Dan Martell - October 15, 2018


How To Use Transformational Leadership to Inspire And Motivate Your Team


Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

204.65523

Word count

1,949

Sentence count

94


Summary

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

In this episode, Dan Martell talks about how to lead your team using a transformational leadership strategy, not a transactional one. Most entrepreneurs lead their teams in a way that is transactional, where they tell, they check, and they tell them what's next. The problem with this is that over a timeline, you can only have so many people that you re telling them what to do before from pure management bandwidth. You need to work through your team to get bandwidth.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.200 What's up? Dan Martell here, serial entrepreneur,
00:00:02.120 investor and creator of SaaS Academy.
00:00:03.920 In this video, I want to share with you how to lead your team
00:00:07.200 using a transformational leadership strategy,
00:00:09.920 not a transactional one because that's probably what you're
00:00:12.920 doing today, to-do list and checklists and all that fun stuff.
00:00:15.840 And be sure to stay at the end where I share with you how to
00:00:18.760 get a copy of my precision scorecard template.
00:00:22.160 It's the structure I use to guide my team during our weekly
00:00:25.720 syncs every week, the metrics, the numbers.
00:00:28.320 I'm going to give you a copy of that at the end of this video
00:00:30.780 so be sure to stick around.
00:00:44.260 So here's the challenge.
00:00:45.340 When I was running my company Clarity.fm,
00:00:47.940 I had a global team.
00:00:49.180 People working in different parts of the world,
00:00:51.380 all over the place.
00:00:52.640 And the challenge is that when you grow teams,
00:00:55.380 30, 40, 50 people large, it's hard to understand
00:00:59.960 who's doing what.
00:01:01.080 Most entrepreneurs are leading their team in a way that is
00:01:04.520 very much they tell them what to do.
00:01:06.660 The problem with this, if you think of it like over a
00:01:08.900 timeline, you can only have so many people that you're
00:01:12.560 telling them what to do before from just a pure
00:01:15.900 management bandwidth, this is pure math,
00:01:18.540 you don't have enough hours in the day.
00:01:20.640 So you get tapped out.
00:01:21.740 Most entrepreneurs kinda tap out about a million and a half
00:01:24.340 revenue and the reason why is because that's how they lead.
00:01:27.740 They lead in a transactional structure and it has an upper
00:01:32.280 limit of what they're able to do.
00:01:34.620 What I want to teach you instead is how to do it
00:01:36.660 transformational.
00:01:37.720 When I applied this to Clarity because I went through this
00:01:40.760 place of like just being frustrated with everybody and
00:01:43.600 nobody knowing how to kind of manage themselves and nobody
00:01:47.000 sees the vision the way I see it to a point where honestly my
00:01:50.300 team rocked you know and it's really about you know empowering
00:01:54.340 the team and working through your team that's going to allow
00:01:57.880 you to get bandwidth.
00:01:59.240 This is everything, it's like you want a new project,
00:02:01.340 you want to start a new project, great.
00:02:02.440 Do you have the management bandwidth?
00:02:03.940 You need to work through your team.
00:02:05.220 So in this video I'm going to share with you kind of the two
00:02:07.680 methods and how to think strategically about
00:02:10.560 transformational versus transactional.
00:02:13.160 The first method is transactional.
00:02:15.320 It's how most entrepreneurs lead their teams today.
00:02:17.700 The way you want to think about it is very simple.
00:02:19.600 First, you tell them what to do, so you tell.
00:02:22.860 Second, you check that it got done.
00:02:25.900 And then third, you tell them what to do next.
00:02:29.200 So it's tell, check, and next.
00:02:32.260 And some of you guys are going,
00:02:33.940 how else are you supposed to do it?
00:02:35.400 That's how I've been doing it for a decade.
00:02:37.840 And I'm going to teach you a totally different way.
00:02:39.980 But here's the reason why this doesn't work is,
00:02:43.280 one, if you have people coming to you and saying,
00:02:46.080 hey, I want to talk about getting a raise
00:02:47.880 or what about this perk or, you know,
00:02:49.480 I heard this company is ironing their clothes for their
00:02:53.080 employees or they've got a co-ed basketball team that they
00:02:57.120 sponsor and all these other perks.
00:02:58.720 If your team's coming to you, it's probably because,
00:03:01.620 on those things, it's because they don't feel like they're
