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The Ops Experts Club Podcast
123. How Visionaries Can Communicate Without Becoming the Bottleneck
00:18:37
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the Ops Experts Club. If you're at all interested in anything we talk about here in this episode, go ahead and check out the description down below and click any of the links there.
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B
Or if you just want to know
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A
more about us, click the links below. Now on to the episode Ops Experts below.
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B
Karen Turner, excellent to see you, my man. Can you hear me when I clap?
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C
No, those are all cut out, dude.
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B
So sucky. Guys, I want you guys to know, anybody listening to the show, I clap freaking legit. You know, most white people can't clap. Can't keep a beat. I can keep a beat. Amazing. Now don't ask me to dance because even though I can keep a beat with my clapping, my dancing gets a little bit wonky. Cause I'm like. But I'm just saying, like, I can clap legit and I'm. I'm disappointed that you guys cannot partake in that because it is sick. Clapping on this end.
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C
You need to clap deeper is the issue. Your clap's too high pitched, deep clap.
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B
I need to go for. What do you think?
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C
No, no.
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B
And I even cut my hands on that one. Okay. Anyway, we can move on. Ops Experts, Great to have you on the show today. Taran Turner. How is was Washington today? Have you guys started getting smoke?
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C
No, we don't have any big fires around us. We had a thunderstorm yesterday. It was pretty cool.
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B
It's awesome.
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C
So it's back to being a little chilly. Whoa, 60, 60 degrees out right now.
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B
Crazy. Yeah, it's. We're starting to get smoke pouring in, which sucks. I'm not gonna lie. It sucks when you can't open your windows at night. Any of you who don't live in the Pacific Northwest don't realize that it's such a pain point. Pacific Northwest, man. It's nice when you open your windows at night because it gets hot during the day, but you can open them at night when it's smoky. You can't do it. It's just not something you can do. So. Yeah, anyway, awesome. Let's talk today, Taryn, about communication. I think it's something that every relationship needs. If your relationship is struggling right now, probably you need better communication. Maybe you might want to think about seeing a therapist together because getting somebody who can talk to you in the same room and you can talk well together is a gift.
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C
Right.
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B
So we're not going to talk about therapy today or relationships, but I would like to talk about communication amongst teams because I think there are a lot of visionaries. This is a really big pain point and there are a lot of teams that. A really big pain point. And they both are pissed, right? They're both frustrated. The visionary is frustrated for reasons. The team is frustrated for reasons. But I think if you can create communication vehicles, a cadence of communication is what I would call it. I think it really cuts down on a lot of frustration. Taran, let's talk about being pissed for a minute. Do you feel like you see that from a perspective of working with a lot of visionaries and a lot of different kinds of companies? But this is kind of a common theme when it comes to visionaries speak and how visionaries feel about teams?
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C
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I mean it's, it's just a quick gut reaction most of the time.
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B
Most visionaries, I would say, are not built to manage people. In fact, they would tell you that themselves. In fact, I would suggest most visionaries first hire is somebody that's going to be able to manage people and problems. That's not where visionaries like to live. They do not like to live in things that slog or things they feel like are cumbersome. They like to have ideas, right? So they are an idea generator. The visionary is somebody that's sharp, end of the spear and it's great. You know, they, some of their ideas work, some of their ideas don't work. But most of us, most people that aren't visionaries, visionary, that's the place we struggle, right? Is coming up with new ideas. We're great at maintenance, they're great at ideas. The danger can be when you try and start mixing the two of those things, you know, so we build a lot here in Colab team on eos, you know, which is entrepreneur's operating System taken from the book Traction by Gino Wickman. There's another great book out there. If you're like Aaron Traction, who is so long and so dry and so boring, that's visionary speak. A lot of visionaries that way. Rocket Fuel is a great like supplemental guide if you want. Much shorter, much more bullet pointed. But you need to have a system, an operating system that your business is working from. That's what we found through the years running operations for businesses. But one of the most critical pieces that you need in there is a cadence of communication so that visionaries aren't getting pulled into daily maintenance. Because that is a killer for visionaries. And honestly, it's a choking point for your team, right? Your team just feels it. Your team feels restricted. They can't get anything done unless they communicate with the visionary. The visionary hates when they communicate with them. Right. Like they're not psyched on getting all that communication. So then you have the pain point of visionary's frustrated. Team's not getting things done. Team is frustrated because they're not getting things done. Visionaries frustrated because team keeps reaching out to them on things that they don't think that they should be reaching out to them about. And the cycle just continues. Right. Just continue perpetual frustration. So I'd like to talk to Taren today about a cadence of communication that alleviates pain on both sides. So Taran, we've. You and I have done this a lot where us has a system that they call visionary integrator when it comes to a meeting, comes to a framework of what we work within and that is visionary needs someplace they, they can just drop ideas. Whenever, middle of the night, first thing in the morning, like all throughout the day, they can just drop ideas. Somebody that's going to take those ideas, capture them somewhere so we can make sure those ideas don't just get lost in the ether and then can take those ideas. A clarifying meeting with the visionary.
