When Your Team Feels Safe You Will

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 under 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.

When your team feels safe, you will. As an entrepreneurial personality type an evolutionary hunter, it can be hard for us to understand this concept, because so many of us are driven to run the team, lead the team, be the person in charge of the team and not be on a team. But there are a ton of people like us who participate on teams. In fact, every business I've ever had, has been built by evolutionary hunters that were just like me, only they didn't want to be in charge. They wanted to create new outcomes, make things happen, change the world, they just didn't want to be the entrepreneur in charge, then. I'm proud to say that at least 100 of the people who have worked with me, maybe hundreds of them have gone out and created their own businesses now. Are now in charge. Are now the people who are making things happen.

And for you if you're trying to grow a team and grow a business, then there's a concept I want you to understand that is crucial. The safer your team feels, the more momentum you will have. And when your team finally feels safe, you will too. This is one of those concepts, one of those topics that is so hard to understand as an entrepreneur, because we don't strive to be a member of a team. We don't understand what it would be like to be a member of a team. And if we've never been there, if we've never been on a team, if we've never been the person who got hired, then it's very hard for us to understand how to make a team feel safe.

But the key here is that when a team feels safe, when they feel like they're part of something greater than themselves, when they feel like they are helping a greater outcome, a greater achievement, you will feel safe. Because when team members buy in at the highest level, that's when an entrepreneur feels fully supported.

So how do you go from a team feeling transient and feeling unsafe to feeling safe? Well, this is something I work with people on all the time. Because a lot of my clients have been building their businesses and growing their outcomes and growing their revenues, and then they come to me when there's somewhere around a $1,000,000 or more. And in most cases, they've been growing the team with a combination of maybe some people helping them directly and some contractors and really, they've been doing most of it themselves and finding people to help. And when you get to the place where you're at a $1,000,000 or more, you have to start helping your team achieve. You have to start creating a team atmosphere. You have to start helping the team all get together and achieve together and go forward.

And here's how you make people on a team feel safe. You let them know where you're going, you let them know what's happened and you involve them in the process. I know that sounds like a massive oversimplification, and it might be.

But here's why it's so crucial. When you let people know where you're going, they understand the perspective that you have in the business, or at least they understand some of it. They know where you're going. They understand what the growth pattern is. They know what the goals are, and what's going to happen next. And when people understand where you're going, they can see the future with you. They can start to see around corners. They can start to see what direction they're going.

I just had this conversation in the past couple days with one of my clients who's been growing a business and she has basically all contractors and she's grown a massive seven figure business that is growing so fast, she's hiring people two or three a week. And we have to go from a team where people were treated like process. People were hired to fill a role. And they just filled the role to a team where people are part of creating the process. To a team where people understand what's going on and can help create solutions. To a team where the entrepreneur isn't the only one who's making things happen anymore. And when you allow a team in like that, when you let them see where you're going, when you let them understand what's happening next, they will feel safe.

Now for a team to feel safe, you have to tell them what happened. Not just where you're going, not just what the outcomes are, not just what the goals are not just involving them with consensus as to what's happening, tell them what has happened as well. Most entrepreneurial teams rarely report results. Once a month, get your team together and show them exactly what happened the month before. What were you aiming at? And what did you achieve? What were the financial results for the month before? Show them everything with transparency and yes, show them how much you made. Quit being afraid that they're going to know how much you make. They assume you make more than you do already. Let them know exactly what's actually happened in the company. The profitability is being number one number there is. Make it your entire team's goal, that they make profitability higher. That's the most important number to you as well.

So if you show people where you're going, and you tell them where you've been, and you involve them, and how you're getting there, that's when they feel safe. That's that third step. Get your team together. Have them give you input. Show them what's happening on the team. Have them tell you what they think should happen. Get ideas from them. Solicit input. Make them part of the overall outcome of what you're doing.

