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[00:00:00] What is going on? My friends Mike Walker here, client Services director at The Wealthy Consultant. This of course is TWC Talks, our Wealthy Consultant podcast. Great to have you here. Thank you for joining me. Um, I'm going to be diving into a topic that I think is near and dear to your heart as much. It is mine because if you find yourself on this podcast, then you are likely.

[00:00:20] A business owner, a consultant, a coach, a subject matter expert, someone that is in charge of bringing value into the marketplace. And in order to deliver that, in order to fulfill on that promise, you very likely depend on other people, which means you are a leader. So all that to say, if you are a leader, if you are a business owner and you are dependent on other people to help fulfill that and bring your mission and your vision to life and bring it to fruition into the marketplace, then um, I believe that this, uh, episode is going to serve you well and is my intent to kind of take a very broad, complex, very deep, uh, and widened scope, topic and distill into.

[00:01:02] Three different areas that you can, um, you know, deploy into your business. Starting today. I want to kind of break off a couple nuance elements of leadership and give it to you and format it in a way that you can deploy into your business starting immediately today. All right, so that's, that's the entire intent of today's episode.

[00:01:19] Um, you know, When it comes to leadership, there again, that's a very broad term, so I wanna narrow it in a little bit. And specifically I'm gonna be talking about innovation and leadership and new approaches for managing teams. You know, the environment, the marketplace, everything has changed. And if you have spent at all any time in the corporate sector, you would've seen this in the most dramatic way back in, you know, the.

[00:01:44] The impact of Covid and how that changed and, and basically displaced a very large majority of the entire work population out into their homes. And then we kind of became a Zoom culture and everybody is now video sharing and doing this. And depending on, you know, if you were already in a distributed workforce or if you, you know, again, were displaced because of, uh, you know, the covid scenario and everything that happened there.

[00:02:06] Or just because that's how a lot of, uh, corporations are now doing things either way. It requires, uh, new approaches to managing teams. You know, if everybody is not in the same building, then you'd naturally have different time zones to consider. You have, you know, loss and translation in terms of what is able to be conveyed across, even just video, things like that.

[00:02:28] So, I mean, there's, there's a lot of elements to be considered as a leader. And as a business owner. And so I want to help, um, you know, bring some ideas to the table for you that I believe will, you know, serve you well. All right. So when researching, uh, the topic of leadership, you're typically gonna hear things like, you know, empowerment and autonomy and, you know, encouraging employees to take ownership.

[00:02:47] Um, and, and that's all well and good. I think you and I can both agree that, wow. Yeah, Mike, that sounds pretty good. I think I want that. Right? And, and that's all. Well, good. But here's the thing. Empower and autonomy. Sure, we might know what those things mean, what the, what the definitions of those words are, but how you, how do you actually deploy that into your organization?

[00:03:04] How do you actually realize that in the workplace? And that's what I wanna more dive deep on, uh, with you today. So the first topic is the principles and benefits of inter innovative leadership, right? Like, What are some ways that we can actually implement this into our organization? And one of my favorite ways of innovating leadership is to.

[00:03:26] Create a culture of self-managing teams. This really becomes a, a key component for you as you start to transition and evolve as an entrepreneur from, you know, you've got your solo operator and then you probably have like a VA and maybe, uh, you know, an in-house assistant. And then you go to realizing, wait a second, you know, we're growing, we need more people.

[00:03:44] And you start then hiring based on more departmental needs, um, to help with fulfillment or client services. Um, it goes on and on, right? Just depending on your vertical, your industry, everything that. You, you deliver to the marketplace is naturally gonna, um, depend on a different set of team, um, infrastructure.

[00:04:02] But regardless, at the end of the day, if you're developing a multi-layered team, then you wanna have systems in place for that. And so one of those elements is a self-managing team so that you are not the bottleneck for your organization. If you are the end all, be all decision maker for your business, you've already handicapped yourself.

[00:04:19] And so you need to develop. Uh, systems and frameworks and methodologies in your business that not just you use, but that your entire organization adopt and it becomes part of the culture and the overall arching systems that are, uh, used, um, internally. Right? So one of the best ways and, and the most straightforward ways of actually making sure that that happens is to make sure you have clearly articulated SOPs.

