Dan Martell - February 08, 2016


How To Manage A Startup Team

Hosted by
Dan Martell
Mentioned
Todd Herman Scrum
How to Pick The Right Business Partners How To Achieve Work-Life Balance ｜ Dan Martell

Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

220.38

Word count

1,723

Sentence count

82

Harmful content

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I talk about my 3M framework for managing a team and how you can use it to your advantage. You'll develop and grow a new high-income skill every week, the same way I mentored my first 3 millionaire students and over 60 others who have now replaced rat-race life with freedom life.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 How to manage a team. Now, I don't know about you, but if you've ever felt frustrated working with people and you're just like, why can't they understand my vision for the business? Or why do I need to monitor everything they do? Or why can't they just come up with their own to-do list? I have to keep creating their own. It's just life, guys. Just deal with it, honestly. I'm going to share with you guys in this video my 3M framework for dealing with teams. I'm going to break it down, but I also want to share with you guys a story.
00:00:27.160 You know, when I started Spheric Technologies,
00:00:29.360 the company that really finally allowed me
00:00:31.360 to understand how businesses should be built,
00:00:33.500 I was so bad at managing people
00:00:35.880 that I actually had to hire somebody to do that for me.
00:00:38.720 And the reason why is I was just so intense,
00:00:41.060 so passionate, so excited about what we were doing
00:00:44.980 that anytime I felt like somebody wasn't on that same level,
00:00:48.000 I rubbed them the wrong way and I totally got that.
00:00:50.560 At least I was smart enough, I think,
00:00:52.840 to find somebody to be the buffer between us.
00:00:55.800 But over the years, I realized this is just no way
00:00:58.420 to build a business and I had to work on myself.
00:01:00.220 I had to read the books.
00:01:01.340 I had to learn and get feedback, 360 feedback from my team
00:01:04.560 so that I could understand what was missing
00:01:06.560 for them to really feel like they could accomplish
00:01:08.220 what they're out to do.
00:01:09.560 And I could feel certain that we're aligned
00:01:12.560 and we're pulling in the same direction
00:01:14.060 on that piece of rope.
00:01:15.060 So the 3M framework comes down to these three pieces.
00:01:17.720 Number one is the four meetings,
00:01:19.800 the meetings that you need to be having in your team.
00:01:22.800 The first one is a daily stand up.
00:01:24.420 Every morning, okay, depending on if your team's international,
00:01:27.220 like I've built companies with employees all over the world,
00:01:30.220 figure out what time zone works the best
00:01:32.920 for the majority of the people.
00:01:34.420 And the ones that can't make it,
00:01:35.420 they just send in a quick email to the team with an update.
00:01:37.920 But it's a stand-up meeting.
00:01:39.220 I borrowed this idea from Agile Development or Scrum,
00:01:42.420 but it's really just, what did you do yesterday?
00:01:44.420 What are you doing today?
00:01:45.420 And are you blocked?
00:01:46.420 It takes less than two minutes per person,
00:01:47.920 50 minutes usually max.
00:01:49.420 If you have a bigger team, you can do it by department.
00:01:52.260 but just a daily stand-up to create a heartbeat
00:01:54.640 for everybody to feel like they understand what you're,
00:01:57.100 and I do it myself as the CEO and founder.
00:01:58.920 Like, I'll update and let them know,
00:02:00.480 here's what I'm working on.
00:02:01.340 Here's what I did yesterday.
00:02:02.140 Here's what I did today.
00:02:02.840 And if I'm blocked on a major piece
00:02:04.500 that somebody else is working on,
00:02:05.820 I wanna let them know in front of everybody else,
00:02:08.020 and it creates kind of like a peer accountability structure.
00:02:11.720 So that's one.
00:02:12.440 The weekly meeting is number two.
00:02:14.020 The four meetings you gotta have, stand-up weekly.
