How I Train Employees That Every Boss Wants (2x Your Business)

Summary

• The fastest way to scale a business is by scaling your people. Invest in growing your team to double your business's revenue.

• Leadership is more effectively learned through demonstration rather than just instruction, as seen in both significant actions, like giving feedback, and small actions, like cleaning the workspace.

• Be the model for your team to follow; your team's skills are a reflection of your own expertise and demonstration.

• Align feedback with personal and team goals. Knowing everyone's goals helps provide targeted, meaningful feedback.

• Encourage self-stated goals. Guide employees on setting their own goals, prioritizing their personal growth above company needs while supporting their journey.

• Feedback is crucial for growth. It's essential to give feedback, as withholding it is selfish and hinders growth.

• Create a clear growth plan. Growth occurs through actions, not just knowledge. Outline skills needed and address them through real-world challenges.

• Tackle growth by prioritizing skills needing improvement and overcoming deficits with targeted, frequency-focused actions.

• Cultivate a culture that rewards imperfect action rather than punishing failure. This fosters a willingness to try and risk making mistakes without fear.

• Use team challenges as growth opportunities; stretch their abilities in alignment with their goals and give them space to adapt and meet objectives.

• Create a supportive environment for growth by offering clarity and encouragement, recognizing improvements, and incrementally challenging skills.

• Be close to your team. Knowing your team members personally allows you to understand their skills and deficits, essential for effective growth planning.

Video

How To Take Action

I would suggest implementing growth by focusing first on yourself. Lead by example. Your actions, like giving feedback or lending a hand in simple tasks, set the standard for your team. If you want your team to improve, become the best model they can emulate.

A good way of doing this is by aligning feedback with personal and team goals. Get to know each team member's goals, and help them set these goals themselves. This makes feedback more meaningful because it's aimed at helping them achieve what they personally aspire to.

Feedback is crucial, and it’s selfish not to give it. By withholding it to stay comfortable, you keep your team from growing. Always try to balance your comfort with their need for clarity and growth.

Create a clear growth plan. Growth must be action-based, not just knowledge-based. Identify what skills are needed, prioritize by urgency, and create scenarios for your team to practice these skills. Use real-world challenges as opportunities for them to develop these skills.

Encourage a culture that rewards imperfect actions over punishing failures. Create a supportive environment where people dare to try and learn from mistakes without fear.

Finally, be close to your team. Know them personally so you understand their skills and deficits. This allows you to provide effective growth plans and move your business forward.

Quotes by Leila Hormozi

"The fastest way to scale your business is to scale your people"

– Leila Hormozi

"Leadership is caught not taught"

– Leila Hormozi

"The only constantly appreciating asset in your business is you and your people"

– Leila Hormozi

"Feedback is an investment in growth"

– Leila Hormozi

"Self-discipline is self-care"

