Dan Martell - January 21, 2019


How To Upgrade Your Team's Talent Using a Simple Monthly Meeting

Topics
democratize the teaching record it
Hosted by
Dan Martell
Mentioned
Spheric Wiki Rich Zoom
How To Increase Your Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) How To Measure Advanced Metrics For Your SaaS Business

Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

199.62

Word count

1,670

Sentence count

98


Summary

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

When I was building my company, Spheric, one of the biggest challenges I had was to take all this human capital, all this knowledge, and all these consultants, and make sure that all the lessons being learned amongst different team members were shared amongst the group. And the way I did this was by hosting a monthly webinar. And during that meeting, everybody would offer up new things that they were learning, and they would just teach it. And because we had all these brilliant people learning new stuff in the simple structure for them to learn from, it allowed us to up level our game. What I'm going to teach you today is the key things we do uniquely in those meetings to really allow you to get the most out of the talent upgrade structure.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hey there, I'm Dan Martell, serial entrepreneur,
00:00:01.800 investor, and creator of SaaS Academy.
00:00:03.840 In this video, I'm going to teach you
00:00:05.560 how to upgrade your team, their talent.
00:00:09.320 I want to teach you how to 5X it using a simple monthly meeting
00:00:12.880 structure that's going to be easy and really powerful
00:00:17.920 and exciting for your team to implement.
00:00:19.400 And be sure to stay at the end where I share with you
00:00:21.720 the link to get access to my business playbook templates
00:00:25.000 to allow you to have a documented standard operating
00:00:28.400 procedure for your business to really allow it to scale.
00:00:44.220 So when I was building my company, Spheric,
00:00:45.720 one of the biggest challenges I had
00:00:47.540 was to take all this human capital, all this knowledge,
00:00:50.380 all these consultants.
00:00:51.280 We're a big consulting company all over the globe,
00:00:54.420 really from Warsaw to Washington,
00:00:56.380 and make sure that all the lessons
00:00:57.920 being learned amongst different team members
00:01:00.180 were kind of shared amongst the group.
00:01:02.120 And the way I did this, because this is back in 2004,
00:01:05.340 was just to host a monthly webinar.
00:01:07.740 Essentially, it was kind of like a GoToMeeting.
00:01:10.040 And during that meeting, everybody
00:01:12.100 would offer up new things that they were learning,
00:01:14.600 and they would just teach it.
00:01:15.600 And we would record it, and then every month
00:01:17.880 we'd catalog that, put it in what we called the Codex,
00:01:21.520 which was our Wiki.
00:01:23.160 And then we just had a backlog of a bunch of different trainings
00:01:25.880 It allowed us, as a team, to continuously up-level
00:01:29.780 our knowledge, our talent, our experience,
00:01:33.260 and really got us into bigger contracts with customers.
00:01:36.560 It was an enterprise consulting company
00:01:38.780 focused on portal development.
00:01:40.340 And because we had all these brilliant people
00:01:42.880 learning new stuff in the simple structure for them
00:01:46.100 to learn from, it allowed us to up-level our game.
00:01:48.000 What I'm going to teach you today is the key things
00:01:50.260 we do uniquely in those meetings to really
00:01:52.640 allow you to get the most out of the talent upgrade structure.
00:01:57.020 Step one, democratize the teaching.
00:01:59.900 One of the things that you need to do right from the beginning
00:02:02.720 is allow anybody to put their hand up and say, hey,
00:02:06.120 I got something cool to teach, and I
00:02:07.860 would love the opportunity to share it.
00:02:10.160 So it's not about the executive leadership team
00:02:13.480 training the underlings.
00:02:15.200 It's literally saying, if you've got something interesting
00:02:17.820 to teach, and I've even broadened it to not even
00:02:19.840 be business related.
00:02:20.800 I just wanted, you know, for example, recently our designer
00:02:23.400 Rich taught the whole team about typography.