Because here's the most precarious place for an entrepreneur to be. I've watched it hundreds of times. When you're an entrepreneur who's building a company, building an organization increasing how much money you're paying on a monthly basis. Involving more people, and every one of them is there, just to do a job. Every one of them is there just to fill a role. Every one of them is there to get their work done and get out as fast as they can. That is the loneliest and I would say the most frightening place in the world to be as an entrepreneur because every day you feel like you're the glue holding everything together.

That doesn't only feel unsafe, it is one of the most dangerous and most precarious ways to run a company. You are literally waiting for the day where people don't show up. You're the only person holding things together. If you get sick, it doesn't matter if you have 20 people on your team. Nothing's going to happen without you, because you haven't drawn the team together and made them feel safe together.

So if you're ready to start building a real organization, if you're ready to have confidence in your team, if you're ready to walk around knowing that you have a group of people behind you, that believes in you, has your back and is ready to help you make your goals happen, your job is to make your team feel safe.

I had a discussion in the past couple days as well with another entrepreneur I work with, and she was asking if she could keep important people on hourly payments because if her business went down, she wanted to be able to pay them less than putting them on salary. And I had to say back to her, you know, the more you make your team feel like the risk is theirs, the less they're going to feel like they're part of a team. And when you hire someone and put them on salary, you're making the commitment that you're going to grow that business. You're going to pay that salary and create margin so that you can keep doing it. And the last thing I would ever tell somebody on my team is I want you to be on hourly. But if business goes down, your income's going to go down.

If you tell that to someone on a team if they're any good at all, they should be finding another position that day. Because you've literally told them their income is not even up to them, it's up to what the overall company does. Unless they're in sales, that's going to be hard to sell. And you're going to make them feel unsafe. And they will constantly be looking over their shoulder on LinkedIn, on monster.com and anywhere else they can to find their next job to replace yours.

But if you bring in a team, and you involve them in decision making, and you show them that they're valuable, and you tell them where you're going, you show them where you've been. You involve them in the process, your team will feel safe, and the safer your team feels, the safer you will feel.

And here's what I know about every entrepreneur I've ever worked with. You don't know what you're capable of until you have a team around you that feels confident, feels safe and knows they can succeed. You don't know what you're capable of in the world until you have a team around you that trusts each other, trusts you and trusts your process. And you don't know what you're capable of in the world until you have a group of people around you that believes in your outcomes and what you're doing in the world and the change you're making and the effect you have on your clients as much as you do. The day that happens, you will start to see what you really are capable of.

I shared with one of my clients recently, that when you build a team the right way, and you create consensus, and you make them feel safe, and they know that they're part of something greater than themselves, it's like being Iron Man. You strap that team on like a suit. And every capability you have is now amplified. Every outcome you can create in the world is now exponentially greater. And the bigger your team gets, the safer they feel. The more your capabilities, your ability, the effect you can have in the world goes up. And for every entrepreneur I've ever worked with, we all have a superhero fantasy about doing more and creating more and making more things happen. This is the path where that fantasy becomes reality.

You hire a team. Make them feel safe. Show them how important they are. Grow them as human beings and your capabilities go exponentially greater in the world. It's not you. It's you times a factor of 100. Because when you put the right people around you, you can change anything.

Find me an entrepreneur anywhere in the world at any point in time that did anything completely and totally by themselves. I challenge you. Because every great achievement or act in the history of the world was done with a team.

It might have been small, it might not have seemed significant, but the fact is, as entrepreneurs, we learned very little standing still and almost nothing alone. Get into momentum and get on a team and go forward fast. And if you're the one running the team, make them feel safe. You will feel safe and everything in your world will change.

If you're ready to grow your business like you never thought possible and get the foundational habits and strategies in place that create momentum in all areas of your life, go right now to momentumwebclass.com, momentumwebclass.com. Our momentum masterclass is open. It's available. We're enrolling people right now. You can create more momentum in all areas of your life than you ever thought possible. This is the first course on achievement and personal development written specifically for the evolutionary hunter. If these podcasts have meant something to you, the course will mean that much more.