– Leila Hormozi

Full Transcript

the fastest way to scale your business is to scale your people in business Founders who focus on growing their people generate twice the revenue than those who don't which means that if you just focus on growing your people you could literally double your business by doing that and nothing else I know this because I built and sold three businesses by the age of 28 leading to a net worth of $100 million and I did it by scaling people the only constantly appreciating asset in your business is you and your people at the end of this video what I want to share with you is the exact framework I use to grow my team the first piece of advice is we don't want to talk about it we want to demonstrate it John Maxwell has this quote that I absolutely love which is that leadership is caught not taught and so people will model you more than they will listen to what you say this can go from everything from the big things that have happen in your company to the small things that happen in your company a big example of this is how you give feedback to people on your team how you invest in people in your team how you speak to people on your team a small example would be something as small as when you leave a restaurant do you wipe down the table the same goes for cleaning around an office like something that's been super interesting to watch has been the more that people see me take out the trash wipe down a countertop you know refill a coffee maker refill snacks the more I notice that other people start doing it too leadership is caught not taught and it's been really cool for me having an in-person headquarters to be able to see just how true that is having so many little tiny things that people pick up on whereas when I was remote and with the teammates that I have now that are remote it's the big things that get caught we have a portfolio company and they were talking about how they wanted to give their team feedback on how the team gives each other feedback and they wanted help they were like I don't know what's not getting through to them for some reason it's like it's just not happening Have you communicated clearly to the team they're like yeah we've done all those things how about I get on I run a training for the team and then you tell me how it works I got on and I did like an hourong training for their team on how to get feedback and when I got off I got a message from the CEO and she said dude now I know what we've been doing wrong once I saw you do it I knew exactly what I need to do next time we could have talked about it for weeks we could have continued to have conversations this is how you do it this is how you do it but demonstrating it that is true leadership you want to demonstrate before you duplicate so just like leadership is caught not taught I also think that in order to teach they have to watch you do it first but what a lot of people do is they skip to just telling people how to do it before they show them how to do it a lot of the times when we want to grow our leaders we want to invest in our people we're thinking okay I need to get them to do these things but the reality is you want to get them to watch you do these things before you get them to do these things I think one of the best examples of this on my team that I have seen over time has been my executive assistant I had an executive assistant her name is Yasmine for seven years and she has literally seen me do everything she's seen me run every type of meeting she's seen me plan the company quarterly she's seen me make every type of small big and medium decision and eventually got to the point where she had caught so much of my leadership that she had ascended beyond the skill set of an EA and I promoted her to director of operations and what's been so cool to see is that I didn't have to intentionally teach her anything but she was so close in proximity to watching me that she by consequence does everything how I would do it and so she has been taught because she watched me something that has taken me a decade to understand is that my team is a reflection of my skill and so if I want my team to be better at something I need to be so good at it that when it disseminates down to my team and then to their teams and to their teams it's still something that's strong if I want people to be extremely good at giving feedback I need to be like the mecca of giving feedback I need to be the ultimate source I need to be the best example ever I need to be a 12 out of 10 so for example in the last few quarters something that I noticed was that certain members of my team really struggled with giving direct feedback with those specific people I was like you know what I wonder if I have not been giving the most direct feedback to them just because you know it's like with some teammates you're a little bit softer with some you're a little bit harsher and so with those teammates that I recognized were struggling to give it more directly to their direct reports I said I'm going to give it to them even more direct than I am now and then I watched as they quickly accelerated because suddenly it was like they had this very clear model that they could multiply if you're looking at people on your team and thinking like how did they not know how to run a meeting how do they not know how to get feedback how is it that they don't know how to have these conversations ask yourself am I a 12 out of 10 example to them am I demonstrating it or am I just talking about it the next principle in growing your people is anchoring to their goal people ask me all the time how do you grow people and really the answer is to grow anybody we want to have feedback if I want to get better in the gym and I want to grow muscle then I want to document what I'm doing and then weigh myself every day and which is feedback if I'm on track with my goal and so I see it as like my job is to be the feedback mechanism for my team and that is how they get closer to their goal but if you don't know their goal then how can you be the mechanism to give their feedback to get to it and so I'll give you an example is like I have a CEO of a company and that person has expressed that they really want to be a fantastic leader to the company I got some feedback from their executive team about how that person specifically was showing up to the executive team in a way that was not received well I approached that person and I said your goal is to be here right and they were like sure and I was like great so if you want to be here here right now you're right here here's what the discrepancy looks like if I