← Epic Success with Dr Shannon Irvine
Epic Success with Dr Shannon Irvine
Build a Team That Wins When You're Not There with Dr. Shannon Irvine
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Foreign. Welcome to the Epic Success Podcast. I AM your host, Dr. Shannon Ervin. On the Epic Success podcast, we unpack the neuroscience of success and really help you become a hardwired CEO and also hardwire your business to scale. All right, this is what we're doing here on the Epic Success podcast. So glad you're here. When you're in the room, your team is on it. But when you step away for a day or a week, little compromises start sneaking in. If that's happening, it's almost never a people or a team. Issue is that your company's culture has been a vibe, not a system. So your business quietly depends on your presence instead of your processes. Today I'm going to show you a three layer culture system my clients use so their team wins in same way whether they're in the room or not. If we haven't met before, My name is Dr. Shannon Ervin. I have been a business owner for over 20 years. I'm the author of the bestselling book the 67 Day Year. I've helped thousands of business owners build what I call self scaling companies. Businesses that can grow their revenue and their profit without the business needing them in the day to day operations or revenue generation, or being glued to Slack and email all day. By the end of this video, you'll have a simple three layer culture system so your team performs at the same or even better standard even when you're not there. We'll talk about why having a founder led Good Vibes culture quietly breaks as you grow. Then we'll walk through the three layers. Clarity, capability and culture that creates the system. So why Good vibe cultures break as you start to grow? Most business owners are the culture. When you walk into the room, standards go up. But when you walk out, shortcuts and standards drop. That works at five figures, maybe even six figures, but it quietly breaks down at seven. As business owners, we start as the culture bears, right? When you're present, everyone feels that bar and that level. But when you're not, people kind of guess where is the bar? Where is the right place? And guessing is expensive. It costs you money, costs you time, and it cost you momentum. Okay, I want you to have a quick mental picture here. Think of the telephone game. You tell your leadership what you want, they tell their team. A slightly different version of what you said. The front line is operating on the third version, right? That's how culture starts to drift. And if you've doubled the business but destroyed your culture to get there, would you actually really consider that A win. The teams want to do what you want. But since so much of culture is caught and not taught, the culture poster on the wall or the one pager in the onboarding book does not hold up to the shortcuts and the. Well, we do it this way of the employees that don't hold the same cultural system standards. So how do we fix this? Well, fixing this starts with three layered system. First, clarity, they know what winning looks like. Capability, they have the skills and the authority to execute at those expected standards. And then culture. They self select, self correct and self recruit. We'll break all that down. So let's define the system of clarity. It's knowing exactly what winning looks like. An expectation that isn't written down. It's a wish. And wishes don't build seven figure teams that run without you. They build really dependent ones. So what is clarity? It's when every person on your team can answer these three questions, what is our mission? Which means like, why do we exist? What's my role in that mission? What are the standards that we hold? And then what does winning look like this week? Key metrics that tell me I have achieved our cultural standards. Lots of times we think we've given clarity to our team because we said it once in a meeting or onboarding or that poster on the wall. But that's not clarity, that's a speech. It's motivational, but it's not really applicable in the day to day. This is why I'm obsessed with a simple, clear CEO team dashboard. Your people should be able to look at this dashboard and within a red, a yellow and a green metric tied to what your mission and culture look like, they would know this is how I'm winning or not winning this week and what to do about it. Okay, next we want you to define the big words. Words like integrity, compassion, and do no harm. They sound obvious, but the reality is integrity means one thing to a nun and something very different to someone on death row. Right? So we have to define these words. No harm in a landscaping company is more than don't hit them with a weed whacker. Right? So you have to define what each of these words look like in behavior in your company. So for one of my clients, their core phrase was do no harm, right? So we sat down and really asked, like, what does that actually mean for the techs in the field? What does do no harm look like? Is it physical? Is it emotional, Is it financial? And the owner really defined that. So until that's written in plain language, defined by you as the founder. Your team will all run on their own version. So today I want you to write down three non negotiables you want everyone to embody and then under each one, add in a line. In our company, this looks like this and define it. That is the first brick in the real clarity system of culture. So now I want to go to capability. Do they have the skills and the authority to execute on the expectations? So if you hire capable people but keep all the decisions, you're likely hired a really expensive assistant. Most business owners hire for skill or for an open role. But then they quietly hold back the authority until they prove their selves. And for good reason. The but the result of this is that they can do the work, but they can't make decisions without you. So every exception escalates back to you. Skills without authority creates task doers, not leaders. Right person in the right seat, it means that the role matches how they're wired. If they're brilliant operator and you shove them into a leadership role because you see potential, they'll burn out and so will you and so will your business's revenue. I know this firsthand because I once took an incredible social media doer and promoted her into a big executive role. Cause I saw that potential. Guess what happened? She tanked. And that was all on me. I put her in the wrong seat for how she likes to own outcomes. Once we rerolled her into a place on the team, a role that fit, she went right back to being that a player that 10 out of 10. So what we really need as owners are really two specific tracks. You want two clear tracks of people in your team. Leadership track who owns people and decisions, and an expert operator track that owns the craft. The results, both of these are