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C
Right.
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B
We call that a visionary integrator meeting. And then from that meeting can then drive those ideas down onto team. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? I know we talked about one of our newest clients that I feel like it's going pretty well with and I think that the cadence is exactly that. A receptacle to receive the ideas, communication around the ideas and the ability to drive down with accountability on those ideas.
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C
Yeah, I think the biggest part is just them needing to drop it somewhere. Sometimes it's great that it can even rest for a bit before I have my meeting with them because maybe the problem will go away and it wasn't actually as big as they thought it was in the moment. So yeah, a place to drop it in quickly, me being able to capture it and put it somewhere else to know it's not going to get lost. There's going to be some investigation. Either I need more questions from him or I'm getting questions from the team. So having a chance to do all that, if it's questions from him or her, the visionary, usually I'll wait until our one on one if it's not urgent, just because I find if I start asking too many questions at once, the conversation gets lost. But if I have them in a meeting, one on one on video and we can do this back and forth with it and I've had more time with the problem, it's going to get solved a lot easier. So I wait for my dedicated time. So that's the important part. You got to have that one on one scheduled too weekly in order to then work through these issues. But if it's urgent, you can usually tell based on the problem and you're just going to have to deal with getting those questions answered.
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B
Yeah. So the way that it works for this client that we're discussing right now is we've just created a text thread. IM vehicle can be anything you want. Right. So if you live by text, most visionaries live by text. Right. So like text is an easy one. I would say make that group pretty small. You know, your, your visionary, your integrator. I like being in those channels because they're clients and I like being able to see it. So visionary will drop information into this text thread and it'll capture that. I think one of the pieces that's very critical is the visionary hears you've got it right, so give it some sort of thumbs up, some sort of comment back like that you see it so that they know that it's been captured and you're going to do something with it. And then from there Taryn can collect all those ideas, maybe ask some critical questions that are in there. I think visionary needs to understand that just because they drop communication into that instant message thread doesn't mean the answers are going to get solved in that thread. It's a place for them to drop pain points, problems, ideas as they have it. Where that problem's going to get solved is in the integrator visionary meeting. So the visionary needs to make time for a meeting with the integrator. If that time isn't made, if there's one meeting you do, if there's only one meeting you do all week, meet with your ops person, meet with your integrator so that they can get clear on whatever it is you ask from them and they can marshal that down onto the team. If you don't want to be on all the team meetings, that's fine. That's up to you. I think it's probably smart for you to be on your team meetings, but if you can't bear it, some visionaries just can't bear it. That's okay. Just make sure you deputize your integrator to be able to drive it down onto teams team and then make sure there's a closed loop where Taran has got an ability to come back and talk to the visionary about, hey, you asked me to do this last week. I drove that down to team. We assigned that to Steve. This is the process. He's going to have the next thing done for us by X date. And then Taren just needs to be able to relay that back to Visionary. A lot of times that's what I found is visionaries move real fast. So whatever was super critical and important to them on Monday, usually by Wednesday, it's just not that critical anymore.
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A
Right.
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They've got a new set of criticals that they're working from. So I think it can be a little bit of an art of feathering the gas and the brake on what things you talk about. I think that's why it's really critical for Taran to be able to have a spot, to be able to drop those. Whether it's in. I know Pete Vargas did it this way. You know, when we helped Pete with his visionary integrator, things is we dropped it into Monday because Monday.com is where his team lived. Right. You know, maybe it's asana, maybe it's ClickUp. You know, there's a bunch of different tools that are out there wherever it is. I think some sort of repository where those ideas are captured. And then we can put deadlines and names next to those, those to dos. Right. And Taryn can bring those to the next level 10 meeting as an old team and say, hey, we were talking to Brian and he was saying that he would like for Steve to be able to take this on. So, Steve, we're going to drop this here. We're going to assign it either. If it's a longer project, it can be part of your books. If it's just a to do that can be solved in the next seven to 14 days. It can be part of your issues that are solved with a to do. But I just think some sort of communication vehicle where just sort of someplace where an idea is captured, an idea is discussed, an idea is assigned, and then we can circle back on it and it can be solved. Taran, what are your thoughts on that?