were you and I was show up to a meeting if I wanted to be this 12 out of 10 leader if I wanted to be the best leader of a billion doll company that had a 10 out of 10 culture here's how I would show up to those meetings and when I presented it that way you know what they said thank you so much this is so clarifying I feel like I know exactly what I need to do differently and the reason it was so well received is it's not like I was anchoring to a negative I was anchoring to a positive a lot of times what we do is we anchor to the thing that we don't want rather than anchoring to the thing that they do want and so I always make sure I know their goal and I anchor to their goal so it's like whether I am getting into a business partnership with somebody whether I am hiring somebody whether I am partnering with somebody the most important piece of information I need to know is what is your goal I can't even answer a question for somebody from an audience for somebody at one of my workshops or a portfolio CEO if I don't know what their goal is and where they want to go now the second piece of this is that a lot of the times when you're anchoring to the goal the temptation is that you want to name their goal for them because they're saying maybe they don't know maybe they're unsure all these things I would say that in those cases you want to guide them towards a goal but it is so important that they claim their own goal this is not about you this is not about your company this is not about your interests this is about theirs and something that I constantly repeat to myself to remind myself of this is I'm always saying human first put the human first because at the end of the day when somebody comes onto my team the first thing I think think about is what they told me their goal is in terms of their personal growth why did they take the role in this company why are they here for example like most of my leaders come here because they want to grow what is it that they want to grow into do they want to be a great leader do they want to be a CEO one day do they want to be ahead of marketing do they want to be ahead of customer success do they want to run a portfolio company one day do they want to start their own business and then anytime that I am giving them feedback about something I'm constantly thinking what's their specific goal and so I'll give you an example is about two weeks ago I had somebody who wasn't director for of mine asked me if I could go on a walk and I said sure and then this person brought up to me she said you know I don't know if you know what my personal goals are and I was like I absolutely remember on the interview that we had that was the one thing I wanted to know and your goal is this she was like how did you remember I was like because it's the most important thing for me to remember out of everything of my interactions with everybody that's in my company the most important thing for me to remember is what that person's goal is I will ask any leader that brings on new people on their team what's their goal I ask for every dir report they bring on what is their goal because I want to know when that person comes to me the one time in six months or 12 months and they ask for feedback if I don't know what their goal is I can't give them the right feedback it's important that we ask them what their goal is and then we're constantly able to coach to it and keeping in mind we want to serve them as people rather than serving the company a good boss keeps your interests in mind but also keeps the companies a great boss will put your personal interests ahead of the companies because they know that if they put people first and they're actually focused on bettering the lives of people everything else gets easier if you grow people the company will grow by consequence rather than thinking like we grow the company and then grow the people it's actually the opposite and so when I went on this walk with this woman what she didn't know is that like where my mind goes in my free time is like when I was thinking about her when she asked if I want to go on a walk I was like I wonder if she's going to want to talk about her career because that's not uncommon and I was like all right here's the three directions I see that she could go because I knew that what she had said her goal was was she was very flexible and she felt like she wanted to get her feet wet in here for a few months before she like really cemented where she wanted to go and based on her position I was like well there's really three paths and here's the pros and cons of each and I laid it out to her when we went on our walk and I said like which path do you want to walk down at the end of the day even if somebody's not certain of the goal I look at it as my job to inform them of all the paths the pros and cons of each and then help give them feedback on whichever one they choose so I kind of look at it like I am the GPS so when you plug a destination into a GP PS right like your teammate plugs a destination in you're the map to tell them how do I get there the fastest what are the cheat codes what are the roads we want to avoid and where are there accidents along the way my job is to help accelerate someone's growth a lot of people join my team and I'm like they're going to win no matter what how do I help them win faster and that is in my opinion The Exchange that you can give people that join your team it's like they help you reach your goals Faster by doing great work within your company you help them reach their goals Faster by giving them great feedback to accelerate their personal growth an example of this would be in my last company when we knew that at some point we wanted to sell the company I was looking at people in the leadership team and planning basically a succession plan which is like who's going to step in be CEO next and I approached kale who was our general manager and I remember I asked him I said like have you considered that you could be CEO and he was like uh oh I I don't know I don't I don't guess I don't know if I've considered that I said well what is your goal then and he was like well what do you think based on like my skills and my potential I could do and so I painted like multiple paths for him which was essentially I was like either you could basically be cro like head of marketing and sales because I think that's like your current skill set or I think the stretch goal is you could be CEO which is like the marketing and sales plus all of the rest of the company and just generally driving growth and operational efficiency and I remember in that