00:02:16.700 You know, every week for a department,
00:02:18.060 you need to sit down, review how you guys are doing,
00:02:20.000 what's stopping anything
00:02:22.100 and what are some of the major initiatives
00:02:23.400 or accomplishments they've had done
00:02:25.300 and really celebrate.
00:02:26.340 So that's the weekly meeting.
00:02:27.760 The third meeting is the quarterly retreats.
00:02:30.620 So maybe it's three times a year, twice a year,
00:02:32.880 but for me, I like quarterly
00:02:34.320 where I grab kind of the senior management of the company
00:02:36.840 and we go away and we kind of just talk strategic
00:02:39.760 because many times you're so busy 0.87
00:02:41.180 just executing, getting crap done. 0.65
00:02:43.020 You don't take time to take a step back 0.91
00:02:44.700 and really evaluate how we've been doing.
00:02:47.160 You know, are we on track?
00:02:48.580 Do we feel like this is the right direction to be going in?
00:02:51.000 So on a quarterly basis, ideally, you're getting the team away.
00:02:55.020 Now, if you want to do it virtually, that's cool.
00:02:57.180 But at minimum a day, ideally two days, and honestly, in person.
00:03:02.740 That's how I've always done them.
00:03:04.000 And when I've had a team distributed across the world,
00:03:06.240 we do them three times a year.
00:03:07.420 We pick a cool location that we'd all wanted to go check out.
00:03:09.980 Maybe it's a ski place, whatever.
00:03:11.740 We do our meetings, and we'd have some fun as well.
00:03:13.940 And then once a year, you want to sit down and do what's called the yearly plan.
00:03:17.640 So really ask yourself, what did we do this year?
00:03:19.940 Were we on goal?
00:03:21.140 Where's the opportunities to improve
00:03:22.940 and do debriefs on all the major projects?
00:03:24.840 But also, for the next year, ask yourself,
00:03:27.640 what are we gonna do that's exciting?
00:03:29.840 What's our good, better, and best goals,
00:03:32.440 as my buddy Todd Herman talks about?
00:03:34.140 You wanna figure out, you know, where is the business going?
00:03:37.340 How are we gonna get there?
00:03:38.340 Introduce new information, take customer feedback,
00:03:41.840 and that's your yearly planning meeting.
00:03:44.240 So those are the four real quick, the daily stand-up,
00:03:46.340 the weekly meeting per department at minimum,
00:03:49.080 so finance, operations, et cetera.
00:03:51.100 And then also the other two is the quarterly retreats
00:03:54.200 and the yearly planning.
00:03:55.180 Do that and your team will love you for it.
00:03:57.980 Okay, trust me, I had to learn this the hard way.
00:03:59.960 I want you guys to get it right from the beginning.
00:04:02.400 The second thing is the message.
00:04:04.880 You know, to me, there's kind of three parts.
00:04:07.620 There's the KPIs or the metrics.
00:04:09.520 Like the team wants to know,
00:04:10.700 like they're playing this game,
00:04:12.000 let's call it like soccer.
00:04:13.140 Imagine playing soccer and not knowing how do you score?
00:04:15.960 What's the game?
00:04:17.120 How does this process work?
00:04:19.200 So without knowing the direction
00:04:21.160 and what's the expectations,
00:04:22.400 then nobody really understands,
00:04:23.960 like, how do I know if I'm doing a good job?
00:04:25.440 So that's the first part of the message, right?
00:04:29.280 Number two is getting them unstuck.
00:04:31.340 It's asking them that question,
00:04:32.840 that's why we do the daily standup, are you stuck?
00:04:35.080 And then your job as a leader is to get them unstuck.
00:04:38.040 So asking them that question is part of the message.
00:04:40.220 It's KPIs, then unstuck.
00:04:41.880 What are you stuck on?
00:04:42.920 That's your job, usually throughout the day,
00:04:44.380 as the manager or the founder or CEO
00:04:46.780 to help them get unstuck.
00:04:47.880 The third is delegate.
00:04:49.120 And not just delegate and then forget about it,
00:04:51.420 it's delegate and verify.
00:04:53.260 All right, guys, I made this mistake.
00:04:54.720 I don't know if you saw my three biggest mistakes video.
00:04:57.200 Number one was hiring somebody,