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C
Absolutely. Great. I have great thoughts on that. I agree completely. One thing I do is I've been logging every request in an asana subtask with the exact verbiage that was used. I might use different verbiage, but then I can reference back to the specific request and over time check them off as they're being done. And that way it's also my own accountability. This person ever asked me about all the things he's been saying. I can show him the list, I can show them. We've done this, this, this, this, this. These are still upcoming. These are still un. Anything like that. So the entire log of communications right there, I can view in one spot.
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B
Yeah, I think super good. Just like you said, use the comments, right? You log it all in, like. However, the beauty about having a project management tool like an asana, like a Monday.com, like a ClickUp, whatever it is you use is that you can use the tool's ability to organize thought. I think one of the biggest things that visionaries can struggle with is holding the thoughts in their brain. And the danger of that is thoughts atrophy. And sometimes your mind gets crowded. What doesn't atrophy and what doesn't get crowded is communication kept somewhere centralized. Right? So if you suck at this, great. Just find somebody that can document it for you. If you just need to talk it out, great, talk it out. But allow it to be someplace where, you know, an integrator can grab that transcript, drop it in someplace else and say, hey, this is what was asked of me. You know, forward it on. I. I love WhatsApp for that. Honestly, I love Voxer for that. Because you can create links back to communication and you can actually drop that into the asana comments if you want to. Hey, I. Conversation with Brian. These are the things he asked. Here are the core points. Here was the message. Because sometimes visionaries need to be reminded. I know we have one visionary, Taran, that has a terrible tendency of forgetting what he asked. And then he can get frustrated with why we actually did it a certain way. And you've had to come back to him and say, hey, so on 6 13, you asked me for this based on this conversation and giving them context. And then once you contextualize, Clay, visionary can recall, but sometimes they need you to send them the message back. Hey, so here's the message you sent me on this. And, man, there's nothing that helps cover your ass better than sending communication back to visionary. Now sometimes that could piss them off too. So you gotta be careful on how you say it and how you communicate. Don't ever whip it back around on
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C
them to show them.
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You're right.
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It's more like, no, no, sorry if things have shifted, that's fine, I'll change. But I'm working off of this premise from this conversation. You asked me this, but unless you're keeping some sort of track of the communication, it can get really lost. It can get really messy really quick.
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C
Yeah, for sure. And I did. You know, we talk about, like, matching it to the person. So we did have one person I was working with and I was able to create for him. I found out you can create automations on iPhones. I think that's been around for a while, but I'd never done one yet. And you can actually hook it up to Zapier. So with one press of a button he could record his memo of the issue and then it goes to Zapier and then through AI it would transcribe it, summarize it and send it directly into ClickUp to be reviewed. And the reason he liked this way was it was one push of a button. And as somebody who traveled a lot for his events and worked weekends, he knew it was more appropriate than constantly texting people while they're not at work in the office.
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B
So freaking smart. So good.
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It was like a win win. He's very respectful way for him to do it too without having to blow people up at 9pm when he's done with an event on a Saturday night. So just just getting to be able to do something to match who you're working with is good too.
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B
That's so sexy. So good. And I think that the nice thing about that is it also gives someplace somebody like. So let's say Taryn's the integrator on that account. He can check in Monday morning into the all these new zaps that have come in to ClickUp and brush them up and turn them into actually working tasks that can come into a board that they review on their L10 or a project that can just be assigned out right then as integrator doesn't even need to be talked about with the team just needs to be assigned to somebody. I think that so smart dude. That's a great solution. I love that.
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Thank you.
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B
So I think too what we just touched on there that I think is really important. We talked about the cadence of communication of having a steady workflow of ideas captured discussed with integrator integrators able to assign them out to team in a closed loop of bringing it back to visionary and letting them know what the progress is. I think we just talked about there was the vehicle of communication, right? Like how are we communicating and where do we communicate things? We actually created a asset for this. If you're looking for a way to discuss and how this can be and something you could share with team, you can check that out. It's at comms C O m m s comms.opsexpertsacademy.com It's a free asset where it's a visual. If your team, team needs something that you can just put in front of them as an explanation of this is how it works. It's a great tool, just a free asset that can help you kind of roadmap out. How does communication work? Not only a cadence of communication but the vehicles that that cadence follows. And I think it's just, it's nice to be able to have something that's centralized so. Comms.opssexpertsacademy.com Taryn what other tips, tricks, tricks to the trade things that you found that are just smart when it comes to communication. From visionary to integrator, integrator to team.