moment it was kind of like a moment of disbelief for him because he's like CEO it just like carries a lot of weight with the title and when I broke it down to him I was like well who else is better set up for it I talked about everybody else that's on the leadership team of the company I talked about his skills his skill gaps the pros and cons of both paths and I said what do you think and he was like no I think you're right I think that the argument you have made makes a lot of sense that that would be the right path for me and he's gone on to be a great CEO for the company it's been three years now since we sold it and he took over as CEO and he's continued to excel in that direction but it was easy because once I painted The Way of the paths he chose what path he wanted we got really clear on what needed to happen to make the transition giving him feedback was one of the easiest things in the world it's often not that you need to give 18 pieces of feedback but you like you need to figure out what the one thing is if they did that one thing that's the level up for them the last thing I will say on anchoring to the goal and then giving people feedback is that feedback is an investment in growth feedback takes courage and I think what a lot of people don't recognize is that they avoid giving feedback and I think that avoidance of giving feedback is selfish and so if you avoid giving feedback to your team it makes you selfish it doesn't make you a leader in fact it makes you a worse leader because feedback is the only way that people grow and get to their goals and so the reason I say that it's selfish is because what you do is you trade your comfort for theirs you get to keep your comfort by not giving them feedback they stay uncomfortable by not knowing how to achieve their goals if you give them feedback you might feel uncomfortable in the moment because maybe you're not necessarily the most practiced or you're not you haven't mastered it yet but then they get the comfort of knowing and having clarity about how to achieve their goals and so at the end of the day I think a lot of people get it twisted and they think that I I'm I'm sparing that person by not giving them feedback you are doing them a disservice and you are suppressing them from growing by not giving them feedback you're being a coward and so once I understood that mental shift that every time a leader withholds feedback it's due to their own fears it's due to their own discomforts it's due to their own desire to avoid or honestly just the fact that they just don't feel like having the conversation they don't put the discretionary effort in like once I recognized that I realized why it is so hard to be such a great leader because we have to do the opposite of what feels good and that is what grows our teams the next piece of advice for growing your team is that you don't grow by accident you need a plan to grow growth comes through action not through just knowledge like if I wanted to lose weight would I just like read books about it and then be like ah I'm going to gain muscle or lose weight no I would have to put a plan together and then I'd have to follow through with the plan and take action on it a lot of people and like myself early on in my career people are always like Leila I want to know what books to read to be a great leader what podcasts do I listen to and I'm like listen you could listen to One podcast of mine maybe this one right you could listen to One YouTube video and that one thing if you just acted on it could take you a whole year to master the issue is that most people love the thought of growth and talking about growth but they don't put a plan in place to actually do it why is that because it's actually hard because growing is actually very uncomfortable and so I can tell you that because like a lot of people for example are like oh my God I want to join acquisition. comom because I want to grow and I'm like no you don't because you actually just want the glamour but what happens on the inside is actually grueling growth feels terrible when it's happening but most people say to I actually want the result without the work I'm like okay that makes sense and so if you want to grow you can't just read books and listen to my podcasts you have to put a plan together where you are stretched and you are pushed and now by consequence if you want to grow and you have to put yourself in that situation if you want your team to grow you have to put them in those situations and this is where it gets tricky the reason so many leaders can promote themselves to be leaders but do not know how to grow leaders beneath them is because of this they Shield them from the pain of growth and because they Shield them from the pain of growth they rob them from the opportunity of growing and so what they do is they hoard all the growth themselves because they are the ones taking all the pain because they're constantly shielding everyone below them from that pain because they think that's what makes a great leader but that's not true what makes a great leader is somebody who who supports somebody through the struggle rather than abdicates responsibility and says like go figure it out and like don't talk to me about it they say you know what this is going to be hard but you can do it I believe in you and this is going to get you closer to your goals and they remind them of the why they give them clarity as to how to overcome the challenges and then they support them along the way but you have to think about it right if someone comes to me and they say Lea I want to be a CEO like you one day in fact my goal is to be like even bigger than you in some way I want to have a bigger company I want to have a bigger presence I want to have bigger impact I would say okay well I'm anchoring to the goal I'm going to give you feedback as if I would give myself feedback I'm going to put you in situations that I would put myself in and I will expose you to the same stimulus that I've been exposed to so that you can change the same way I changed because if you think about it right like if you want a muscle to grow somebody says I want bigger biceps you're just like oh you know what let me do some of the Reps for you instead I'm going to do the bicep Reps for you because I know it's hard and it hurts and you're going to be sore so let me do them for you so then you've got like the trainer over here who's doing the biceps for you right with like giant biceps and you have like these like measly arms because he's keeping all the Reps to himself that's what you're doing when you brought people of