Systems for building and leading your team
You can hire an agency to do marketing and sales, or learn a lot simply by watching what others do on the outside of their businesses.
You can work with with a bookkeeper, CPA or fractional CFO to help you with your books and financials, a systems team to help write SOPs.
But the major function in your business you can’t outsource to someone else?
And what you probably can’t witness how to do well from the outside?
Building and leading a team.
When you decide to bring on any level of support, you take up the mantle of leadership and responsibility to your people. Sure, you get support and to ease the burden of running a business.
But that comes with hard conversations: hiring, expectation setting, delegation, performance, pay. Why are these conversations so hard? Because they involve people and emotions, and you almost certainly weren’t taught how to do these well.
Few in the online and small business space are modeling good practices, and even fewer are teaching the skills of being a great people leader. I’ve heard horror stories on both ends: truly toxic work environments cultivated by seemingly equality-touting CEOs, and the challenges with team members who are missing deliverables even though you can’t afford it as a small business.
The business owners who delay learning the skills and developing the systems of building and managing a team? Have frequent turnover, end up micromanaging, take work back, feel squeezed on profit, and can even come to resent their team members. (”I’m paying how much, for what work, when I end up just having to do it myself?”).
But the business owners who learn about leadership, management, and team communication? They thrive. They have long-term team members, including partners, contractors, or employees, who bring their best to your organization.
I was thankful that I learned the basics of what to do (and what NOT to do) in my corporate roles, but what if you didn’t come from a background with formal leadership training? Or what if your only experience with leadership came from horrible bosses?
People leadership is a set of systems, rhythms, and skills that can be learned. And implementing strong systems in advance leads to less hard conversations when things get challenging, as they inevitably will.
The People Leadership Systems Include:
Organizational Design: Defining the roles you actually need, their responsibilities, capacity and workload, and key measures of success.
Hiring, Onboarding, and Training: Hiring the right candidate, for the right role, and setting them up for success.
Prioritization and Delegation: Ensuring everyone is working on the right things with clear expectations.
Communication Systems: The systems and rhythms for communication so nothing gets lost in a Slack channel or buried in an email.
Development Systems: How to provide feedback, assess performance, and progress your employees
As I was writing out systems on each of these points... they deserved their own posts and future workshops!
So I’ll leave you with some assessment questions.
Assessment Questions
Design: You have the right roles in the organization across visionaries, leaders, managers, builders, and doers.
Roles and Responsibilities: Your team members are clear on their roles, responsibilities, and their most important priorities in order to grow the business.
Onboarding and Training: You have a documented process to onboard team members, including repeatable training assets (wiki, SOPs, videos)
Communication Rhythms: You have a clear communication rhythm across meetings, emails, and asynchronous tools (e.g., Slack, text, task managers).
Development: You have a process to manage and develop your team: delegating, providing feedback, and evaluating performance.
Capacity and Workload Management: You have clarity on how you and your team spend your time and manage your tasks.