[00:04:44] For every single task and project that gets done on a regular basis in your business. S o p, if you're not familiar, is standard operating procedure. And typically these are lined out in, you know, uh, clearly articulated, itemized, more bullet point style, uh, how to step-by-step frameworks. You can build these out, um, on platforms like Asana, which is what we use.

[00:05:03] We also use Notion. So Notion so is just an open, uh, format. It's it's very flexible format, uh, tool that you can share information with your team internally. And it's searchable, which is nice, meaning that, you know, for us here at the Wealthy Consultant, we have an entire, uh, section in notion dedicated to SOPs, and any single person on the team can jump in there, search for whatever particular activity or project that they're working on, and know exactly how to fulfill on that task.

[00:05:31] Now, the beauty of this is twofold. Number one, it forces you or whoever's in charge of that particular. Role to very clearly spell out what does success look like for this particular process or function, right? If you can't describe it well in a way that someone else can then read it and then do it, it means that there's unclarity there, there's something there that's not, uh, fully, uh, transparent in the organization or how things are getting done, or maybe it's kind of getting done different ways at every single time.

[00:06:00] It's a really great way to identify weak links in your operation just by the, the very nature of building out SOPs. So I would highly encourage if you don't already have SOPs for every single department and every single reoccurring task, then you need to do that because it's not just, you know, busy work to do it.

[00:06:18] It's a matter of creating, um, enterprise value for your organization gives you the ability to scale and, and grow a team for one, but it's also gonna force you to look through your processes and identify weak links, friction points, things that could be done better, more simply, more optimized, more systematized.

[00:06:33] Whatever it may be, it's gonna highlight all those different elements. So there's a very kind of a multi, uh, benefit approach for building out those SOPs. Now, here's one thing that a lot of people miss when they do this though, and that is problem solving and decision making SOPs. So not just how to do specific tasks, but how to approach different problems.

[00:06:54] How do, how do we, uh, approach decision making? Now, this is a whole nother layer of operational, uh, and almost culture building because, You may have, you probably do. You know if you've reached any level of success in your business or in any job or position for that matter you've innately developed internally and maybe even subconsciously a system or a framework or a paradigm for how you approach different problems.

[00:07:20] And this is awesome and hopefully it serves you well. But what if every single person in your organization approaches problem solving and decision making in a different way? You get where I'm going with that. Now there's some benefit in having some variety. We're gonna actually speak to that in a minute.

[00:07:36] But the reality is that we all need to be kind of rowing the boat in the same direction. Can you agree with that? So it would make sense then to provide some frameworks, some some overarching principles that can help guide problem solving and decision making internally within your organization so that when you are faced with these types of elements of business, which you absolutely will, On probably a very ongoing basis, then you need to, um, have a framework and a, a premeditated thought out way of addressing.

[00:08:07] Problem solving and decision making, cuz at the end of the day, guys, think about it. The business of business is solving problems. That's what we do as business owners. We are either presenting a product or service that people need to get away from a particular pain or challenge that they're experiencing, or to get closer to something that they want more of.

[00:08:25] That's it. We're either way we are solving a problem. The larger the problem, the more valuable that problem is. The more money we can charge, the more money we make, and the more impact we have overall in the marketplace. So, If that is all to be true, then what does that suggest? If the business of business of problem solving, then would it not make sense for us to have SOPs developed specifically for problem solving and thinking through new and more nuanced elements of things like the unknown unknowns?

[00:08:52] What happens if we get hit with a question or a challenge in the market, or buy a client or. During a particular element of our daily functions that we are not sure of how to address, then what, what is the sequence of steps or thoughts that we need to go through as an individual, as an organization to then address those?

[00:09:11] These are like higher level SOPs that not many people spend much time on, and then they just kind of do it in the moment and realize that they're just flying by the seat of their pants, or they're making, you know, decisions more emotionally based instead of principle based. There's a lot of benefits in thinking through these things in advance.

[00:09:26] So number one, self-managing teams having clearly articulated SOPs. Critical number two, have an ascension model built into your management tiers, Ascension models, essentially meaning that you have a particular role, a departmental role in your organization. That same person needs to be responsible for building out the tasks, the SOPs, whatever would be required to replace themselves.