these opportunities every time in my career that I have recognized that somebody needs to grow I have intentionally put them in a situation where I know that they will have to adapt and so often what that looks like is it means putting together a plan so for example I met with one of my director ports this was about a month ago and she's moving up into a leadership position in building out her team and I said okay I want to do a few things the first thing is before I can give you that growth plan I want to paint the picture of where you're going to go so at the end of this growth plan here's what the job looks like here's the five main things you're going to be doing here's what you're everyday is going to look like and here's what you're going to take off my plate because the first thing I noticed to a growth plan is that if a person doesn't have a clear vision of where they're going to end up they're very afraid to grow because then they're like it's this odd feeling of like job security it's like well what is my job today going to look like you're just getting everything off my plate what the am I going to do is she trying to get me out they trying to fire me that's like always everyone's like underlying fear the first thing I do is I paint that Clear Vision of like here's where I want you to end up and then I really talk through it so they really understand like this is what it's going to look like it's going to feel like how we're going to interact these are the things you're going to take off my plate and so I give them that exciting Vision that's the first thing the next thing I look at is what has to happen to reach that Vision what skills do you have to learn and then we look at okay I do a red yellow green and basically go through the job description of their future role and say like green is like you're already killing it here you've already got the skills yellow is like you're acquiring the skills and improving but we don't have them yet and then red is like this is our area of deficit that we should focus on what we did is we went through it together and we said okay here's the skills that we need to work on based on this which is like red are like they will hold you back if you don't acquire these skills you will not get here and so then we take those Reds and I say okay here's what we're going to do to tackle the Reds here's the three things that I'm going to have you take on we're going to start here and we're going to focus here these other two let's not even talk about today because I want to focus on this this will take the next three to four months and then what I do is I don't give them some sort of stepbystep plan to grow somebody I give them a challenge or an opportunity and so what I did is I said cool so there's this challenge we have in the business right here I'm going to give it to you because you will acquire the skill if you overcome this challenge so if you overcome it I know that you've acquired the skill she said great I'm here for it and so I think a lot of people over complicate these things with these very like corporate growth plans that are like and then we're going to have you take a class on this and then we're going to get you into a course on that who gives a about a class or a course the question is can they do the thing and you know if you've acquired a skill by if you have utilized the skill in a situation in the environment that you're looking to use it on and so I think a lot of times as Leaders we over complicate these growth plans with like okay let's send them to this formal course and like you know maybe oh like I saw Harvard Business has this online thing and then there's just this thing it's like where have you learned most of your skills to be a business owner by taking classes and sitting in a classroom I know I sure as have not I have learned it by my back is up against the wall and I need to figure this out or my company's not going to grow so what do you do to grow people you put them in situations not where it's like they're going to burn down the company but hey we've got this huge project to turn around this department you said that you want to be a leader one day and a CEO go turn around that department and then what I do to support them through that plan is I am there to support them to encourage them to constantly give them Clarity and then anchor to the goal you're doing such a great job like I just want you to know like you've increased so much in the skill you're doing such a great job like six months ago it would have never looked like this you would have honestly cracked you would have crumbled you would have been so anxious like but look at you now and so I'm constantly reminding them of how far they've come and encouraging them to keep taking steps even if it feels uncomfortable towards their goal if you want to make it hard not to grow then put yourself in really hard situations over and over again if you want to make it hard to grow avoid those situations over and over and over again a few weeks ago I had a leader come to me and that leader has a really lofty goal of where she wants to go and she was telling me that she had overcommitted herself to different things in the company and basically said like I'm not sure how I'm going to get all this done and she seemed very stressed about that situation and so in the past when that person did not have lofty goal I might have said okay well let's get these things off your plate and reprioritize but I looked at what was on her plate and they were all commitments to the team and so basically in order to relieve some of the pressure she would have to break a commitment to the team I said you know what based on where you want to go I actually think it's worse to break a commitment to the team than it is to figure out how to do all this and so this is a great moment for us because you are working on one of the skills which is being more flexible rather than rigid so how can we bring flexib to this situation right now how are you holding yourself to unrealistic expectations because she showed me what the commitments were and I said I could do all that in a day so what is it that you're doing differently than me and a lot of times what you find is that in those moments like it was a great coaching moment because I realized she was taking like four days to prepare for something that I might take two hours to prepare for because I know what what's really important about that thing whereas she's nervous so she was expanding it and just like just in case I'm going to do all these other things what actually ended up happening was she