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C
You know I love the power of voice messages myself personally I give a lot more context. Quick short texts can leave a lot out and leave room for assumptions. So whether it's just you know, using imessage text message your phone you can drop in a voice memo there that's really great, just a quick way to give it to them. But some people, you got to learn whether or not they like it. Some people like to read because they're always busy. Maybe they don't want other people to hear the voice message. Maybe they just don't like it. So once again tailor it to them. But yeah, I think from that the biggest thing to take away is I always try to come in and work with whatever's right for them. The text, the voxer, the email, phone call. I work with people who just want to pick up the phone and call me. Whatever works for them. That's what I'm going to have to tailor myself to because there's, there's a lot I can force onto a company when it comes to we're here to set up better processes but when it comes to how the visionary works best, that's going to be one spot where I can't force him to work within my workflows. I need to start where he's starting from and then take it from my workflows from there. I can force him to do the weekly meeting with me if he wants some of things solved. But I'm not going to be able to force him to not text me at 9pm at night or to send me an email. I'm going to have to start where he's starting from.
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B
Yeah, and I think that's the key. There are some visionaries out there that might be kind enough to humor you to think that they're going to change the way that they communicate. It's short lived. It's not going to last, you know, so it's better for you to meet them the way they communicate and create systems, just like you said. That's why I loved what you were suggesting about, you know, from iPhone to a zap to a Monday or to a ClickUp task. Because I think that that then takes the way the visionary speaks and communicates it into a language that I can then take and drive down from. I think that's the biggest thing is come up with how does Visionary best speak? What's the best medium? And then how do we operationalize that rather than trying to get them to. You know, I've seen people try and force visionaries into slack. Very, very rare. I've seen that work. You know, I've seen people try and force visionaries into project management tools like ClickUp. Very, very rare. Do I see visionaries live in that land. That's just not the way they are Visionaries. You want them just like salespeople, right? You want salespeople to be focusing on selling. You don't want them to get lost in CRMs and how they organize the data and all. Like, you know, that's your job to figure out a way that's going to best process through their ability to drop data and us to be able to take it and document it. You want them on the phone selling. Same thing with Visionary. You want them ideating, you want them out there coming up with new ideas. You want them relationship managing, you want them out there front end of the spear knocking down more opportunities to sell. You don't want them to be encumbered by your communication just because that's what works best for you. Find whatever medium they work with and then you operationalize. And I think now being in a time where there's so much AI, I think AI can really help with this because I think that there's a lot of opportunities where AI can take speak dictated speech and actually translate that into something else. I'm excited to see how AI is going to meet us in that and other tools that can come from AI because I think that there's some really exciting stuff that's going to be coming up within the next year or two. Even more than what we're seeing right now I think too Taren probably, probably to tie it down, I would say another great tool that I've seen out there is 1.3.1. I think as Visionary is dropping it down to team as it's becoming something operationalized by integrator 2 team. If the team gets stuck, great. But like don't just bring back to me that you're stuck. Bring back to me what the issues that you're having. A pain point with three ideas on how you could fix it and what's the one that you would suggest? I think that way it takes the pressure off the integrator because otherwise integrator becomes the choking point. If everybody's just crowdsourcing integrator's brain, then that means they're not actually using their brain to solve it. So as integrator tasks it down to other people, make sure they're implementing 131 that's also included in the comm sheet comms opsexpertsacademy.com that's part of the thing we suggest is as it gets rattled down to team, make sure team is actually using their own brain to come up with good ideas and bringing you back things that you can yes, no or give them more data to be able to get them to a better answer. So Taryn Turner, excellent, man. What a great time hanging out with my buddy Taran Turner. I appreciate you. Sorry my Internet speed lagged today. I hope that didn't cut up or make things too choppy for anybody listening. But Taran, grateful for you always, man. You're a scholar and a gentleman. Ops Experts, thanks for hanging out with us today on Ops Experts Club. We'll be back here next week, same place, same time.
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C
See y' all.