[00:09:52] Here's the beauty of that. In doing so, exact same thing that I just basically spelled out earlier with the SOPs is it forces that person to analyze what is it that I do. What is it that the, what are the outcomes that are, am I trying to hit? What does success look like for my particular role? When that person is, is put in that position to think through that, naturally they're gonna become better.

[00:10:12] They're gonna be more articulate and thoughtful about what it is that they do on a daily basis, but also what it's doing is it's building a framework for someone else to backfill that person and allows that person to ascend to a higher role, puts them into a more leadership. Environment when they are now responsible for educating the person to bring in and basically backfill them.

[00:10:34] Here's the cool part, and I think you've probably heard this before, that you don't truly know something until you're able to teach it to somebody else effectively. Right? It's one thing to know something, it's an entirely different thing to actually know it so well that you can then, you know, distill that information to somebody else and have them understand it and actually be able to fulfill on it.

[00:10:53] That's the next level of. You know, ownership of your knowledge, right, is being able to teach it to somebody else. So by creating an ascension model into your organization specifically for your, uh, management tier in particular, it's a really powerful way of creating that more innovative leadership.

[00:11:09] Because in the process of doing that, they're gonna realize, wait a second, if someone had to fulfill me, if I were not here today, what information, what set of instructions, what playbooks, what frameworks would have to be in place in order for this person to be able to fulfill? And you know, the void that's left by me not being around.

[00:11:27] Right. Pretty straightforward stuff, but very, very powerful if you actually implement it. All right, and then lastly on the principles and benefits of innovation in leadership would be optimizing for unique ability versus just filling the role. All right, so we have these roles and typically what happens, especially if you're in a smaller organization, everyone's wearing multiple hats.

[00:11:47] Now that's all well and good. That's kind of by default, what what has to happen, right? But as the organization grows, what happens is that oftentimes people just get stuck in that departmental role. They're like, well, that's, that's handled by marketing, or that's handled by the sales team. Or that's handled by fulfillment or service, uh, client services, which is fine.

[00:12:07] But in those unique roles, make sure that you actually have people that are uniquely suited for particular aspects of that. Task or project or department, and then look for opportunities to actually take some of the load off of where they, they don't necessarily bring the best talent or the best, uh, you know, natural ability to Right.

[00:12:28] And then fill that in with somebody else. And the beauty of this is it means your key players, the ones that are really performing, can spend more and more time on the things that they're uniquely skilled for. So, yeah, they may be a quote unquote marketing person, but what element of the marketing role are they just uniquely suited?

[00:12:47] Where do they bring, uh, just a natural talent? Where are they most, uh, you know, enjoying what they do? How can we get them spending more time on just those things? Where can we outsource or, or, Remove some of that 80% of the work that's more just task orientated or things that can be done by somebody else that's either not necessarily as skilled or just simply not as experienced in a particular, you know, set of more nuanced, um, skill sets or abilities.

[00:13:14] Can we offload that so that our, our key players can spend more time in their zone of genius. If you're able to do that, it's a really, it's a huge lift to our organization because naturally the people are gonna have more fun, they're gonna feel more fulfilled and bring more, you know, innovation to their particular role because they're spending more time where they really bring a unique ability versus just some of the time.

[00:13:35] And then the rest of the time they're spending, you know, on just basic tasks that technically don't, not necessarily. Require their level of skills or their level of talent. Okay? So when you find talent, look for ways to optimize for their unique ability and not just to fill the role. All right, let's dive into the second set of, um, topics here, and that is strategies for fostering creativity and innovation.

[00:13:58] So once you have people that are in the organization, you naturally want to foster that creativity. We already touched on it a little bit, but the importance of developing accurate and specific scorecards that clearly articulate what success looks like. This is a big thing because a lot of people that I talk to in business, they're like, oh, I'm not sure if I have a players or not.

[00:14:18] Um, and I say, okay, well what does success look like? Number one, what, how would, how would you measure an A player? What would an A player have to do and say, well, you know, and it's just kind this vague idea of what that success looks like. You need to have clearly spelled out scorecards or job descriptions that itemizes, you know, not only the prerequisite of what that person necessarily needs in terms of education and, and all those things, but more importantly, the actual day-to-day skill sets or.

