Dan Martell - October 15, 2018


How To Use Transformational Leadership to Inspire And Motivate Your Team

Hosted by
Dan Martell
Mentioned
Maslow
How to Define A Customer Avatar For Your B2B SaaS Company How to Build a Revenue Growth Engine For Your Startup

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

204.66

Word count

1,949

Sentence count

105


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).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00 What's up? Dan Martell here, serial entrepreneur,
00:00:02 investor and creator of SaaS Academy.
00:00:03 In this video, I want to share with you how to lead your team
00:00:07 using a transformational leadership strategy,
00:00:09 not a transactional one because that's probably what you're
00:00:12 doing today, to-do list and checklists and all that fun stuff.
00:00:15 And be sure to stay at the end where I share with you how to
00:00:18 get a copy of my precision scorecard template.
00:00:22 It's the structure I use to guide my team during our weekly
00:00:25 syncs every week, the metrics, the numbers.
00:00:28 I'm going to give you a copy of that at the end of this video
00:00:30 so be sure to stick around.
00:00:44 So here's the challenge.
00:00:45 When I was running my company Clarity.fm,
00:00:47 I had a global team.
00:00:49 People working in different parts of the world,
00:00:51 all over the place.
00:00:52 And the challenge is that when you grow teams,
00:00:55 30, 40, 50 people large, it's hard to understand
00:00:59 who's doing what.
00:01:01 Most entrepreneurs are leading their team in a way that is
00:01:04 very much they tell them what to do.
00:01:06 The problem with this, if you think of it like over a
00:01:08 timeline, you can only have so many people that you're
00:01:12 telling them what to do before from just a pure
00:01:15 management bandwidth, this is pure math,
00:01:18 you don't have enough hours in the day.
00:01:20 So you get tapped out.
00:01:21 Most entrepreneurs kinda tap out about a million and a half
00:01:24 revenue and the reason why is because that's how they lead.
00:01:27 They lead in a transactional structure and it has an upper
00:01:32 limit of what they're able to do.
00:01:34 What I want to teach you instead is how to do it
00:01:36 transformational.
00:01:37 When I applied this to Clarity because I went through this
00:01:40 place of like just being frustrated with everybody and
00:01:43 nobody knowing how to kind of manage themselves and nobody
00:01:47 sees the vision the way I see it to a point where honestly my
00:01:50 team rocked you know and it's really about you know empowering
00:01:54 the team and working through your team that's going to allow
00:01:57 you to get bandwidth.
00:01:59 This is everything, it's like you want a new project,
00:02:01 you want to start a new project, great.
00:02:02 Do you have the management bandwidth?
00:02:03 You need to work through your team.
00:02:05 So in this video I'm going to share with you kind of the two
00:02:07 methods and how to think strategically about
00:02:10 transformational versus transactional.
00:02:13 The first method is transactional.
00:02:15 It's how most entrepreneurs lead their teams today.
00:02:17 The way you want to think about it is very simple.
00:02:19 First, you tell them what to do, so you tell.
00:02:22 Second, you check that it got done.
00:02:25 And then third, you tell them what to do next.
00:02:29 So it's tell, check, and next.
00:02:32 And some of you guys are going,
00:02:33 how else are you supposed to do it?
00:02:35 That's how I've been doing it for a decade.
00:02:37 And I'm going to teach you a totally different way.
00:02:39 But here's the reason why this doesn't work is,
00:02:43 one, if you have people coming to you and saying,
00:02:46 hey, I want to talk about getting a raise
00:02:47 or what about this perk or, you know,
00:02:49 I heard this company is ironing their clothes for their
00:02:53 employees or they've got a co-ed basketball team that they
00:02:57 sponsor and all these other perks.
00:02:58 If your team's coming to you, it's probably because,
00:03:01 on those things, it's because they don't feel like they're
00:03:04 being, they're not growing.
00:03:07 So when people don't feel like they're getting enough out of a
00:03:10 relationship, they start asking for other things and that's