00:02:26.040 What does that have to do to somebody that never does any
00:02:29.300 design work?
00:02:29.980 Nothing, but it's interesting.
00:02:31.840 And what's fun is it builds connection.
00:02:33.580 So one of the things that I highly encourage you to support
00:02:37.920 is anybody can offer up some unique thing that they know how
00:02:41.560 to do that they're going to teach the rest of the team.
00:02:43.680 So that's number one.
00:02:44.720 Number two is showcase your bright spot.
00:02:47.900 So one of my favorite things to do
00:02:49.740 is as I'm interacting with the team
00:02:51.360 and I see somebody do something really cool, I'm like, man,
00:02:54.020 that's amazing.
00:02:54.920 Could you add that to the list of training in our next team
00:02:57.720 training meeting so that you could teach the rest of the team?
00:03:00.440 And what's cool about that is that not only as a leader
00:03:03.140 do you acknowledge the person's work and showcase it
00:03:07.300 and say like, wow, that was really done,
00:03:08.880 but you also kind of amplify positive behavior
00:03:12.980 or really thoughtful implementation
00:03:16.080 of some kind of output or project.
00:03:17.860 And having that added to the list,
00:03:19.780 because most people aren't going to put their hand up.
00:03:21.480 That's the reality.
00:03:22.280 You know, the internet's made up of 5% of the world
00:03:24.700 that produces content and 95% that just consumes it.
00:03:27.300 So the same thing will probably happen in your organization.
00:03:29.520 If you had 100 people, there's probably only five people
00:03:31.220 who put their hand up to actually teach something.
00:03:33.200 What you want to do is have your leadership team identify
00:03:35.920 really neat things going on in your company
00:03:38.540 and prompt them to add it to the list,
00:03:40.900 encourage them to teach that at the next team training.
00:03:44.960 Number three, prioritize the cue.
00:03:47.580 Now, one of the exercises, you're going to have to look
00:03:49.880 through all the different trainings that are offered up.
00:03:51.920 Typically, our meetings are about 60 minutes.
00:03:54.160 And if there's way more things that people want to teach them
00:03:57.060 and you have time, you're going to have to prioritize.
00:03:58.800 And I think it's really important, as much as I love
00:04:01.060 learning about how to play the ukulele,
00:04:03.260 we need to make sure that we top load the training to be things
00:04:07.440 that could actually move the business forward
00:04:09.400 or that would be relevant to the largest percentage
00:04:12.140 of the people attending the meeting.
00:04:13.940 So you want to prioritize a little bit around business
00:04:16.240 driver and relevance to the group as a whole.
00:04:19.340 Number four, don't forget to set a timer.
00:04:22.940 People that are teaching things, especially if they're
00:04:25.220 passionate about it, they'll just go and go and go and go
00:04:29.080 and go.
00:04:29.580 Sometimes my videos are 10 minutes,
00:04:30.880 sometimes they're a lot shorter.
00:04:32.160 I have gotten on stage with 20 minutes and ended up walking off
00:04:35.220 60 minutes later because I'm passionate about the topic
00:04:38.060 and just keep rambling and going and you don't stop.
00:04:40.800 So make sure you set a timer.
00:04:42.040 Ideally, the person can see it.
00:04:44.740 It's what's called a confidence monitor in the speaker
00:04:47.460 parlance so that they can see how much time they have.
00:04:50.680 So they can set their own timer on their phone,
00:04:52.340 pull out your timer, start at 10 minutes.
00:04:54.040 Ideally, I like to go 10 to 15 minutes.
00:04:55.900 10 is better if you have a whole big queue.
00:04:57.980 That way, you can get through six of them in an hour.
00:05:00.000 And that is an incredible amount of cross-training
00:05:03.000 and knowledge and just understanding
00:05:04.900 of new areas of the business that you might not be aware of.
00:05:07.540 So set the timer and let them pace themselves accordingly.
00:05:11.100 Number five, record it.
00:05:13.180 I can't stress this enough.
00:05:14.620 You need to record it.
00:05:16.520 The reason why is what you're doing is you're building a
00:05:19.600 library of organizational knowledge.
