Momentum Podcast: 847

The Secret to a Fully Committed Team

by Alex Charfen

Episode Description

As entrepreneurs, we often feel like we need to challenge ourselves to the absolute extreme in order to drive ourselves forward. A goal doesn’t mean as much to you unless its as intense as climbing Mount Everest. In many ways, this is a superpower for you in your business, but it has a significant drawback.

Your team is not wired the same as you. Even if they share your entrepreneurial spirit, as a team member, they see the realities of your business in an entirely different way than you do. I recently shared this concept with a member in our coaching program. In order for your team to be fully committed, you must do one really uncomfortable thing…

Pull the target closer.

In this podcast, I’ll show you how to create goals that you and your team can achieve together and win.

Ready for more?

Book a call with our team and see how we can help you get out of overwhelm and calm the chaos in your life and business: 

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Full Audio Transcript

This is the Momentum podcast.

I just got off a call with one of our members, and it was a call where I repeated a discussion that I've had over and over again with visionary entrepreneurs. And the key aspect of the discussion is how important we are as a person in the lives of our team and why when we look at that responsibility that we have, that importance that we have in the right way is when we quickly, rapidly and start predictably growing the business we actually want. I can't wait to share this with you.

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.

If you've been listening to the podcast, you know, I've been jumping on a lot more calls with our members recently. Thankfully, our company has hired a couple of people who are going to be coaching and taking some of those calls as well. So I'm not going to be doing as many as I have been. But man, has it been insightful. I think if you're in any type of company, don't forget that being close up and personal with your customers is one of the most important things that you do. And it doesn't matter how big your company is, understanding what your customers are doing as the CEO, as the visionary of the business, is so crucially important. It has been phenomenal for me, and I just got off of the call, one of our coaching calls with a member who I brought out in me or brought out of me a conversation that I've had with so many visionary entrepreneurs. And if you're a podcast listener or my podcast listener, you probably heard me bring up this concept before: pulling the target closer so that your team starts to win. And we had that discussion around a gross revenue goal. And this is a person that wants to hit six, eight, 10 million in a business and currently is probably at around two or 3 million. And the revenue goal that we want to set as visionaries and by the way, this conversation repeats itself so often for me, it's one that I've had literally hundreds, maybe thousands of times, because as visionaries, the goal that we want to set is 10 million. I want to hit eight, so I'm going to hit ten or I want to hit eight, so I'm going to set the goal of 10 million. Because for us as visionaries and you know this, if you're a visionary entrepreneur and you also know this if you're an operator working for a visionary entrepreneur as visionaries, if we aren't climbing Mount Everest, why bother? It's how we're wired. We are the evolutionary hunters that are willing to take on all the responsibility of running a business. And we can sit in a space, and in a responsibility, and in a level of pressure and noise that the average person would not be able to withstand at all. I often share with visionaries that we put up with more stress and noise than the average person before noon on Monday than most people will experience all week, and many people will experience all month. And so for us, the feeling of climbing Mount Everest, the feeling of having a huge goal is inspiring. It's exciting, it's energizing. You know. And this is actually reinforced by so much of what's out there in the entrepreneurial space. You know, you have to have your stretch goal or your big, hairy, audacious goal or that huge outcome.

But when we have a team, here's what happens when we set a goal that's so big that the team can't see a path to get from here to there. There's this progression that happens. First, they feel like they're letting you down as the visionary entrepreneur. That's the first step of the progression. Like you said, the $10 million goal and you have a $300,000 month, which is a huge month for most businesses. But because you're not at 800,000 and change, the team feels like they're losing. So the first part of the progression is they feel like they're letting you down. And as a visionary entrepreneur, I want you to know how important you are to your team. You're one of the three most important people in their lives for most people. And I'm grouping these: it's parents, family and then the entrepreneur they work with. I pause to let that sink in because I want you to hear me. And when it comes to their self-esteem, when it comes to their ability to achieve in their life, when it comes to their ability to show who they are in their life, you are probably the most important. That's a responsibility we have as visionary entrepreneurs that run teams. Our team is going to look to us to see if they're succeeding. Our team is going to look to us to see if they're doing the right thing. Our team is going to look to us to see if they should have pride in what they do. And when we set a goal that's so huge that the team can't see how to get from here to there, and they instantly out of the gate start seeing numbers and metrics that say that they're losing, they get a huge hit to their self-esteem. So the first part of the progression is the team started saying, ‘Man, we're letting you down’. We're letting the visionary down. We are good at what we're doing. You know, this is challenging. But then the team starts looking at and saying, ‘Wait, this doesn't feel realistic’. So the next part of the progression is like, do goals even mean anything around here? And teams live in a state of confusion. Like sometimes we hit some goals, sometimes we don't hit any. But man, the big goals that we're supposed to hit are so huge that we have no idea how to get there. So it goes from, “Hey, do the goals mean anything around here?” to “goals don't really mean anything”. Think about that. Let that sink in. If you are setting goals that are so huge, there's no plan to get there. There's no path to see how to get from today to actually achieving that goal. Your team actually starts thinking the goals don't mean anything, and that is such a terrible place for us to be as visionaries. Because when your team goes through the progression of ‘We're letting you down’ to ‘Does this mean anything’ to ‘This doesn't mean anything’. The next step is ‘I'm just going to do my work and keep my head down and do as little as I can to get by and get out of here on a daily basis and go someplace else where I feel good’.