valuable and both are culture carriers in different ways. And to put this into action, I want you to pick one person you want as a future culture barrier this week. Give them a small leadership opportunity. Maybe run a part of the team huddle or own a client handoff or go catch culture in the field and report back. Then coach them. Don't grab the wheel back. This starts to build culture bearers in your company. Now I want to go to the third piece of the system, which is culture. This is where they self select, self correct and self recruit. The reality is you don't automatically have the culture you say you have. You have the culture you allow. Define culture as a system. So culture are the behaviors that get rewarded, tolerated or eliminated. So what gets rewarded gets repeated. I see this firsthand in my own company that when an employee, somebody that is on my leadership team or one of my execution teams really aligns with what matters most to me, I reward it publicly and I encourage my clients to do it too. In fact, whether it's in Slack or in the team meeting, I publicly praise the people that are culture bears standard holders. And I will never forget this one moment. In one of my meetings, one of my most soft spoken, most quiet employees just held a standard with our clients that just made my heart so warm, like she did the right thing for the client without needing to come to me. Because she embodied the culture of client obsession, which is what we call our client team. And it was so normal for her. She didn't think it was a big deal. But when we brought it out on the team meeting and we gave her some big claps and really recognized her, people that week on the team started proactively doing the same. That's how you catch the right culture. Now on the flip side of that, what you quietly tolerate becomes the new standard. So sometimes we get into this mode of operating where we're tolerating some things because of needing employees or not wanting to shake the boat. But here's the thing. You're A players, they're looking. I had this exact scenario with one of my clients where their A player was really watching to see with one of their key technicians in the field that was taking shortcuts and and not doing things to standard. This one employee that is their best employee noticed when it was called out. We quietly are going through that situation over and over and over again. If we decide to tolerate things from B players, your A players are noticing and they're deciding if they want to stay or not. So when you quietly tolerate just really becomes that new standard. So real culture shows up in those hard moments, right? When a deadline is missed, when a client is upset, or when somebody is underperforming and nothing is said, that's where your true standards and culture live. So here's what I want to do. I want to do an actual exercise, not just aspirational learning. So write down your top five stated values. Then write the last five hard decisions you made as a CEO. If those lists don't match, that gap is a culture problem. What we really want is our employees to self select, to self correct and to self recruit. Strong culture makes your team do this. They self select. They people know quickly is this their place or not, right? They self correct peers address off standard behavior before it gets to you because they Want that A level culture and self recruiting. Your best people are proud to bring others in because they know what this place stands for. So the worst thing you can do is a wrong hire as an anchor to your business. Keeping someone in the wrong seat, it's like throwing an anchor off the boat. They don't just slow the business down, they drag down everyone around them and your A players are watching. How long are you going to tolerate this? Right. That reminds me of a client who had a tech who did excellent work but talked down to teammates and talked down to clients. He took huge pride in the quality of work and being the guy, right? So we used that. We knew his style and we used that. We sat down and we said, okay, need a favor from you. You're my point guy. You need to carry this standard with the same pride that you carry your work. How you treat the team and how you treat our clients, I want you to own that too. We framed the behavior change as an upgrade to his role. So that is enrollment, linking the new behavior of culture to what they're already proud of. All right, let's put this into real world action for you here. Make two lists. In the next 60 seconds, list the five behaviors you've praised and the last five behaviors you tolerated but hated. That, my friend, is your real culture. And this week decide on one tolerated behavior you're going to stop allowing and one behavior you're going to start catching and praising publicly. That will be a culture shift. The reality is your business stops defaulting back onto your back when the three layers of the culture system are in place. Clarity, capability and culture. So quick recap. Clarity is your team knowing exactly what winning looks like. This week. Capability is the right people in the right seats with real authority and culture the behaviors you reward, tolerate and eliminate. So people self select, self correct and self recruit. When you plug this into a simple CEO calendar where rule scorecards with one to three numbers and a weekly red yellow, green CEO dashboard, you stop being the backup brain and the backup culture bearer and start leading like the scaled CEO. So if you're watching this and thinking that's exactly why things feel great when I'm in the room and wobble or fall apart when I'm not. This is the work we do together inside my free self scaling business diagnostic. We we walk you through your CEO system, your team system and your profit scaling system live. We diagnose exactly which system is broken or missing and making it collapse back on you so you can see exactly where culture and ownership are breaking down and what to focus on in the next 90 days to shift it. So click the link below and save your seat for the next live self scaling business diagnostic and we'll start building your three layer culture system together. Or if you want keep Learning here on YouTube right there click the next video and we'll keep building your Scaled CEO operating system. That is what I have for you this week to help you become the Scaled CEO. Until next week. Bye for now. Thanks again for listening to the Epic Success Podcast. If you loved the podcast this week, do me a favor, would you give us a five star review? And over in Instagram please share with me in the DMs. What was it that you loved about it? How did it resonate? And I always say for podcasters those reviews are our big warm hug. And of course if you want to go deeper or see this on video, please follow my YouTube channel at Dr. Shannon Ervin on YouTube. I cannot wait wait to see you next week on the Epic Success podcast. Bye for now.