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How To Prevent Team Territorialism And Nurture Creativity

Shannon Waller dives into a common challenge for a 10x growth team: how to support team members who need assistance without triggering feelings of insecurity. You know they need help to free up their valuable time, but how can you make them feel supported, not threatened? Shannon has tips on fostering Unique Ability® Teamwork and growth mindsets to prevent territoriality and roadblocks to team creativity.

Show Notes:

  • What happens when the person you hired to help free up your time becomes swamped with too many tasks?
  • Babs Smith says, “I always want people to have capacity. I never want people to be fully used up because if there’s no capacity, there’s no room for creativity.”
  • Dan Sullivan says, “A too tightly scheduled entrepreneur cannot transform.” This is true for entrepreneurial team members too.
  • The dangers of not laying the proper groundwork before adding new hires or technological support include:

- Team member feels like they’ve failed.

- Team member feels job is threatened.

- Team member becomes territorial about their role and tasks.

- Teamwork becomes bottlenecked, with people working around one another instead of with one another.

- There is no energy left for creative solutions that lead to 10x growth for the business.

  • Laying the proper groundwork involves:

- Reassuring team members that their performance and contribution are valued.

- Open conversation about bigger future plans for the entrepreneur, for the business, and for that team member.

- Regular conversations about the team member’s Unique Ability® and how to continue growing and expanding it.

- Regular check-ins on the team member’s Activity Inventory: What tasks can they be freed up from doing?

- Frequent and ongoing conversations about frustrating tasks that can be better handled by someone else who loves doing them or technology that can do them more efficiently.

  • For everyone and the business to grow 10x, everyone should be using more of their Unique Ability and none of their “Incompetent” activities:

- When working in Unique Ability, we are 10x more effective, productive, and profitable.

- In our Excellent activities, we are 2x more effective.

- In our Competent activities, we are at 1x. o In our Incompetent activities, we can be -10x.

Key Takeaways:

  1. Setting up positive expectations and reassurances when introducing new resources can help alleviate fears and resistance from team members.
  2. Regular communication and discussions about offloading tasks and leveraging people’s Unique Ability can create a culture of growth and productivity.
  3. Territorialism and power struggles within a team can hinder collaboration and creativity, so it’s important to encourage a focus on Unique Ability and expanding growth opportunities.

Resources:

Who Not How: The Formula To Achieve Bigger Goals Through Accelerating Teamwork by Dan Sullivan with Dr. Benjamin Hardy

Unique Ability Teamwork

AI as Your Teammate by Evan Ryan

The Gap And The Gain by Dan Sullivan with Dr. Benjamin Hardy

Multiplication By Subtraction by Shannon Waller

Episode Transcript:
 
Shannon Waller Today, I am going to talk about finding Whos for your Whos, and the trials and tribulations and opportunities that comes with leveraging your team. Stay tuned.
 
Hi, Shannon Waller here, and welcome to Team Success. Really interesting conversation came up when I was coaching the 10x workshop about a month or so ago, and it was about supporting the people that you hire to support you. Or as I like to call it, finding Whos for your Whos, and the Who Not How concept. And I've been thinking about this from a couple of different angles, as I often do, because once an idea comes to my mind all of this evidence in the world comes to support it.
 
One of the things that's really interesting though is that can be a little more challenging. Let me just set the context. You're going to find some amazing Whos to leverage you so that you're freed up to do more of your Unique Ability. Hopefully you're not doing anything you're incompetent at or competent at, and this will even free you up from what you're excellent at so you can really do that deep dive into Unique Ability.
 
So you find one person who's going to support you in a new way that hasn't been done before, and that person comes on board and they're so excited for the role and they're so happy and they feel accomplished and they're achieving. And then a few months later, you notice that they're getting pretty swamped. They're working crazy hours, they're working really hard, they're doing a fabulous job, but you're like, "Hmm, I think I might need more help, more support."
 

About the Author

Shannon Waller, Entrepreneurial Team Strategist, is a natural collaborator who instinctively saw that a thriving Unique Ability® Team can strengthen their entrepreneur, the business, and themselves. A win-win-win. Go, team, is Shannon’s rallying cry.

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