[00:14:44] Uh, you know, projects that they're going to complete. What does fulfillment, what does success look like, uh, for that particular role? Have that really clearly spelled out, because, again, you can't hit a target. You can't see, so if you, as the business owner or the department head cannot clearly spell out exactly what success looks like, And what you want to have happen, then naturally you're, you're just leaving it up to, to chance that it's even gonna happen in the first place.

[00:15:10] So I would highly encourage, have, have your, uh, you know, scorecards fully built out. And these can be iterative too, meaning that you'll probably have a version 1.0 of this. But then over time you realize, you know, actually for this particular role, we need this person to be able to do X, Y, and Z. We thought it was this, but it's actually that, right?

[00:15:28] So it's something that you need to revisit even if you've done it once before. I always, hi. I highly encourage to, um, seek out people who add different perspectives. So naturally, you know, you have all kinds of different, uh, personality tests out there and, and all that. And that's, that's a great component to bring into your hiring and your vetting process is to make sure that you, you're not just bringing all, you know, engineer type brains into your organization, right?

[00:15:53] Because naturally, if you are the one in charge of hiring, you're gonna have an affinity towards, you know, um, And connection with people that you can identify with and you just naturally get along with better and whatnot. And that's fine. There is an element to that that you need to, um, you know, you need to connect with your people obviously, but there has to be some diversity in who you bring into your organization.

[00:16:18] Otherwise, everybody's just gonna be kind of, Going along in the, in the same path. And you're gonna have kind of a tribal mindset, which isn't necessarily always good. You wanna have some, uh, almost positive friction there amongst your team, not from a a value perspective or, or, you know, attitude perspective, but more just in the pers in the way of how do you look at things, how do you approach things.

[00:16:42] Um, these are all really key things. And so you can use, uh, personality tests like the Myers-Briggs test. You can use the DISC assessment. There's big five personality traits, strengths finder, Enneagram. All of these provide different, um, ways of kind of looking at the same thing, which is addressing people's personality types, how they, uh, you know, approach problems, how they approach, uh, relationships, all these different components of the business experience.

[00:17:06] Can be, you know, identified in these types of tests. So definitely wanna lean in on some form of a personality test that really helps analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your team overall. And, and best of all, see how those interplay with each other. It's not about, you know, necessarily one being better than the other.

[00:17:23] Like, oh, this person has to be this particular role. It's really more like a. Uh, playing scientists a little bit and combining variables, combining different compounds to form that perfect combination, right? That perfect concoction of skillset and personality. Um, and you, you need to have some variables there.

[00:17:41] There needs to be some, some form of, uh, distinction between, so that you all are balancing each other out in terms of skills and weaknesses. Lastly for, uh, strengths and, and foster and creativity and innovation within teams, you must have clearly articulated vision and values for your business. The reason is because those people that you bring into your organization need to have a solid framework on how to make decisions.

[00:18:07] Again, we talked about decision making processes, but all of that is gonna hinge on the vision and values of the organization as a whole. At the, the end all be all of making decisions is, is this in alignment with our vision, with our values, with how we want to show up for our clients in the, the marketplace, right?

[00:18:26] That's the end all be all when it comes to making decisions. And so you need to make sure that you actually have. Clearly spelled out vision and values, uh, for your organization. We have them here at the Wealthy Consultant built in into the Notion Deck. So every single member of the team during onboarding is able to visit those.

[00:18:43] We bring them up constantly during our quarterly offsites. Um, as an organization, if we're stuck on something, we're not sure how we wanna approach particular, uh, you know, challenge in the business or a particular element of, of growth. We always, by default, fall back to. Let's go visit our vision, cultures, and values and see where does this fall.

[00:19:03] It becomes the guiding light. It's like the, the, um, you know, lighthouse in a storm, so to speak. It helps guide the way through any kind of uncertainty that you'll experience in your business. All right. And the very last thing, my friends then we're gonna wrap up with this is decentralizing intelligence and decision making.

[00:19:18] This is a big one because it's the polar opposite of the old school, more traditional top-down management. Think of a pyramid, for example, right? And you have the CEO or the business owner at the very top. Well, it's only that one person that would have a full view of all the other layers below it, right?

[00:19:35] They're the only one that has clarity of every layer and all the things that happen within those, uh, different levels of the organization. Now, here's the problem with that. If you are that person, you cannot go anywhere because you're, you've now put yourself in the position where you are the end all, uh, decision maker.