00:03:04.760 being, they're not growing.
00:03:07.240 So when people don't feel like they're getting enough out of a
00:03:10.140 relationship, they start asking for other things and that's
00:03:13.580 what happens in a transactional structure.
00:03:16.480 Because you're treating people as a process, okay.
00:03:19.380 You can't treat people like automation and software.
00:03:22.640 You wanna treat them like they're part of the business
00:03:25.560 and give them accountability and really create a scenario
00:03:28.760 where they're growing as individuals.
00:03:30.500 This is Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
00:03:32.000 It's self-actualization.
00:03:33.900 So there's transactional, that's number one.
00:03:35.860 That's what most entrepreneurs do.
00:03:37.840 They tell, they check, and they tell them what's next.
00:03:40.900 What I wanna offer up is a totally different approach.
00:03:43.600 The second way of doing this is transformational leadership.
00:03:47.080 The way it works is very simple.
00:03:48.600 One, we don't tell people what to do.
00:03:50.960 We talk about outcomes that we want to achieve.
00:03:53.440 We describe the end state.
00:03:56.200 We're very clear of where the mountaintop is.
00:03:59.080 Think about this, if you can just tell your team
00:04:00.980 and be crystal clear, mountains are easy
00:04:02.680 because you can point to the top and you say,
00:04:03.840 we're gonna be standing up there, we're gonna look around
00:04:05.580 and it's gonna be great and we're gonna be healthy
00:04:07.160 and we got there in this amount of time
00:04:08.860 and everybody made it safe and all these different
00:04:10.820 characteristics of the outcome you want to achieve.
00:04:13.560 Mountaintops are easy but maybe it's a new website,
00:04:16.360 Maybe it's a new marketing funnel.
00:04:19.260 Maybe it's hiring a salesperson,
00:04:20.740 making sure they're productive.
00:04:21.900 What we need to do is number one is set a very clear outcome
00:04:25.300 for what we want our team member to achieve
00:04:28.080 and then work with them to collaborate kind of next actions
00:04:31.440 and strategies to get to that outcome.
00:04:33.240 So that's one.
00:04:34.080 Two is we want to focus on measuring
00:04:37.340 the progress they're making.
00:04:38.820 So we need to let them know how to measure.
00:04:40.860 And think about this from a human point of view.
00:04:43.820 We don't need to tell a kid when they're playing hockey
00:04:46.360 or basketball or soccer, my kids play hockey,
00:04:49.020 we don't have to tell them to play better.
00:04:51.300 We don't have to be like, hey, you need to learn to pass the
00:04:53.640 ball or move faster or get the rebound or whatever it is.
00:04:57.440 They just do it because they understand how the score is
00:05:00.180 being kept.
00:05:01.180 They're playing a game.
00:05:02.880 They see the scoreboard.
00:05:04.380 They know that when they get the thing in the net or, you know,
00:05:08.980 whatever, that they get an extra score on the board and then
00:05:11.420 they say, well, what did I do last time to get that and how
00:05:13.320 can I get that faster?
00:05:14.920 Your team want the same thing.
00:05:16.720 They want to know that, hey, if you're going to measure,
00:05:18.480 if you want a new website, what are you going to measure me on?
00:05:20.360 You're going to measure me on site performance,
00:05:22.400 so we want the site to be faster.
00:05:23.860 We want customers to fill out more forms,
00:05:25.900 so maybe it's conversions.
00:05:27.160 We want there to be more traffic,
00:05:29.200 because if it's faster, we should increase our traffic.
00:05:31.840 And by giving them the measurement,
00:05:33.740 then they have a clear understanding of how their progress
00:05:36.140 or their outcome is going to be measured.
00:05:38.020 And then the third is you want to coach them to success, okay?
00:05:41.480 Coach, you want to treat them like a coach would
00:05:44.420 with a player on a professional sports league.
00:05:48.860 And think about this, like, instead of telling people what
00:05:52.460 they got to do, checking it got done and tell them what to do
00:05:54.060 next, now all of a sudden you're coaching them to get outcomes
00:05:57.500 and measure things so that they know how they're doing so you
00:05:59.740 don't have to be the bad guy.
00:06:01.100 And when they run into issues, you can actually support them
00:06:03.440 and say, hey, have you thought about this?
00:06:04.740 Do you know this person?
00:06:05.500 Would you like to make an introduction?
00:06:06.980 I remember one of my coaching clients was frustrated with their
00:06:09.940 new growth team because the team couldn't come up with great