Think about that. As a visionary entrepreneur, if you have massive goals like every single client that I have, if you have huge things that you want to accomplish in the world, then it is not a nice-to-have. It is a must-have that every person on your team is engaged, that every person on your team is excited to be working for your team, that every person on your team feels confident in what they're doing with you. That's how you hit massive stretch goals. That's how you hit massive outcomes. And now this is kind of a challenging concept to understand. But when we pull the target closer, when we make it so our team feels like they're winning, we reverse that progression. The team starts saying, ‘Hey, you know what? We can win here. I'm going to pick my head up and like, start really looking around and looking for opportunities’. And then instead of saying the goals don't mean anything around here, they're like, ‘Hey, these goals probably do mean something’. And then instead of saying, “Do the goals mean anything?”, they say goals are necessary here. We're going to win. We're winning as a team. We should all be excited. And then they say, ‘We're helping you out. We're making you look good. We're succeeding. We are succeeding for the visionary. We are succeeding for the person running the company’. And that is a huge increase and boost to their self-esteem. And so in order to have that happen, as a visionary entrepreneur, this takes a level of maturity and a level of behavioral change that is rare in the entrepreneurial world. I just want you to know that. If this sounds difficult, it's because it is. And growing an eight figure business or a nine figure business isn’t easier or everybody would do it. And the numbers are a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of entrepreneurial businesses or businesses in general ever get to eight figures. And the reason is because the visionaries don't make the behavioral change necessary. There's other reasons, but that's the main one. And the behavioral change that's necessary to successfully lead a team is to lead them in a way that they feel successful. And so here's what happens to every visionary, because I want you to know the feelings we have around this, that the objections we have to this when we set a goal that feels achievable, it doesn't feel exciting to us because as visionaries, we're evolutionary hunters. We want to go on the hunt. We want to have a huge outcome. We want to chase it down. We want to feel like we're climbing Mount Everest. You know, I can't tell you how many times I've had an entrepreneur say, “Hey, I'm going to get in shape”. And the first move is like run a triathlon or a marathon or something that the average person would spend years preparing for. And entrepreneurs just say, ‘Here's my first goal. This is the first thing I'm going to do’. And that's often how we treat our businesses. We set the triathlon marathon, climbing Mount Everest goal for everybody on the team. But the challenge is we set them up to lose. We set them up to be de-leveraged. We set them up to not feel confident and to not feel excited. And we set them up to feel like what the company says that they can do, or what you say the company can do doesn't really matter.

And so in order to make this behavioral change as a visionary, here's what we need to do. We need to detach our excitement from climbing Mount Everest goal in the business. Like we can have that in the back of our minds. And we should, we can have that in our internal dialog, and we absolutely should. But we need to set the team up so they can get there. So in the short term, in the next year, we set a goal that we know the team can hit. So every single month they're winning and it changes the entire environment of a team. They will lean back in. They will get excited again. They will give you discretionary efforts. Because the converse of this that I didn't say before is if they go through that progression of we're letting you down, do goals mean anything, goals don't mean anything, I'm gonna keep my head down. That's where teams get burned out. That's where teams get frustrated. That's where really good team members leave teams. That's where you're left with only people who are willing to work in a space where they keep their head down. They don't contribute. They try not to get noticed and they just try to make money and then go back to another place in their lives where they actually feel good about themselves. A-players insist on playing a game that they can win. Do they want to be stretched? Sure. Do they want to grow as individuals? Absolutely. But if you set up a scoreboard where they can never win. A-players will leave. The true believers on your team will leave. The people who are most important to the team will leave. And so by bringing targets closer, by setting up a game, your team can win, by helping them get there, by helping provide a clear plan with clear outcomes, you will completely change the environment on your team and have an unfair advantage when competing with other entrepreneurs who are still telling their team to go out and chase something that's completely unachievable from their perspective. You will have an advantage over entrepreneurs whose teams have gone through the progression of ‘We’re letting you down. Do goals mean anything? They don't mean anything. I'm just going to keep my head down.’ You will have a massive advantage and you will be able to have a smaller team where every person is fully engaged and gets more done with less of a salary and infrastructure investment than the other person who has a whole bunch of people who are barely making it.

This is the real way to run a business with a team. This is the type of stuff that nobody talks about because it's not very exciting. This is the behavioral change that's necessary. But most coaches are unwilling to bring up because they know it's going to be difficult for the visionary entrepreneur to change. But here's what I believe about you. If you're a visionary listening to my podcast, I believe that the outcomes you want to create in the world are more important to you than short term feelings, and you are willing to make the behavioral change necessary so you can grow the business you want and the life you want. And this shift in perspective, this shift in strategy will help you grow a team that leans in for you, that is willing to walk through walls for you, that is willing to become true believers or are true believers, and will be fully leveraged and help you grow the business in life you want long term. I know this isn't the easiest behavioral change to make, but let's not forget we're visionaries. We like to climb Mount Everest. Instead of having a huge number out there, make this the outcome that is important to you and you will see your team lean in and your company grow and you'll start getting predictable results consistently. And that's what all of us really want.

If you want some help with this, I'd love to have you in our membership. Go to SimpleOperations.com. Fill out the quick form on the home page. Take a look at the testimonials page so you know some of the companies that we worked with and the outcomes they've gotten. If it sounds like a solution for you, click the link on the home page, fill out the survey, jump on a call with one of us, and let us show you how we can help you. SimpleOperations.com. Thanks for being here today and thanks for being a podcast listener.

Thank You For Listening!

I am truly grateful that you have chosen to spend your time listening to me and my podcast.

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With gratitude,

Alex

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