00:03:13 what happens in a transactional structure.
00:03:16 Because you're treating people as a process, okay.
00:03:19 You can't treat people like automation and software.
00:03:22 You wanna treat them like they're part of the business
00:03:25 and give them accountability and really create a scenario
00:03:28 where they're growing as individuals.
00:03:30 This is Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
00:03:32 It's self-actualization.
00:03:33 So there's transactional, that's number one.
00:03:35 That's what most entrepreneurs do.
00:03:37 They tell, they check, and they tell them what's next.
00:03:40 What I wanna offer up is a totally different approach.
00:03:43 The second way of doing this is transformational leadership.
00:03:47 The way it works is very simple.
00:03:48 One, we don't tell people what to do.
00:03:50 We talk about outcomes that we want to achieve.
00:03:53 We describe the end state.
00:03:56 We're very clear of where the mountaintop is.
00:03:59 Think about this, if you can just tell your team
00:04:00 and be crystal clear, mountains are easy
00:04:02 because you can point to the top and you say,
00:04:03 we're gonna be standing up there, we're gonna look around
00:04:05 and it's gonna be great and we're gonna be healthy
00:04:07 and we got there in this amount of time
00:04:08 and everybody made it safe and all these different
00:04:10 characteristics of the outcome you want to achieve.
00:04:13 Mountaintops are easy but maybe it's a new website,
00:04:16 Maybe it's a new marketing funnel.
00:04:19 Maybe it's hiring a salesperson,
00:04:20 making sure they're productive.
00:04:21 What we need to do is number one is set a very clear outcome
00:04:25 for what we want our team member to achieve
00:04:28 and then work with them to collaborate kind of next actions
00:04:31 and strategies to get to that outcome.
00:04:33 So that's one.
00:04:34 Two is we want to focus on measuring
00:04:37 the progress they're making.
00:04:38 So we need to let them know how to measure.
00:04:40 And think about this from a human point of view.
00:04:43 We don't need to tell a kid when they're playing hockey
00:04:46 or basketball or soccer, my kids play hockey,
00:04:49 we don't have to tell them to play better.
00:04:51 We don't have to be like, hey, you need to learn to pass the
00:04:53 ball or move faster or get the rebound or whatever it is.
00:04:57 They just do it because they understand how the score is
00:05:00 being kept.
00:05:01 They're playing a game.
00:05:02 They see the scoreboard.
00:05:04 They know that when they get the thing in the net or, you know,
00:05:08 whatever, that they get an extra score on the board and then
00:05:11 they say, well, what did I do last time to get that and how
00:05:13 can I get that faster?
00:05:14 Your team want the same thing.
00:05:16 They want to know that, hey, if you're going to measure,
00:05:18 if you want a new website, what are you going to measure me on?
00:05:20 You're going to measure me on site performance,
00:05:22 so we want the site to be faster.
00:05:23 We want customers to fill out more forms,
00:05:25 so maybe it's conversions.
00:05:27 We want there to be more traffic,
00:05:29 because if it's faster, we should increase our traffic.
00:05:31 And by giving them the measurement,
00:05:33 then they have a clear understanding of how their progress
00:05:36 or their outcome is going to be measured.
00:05:38 And then the third is you want to coach them to success, okay?
00:05:41 Coach, you want to treat them like a coach would
00:05:44 with a player on a professional sports league.
00:05:48 And think about this, like, instead of telling people what
00:05:52 they got to do, checking it got done and tell them what to do
00:05:54 next, now all of a sudden you're coaching them to get outcomes
00:05:57 and measure things so that they know how they're doing so you
00:05:59 don't have to be the bad guy.
00:06:01 And when they run into issues, you can actually support them
00:06:03 and say, hey, have you thought about this?
00:06:04 Do you know this person?
00:06:05 Would you like to make an introduction?
00:06:06 I remember one of my coaching clients was frustrated with their
00:06:09 new growth team because the team couldn't come up with great
00:06:13 strategies to go run tests and experiments against.
