3 Ways That You Can Strengthen Your Team With Your Vision
Join Carter Schelling and find out 3 simple but potent ways that your vision can empower your team.
Full transcript
Generated from the episode audio and lightly edited for readability.
Welcome to studio 3655. I'm Carter Sheling, director of business development for Martin Healthcare Advisors. I also have my own consulting company, 3655 Incorporated, where for the last 43 years, I've been helping business owners build extraordinary companies in ordinary industries. We've done several of the shows that Paul's done, the interview shows in this studio, and today my job is to continue our series on what's it like to lead with a vision and what's the value of doing it. Last week we talked about the value of in your own life making sure that when you make decisions you do it with two contexts in mind.
The current with today's facts as well as what your world is going to be like December 31st 2026 if you get your way. So that you have both of those as inputs to your decisions about your own personal life. Today we're going to talk about what if we take that to the company. What if we say starting with your company today, what do you want your company to become by the end of the year, by the end of 24, by the end of 25, and by the end of 26.
And when I say what do you want it to be, I mean how large do you want it to be? How many people do you want to have there? What's your ownership of it? What's the culture like? What are the clinical capabilities? What are the offerings, the service offerings you provide? What's your role in the community? These are all dimensions of your business in the future. What do you want them to be? December 31st, 2026. I say that if you put some real time and energy into fleshing out that if you will almost like a video of your company at that time, it can be very helpful to your team as they attempt to help you move your company forward.
I'm suggesting you lead your team with your company's vision as their partner. What are the benefits that come from that? Number one, if you're able to do that, it's going to be way easier to build a championship team. Let me show you what I mean. I've got to do a little diagram here. Okay. Now, let's look at the org chart of your business. We have you, the CEO, and we have top managers. The first thing I want you to know is although you of course you're called CEO in an owner operated business I have found that the owner is so much more important so much more powerful.
The term CEO doesn't really get it. You know I tried calling him God and people didn't like that. Okay. So I decided I was going to rename this title to Rah after the ancient Egyptian sun god, the source of all love, approval, praise and money, the center of the universe. Because in an owner operating company, you really are like the center of the universe. And in fact, if we look at these top managers, you hired this one and you have a relationship with them. You hired this one, you have a relationship with them.
You hired this one, you have a relationship with them. And I have to tell you that relationship with you is way more important than the relationship they have with each other. And in most owner operated companies, to tell the truth, each of these managers is first thinking about how can they please you? How can they get your approval? How can they get your time? That is as important to them as any other performance metric. It's a little bit like a family where you're the parent and they are the siblings.
Now, what do siblings do? They rival. They rival because they're all after the same limited resource. And the more that one gets, the more attention, approval or time that one gets, the less is available for the others. This is normal. This is natural in a owner operated company. But this is not a team and it's definitely not a championship team. This is what we call a raw centric business. People come to work, how's she feeling today? Is she happy? We must be doing well. Is she unhappy?
We couldn't be doing well. You are the son of the universe. Now, the problem is that when they're asked to work as a team, they don't have a the practice doing it or really b the incentive. They don't share a common goal that is limitless. If you want to build a championship team, I say you have to give them a championship to play, you have to create something in the company even more important than you. You have to create what I call I have something called star dyslexi.
I can't draw stars. Pretend that's a purple star. Something for them I call the north star for your people. And that is the three-year vision. That is where we're headed. That is you say to them even more important than what you want to do today. You have to establish another center of importance for your team. Something they can all connect to that isn't limited. Something that gives them something to pursue beyond what you ask him to do today. Now, that's the beginning of building a championship team.
Excuse me one second. Let me remove the easel. Now, what's the second benefit of having your team work in partnership with your vision of the future? The second is it's way easier to harness the number one source of motivation for all human beings on the planet, selfm motivation. Because if you're able to make this clear to them, you can begin a conversation with each one individually about where they want to be in their career at this time and what the company achieving this goal can do for their own personal goals.
You know, many years ago, I worked at a large construction company, and in 1995, we had a retreat with the 16 highest managers where we rolled out vision 2000, our description of where we wanted the company to be in five years. And then during one of the evenings, I set up something I called Cabaret. We had a raised stage and one at a time we put our managers up on that stage in a chair in a spotlight and asked them when we reach vision 2000 how could that help you with your own personal career goals and each one in turn would say well I want to have this responsibility or I want to have that income or I want to have a second house in Florida the things they wanted and how us reaching our company's goal could help them.
When each one finished, I asked the group, "Are you behind him?" And we'd all cheer and say, "Yes, we were." And then we'd drink. And then this next person would get up 16 times. It got pretty exciting. But I have to tell you, that was 27 years ago. The company was doing, I don't know, 100 million, 200 million, something like that. At that at that point, most of those people are still with us. And we're doing $1.3 billion dollars a year. Now, I think that little exercise might have helped.
Think about having a relationship with your people where you know what they want to achieve and you help them connect that very motivating factor with the company's success in the future. That's number two. Number three, it's way easier to get way more better ideas. You know, being a business owner is one of the few professions where success makes you stupid. You know, if you're a brain surgeon, you do 500 brain surgeries, you get pretty smart about brain surgery. However, if you're a business owner and you start with five employees and you're very successful, you run up to 50 or 100 employees, you no longer know what you're doing.
You no longer are an expert at your job. You're stupid because you've never done this job before. You're at what do we call the frontier of your own ignorance. Worse yet, mistakes at that size are way more expensive, way harder to fix, and everybody, including you, thinks you're really smart. You just took the company from five people to 100 people. You must be a genius. So, when you say something, nobody doubts it. That's not good because you are learning by trial and error. You don't know everything you need to know to be right when you make a decision.
And if you say something that's really stupid and your people say to themselves, "That's really stupid." They can't say anything to you because who ever tells their boss they're stupid? However, if you have that goal out there, and if you take the time to say, "I think we should do this, and I think it serves our vision of the future." What do you think about it serving our vision of the future? They can say, "Boss, I'm not quite sure it serves the vision of the future." Without insulting you, you're going to get more feedback.
You're going to get better responses. You're going to get way more better ideas. And you need them when you include the future in your conversations about the present with your team. So with these three attributes, I'm suggesting that if you go back and work out the best definition you can possibly create of where you want your company to be in three years and share it with your team, you'll get there quicker and more successfully. Thanks for your time today. If you want to know more about this topic, put your name and email in down below and let's talk. Otherwise, I'll see you here next week.
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