00:04:58.660 giving them a huge project to be accountable for
00:05:00.800 and not even paying attention to it.
00:05:02.800 Cost me a lot of money.
00:05:04.360 And now when I delegate, I always verify.
00:05:06.860 So the second M in the 3M framework for managing teams
00:05:10.440 is the message, KPIs unstuck and delegating with authority
00:05:14.920 and giving them the tools they need
00:05:16.460 to actually be successful.
00:05:17.960 The third M is motivation, all right?
00:05:20.380 And a lot of entrepreneurs and founders,
00:05:22.360 they just feel like I've already explained them this stuff,
00:05:25.200 why do I have to recite myself?
00:05:26.340 But I'm gonna tell you the story,
00:05:28.260 why you started the business should be something
00:05:31.020 that everybody in your team, all your contractors,
00:05:33.380 and ideally even your customers should know how to tell.
00:05:36.520 They should know why you got into this industry,
00:05:38.640 why you got into this business.
00:05:40.200 your purpose, so that's the story part
00:05:43.260 and that is the motivation for other people
00:05:45.040 because if they know that, if they know that it comes
00:05:46.840 from a place of vision and excitement,
00:05:49.940 then they're gonna work harder.
00:05:51.200 To me, the other one is understanding your why as a business.
00:05:53.820 Why are you here?
00:05:55.160 And the way I like to frame that,
00:05:57.060 really to nail the motivation aspect,
00:05:59.200 is what wrong in the world do you wanna right?
00:06:02.380 What did you see that was broken,
00:06:04.000 that you were just frustrated and you were like,
00:06:05.360 I can't believe this is working this way,
00:06:07.360 I'm gonna do it better and if I even
00:06:10.160 You don't accomplish it.
00:06:11.160 Here's my vision, this is where I wanna go,
00:06:12.960 and even if I spend the rest of my life
00:06:14.500 trying to right this wrong, it would be time well spent.
00:06:17.960 If you share that message with your team,
00:06:20.360 and as they're working, you know, tell them,
00:06:23.000 like, you know this work you're doing?
00:06:24.320 It's gonna allow us to do X, Y, and Z
00:06:26.320 to be able to accomplish this goal,
00:06:27.820 and that's part of the bigger mission of our business.
00:06:30.160 Many times when people are frustrated with their team
00:06:32.460 and they don't feel like they've really got a good grasp
00:06:34.320 of how to manage them,
00:06:35.460 it's because they've stopped telling their stories.
00:06:38.000 You should be doing this on a daily basis,
00:06:40.260 weekly, out at events, to customers,
00:06:43.120 just letting them know the why
00:06:45.280 behind the reason you started the business
00:06:46.940 and also what is the wrong you wanna right as a company.
00:06:49.900 So the three M's, real quick, our meetings,
00:06:52.120 the four, I just went through them,
00:06:53.540 weekly, daily, quarterly, and yearly for the planning.
00:06:57.940 The second M is message, helping to get them stuck,
00:07:00.180 understanding the metrics that they need to hit and move
00:07:02.700 so that they know how to play the game and be successful,
00:07:05.120 and then really just delegate, but monitor.
00:07:07.980 And then the third M is motivation,
00:07:10.300 and really it comes down to story.
00:07:11.660 There's a great quote that says,
00:07:12.620 he with the best story wins.
00:07:14.300 Make sure your team, your customers, your contractors
00:07:17.140 understand your story for the business,
00:07:19.180 for yourself, for your life,
00:07:20.660 and that will help you build a bigger business.
00:07:22.400 I wanna encourage you guys to subscribe to my channel
00:07:24.720 and share this video.
00:07:25.640 If you know anybody that needs to hear this
00:07:27.640 that you've talked to recently that's like,
00:07:29.080 man, I'm really frustrated with the way
00:07:30.580 my team's been acting, share this video
00:07:32.620 and it might inspire them to take a different strategy
00:07:35.100 to get a better outcome i want to challenge you guys to live a bigger life and a bigger
00:07:39.100 business and i'll see you next monday