[00:19:52] You're the only one that knows enough and has full context of the organization, of all the different people and, and projects that are going on. To make the types of decisions that would, you know, move the, the organization as a whole. Right. So I, we like to flip that on its head and remove that. We like to decentralize that intelligence, and we do that in multiple different ways.

[00:20:12] But the most simple of ways and ways that you can implement into your business starting today are simply having what we call a weekly huddle, a weekly executive meeting, and. We have kind of a, a love hate relationship with meetings because you may or may not have experienced this in any, in your past or in the corporate sector, but you can have a, a culture of meetings where it is just the entire day is filled with meetings and you're talking to, to each other and not talking to in the marketplace.

[00:20:38] Right. And, and that's, uh, That becomes a almost like a virus in a business where it's just meeting after meeting after meeting. Then you have meetings about the meeting that you're gonna have, about the meeting farther down the way next week. Right. It's just, it's exhaustive. It's, it's boring and it's just, uh, kind of incestuous, it like builds on itself.

[00:20:57] So. We, we do wanna meet as an organization, obviously, and we meet weekly. However, what we do is slightly different. We have these weekly huddles where using notion, um, but it could be on any open doc that is available to the entire team. We have our notes spelled out in advance, so we have our KPIs, the weekly, uh, report metrics that are due for everybody, and that's shared on a dashboard, essentially a shared spreadsheet.

[00:21:21] And every departmental head, every executive has to share their KPIs for the week. So now as an organization, every other single executive is able to jump onto that exact same dashboard and see where, what everybody else is doing, how are their numbers. And what happens is you start to understand as an organizational whole, how your numbers impact the other numbers.

[00:21:42] It's really, really important. And so these numbers, you know, having that transparency and, and the, the clarity that that provides is key to creating a more, uh, cohesive team and a team that has that more autonomy and ability to make decisions. At a larger level because they're not just isolated or siloed out into their own little bubble, like, well, I don't know what they're doing, but I know my department's doing good.

[00:22:05] Right? We see a lot of that in the corporate sector, and what we're doing is we're flipping that on its head and creating a more transparent view of the executive level with this dashboard. And then with the weekly huddles, we'll do the same thing where. We'll share notes in an open doc and, Hey guys, this is what I'm working on for the week.

[00:22:23] These are my objectives. These are the three primary things I'm looking to hit. You know, there's, there's just different bits of information that doesn't necessarily need to be translated in a sit down meeting where we all sync calendars and we block everything out, right? We're all busy. We all have lots of things to do.

[00:22:38] So if we can minimize the amount of time that we have to necessarily sit down side by side in a meeting and instead get the exact same value. But in a more flexible format, uh, you know, like on a Notion Doc, for example, like what we use here, then it's just a really powerful way of getting the same value and, and extracting the same amount of information and data that we need to make decisions as an executive team.

[00:23:02] Without having to eat up the bandwidth and the calendar space to, um, you know, have a, have a meeting now, we absolutely still meet, you know, face-to-face on Zoom. We'll, Stu still do that once a week. Um, but the day-to-day look for ways to systematize and, and share that data in a more distributed way, more decentralized ways so that you can have, uh, better de uh, decision making across the team because everyone already knows in advance.

[00:23:26] What they are, um, doing and how their actions and, uh, numbers are impacting the other departments. All right. Okay, guys, that's basically it. I, as a wrap though, I would just, you know, encourage you to think through the approaches for managing your team and look for ways to optimize. And it could clearly just comes down to communication, communication cures all.

[00:23:45] And so if you can figure out ways, frameworks, and systems for conveying the details of what success looks like and how to make decisions. Everybody's gonna be going the same direction, and you're gonna naturally find just a better, faster, more streamlined operation as a whole. And, uh, the ability for people to grow up and become more decisive leaders in their department.

[00:24:09] And then what happens? You create an environment where your team is running itself. You have a self-managing team. It's exceptionally a powerful element of a business. If you can remove yourself as the end all operator and decision maker. It's just a really cool place to be when you can depend on your team and that starts with trust and that trust is developed by creating communication tools and systems in order to, you know, establish that trust.

[00:24:32] All right guys. Excellent. Have a blessed day. Thank you for joining us here on this episode. We look forward to next one. We'll see you on in an enough upcoming episode of TWC Talks. Take care, guys.