Team Work Works

Hi and Happy Tuesday! I think you might like this.  The below is from a guy I identify with quite a bit.  His name is Pascal Finette.  He talks below about how a great team needs to work together in order to be GREAT.  In order to truly be exceptional on a large scale you must trust your team members and they must be held accountable.........simple as that.  In the real estate business our teams not only consists of our internal team members like my team of Chris Harris (my assistant), Heather Phillips (my operations manager), Jim Challis (my sales manager) and the rest of our staff, but also the Realtors we work with, the escrow officers, the appraisers, the mortgage banks, the termite companies and others who we rely on everyday to do their part of the transaction and do it beautifully.  My personal experience of “empowering your team members” came when I was 20 years old working for my mentor and friend Joe Solis from Monte Vista Market.  Joe did not micro manage the store but yet empowered his team (the produce manager, the head butcher, the dry-goods person) to each manage their part of the shoppers experience.  Each person on the team took great pride in doing what they did best and as such the store took on an almost iconic standing during that era and the shoppers received over the top personal attention during each department they walked through.  It was truly something to see. Here is how Pascal puts it..........................enjoy The Micro-Managing Antidote Recently I spoke with a young founder - he observed a tendency in himself to micro-manage his team. When talking about it, it became clear that this tendency mostly came from his anxiety to make sure stuff gets done. He felt that he needed to stay on top of things all the time - and that let him to be more involved that he should and wanted to be. Our discussion made me think of Gordon Ramsay’s TV show Hell’s Kitchen: Beside the entertainment value of having Gordon regularly loose his marbles, it offers a fascinating insight into the stressful environment of a professional kitchen. The thing which always stands out to me is the way the different stations work together: An order comes in, is dissected into the different parts (meat, veggies, garnish), the respective stations are informed and they shout back that they a) received the order (acknowledgement) and b) when it will be ready (information). When this is done in a fluid movement the kitchen runs like clockwork. When this line of communication breaks down, it’s time for Gordon to get a nervous breakdown. “Teams: Acknowledge receiving a task, indicate when it’s done and how others will know it’s done.” There is some deeper insight into this: Teams should work like the kitchen staff - when you receive a task, acknowledge it, tell the others when it will be done and how they will know it’s done. Establishing this simple routine in a team will immediately lift you out of micro-manage mode (at least for the reasons which made the young founder a micromanager). Always Run. Never Walk. Pascal

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