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- [00:06]
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Does running your business ever feel a little bit like herding cats? Like trying to nail jello to a tree? Maybe you've hired some thoroughbreds to work on your team and you've finally gotten some help, but you just can't seem to get everyone running in the same direction. When my son Daniel was a little guy, five years old, he decided he was gonna start playing ice hockey. And I had played. So dad gets to be the coach. Let me tell you what's more fun. Nothing is more fun at all on the planet than a whole bunch of 5 year olds with pads and helmets and skates on, rolling around the ice, chasing the puck. They were so disorganized, like a little beehive chasing something around. And so what we had to do as quickly as we could was to teach them to stay in their lanes and pass the puck back and forth across the ice instead of everybody just following it. So we had to convert chaos into a system. And as soon as we did that, we started winning hockey games. If that's what you call it with 5 year olds, if you can relate to that, then it probably means you're in the second stage that all businesses go through, which we call the Pathfinder stage. And today, John Felkins from Entree Leadership is going to show you how to move past the Pathfinder stage. You'll learn how to align your team around a clear mission to get everyone to chase the same goals without chasing the puck all at once.
- [01:30]
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In the Pathfinder stage, your business starts to feel, well, a little messy. You're no longer stuck doing everything yourself, and you've given your team a lot of tools they need to succeed with good hiring and delegation. But ultimately your business lacks the clear direction it needs to keep growing and getting better. It can feel like you're running in circles or worse, like you're the only one who cares. That's because Pathfinders run into three major issues. For starters, team member turnover is too high. Your business has grown past the small family feeling, but hasn't yet built the systems and culture and clarity that make people want to stay long term. Early hires may feel like they've outgrown their roles, while newer hires struggle to connect to a bigger purpose without that shared sense of why. Next, you have unreliable results. When you were doing everything yourself, you could make sure it was done the right way. But now you've got a team and so things start to get a little bit varied. Results lack consistency when you don't have repeatable processes in place. Instead of a system. The business runs on individual people and their moods, their personalities, their best guesses. And the problem with that is results aren't reliable. You don't know what to expect. And you're always having to respond just in the moment. Sometimes it'll be good, but sometimes it'll be bad. Finally, the team doesn't demonstrate the values that created your initial success. And they aren't all aligned. They're not pointed in the same direction. This leads to that sinking feeling that your team doesn't care as much as you do. That happens because you haven't intentionally defined a reinforced set of values. What I mean is, in the early days, your values showed up naturally. You lived them out. Your small team absorbed them. They watched you. But as you grow, culture has to be taught. It has to be repeated. It has to be modeled on purpose. Without that clarity, your values get diluted, they get watered down, and people start operating from their own playbook instead of a shared one. To sum it all up, in the Pathfinder stage, you and your team lack clear direction. And if that's where you are right now, you should have one goal in mind. Getting your team all pointed in the same direction. To make that happen, you need to focus on five major things. Number one, you need a mission statement. A mission statement is a simple, powerful declaration of why your business exists. It's what you do, who you serve, and why your business matters. It's not just a nice line for your website, it's the heartbeat of your company. A strong mission statement should be short enough for your team to remember and clear enough to guide daily decisions. For example, our mission statement at Ramsey is Ramsey Solutions provides biblically based, common sense education and empowerment that gives hope to everyone in every walk of life. And that's a filter for our team. It creates clarity, it keeps us aligned, and it helps us to decide to say yes and no to the right things. Instead of reacting to every opportunity that comes our way, we get to focus on what actually moves the business forward to accomplish that mission. Number two is vision. A vision statement paints a clear picture of where your business is going and what the future will look like when. When you're wildly successful at accomplishing your mission. Now, your mission is about why you exist. Today, your vision is about tomorrow. It's your destination. That's the key distinction. The mission grounds you into present, while the vision pulls you towards the future. A strong vision inspires hope, gives your team something to chase, and helps everyone see the bigger story that they're a part of. It should Be bold, compelling and easy to rally around to create one. Ask yourself, what will the world, my industry, our community look like if we achieve our mission to the fullest? Push yourself to think big. This isn't about the next quarter or even the next year. It's about the ultimate change you want to see because your business existed and accomplished its mission. Keep it concise and memorable. The best vision statements are ambitious but believable. So your team feels challenged without feeling defeated before they even get started. Number three is core values. Core values are deeply held beliefs that define how your organization will behave day in and day out. They answer the question, what do we stand for? How do we behave no matter what? While a mission explains why you exist and a vision describes where you're going, core values set the guardrails for how you get there. They shape your culture and guide decision making. And they give your team clarity on what behaviors are expected and celebrated. We have a core value, self employed mentality. Something you don't want to say in this team is that's not my job. When we see something broken, we jump on it. We fix it. Now, we might figure out whose job it is later on, but we never shy away from taking the reins and fixing whatever problem or moving whatever needs to be moved. We need to look at it as if we own the business ourself. Pathfinders often see their teams feeling confused or pulled in different directions because expectations aren't clear. I've heard it said before that uncommuted expectations are actually just premeditated resentments. You don't want to do that to your team. Documented values give everyone a common language for how to work together and what to expect of each other. This reduces friction. It strengthens the culture and creates accountability. Number four, Clear communication. Most leaders think they're communicating clearer and more often than they really are. And their teams feel that gap every single day. Communication isn't just about passing along information. It's about making sure your people understand the what, the why and the how behind the decisions that you're making. The fact of the matter is, if you're not crystal clear on your expectations and people just fill in the gaps and frequently they fill in the gaps with worst case scenarios. So make sure you double down on communication. To create clear communication, you need intentional rhythms and repeatable systems. That means setting up a weekly leadership meeting and one on ones with your direct reports so information flows consistently up and down the organization. It also means over communicating your mission, vision and values until your team can repeat them in their sleep. Because just making them isn't enough. Your team needs to know them. When you start getting sick of saying it, that means you're probably just starting to say it enough. And finally, number five, role clarity. Role clarity means every person on your team knows exactly what winning looks like in their job. It answers the question what am I responsible for and how will we measure success without it? Team members overlap. They drop balls or waste energy second guessing their priorities. Said a different way, clarity equals speed. The more clear people are on their roll, the faster they'll be able to produce results. To create role clarity, write down their key results areas, or as we call them, KRAs, for every single position. A KRA is a short document, usually one page, that lists the main responsibilities of a role and the specific outcomes expected. And I recently broke down the whole process of creating those in another video. Just click the link in the show notes to check it out.
- [09:26]
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If you're leading a business in the Pathfinder stage, remember this clarity is your way forward. A clear mission, a bold vision, defined values, strong communication and and role clarity will help you turn a scatterbrained operation into one with unity and momentum. The path out of chaos isn't about working harder. It's about aligning your people around the same goals and giving them the confidence to run in the same direction in their own lane. Be sure to subscribe to the Channel if you haven't already. Thanks for joining us. See you next time.