How to get your team to do their work without needing you to tell them what to do so you can stop being a slave to your business...

All right, welcome to today's episode, my name is Tom Rolley of SystemIO.

excited to bring you this challenging headline.

If you read the headline might be drawn in, Hey, what is going on here how to get your team to do the work without you needing to tell them what to do so that you can stop being a slave to your business, you may recognize this straight off be like, Oh, my goodness, I spent all my time telling my team what to do.

And this could look like meetings at the beginning of the week, this could make it look like interruptions through your week, you are continually giving them the direction for what needs to be done.

But the interesting thing is, even if you do that, then all the questions that come up about that still come back to you.

And you have to make the decisions for that.

This is quite problematic, it means that you've got people in your team, just doing nothing while you make the decisions.

It also forces you to make all the decisions.

And this opens up for a particularly interesting problem in that you now no longer have any time that your entire day is spent putting out fires sorting out decisions, questioning why is this happening? You may even ask yourself, Hey, why is it that I brought on all of these team members, and yet there is still more work for you to do? Like surely the whole idea, the problem that you were trying to solve when you brought on your team was like I got too much to do, I'm going to bring on a team member, and they're going to help me.

But after a while, something has somehow morphed somehow it changed and it became something else.

It was like, oh, man, I'm busier than I was before.

It takes more work to run a team.

And this is a problem.

This leaves you late at night, almost beginning a second workday as everyone leaves.

And finally, you have some peace and time to yourself to do the work that you're meant to do.

But hey, look, if you've got a family if you've got a wife, or a or a husband, or partner, and they're like, Dude, where are you? What was the workday finished four hours ago? Why are you still at work at 9:30 pm? When are you coming home, I'll put your dinner in the oven in the microwave, or see in bed, this is a major problem, this is not a good relationship, this will cost you big time.

And so while you might be working away trying to solve your business, if it ends up in divorce are ends up in loss of the relationship.

Was it really worth it? So you got to come back to that original promise like, Hey, why is it taking more work to get these people to do the work that I hired them for.

So you might actually realize that there is a never-ending amount of work, there is so much stuff that could be done.

That even if you bring on more team members, more work will appear.

But if it's all dependent on you making the decisions, your days will get longer and harder and more stressful, you will be exhausted.

You'll be like, Why is this happening to me? You may even have to go along and check everything is actually done to standard.

Like, okay, you guys, I told you to do this, did it actually get done to a sufficiently appropriate standard? And if you don't do that, like a hope that the customer is happy? Because you can't actually be sure that what you told the team to do actually got done right.

So you may have to go along and check everything.

Why? Why is this not done to stand and that means like going to send it back, I do it properly.

This whole gig starts to feel like a kindergarten or preschool rather than an actual business that's designed to produce quality work.

And finally, you may have to confront yourself that you actually don't really know what's going on.

You got a bunch of people high payroll, and yet, if you ask yourself on a Friday afternoon or a Friday night as you're like still the last one to leave.

What actually got done this week.

You're not really sure.

This is a difficult experience.

When payroll comes around.

You're like man, I'm paying all of these people out I don't even know what got done.

What are they doing a week?

You do know what problems you troubleshoot, you know like when they came to you and said hey, what's going on here? You sorted what do we do and you sorted it out.

So you're aware of that but the rest of that time.

Kind of awkward a lot of money going are not really sure what get done, what got done.

So if this is the difficult situation, that you find yourself in that you are basically a slave to your business, a slave to your people that you are the decision-maker, making the decisions on all of the work slowing everything down, and pairing quality.

What do you do? Perhaps you have a daydream of dropping back and getting rid of your team.

And just going back to a solo entrepreneur, you're mad, how good would it be, if it was just me, but perhaps you have a memory about why you had to hire a team in the first place that doing everything yourself is not so much fun, either.

So you find yourself trapped, you can't continue like it is right now with this dysfunctional team.

But you can't go back to not having a team either.

I want you to open up to the possibility that you could actually design your business.

So it works when you're there.

But it also works when you're not there that you could actually take two weeks off, not open your phone, not open your laptop, be fully present with your family be fully present on holidays actually have some r&r.

And your business continues to work.

Is this even possible? Is this a pipe dream? Well, imagine that you knew what needed to be done.

Like out of the infinite amount of work that could be done, you are clear on what the critical things that if they're done, then your business works.

Next up, you are clear on who's doing that.

And it might be you.

But it could also be another team member.

And this is extremely helpful if suddenly a team member gets sick or goes on holiday that you can redeploy another team member to cover that work.

So you know what work needs to be done, you know who's doing it.

