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Hey, this is Sharan Srivatsa. Welcome back to the Business School podcast. And in this episode, I'm going to break down for you one simple question. Why your team is probably not performing at the highest of levels. Now, it does not matter if you have a small team or a large team or somewhere in between. Every time I talk to entrepreneurs, business owners, CEOs, the one thing they want is a better team member or more performance from their team. And I'm going to give you the one tactical advantage, if implemented right, will change your team forever. And going to break it down step by step, starting right now. One thing is for certain, just because it's tried and true doesn't mean it's working right now. So the big question is this. Where can you learn what is working right now? The strategies, the tactics, the psychology, and the exact how to. How to grow your business, how to blow up your personal brand and supercharge your personal growth. That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Sharan Srivatha, and welcome to Business School. So the promise was big. It is. What is this one tactical advantage on how you can communicate with your team to make them super productive and make them super happy. And the big part is that Most managers, leaders, CEOs, think they're being clear, but most people cannot read their minds. And the team will hear things like, oh, you need to be more visible or you, you need to take more ownership. But no one defines what that actually means. And I hate using this word clarity, because nobody knows even what that word means internally. At acquisition.com, we say, well, what does that mean? The lack of clarity kills the performance. People don't know what they're doing. It kills motivation. And of course, at the end of the day, it kills trust between you and the employee. And I will tell you, great leaders do one simple thing very consistently. They show people exactly how to win. And I'm going to show you why this is important and probably start with a sports example. Now, here's the crazy part. I want to give you the Bill Belichick example, and I want to state up front that I am not a New England Patriots fan. I am not a Bill Belichick fan. But it's pretty amazing that Belichick led the pats to win six Super Bowls and 14 straight winning seasons. And there is a quote that is etched. I have not seen this, but actually the locker room, I believe that says, at the Patriots is do your job. And that's a Bill Belichick Quote. And the inside story is the do your job wasn't just a motto. It was a system that Belichick kind of installed. He gave the players very precise instructions on every scenario. He goes, do this when the snap count happens, do this when the coverage reads like this, do this when the defense moves this, do this when they play that formation. There is a very clear when then behavior based approach to do it things. Because when, when you give every team member crystal clear expectations for their role, everything changes. If you define what success looks like, as in, hey, before the snap, you know, I don't know, tickle your nose, it doesn't matter what it is, not after they've already made the mistakes. So the job is you should not assume that competence equals clarity or understanding, right? You want to teach the team how to do the job your way, as in what is expected of them. Because when they do that, they get the confidence of getting the result that they want. So this is, by the way, not just true in sports, it's true in everything else. And of course I did some research on all of this, right? There is a Gallup poll that says only 50% of employees, there's one half of employees strongly agree they know what is expected of them at work. Think about this. There are one out of two employees in the world right now, right? Let's assume that, you know, out of the 8 trillion people in the world, let's assume that 2 trillion people work, a trillion of them don't know exactly what is expected of them. Like, how crazy is this? Right? And managers will often say things like, oh, I want you to be more visible. Well, what does that mean? You've got to have some competitive greatness. Well, what does that mean? And so because of that, if someone you know said to you, be more visible, you will say, oh, let me send more emails or let me post more messages in Slack, and then you don't get any better feedback out of all of it. And that just seems painful. So anytime you provide some feedback to somebody like, oh, take initiative or act like a leader, you want to translate that into an observable behavior so that they know what they did. Otherwise you don't know what they did and they don't know what they did. Therefore they don't know if they're acting like a leader or taking initiative. And if you give them the behavior, then you don't even have to check back. They don't even have to explain to you that they understand. They know that if they don't do the thing that they didn't do the thing. And so I think there's a, there's a really important thing here that people need to know when they're winning. And that is why you do this. When people are unclear, they're gonna try a lot of different things, then they're gonna get frustrated, then they're gonna say, well, I'm trying really hard, but I'm not hitting the mark. And that really sucks. So let's actually answer this question, right? So instead of saying be more visible, what you wanna do is you wanna tie visibility to an employee's personal goal. And you can say, hey, if you want to become a great C level leader in this company, would it be okay if I gave you ideas and you're already doing the other things? Well, now I'm tying it to their goal. Because I'm not just saying you should do this better, because I think you should do this better, I'm saying you should do this better. Because if you did this, it will help you achieve your goals. Right? So step number one, tie the feedback to a personal goal. Step number two, give them specific behaviors that they can do. And step number three, explain the why behind each thing. So for example, I would say, hey Jimmy, I know you have, you know, aspirations of becoming the CFO of a company. You're doing a great job. I believe that if you can do these three things, it will get you the there faster. Would it be okay if I shared that with you? Now I'm not saying I need you to do this because I think because it's my way, I'm saying I need you to do this because it will help you hit your goals and you want to do everything in service of the person. Because if you don't do it in service of the person, why are you doing it anyway? So number one, try to feedback to their personal goal. Number two, give them the specific behavior that they can implement so that they know what winning actually looks like. Right? And number three, explain the why. So what I would say is, hey, so Jimmy, to be more visible, it's important to hit your goal. So the three things that I would suggest doing are, number one, post your weekly insights on Slack. Number two, when you're on a client call, take control of the call. And number three, write summaries that highlight team one. So I will explain, hey, when you post your insights on Slack, do it in a five bullet point