One of the most frustrating things in business is to work with incapable and unreliable people. You never know when, how and even if things are getting done. Your business stagnates and you find yourself doing everything on your own because “nobody can get it done the way you do”.
You complain to your inner circle about the pain of finding quality people and how hard you have it in your business.
Well, we are here to burst your little bubble. When you find yourself in that situation, 9/10 it’s your fault, not theirs.
You are a bad manager. You are a mediocre leader. So you can’t get people to follow and execute, and that’s on you.
In this video we’ll go over how to deal with this kind of situation and how to get people to do what you need them to do. If you don’t feel like reading the article here’s the video version:
First of all, there are some things you need to get through your skill. Your business is your baby. You want to protect it from outside factors and see it grow and flourish.
You are deeply involved and 100% invested.
- Now, you wouldn’t expect a babysitter to care for your kid as much as you do.
- So why would you expect people working for you to be as invested as you?
- Why should they care if the business succeeds or not?
- Besides needing to find another job, they have no other problem in case the business fails.
- But for you it could mean a game over, or 10 years of your life wasted.
- The stakes are way higher for you, so the pressure is incomparable.
You need things to work.
They prefer things to work. Big difference.
So if you expect people to do what you need them to do just because you tell them to, and you pay them, that’s the bare minimum.
We heard a lot of entrepreneurs, ceo’s and managers complain about poor performing employees and increasing demands from the workforce.
But they fail to realize the fact that people have more options now than they did ever in history.
As of today, job hopping is the most reliable way to increase your annual salary. Statistically speaking, someone working for the same company for multiple years will get on average 1-5% more money each year. But if they switch job every year, they will see an increase between 10 and 50%
We’ve seen this happening with our own eyes.
We know someone working in the HR industry and she saw someone almost triple their monthly salary in the span of a week, by constantly going to interviewers and one upping every time.
So you have workers with a lot of options and entrepreneurs and CEOs thinking others should do stuff just because they tell them to do.
Clearly these 2 things can’t match, and you get stagnating business. Which brings us to today’s topic:
How do you actually get people to do what you tell them to do – and also not run away at the first sign of hardship? There are 3 major things you fail to do, and these apply both in business, as well in your personal life.
1
You don’t set the right expectations.
Contrary to popular belief, people actually want to do good, quality work. But they can’t really do that if they don’t know what good quality work looks like. If you don’t know what’s expected from you, you will struggle to deliver. And we’ve seen this happening time and time again. Entrepreneurs, CEO’s and Managers give vague directions and idyllic scenarios without fleshing out how it actually needs to happen.
If you want to quickly demotivate the people working for you, give them a vague direction and be upset when they get it wrong.This happens because you expect people to read your mind. You expect that if something is clear to you, that means it’s clear for others as well. So You expect them to execute exactly how you would do it and you get frustrated when they end up not doing so You don’t tell them exactly what needs to happen, how to do it, how to get educated on the matter and how to execute. You don’t show them what the best scenario looks like.
So you keep wondering why they don’t get it, when in reality they may not even know there is something to get. You form an ideal scenario in your head but you don’t explain it to anyone, and then you get upset when things don’t work like you think they would.
But the fault is on you. You set the wrong expectations or you haven’t set them at all. You didn’t tell your people exactly, in detail, and over and over again how to be great at their job. So they aren’t.
People usually default to the minimum requirements. If something works well enough that nobody bats an eye, they will stick to that.
2
You don’t give them the tools they need to be the best.
People love doing something they are good at. And they love it even more when those around them enable them to do so.
The environment you set for your team should act as a booster for their skill, not a friction point. It seems obvious on paper but so many people fail to do so. Your people should have access to the best tools you can provide, whatever those tools mean in your context.
It can be access to information, technology, investing in their professional development and so on.
We recently watched a documentary on how George Lucas made the first Star Wars movie.
We are fascinated by how individuals manage to change entire industries through innovation and creativity.
Now, George Lucas wanted something special for his film, but the current technology was not there yet. So he employed, not even the first, but his second option, to build a team for him.
His name was John Dykstra. He gave John full freedom to recruit whoever he wanted and gave him full control over the whole operation, including access to whatever tools and technology they needed.
John recruited college students, artists and engineers and together they built this new visual effects company called Industrial Light & Magic. Now, were these people the absolute best in the industry? Probably not. But they knew what the expectations were and they had access to all the tools.
The revolutionized the way visual effects were done, and in fact, every major fantasy franchise out there was worked on by ILM. Everything from Star Wars, Harry Potter, Indiana Jones, Pirates of the Caribbean, everything has the ILM print on them. We highly suggest you check that documentary out. Now back to the topic, if you want your people to do their best work, you need to give them your best tools.
Mister Beast and his team play and edit Minecraft videos on stupidly overkill computers.
They don’t need that kind of power. But yet every single member of his team has access to everything decked out. Because he knows that kind of access gives them a better environment to be creative and push content creation.
And finally, something a lot of entrepreneurs are guilty of:
3
Your feedback sucks.
We’ve seen a lot of CEO’s that follow the mantra “no news is great news”. But this motto is incredibly destructive. Most of us here at Alux have dogs. We know that in order to train them, we need to encourage good behaviors while discouraging bad ones.
Now, the comparison between pets and team members may not be the fairest one, but it holds true in this example. If someone did something that you liked, you need to actually tell them to keep doing it.
Regularly. You need to keep enforcing that kind of behavior. We’d argue that it’s actually more important to acknowledge good work than to punish the bad.
When people don’t get recognized for their good work, they will eventually stop doing it. It’s the same in relationships. If your partner cooks you dinner after a long day of work and you don’t take your time to appreciate them for doing so, they will eventually stop doing it.
Only giving feedback when it’s negative puts your team in a place where they don’t know then they are right and they’ll be too late when they are wrong.
It’s a lose-lose situation. Instead they need to share the upside, as well as the downside. When the business is doing good, everyone in the business needs to do good.
Like J Cole said “What good is first class if my *hommies* can’t sit.
And with that we’ll end this video. We hope you learned something valuable today, Aluxers. We’ll see you tomorrow.