And you know, when it's being done, like a lot of work will have a standard amount of time, it might take 10 minutes, it might take 30 minutes, it might take 90 minutes, but you could put that in their calendar.

And this has got some serious advantages.

Like when that time comes around each week, or each month or each quarter, that system gets done by that person.

And suddenly that critical work creates an outcome further down the line, it also gives you the capacity to go, Hey, if they're away next week and the week after, here's the work that needs to get done.

How are we going to do it, who's going to cover this, what decisions need to be made by you not to do the work, but rather to say, hey, I want you to do this work?

And finally, that you know how this work is done, that it's not stuck in your head, it's not stuck in your team's head, but rather, it's actually written down.

And the good news is it doesn't need to be super detailed, you could just have something written down, that gives a team member an idea about how to do it.

And that's enough.

Now the cool thing is that as you go along, you could actually improve those.

So not only do you know what needs to be done, that you know, who's going to do it, when it's going to be done and how it gets done.

So this suddenly opens up a possibility that your business is designed to work when you're there.

And it's designed to work when you are not.

So how are you going to bridge this? If you find yourself in this current entrepreneurial hill and you want to get to this place where your business is designed, then how are you going to do that? Well, I want to give you a couple of steps here, number one get organized.

And I mean that if you have multiple people working in your business, then the organization of your business becomes very important.

Where do you keep things? How do you name things? If you've got a lot of people working together, this organization is critical to make sure that stuff gets done, that you don't spend hours looking for where did they put that file? Where did they keep that document searching on Google going? Why can't I find this file, I know that I did it and I can't find it.

So number one, you got to get organized.

Next up, copy to use.

Alright, I want you to have the idea that you could have templates or originals that define how things get done, like the process for doing a particular task or a template that gets used in that task, and that there is an original that you copy and you use the copy so that your original stays clean.

This has got some serious advantages for you.

Number one, it means that when you copy it, hey, the original doesn't get messed up.

You don't have to delete everything and close that file.

Secondly, when you make improvements to those originals it then carries through on all subsequent work.

So that brings me to the third one, that as you use your systems and processes improve them.

This is super cool.

Like this means that the overwhelming and daunting task of documenting everything that gets done can be broken down into very bare-bones, beginning points that you're just running through a bare-bones experience, and it might just have one document that you're going to duplicate that it might just have the name of the process, but as you go along and use it, then you can improve it, you're like, Okay, now I'm going to add in a little bit more detail, I'm going to add in some headings here, I'm going to get clear on the best order.

And when there's no time, you just need to get it out, done straight away.

Like I'm not doing that improvement work right now, I just need this done.

But when there is time that you can go through and fill in the details.

So as you use your systems that actually get better.

And the final thing that I've got for you is to track your work.

So first of all tracks when you begin a process when you start here, click Start.

And you'll know that, hey, I'm up to that when it's done, click Done.

Suddenly, you can get distracted, you can deal with things that come up and come back and your time to get back on track is significantly reduced.

It's not five or six minutes, it's 20 or 30 seconds, you're like, Okay, great.

That's where I'm up to.

Brilliant.

Let's go again.

The other thing that I want you to consider tracking is the outcome of your systems, like when you go and produce the work track that this is cool.

This means that you can easily see whether there are missing parts, like if you know that there's meant to be four documents that get produced by a particular system, and you only have three, then there's a missing one.

So either there's a problem with the system, and you can correct it or something got skipped and say Hey, okay, go back.

Where did I miss that? Oh, wow.

So not only are you tracking what processes you're up to so that if you get distracted, you can come back.

Also, if someone's on a big project, and they're away for two weeks, then it can be taken over by somebody else.

And then when the original person comes back, they're like, right, this is where we're up to.

But also you can see the work that got done by your teams, you're like, oh, sweet, it got done.

Look at that.

His outcome one, outcome two, outcome three, outcome four, clearly documented.

So to bridge this gap between the nightmare of being a slave to your business to a business that is designed to work with or without you, then you're four things, get an organized copy to use, improve as you go.

And finally, track your work.

If this is a conversation that you know, is resonating for you, you're like, Oh man, you are speaking my language, then my invitation to you is to go into the System IO Facebook page.

And on that page, there's a button that says Send a message, click that button type in what's going on for you how many teams you got, what sort of problems you're having.

And then if I think that we can work together, I'll send you a link and we can set up a meeting.

So head over to the Facebook page for System IO, click Send Message.

Let me know what's going on.

And we can meet up and find out how to customize the solution these steps to get the right solution for you.

Thanks so much for tuning in today.

Look forward to seeing you on tomorrow's episode as we continue this exploration of the power of systems and processes in transforming your business from you being a slave to having one that is designed to work for you.

See you then.