format but make it applicable to the entire company. And say you observed X thing and you think that's a Y thing. You have to provide an insight so that it's not just lost in a random Slack thread or an email or end of week update. It is given to everybody. Now people can see how you think and an insight can actually help them. They will take your insight and do something with it. And when they do that now, they tie their success to your success. Right? Second, let's say take control of the meeting in group client calls. Hey, when you get on a client call, instead of just saying something like, hey, meet Jenny, she's going to be your finance lead. Like, that's terrible for Jenny. Instead, take over the call and say, hey, today we have four people on the call who are part of your custom team to get you your results. First, I want you to introduce you to Jenny. And you could say, here's when I met Jenny. Here's what she does, here's how she does it. Here. Here are superpowers. And we are so lucky to have Jenny on the team and to be a part of this account to actually support you to delivering on the thing that you really want to do. Now that is significantly better than saying, hey, Jenny will be your finance lead. Right? And the third recommendation that I don't, I'm making up any gave here is write summaries that highlight team wins. Most people, you know, want to take credit, but they don't realize that giving credit is actually more applicable than taking credit. Because the person who gives credit is seen as the one, as the leader that shines the light on other people. And that way every other person supports that person. It's actually, if you think about it, you may be able to take credit for something that you did maybe one time every three months, but you can give credit to other people ten times a week. And that's really important because the frequency in which you are able to do something like that allows you, allows you to win so much more. Right? So now if I gave you that framework, number one, tie it back to their personal goal, number two, give them three specific behaviors, and number three, explain the why behind each one. Now, Jimmy knows exactly what he needs to do. And that's the answer here. Like, people need to know what winning looks like for them. So the next big thing is, you know, I read this thing, which it's kind of like a funky phrase very maybe AI generated called leadership is caught, not taught. And I always like, what does that mean? And whenever I hear something and I'm like, well, how do I translate that? What does that mean? And so the big idea is that when you coach somebody, clearly you don't just help them perform. You give them a chance to help coach others. And so, for example, let's say I gave this advice to Jimmy and then Jimmy becomes the VP of finance. Well, what does Jimmy do? He then writes a memo to his team modeling the style of exactly how I gave him the feedback. So a couple of amazing things happen. Number one, we want to model this clarity. We want. I hate that word clarity because it isn't. You don't really know what it means. We want to model this process so that the future leaders start to mirror it. Otherwise they don't know how to give the feedback. Number two, you want to document this leadership playbook because people know, then they know how to run the meetings and they know how to give the feedback. Then they know how to write the Slack messages, then they know how to introduce people on calls, right? And then what happens is you have all these top performers as culture carriers because now the things are translated the right way in the organization. So while you think you just helped Jimmy one time, Jimmy now goes and does that in multiple ways. And everyone starts to model Jimmy's behavior because clearly it works. The reason why people don't model other people's behavior is because they know it doesn't work. So they stick to their own ways. But when I see a meeting run differently, or when I see someone being introduced correctly, or when I see a shout out being done on a Slack channel, what do I think? I'm like, listen, that was really good. How do I model that overall, right? The reason I'm sharing all of this with you is this. I think vague expectations just dramatically kill teams. And it's not your fault, but it is your problem, right? I really, really believe that great leaders define winnings in terms that people can act on. If they don't understand what to do, they don't know what winning means. So you want that feedback, number one, tied to their personal goals. Number two, give them very specific behaviors. And number three, tell them why. And when you do this consistently, I think not only does your team get stronger, your future leaders start to get stronger as well. That becomes the way you do it, which is unbeatable. And now because of that, they feel excited to be there. So literally that is the winning conversation framework. If you will pick one team member, tell them, you know, tied to their personal goals, show them the clear behaviors and tell them why. And if you do this, you can do that in a written form, you can do this in a spoken form, and it's really easy to give this feedback because it's not a hard conversation. If you have managers on your team, if you have other people that lead in your organization, I highly recommend you sharing this with them because I get nothing out of it. I just want them to win because now they have the same playbook, they have the same rubric and they realize that they don't have to have a PIP conversation or improvement conversation with somebody. They can just do this in such a way that it changes behavior and that's exactly what you're looking for. You want to do it so that that process is wholesome and it's good for them. You don't want to manipulate them to doing something, a behavior change that is good for you. Right? If you tell me to do something for the organization and I don't want to do it, that's manipulation. I'm just doing it to protect my job. But if you tell me something that is good for me and my care and it also ties to the benefit of the organization, I totally want to do it. And that's why this is important. All right? So please, if you like this, I'd love for you to screenshot this and tag me. That way I can make more like this for you. But more importantly, if you like this and you think other people in your organization can benefit from it, especially managers or leaders, just send it to them. That way they'll have the same framework you do. Again, I don't get a lot of feedback on this one. Hopefully this was helpful. Please, if you like this, screenshot this and tag me. That way I can make more like this for you. Hey this is Sharon. I have an awesome free gift for you just for listening to the podcast. As you may know, I've got a chance to build two billion dollar companies the hard way. So if you like this episode, you will love getting the exact playbooks from those wins. It's on my sub stack called My Next Billion. It has the exact frameworks I wish someone had given me when I was figuring it all out. Now you get the real lessons from the trenches as I go for a three peat and build the next billion. So everything's free@mynextbillion.com please check it out. My nextbillion.com.