00:06:16 And I challenged him, are you really coaching that person or
00:06:19 that team to success?
00:06:20 Because you knew by putting those five people together and
00:06:23 giving them an outcome and measuring, you did all that
00:06:26 stuff great, that they were never going to win.
00:06:28 They were never going to be successful.
00:06:30 What you should have done is said, hey, do you think maybe
00:06:33 bring in, because like if you've got 20 years of experience in
00:06:36 something, maybe you're an incredible builder, creator,
00:06:39 programmer, designer, et cetera, if you've got 20 years of
00:06:42 experience, you can't expect your team who has two years,
00:06:46 one year, maybe no experience to get the same outcomes
00:06:49 and you're just setting them up for failure.
00:06:50 So coaching is different.
00:06:52 Coaching is saying, hey, I think there's this really
00:06:54 incredible consultant that I could pay for 500 bucks to come
00:06:57 in to spend an hour with you to ideate different strategies.
00:07:00 And just ask yourself, if my team's gonna be successful,
00:07:03 how can I coach them to get outcomes without having to tell
00:07:06 them what to do by putting scenarios and people and
00:07:09 structure in the way they work so that they can succeed.
00:07:13 And if you do this, your team will feel empowered.
00:07:16 They'll feel like they're growing every day within your
00:07:18 organization and they're gonna want to contribute to improve
00:07:22 their score.
00:07:22 This is the power and what's neat is from a management bandwidth
00:07:26 there's an upfront cost but after a few months, let's call it
00:07:30 six months to nine months, your team starts to understand how
00:07:33 you operate and they don't need to come to you as much anymore
00:07:37 and all of a sudden you get your time back.
00:07:39 And the beauty, as you grow the organization,
00:07:42 the team, the startup, is that they start managing their
00:07:45 people like that.
00:07:46 Because what you're probably experiencing today is your team
00:07:49 is frustrated because the people that report to them don't do
00:07:52 what they say they're going to do, et cetera, et cetera,
00:07:53 et cetera, because they're managing with the transactional
00:07:55 leadership strategy.
00:07:56 You need to coach them in a way that's more transformational
00:08:00 and then through osmosis they will start communicating down
00:08:04 to their team using that same way.
00:08:06 So those are the two.
00:08:07 Real quick recap.
00:08:08 One, transactional is bad, it stacks up.
00:08:11 You could probably get to about 10 to 12 people
00:08:13 until you max out for management bandwidth.
00:08:15 And number two, transformational leadership
00:08:18 is really about creating a place and a way of working
00:08:20 that's empowering, that's actually more productive,
00:08:23 and that gets you your time back in a highly leveraged way
00:08:26 as you grow your leadership team.
00:08:27 As I mentioned at the beginning of this video,
00:08:29 I wanna share my precision scorecard template,
00:08:32 so it's what I use every week with my team.
00:08:34 In the template, it has a few key elements
00:08:37 you've probably not seen in other kind of reporting or
00:08:39 scorecarding strategies.
00:08:42 One, it's funnel metric base in regards to the top to the bottom
00:08:45 of how you measure and I do an open book strategy with my team.
00:08:49 So you can put the financials at the bottom or not but think
00:08:52 about top of funnel, mid funnel and bottom customer success
00:08:55 type activities.
00:08:56 The strategy of measuring every week so you build that cadence
00:08:59 and also the calculations of actual versus target on a monthly
00:09:03 and a quarterly basis and just really the structure.
00:09:06 So you can click the link below to get your copy
00:09:08 of my Precision Scorecard there.
00:09:11 And if you like this video, I'd encourage you to click
00:09:13 the like button, subscribe to my channel,
00:09:16 and be sure to share this with somebody that you care about
00:09:18 that you think could get a lot of benefit from watching it.
00:09:20 As per usual, I wanna challenge you to live a bigger life
00:09:23 and a bigger business, and I'll see you next Monday.
00:09:27 Is that from 300?
00:09:28 Are you not entertained?
00:09:30 Yeah, it's from 300.