kept her commitment right and the team was super excited about that because what she delivered was really valuable to them and at the same time afterward she came to me and was like I really appreciate that because me six months ago would have like had a meltdown and then me today got to do all of it and feel good like I made progress the last principle to grow everyone in your company is to create a culture of growth what you reward in your company is what gets repeated and so if you think about what's a culture that de incentivizes growth versus a culture culture that rewards growth think about a culture that rewards imperfect action versus a culture that punishes for failure and so a lot of people say that they want to create a culture of growth but then when somebody fails when somebody messes up when somebody makes a mistake rather than telling them what they could do differently they say you did a bad job bad take away something a lot of times people do want to create a culture of growth you might be watching this thinking like I would like to do that but when somebody messes up whether you mean to or not you punish them for that mistake and what I've recognized is that even if in the moment I'm upset about the thing even in the moment if it completely messed up something when somebody makes a mistake you still want to reinforce them or reward them for taking action even if it didn't get the exact result you wanted I'll give you an example of this so I had somebody in my company um and this was about a year and a half ago I wanted her to do a presentation and she said Lea I am awful at public speaking and I do not want to do the presentation and I said if you want to reach your goals I was like then we have to do the presentation you've got to learn presentation skills so I had her present to a group of our portfolio CEOs and it was not the best instead of lying and saying it was the best and instead of punishing and saying that it sucked I reinforced her for trying I said I'm so proud of you for doing that presentation because I know how terrified you were and I'm so excited for you to try it again lo and behold you know two years later in the company this person is one of the best presenters we have she can do amazing presentations she can speak to people of all different stances in the company like she presents herself incredibly professionally and well and it's because she never stopped because she wasn't afraid to mess up because she got rewarded for the effort and the actions that would eventually lead to being good rather than punished for not being good on the first try and so if you want to create a culture of growth you also have to learn how to tolerate other people's failures a lot of times what happens is that we tolerate our own but we don't tolerate all the mistakes that the people on our team are going to make and the reality is that if you want people to grow there will be growing paints both for them and for you another way in which you can create a culture of growth is by constantly making your challenges somebody else's opportunity whenever I have a challenge presented to me which is like there's an impossible situation like I cannot do this thing without help from somebody else I will always present that to somebody because I also have recognized that those are the instances where somebody will always rise to the occasion so I'll give you an example I a few months back was doing IVF and when you do IVF there's a point in time which they say you've got to pull the trigger and you're going to have to go into surgery that day and they can't tell you what that day is going to be they can't predict it and then when they kind of know about the day it's going to be it's never convenient right it's not like you can plan for it so it just kind of happens and so for me what actually happened was that I was ready to have a surgery about seven days before they thought I was going to and it happened to fall on a day that I had an event planned for our company it was one of the workshops we were doing and there was nobody that could do my presentation I went to two people on my team who I felt it would be a stretch for it would be a challenge for but it would not be impossible for and it aligned with their goals and I said hey I need help and I always start with that line which she like I need help because it's very rare that I say I need help I said like I don't know what to do because here's the situation I cannot be there that day I have to do this surgery I've been doing this thing for this last month Harvest these eggs out of my body and so I need somebody to come in and step in and do this and I wondering if you could be that person for me and it was two different presentations and both people said absolutely I will do it and the cool thing is that I watched both people go from not knowing those presentations at all to completely dominating them and being like a 10 out of 10 speaker within a matter of weeks and it's funny because when you give somebody a challenge and a timeline and Clarity you watch them hit their goals and grow so much faster than with the opposite it's like if you have a very clear goal you have a ton of support and you know how to reach that goal people can achieve massive success and massive growth in a very short period of time for that person watching him go from someone who had never presented on stage to being rated our highest speaker was one of the coolest things I could have seen and it all happened because I took something that was a challenge for me and that I was struggling with and said you know what I'm going to make this your opportunity and so I look at as this which is like just like a flower sunflowers if you put them in a small box they only grow to be really small because they only grow to the size of the box it's the same with your people which is if you only put them in small opportunities right then they're only going to grow to the size of those small opportunities which is they're not going to grow as big as you want them to and so something I constantly think about is I constantly think no limits allowed I believe anyone can achieve anything I have achieved because we are all humans and there's nothing special about me and so if I can do it anybody else on this team can do it too now they all have different skill gaps and skill deficiencies but it doesn't mean that it's not achievable by somebody and so I think one of the best things you can do to promote that culture of growth is by constantly giving people opportunities to see what they're actually capable of and the cool