00:05:22.460 You're building a library of people on your team that know
00:05:25.900 how to do things that could teach other new employees.
00:05:28.240 This is the kicker.
00:05:29.360 Imagine if you had a year's worth.
00:05:31.300 So you had 12 different team trainings recorded, each one of
00:05:35.180 them an hour long, 60 minutes, six different trainings from
00:05:38.980 different team members and somebody's new and they join
00:05:41.640 your organization, all of a sudden now they're being taught
00:05:44.020 best practices, they're understanding who in your company
00:05:47.080 knows what about what, which is a big question.
00:05:49.820 It's like, who actually knows how to do this thing?
00:05:52.060 And they get to know the personalities and the interests
00:05:54.860 of different team members because, again, people are gonna
00:05:56.900 be teaching stuff that they're passionate about that may not
00:05:59.460 necessarily be business related but still is interesting.
00:06:03.140 And I think that that's just a great way for somebody new to
00:06:06.640 onboard and to also build this catalog.
00:06:09.220 So what we do is when we, everybody's training or they're
00:06:12.480 teaching, we just add it to the show notes.
00:06:14.480 So there's the six different people that went and what they
00:06:16.880 taught and that is a link to the recording and it's locked and
00:06:19.880 loaded in our playbook.
00:06:21.380 So really simple structure.
00:06:23.460 Make sure that you prompt people to do it and you record it.
00:06:28.100 So five steps to a really great monthly team training meeting.
00:06:32.040 Number one, you got to democratize the teaching.
00:06:34.100 Anybody can put their hand up including yourself as a leader
00:06:36.940 and teach something cool for the rest of the organization.
00:06:39.340 Number two, showcase the bright spots,
00:06:41.540 things that are going well.
00:06:42.500 People are doing incredible work.
00:06:44.380 Ask them to teach the rest of the organization
00:06:46.620 how they thought about that work.
00:06:48.960 Number three, prioritize the cue to make sure
00:06:51.620 that it has the highest business impact and relevance
00:06:54.260 to the group.
00:06:55.260 Four, set a timer so they can self-pace themselves.
00:06:59.800 And number five, record it, record it, record it.
00:07:02.500 Please hit the record button.
00:07:04.260 If you're using Zoom, it's so simple.
00:07:06.120 Go to meeting, et cetera.
00:07:07.480 They all have the ability to record.
00:07:09.100 You grab that little bit of show notes,
00:07:10.580 and you are locked and loaded.
00:07:12.580 So as I mentioned at the beginning of the video,
00:07:13.880 I want to share with you an exclusive download.
00:07:16.020 It's called the Business Playbook Templates.
00:07:17.920 It's my core system for the key reference documents, standard
00:07:22.540 operating procedures, templates, systems
00:07:24.820 that you need in your business to really get things going.
00:07:27.160 And the cool part is you can create a new one called the Team
00:07:30.620 Upgrade Trainings that has not only
00:07:33.140 the recommendations for the next set of trainings
00:07:35.760 that people want to opt into, but also the backlog,
00:07:38.860 the archive of all your existing training.
00:07:41.100 It's a simple format.
00:07:42.220 You can click the link below to download your copy
00:07:44.800 of my complete Google Drive template.
00:07:47.920 So you just click the link, opt in,
00:07:49.460 and get that copy for yourself and create a new one
00:07:52.120 because I actually have a system in there
00:07:53.420 on how to create a system.
00:07:55.000 You can create your first on the team upgrade meeting
00:07:58.260 structure and get that deployed to your business today.
00:08:01.300 If you like this video, be sure to click the like button
00:08:03.880 and also subscribe to my channel.
00:08:05.240 And if there's somebody you think this video could serve,
00:08:07.240 Feel free to share it with them today.
00:08:09.040 As per usual, I wanna challenge you to live a bigger life
00:08:11.560 and a bigger business and I'll see you next Monday.
00:08:15.060 The whole point is a team upgrade, right?
00:08:16.800 Upgrade.
00:08:18.340 Is that good?
00:08:20.120 Does that make sense?
00:08:20.960 It's hilarious.