00:06:13.320 strategies to go run tests and experiments against.
00:06:16.120 And I challenged him, are you really coaching that person or
00:06:19.160 that team to success?
00:06:20.320 Because you knew by putting those five people together and
00:06:23.560 giving them an outcome and measuring, you did all that
00:06:26.600 stuff great, that they were never going to win.
00:06:28.560 They were never going to be successful.
00:06:30.600 What you should have done is said, hey, do you think maybe
00:06:33.700 bring in, because like if you've got 20 years of experience in
00:06:36.200 something, maybe you're an incredible builder, creator,
00:06:39.320 programmer, designer, et cetera, if you've got 20 years of
00:06:42.380 experience, you can't expect your team who has two years,
00:06:46.220 one year, maybe no experience to get the same outcomes
00:06:49.560 and you're just setting them up for failure.
00:06:50.920 So coaching is different.
00:06:52.420 Coaching is saying, hey, I think there's this really
00:06:54.560 incredible consultant that I could pay for 500 bucks to come
00:06:57.400 in to spend an hour with you to ideate different strategies.
00:07:00.400 And just ask yourself, if my team's gonna be successful,
00:07:03.060 how can I coach them to get outcomes without having to tell
00:07:06.480 them what to do by putting scenarios and people and
00:07:09.840 structure in the way they work so that they can succeed.
00:07:13.140 And if you do this, your team will feel empowered.
00:07:16.420 They'll feel like they're growing every day within your
00:07:18.340 organization and they're gonna want to contribute to improve
00:07:22.060 their score.
00:07:22.980 This is the power and what's neat is from a management bandwidth
00:07:26.680 there's an upfront cost but after a few months, let's call it
00:07:30.120 six months to nine months, your team starts to understand how
00:07:33.500 you operate and they don't need to come to you as much anymore
00:07:37.440 and all of a sudden you get your time back.
00:07:39.840 And the beauty, as you grow the organization,
00:07:42.780 the team, the startup, is that they start managing their
00:07:45.340 people like that.
00:07:46.540 Because what you're probably experiencing today is your team
00:07:49.440 is frustrated because the people that report to them don't do
00:07:52.080 what they say they're going to do, et cetera, et cetera,
00:07:53.680 et cetera, because they're managing with the transactional
00:07:55.680 leadership strategy.
00:07:56.960 You need to coach them in a way that's more transformational
00:08:00.600 and then through osmosis they will start communicating down
00:08:04.500 to their team using that same way.
00:08:06.000 So those are the two.
00:08:07.400 Real quick recap.
00:08:08.740 One, transactional is bad, it stacks up.
00:08:11.640 You could probably get to about 10 to 12 people
00:08:13.420 until you max out for management bandwidth.
00:08:15.380 And number two, transformational leadership
00:08:18.020 is really about creating a place and a way of working
00:08:20.620 that's empowering, that's actually more productive,
00:08:23.180 and that gets you your time back in a highly leveraged way
00:08:26.120 as you grow your leadership team.
00:08:27.820 As I mentioned at the beginning of this video,
00:08:29.100 I wanna share my precision scorecard template,
00:08:32.240 so it's what I use every week with my team.
00:08:34.800 In the template, it has a few key elements
00:08:37.240 you've probably not seen in other kind of reporting or
00:08:39.640 scorecarding strategies.
00:08:42.080 One, it's funnel metric base in regards to the top to the bottom
00:08:45.840 of how you measure and I do an open book strategy with my team.
00:08:49.920 So you can put the financials at the bottom or not but think
00:08:52.380 about top of funnel, mid funnel and bottom customer success
00:08:55.400 type activities.
00:08:56.420 The strategy of measuring every week so you build that cadence
00:08:59.800 and also the calculations of actual versus target on a monthly
00:09:03.760 and a quarterly basis and just really the structure.
00:09:06.840 So you can click the link below to get your copy
00:09:08.940 of my Precision Scorecard there.
00:09:11.220 And if you like this video, I'd encourage you to click
00:09:13.920 the like button, subscribe to my channel,
00:09:16.180 and be sure to share this with somebody that you care about
00:09:18.260 that you think could get a lot of benefit from watching it.
00:09:20.620 As per usual, I wanna challenge you to live a bigger life
00:09:23.520 and a bigger business, and I'll see you next Monday.
00:09:27.260 Is that from 300?
00:09:28.520 Are you not entertained?
00:09:30.260 Yeah, it's from 300.