thing about it is that the amount of times where I've given someone an opportunity and I've watched that they don't believe they can do it yet but if I believe for them and allow them to borrow my belief right then they're able to achieve things that they did not even know they could something I say a lot is that self-care is actually self-discipline real self-care is when we push ourselves to do things that don't feel good but are good for us the same goes for doing those things with our team if we want to really make the people around us better that doesn't mean it's always going to feel good because especially if we really care about people because a lot of great leaders really care about people that can also be your downfall because you won't actually push people enough you won't put them in those situations to give them an opportunity because you're so worried about them feeling bad and them feeling uncomfortable and you're trying to protect them from those things but the reality is is I think the best way to take care of your team is to push your team and challenge them while giving them clarity and support so if you do these things the goal really is that you create this culture of growth by constantly showcasing the growth you make it normal for people to struggle you make it normal to see people trying new things to see people taking on new responsibilities in the business trying new things putting people on different projects you make it normal to try things and not do so great the first time and so you basically normalize to everybody on your team the trying of new things and the growing of people and the first place you do that is by not punishing making mistakes not punishing failing and making it normal to try and kind of suck at first here's the thing when I talk about growing your people and growing your business businesses that grow the fastest are not the ones that make the least mistakes they are the ones that make those mistakes but fix them and course correct the fastest but people won't do that if they feel like they get punished every time they try something new they try a new way to remedy something they try a new solution and so in the reality if you don't have a culture of growth you will not grow fast at all because people are constantly trying to avoid failure rather than they are trying to attain success you might not know this but self-discipline is self-care now if you look at all of this and you're thinking like how do I actually take all of these principles and grow somebody within my team there's one reason why most leaders can't grow people beneath them and it's that you are too far away away from your people think about it like this for me when I look at my team if I told one of them hey go spin up a new company I would immediately know who could do that and who could not the reason I would know is because I know where each of them sit in terms of their skills is because I spend time with them I work with them and I am close to them if you are far away from your team it will be incredibly hard to do any of this working on a team in my opinion is not people sitting in silos working by themselves working on a team is interacting on a daily basis most of my teammates I talk to every day multiple times a day because we are a team moving things forward together I've noticed that that is the main issue with a lot of people is you cannot grow your people if you don't know your people so when you know your people and you're working with them and you have a good relationship it's easy to see what their skills and deficits are for example if I have somebody who has difficulty having Direct conf conversations then I'm going to put them in as many situations that in order to move things forward they have to have direct hard conversations an example of this would be I had somebody not that long ago who said I want to get better at hard conversations and so I said great I want you to take these three calls for me while I was going to have two with these CEOs over here I was going to have one with this teammate to give them feedback because they were struggling in these areas and they needed some direct feedback about how they showed up in front of the team I said you take those instead I said do you need help scripting it out scripting out the conversation do you need help having the conversation they were like no I mean I'm just nervous but what was so cool was they took those three calls and then the next week I said all right what are two more hard conversations that you need to have this week and we just kept working on it and within a period of like two weeks that person had gone from probably being like a 5.5 out of 10 in terms of having direct conversations to like an eight out of 10 in having direct conversations because it's not about the time that you spend on a skill it's about the frequency at which you work on the skill so you could have 10 conversations over the span of a year or you could have 10 conversations in a week you get the same Improvement either way it just takes longer in one of the scenarios when I'm trying to help improve those skills I prioritize the Reds and I put them in as many situations as close together as possible where they would have to flex that skill in order to overcome that situation or to move something forward another example would be if I have somebody who's not great at communicating with teammates I would put them on multiple projects with teammates that they're not great at communicating with and I would would say here's what we're going to do you're going to go on these three projects and I want you in each of these situations to prepare ahead of time so that you know how you're going to communicate on these meetings and show up in a way that you are a team player rather than somebody that's suppressing people on the team and I want you to report back at the end of the week and let me know how you did I did this with one person about three months ago that person everyone had told me like oh they're not a team player they're really scary on calls now that person is everyone's favorite person on calls it's not like we had to make this yearlong growth plan it's like let's focus on it for two weeks so to sum it up if you want to grow somebody on your team anchor to their goal paint a clear picture of that goal with even a job description do the red yellow green start with the Reds and expose them as quickly as possible to situations where they will have to acquire that skill in order to succeed and lastly remember if you don't know your people you cannot grow your people