and we committed to the plan, so I would push everyone twice as hard when that happened. Here's what happened, it worked. It worked. It worked in the short term. It worked maybe the first or second time with someone. What I didn't recognize for a long time, I think I have trouble sometimes picking up on social cues and making associations. What I didn't realize was how often people were leaving my company. Just out of the blue, they had a better offer, and how often people didn't give us notice and left and how hard a time I had keeping people in the right lanes and keeping them motivated and keeping them excited. I also realized that great people would join our team and then they leave. It was just the most frustrating way to run a business. What I realized was if I kept my team overwhelmed all the time, that just became their reality, and sooner or later they had to change their reality. Now, today, when I feel the slightest bit of team overwhelmed, if we've had a change or a shift or a change in personnel, I want to do everything I can to get my team out of overwhelm immediately because these days we don't tend to overwhelm ourselves that often. We're good at planning, and so if we plan consistently, we typically are hitting 80% or more of what we set out to get, which is that's where we're always aiming because things shift throughout the month, but some months, we're at 95. Sometimes, we're at 97 so we do really well, but if something shifts and the team gets overwhelmed, I want to get them out of it as fast as possible. A shift could be a big opportunity comes up or we get a huge influx of leads or someone leads or whatever it is. I want my team out of overwhelm because when your team is overwhelmed, here's what happens. One, it slows everything down. It feels like your team's doing more, but your team will be trying to do more, and because of the overwhelm, communication issues go up. You have challenges getting things done. People don't know how to hand things from one to another. Your team will become indecisive. It slows everything down. When your team's overwhelmed, team conflict goes up. Any type of irritation or frustration normally becomes something that feels contentious, something that feels frustrating, and something that will get people emotionally triggered when they're overwhelmed, so team conflict goes up, and this is what happens to any human being when they're overwhelmed is problem solving skills actually go down. When we get overwhelmed, when we get into that fight or flight place, our vision narrows, so our perspective literally narrows. Our vision of the future pulls forward, so we literally see less of the future. When you keep your team in overwhelmed, you are going to get way less out of all of them. If you keep them there too long, they will leave. I know. I've lost some incredible people because I ran businesses in a way where even though there was a culture that people liked, and we won awards for best places to work and stuff like that, we still would get to a place where we kept people in such high level of overwhelm that eventually they broke and left.

I mean, they love the culture. They loved us, but we never let up, and losing great people who are helping you build a multimillion dollar company is incredibly challenging because you get to a point where the growth of your business is it's 100% dependent on the human beings around you willing work with you and your business. When you lose great people, it slows everything down. I've heard CEOs say everyone's replaceable and things like that, but you know what? The fact is if you have an incredible team member, they're not replaceable.

I mean, you can replace the stuff they're doing, but if you have someone who's a real A player, a lynchpin, an incredible team member, you ask any business owner who's had one. I have a bunch on my team right now. You ask any business owners who's had one, when you lose one, it hurts. It's hard to replace. It's frustrating, and it makes everything in the business slow. It makes it feel like everything's slowed down, and as a business owner, when you lose somebody who's really incredible and you have to replace them with someone who's not so incredible, it can feel really vulnerable and exposed, and so you shouldn't ever leave your team in overwhelmed.

In fact, here's what it took me over a decade to figure out is that teams who aren't overwhelmed actually accomplish more. There was a time where running teams with Cadey, we got to this place where we said we were going to actually put goals up on the board, and we were going to do it with the team and get consensus and get them out of overwhelm. We did all kinds of other things to get people out of overwhelm. It was incredible what happened to people, how they developed, how fast they grew, how much they accomplished, because we stopped overwhelming everybody. We started creating a safer place for them to work in. Today in the team that we have today, most of the time, they're not overwhelmed. If something out of the ordinary happens, they are, and we can see the difference. Today, we have a team that gets ... I mean, I'm impressed on a daily basis at just the character and who we work with and how much they get done. It blows me away. If your team's in overwhelm, here's what you have to do. You must, and here's what we're going to do over the weekend. We're going to make a decision to do one of three things or usually a combination of all three. Number one, if your team is overwhelmed, you have to commit to do less. You have to choose projects that are coming off the board. This is called extreme prioritization. You figure out what is really crucial right now, and you don't do any more. What's interesting is sometimes getting your team out of overwhelm. I want you to hear this. Getting your team out of overwhelm somehow will cause a massive period of growth in your business because when you start committing to doing less, and you do extreme prioritization, you only do what's important, so commit to doing less, extreme prioritization.

The second thing that you can do when your teams in overwhelm is you can give them more time. A lot of times, the reason that people are overwhelmed is that there's a deadline on something that is overwhelming them. What we do a lot of times as entrepreneurs is we wait until the very end of a project to move the deadline, but if your teams are already overwhelmed and you're in the beginning, the first half of a project, and they're already feeling the pressure of a deadline, give them more time. Move the score. You move the goal line. Give them a bigger playing field so that they can actually have time to get it done and not feel like they're not going to get there.

Give them more time. That whole give them a bigger playing field really didn't make sense. Now, you understand just how much I know about sports. The first thing you do if your team's overwhelmed is you do less. The second one is you give them more time. The third one is you get help, and getting help takes time, so usually you have to do a combination of these three because you usually have to do less. Give them more time and get help if the situation in your business is extraordinary enough, if it's important enough or something or if it's significant enough that it's slowing down most of your team.

Here's what I want you to know about getting your team out of overwhelmed. When you get your team out of overwhelm, you will actually get more out of your team, and you'll keep your best people. Here's how I know that. We show entrepreneurs a planning system where we create massive clarity. We show people exactly where they're going. We create a communication system where everyone on the team understands what they're doing, what their role is, what their accountability is, and then we create scoreboards throughout the business so everybody knows what's going on.

What happens is teams immediately get out of overwhelm. They get clarity, and the business starts exploding with growth. The best people not only stay there. The best people recruit other incredible people into the business, so my world now, when I was younger and I think about how if I was in a situation like I'm in today, I would have been every day pushing people and checking in to make sure that things got done, and telling the team we were going to have to give extra effort and push harder and come in early and stay late.

I have a team where they do all of that stuff anyway. I wouldn't ever ask them to work harder than they work because they all work incredibly hard and they overdeliver on a weekly basis, and so pushing makes absolutely no sense at all, because I have a team of true believers. With true believers, you have to protect them. With true believers, you have to make sure they feel safe. With true believers, you cannot allow them to be overwhelmed because that is when real challenges will start. Your business will slow down, and that is a spiral you do not want to be in. Get your team out of overwhelm.

If that's where they are right now or if they ever get there, go through everything you're doing and commit to doing less. Give your team more time where you can and then get help so that you can get more done as a team, and you'll feel incredible momentum. In fact, we've been coaching long enough now that we've gone through this framework with people enough times, that we know that when you do this, like I said before, it creates a period of explosive growth because doing less and giving teams more time and then getting them help is a recipe to grow your business fast and keep the right people.

Get your team out of overwhelm and into momentum. If you're ready to do this, if you want to have the type of team that isn't overwhelmed, that can predict where they're going and deliver on a monthly basis, and help you grow the business you've always wanted, reach out to us. Go to billionairecode.com. Fill out the application and we'll give you a copy of our ebook Billionaire Code Decoded. We will show you exactly where you are on the billionaire code and where you should be focused now to scale your business as fast as you can. We'll also give you the opportunity to set up a momentum session with a member of my team and see how we might be able to help you grow and scale your business, billionaire code.com.