What if my team doesn't care like I do?

Hey there,

What if the question that stops you taking a month off is this:

"Do my team really care the way I do about individual clients and helping them long term?"

This is a deep question, but it looks worse than it really is. So in this newsletter I'm going to go through:

What you're really asking when you're asking if your team cares.
How to help your team behave more like you.
How to motivate your team to take the right decisions.

What you're really asking when you're asking if your team cares.

This looks like a question about trust, and in a way it is, but what I think you're really asking is this:

"If something untoward happens while I'm away, will my team do what I would do?"

In other words, what you want is for your team members to behave as if they were you. In the best long-term interests of the client.

But in order to behave like you they need to know what you know - about Clients and their long-term interests, about the options open to them in any given situation, and about potential consequences of those options on the business they work in.

And the only way they'll get to know what you know, is if you make your knowledge accessible to them.

And the only way to make sure your knowledge is accessible to them, even when you aren't, is to build that knowledge into the processes your business runs.

That way, it doesn't matter whether they care, what matters is that they follow the processes you've laid out for them.

By the way, everyone in your team almost certainly does care. Most people do. I've met very few people who come into work to do a bad job for their Clients or their team. What stops them behaving like you is not an absence of care, it's often a lack of confidence in handling exceptions. It's not knowing everything you know.

So the problem is not so much how to get you team to care the way you do, it's how to communicate what you know, so that they can be supported by 'you' even if you are away.

How to help your team behave more like you.

You know what I am going to say here.

Build everything you know into your system for making and keeping promises:

For example, as part of Keep Promise:

When you onboard a new Client, include a meeting where they present their current situation, their goals, and their Promise of Value to the whole team. (If they don't have a Promise of Value, run a workshop for them. This won't just help your Client, it will help you to help your Client better too.)

Write up the details of every Client into a Prop - a Client Profile, not just of who they are, contacts etc., but also their current situation, their goals, and their Promise of Value. Save it somewhere accessible to everyone.

Use the 'Client Profile' as part of a 'Review Client Profile' Activity, inserted into your Keep Promise process, wherever a team member needs to consciously remind themselves what matters to the Client.

You could push 'Review Client Profile' down a level into 'Deliver Part 1', 'Deliver Part 2' etc. It's up to you. The point is to include it wherever you would normally stop and think about what's best for the Client before taking action.

Be sure to include the relevant 'Client Profile' as a Prop for your 'Restore Client Faith' and 'Bolster Client Faith' processes, alongside the Customer Net Profit numbers for your business. That way, when things don't go to plan, whoever is running the process starts with the needs of both parties in mind.

Whenever a Client situation requires a non-obvious solution, make a note of the situation and how it was dealt with for future reference. Include why you took this decision, what else was considered and if rejected, why. Save this log to a 'Solution Bank' where everyone can find it. Over time you'll build up a valuable resource (a bit like an internal FAQs) that people can call on when you aren't there to ask.

As part of 'Improve Process':

Create regular opportunities for learning about what matters to Clients, and how Client situations can be dealt with:

Schedule regular meetings to remind yourselves of a Client's Promise of Value, to review their goals, and to keep abreast of new packages they offer. Update the Client Profile after each meeting.

Schedule regular get-togethers to go through the latest entries into the 'Solution Bank', so that everyone can learn from everyone's experience.

Schedule regular get-togethers to ensure the 'Solution Bank' contents are in line with the latest regulations and best practice. You don't have to limit this kind of meeting to yourselves. You could buddy up with one or more businesses in the same space and review each others' 'Solution Banks'.

Once you've embedded caring about Clients into the day-to-day process of doing the work, it will become a habit for your team, just as it did for you.

How to motivate your team to take the right decisions.

The chances are that once your team are familiar with your Clients and their visions for their businesses, they will care about helping them to achieve those goals. They're human beings, they won't be able to help themselves.

But if you want to do more to motivate them, it helps to remember what most people want from life:

Agency - to make their own ‘me-shaped’ dent in the universe.
Mastery - to learn and master (even teach) new skills.
Autonomy - to be free to choose how they make their dent.
Purpose - to do this for something bigger than themselves.
Community - to do all this with ‘people like us’.
Status - to know (and for others to know) where we stand in our communities.

Use this to align each team member's interests with those of your Clients, and yours:

Share your Purpose - what you're here to do, who you're here to do it for, and your unique way of doing it. The best way I know to do that is to articulate your business's Promise of Value.

When you do this with your whole team, not only will you get amazing insights, you'll also get buy-in. When you then write up your Promise of Value as a Fedex Sentence, you summarise the Purpose in a way that gives them Autonomy and Agency to act on it.

Reinforce your Purpose daily by giving your team Role Names that reflect what they do for the Client, rather than an aspect of their job, or their position in the machinery of your business. When your title is 'Flight Dynamics Officer' rather than 'Client Bookkeeper' you can't help but know the importance of what you do for the Client.

Build a sense of Community in your team, by continually exposing your team to the context of their work, through regular contact with Clients and regular learning from each other. Remember, Community doesn't just mean you and your team, it includes Clients. It can also include Suppliers, Sub-contractors - anyone who shares your Purpose and works alongside you to achieve it.

Enable your team to build Mastery, and to be confident in exercising Autonomy, by gradually giving them responsibility for bigger and bigger chunks of the process. So they see the context of the work they do. Extend that Mastery by making sure they can and do contribute to Improving how the business works, and how the business Packages up it's promise. Increased responsibility builds Status too.

Finally, do the thing that will really help them to behave more like you:

Give them a share in the results. Good, or bad. Having Agency means being prepared to put up with the consequences of your actions.

This sounds brutal. But it isn't really. After all, with a framework of processes to support them, and plenty of opportunity to learn from and collaborate with each other, no team member is operating in a vacuum.

That all got a bit heavy there, but here's what I hope you've learned today:

'How can I get my team to care like I do?' is the wrong question. They almost certainly already do care. What you need is for them to be able to do what you do, and that means they have to know what you know.
When you create the framework of processes to support your team to do what you do, remember to include activities and processes for learning, the way you did when you built your business.
Most people are motivated by the same set of incentives. And they are not primarily about money. They're about growing and developing as a human being among other human beings. They're what motivated you to start your own business, and they will motivate people to be like you, when you can't be there.

Ans I hope this has helped if you're worrying whether your team will care for Clients while you take a break.

If you'd like to read about an extreme (and extremely successful) case of building everything you know into your system for making and keeping promises, I highly recommend this book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/500-transformed-productivity-self-leading-organisation/dp/1527265358

And for a lighthearted, yet serious look at how to help people care about the job they do, have a watch of this right to the end:

If I had to sum up the whole of this newsletter it would probably be like this:

"It's a ticklish sort of job, making a thing for a thingummy-bob. Especially if you don't know what it's for".

~ from 'The Thing-Ummy-Bob (That's Going to Win the War)" written by Barbara Gordon and Basil Thomas with music by David Heneker.

Finally, a shameless plug:

Helping business owners like you to embed everything they know into how their business works is what I do.

I can give you some ideas and even specific processes in this newsletter, but if you really want to go for it, you'll get there quicker with me alongside you.

Get in touch if that's of interest.

Thanks for reading!