The developing team 💪🏼
What does Africa have to do with the OM?
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There's an old African proverb I heard from one of my mentors.
🇿🇦 It goes like this:
"If you want to go fast, go alone.However, if you want to go far, go as a team."
Fortunately, I learned this early in my "career" and realized that I can't do everything myself, because I would just simply kill myself and I'm not good at everything (well, to be honest, I'm good at very few things) 🤫
Let's see then...
👀 Why do you need a team?
Many people don't understand at first why it's good and only see the problems.
More people, more problems 🚫
More pay 💰
More hassle with communication 🗣
Maybe lower quality 📉
etc.
Yes, I have to admit these as real fears, but...
Not all teams make these mistakes and when they do, 99% of the time it's the manager's responsibility. Because once you have a team, everything is YOUR responsibility! 😨
📕 Book recommendation: Jocko Willink's book Discipline = Freedom is a must-read on this topic! (🎧 10 minutes in BookBase) Jocko Willink was an elite navy seal and on one of his deployments he made a huge blunder that cost a few lives, but he knew that this is when he really had to take responsibility for his actions and not blame it on someone else!
In the OM team, we have never once had something go so wrong that it threatened the whole company. Sure, there have been minor slip-ups, whether in app development or content production, but they happen everywhere. 😉
💡 Side note: You shouldn't haunt your employees all the time and make sure they don't make mistakes. You have to tell them what the expectations are, help them as much as you can and then let them work, let them make mistakes. People are afraid of making mistakes, but I can assure you, any employee I have had who has made a mistake has learned far more from it than the "problem" it caused. So yes, let them make mistakes, but help them correct their mistakes too.
Let's see what the difference is:
✅ Good team and Bad team ❌
A good team member is:
Wants to keep improving
Looks for feedback
Always looking to do more
Puts the interests of the community first
Works hard
Is self-motivated
Part of the wrong team:
Thinks he knows everything
Gets offended by feedback
Always does as little as possible
Puts his own interests first
Always "rests" and produces minimal results
Always needs to be motivated and pushed
(It was horrible to even write this... unfortunately I know entrepreneurs who have teams like this and I know their lives are hell.) 👹
A good team can fly you and your business to "Heaven". 🌟
And a bad team can make your everyday like "Hell"! 🔥
That's why it's important to choose who you work with...
But I'll write another article about that (just remind me) 😉
📆 Annual planner for the BookBase
Anyone who downloads the BookBase by 30.12.2022 from this link and starts the Free Trial will also receive the "The Golden Compass" as a gift.
Try it for free and join the Community! 😎
Back to our theme...
Okay, let's look at the next question:
😎 How to build a good team?
✅ First of all, it's important to choose good people for your team!
Side notes 2: It's more important that your personality fits into your current team than that you have the professional qualities. Anyone can learn professional skills from 20 hours of YouTube videos, but it's hard to change the personality of a person.
🎯 Have specific rules in your team and expectations that new members can relate to. I would bring a good quote here:
"Life is not about what you like, it's about what you tolerate."
If there were no rules, even the best people wouldn't fit in because they wouldn't know how to "behave" here.
🗣 Provide constant feedback to team members. Perhaps the most important thing is that they can give feedback to each other.
Side notes 3: Always give feedback by saying the "Good" first and then the "Improve". Trust me, there is always Good to be found, sometimes you just have to look for it. That way, you are more open to what can be improved. The really good feedback is the feedback that says "How" (How can it be improved?)
🔗 Honest feedback is based on "Trust", so the most important step is to build trust within the team. There are lots of ways to do this, but what works best for us is sharing experiences!
Shared experience → Shared stories → Shared jokes → Trust
That's about how it usually works!
What kind of experiences can we have?
🏡 Team fun
🏎 Go-kart
🔫 Paintball
🧖🏽♂️ Wellness
🚗 Road trip
🏝 Holiday together
The possibilities are endless, the point is just to be common and everyone wants it. It shouldn't be that someone has to be forced into it (except when 8/7 people want to go to a wellness, but Adam Gyovai is against it and can't explain why... Well, this is an exception). 🥲
🪢 The team needs to be flexible enough and not stick to the same old stuff.
In these times, everything changes at the speed of light and sometimes we start something today because it looks good, but in 3 days we know that it's not such a good idea. We have to be flexible enough to let it go and move on to something else.
Or if there is an update that has to go out on time, Edu and Kokesz may be pushing 24/7. However, shortly after that there is a slightly lighter period. You have to be able to adapt to the situation.
"It's not the species that survive that are the smartest or strongest, it's the species that can adapt the fastest." ~ Charles Darwin (The Theory of Natural Selection)
🎨 It's important to have a diverse team and I don't mean where you come from, but what you do and what you are like.
A quick disclaimer here, as I said at the beginning that people should have the same personality. By that I mean that their values and principles should be the same, but their personality type and area of expertise can vary greatly.
In fact, it's good if they do!
If everyone in the team were just marketers, then only marketing ideas would come up. Same with designers or programmers. It would be flat and monochrome after a while because the same ideas would always come up.
However, if you have other people on the team who think differently about certain things, then you can easily build a very creative team who have the solution to everything!
See OM:
🖼 Geri - Video clip
🎥 Batu - YouTube
🎨 Kokesz - Design
💻 Edu - Coding
🧡 Dani - Customer Support
✍🏼 Pityu - Writing
📝 Bögszi - Summary of Thoughts
🎙 Gyova - Audio and Writing
👨🏼🚒 Gringo (myself) - "Firefighter"
It's a team of so many colors that can really think creatively and solve problems!
🦁 And finally, most importantly... All of this means nothing without a true leader to keep the team together in tough times!
As I said at the beginning of my letter, everything in a team is the fault of the leader. Anything that goes wrong will be your fault! This is not easy to understand and accept mentally at first, but in the long run it pays off!
The difference between a boss and a leader is that the boss is the one who is in charge from the top and takes no responsibility for anything, while the leader is the one who fights on the front line and takes responsibility for everything! ⚔️
I would also like to add, that taking responsibility is sexy! 🔥
📕 Book Recommendation 2: A must-read for leadership skills is Gary Vee's book "Twelve and a Half" (🎧 14 minutes in BookBase). In it, he explains the 13 skills he believes are essential to become a good leader. I have to say, I agreed with him a lot! It has greatly shaped my empathy towards others!
The theory is simple, but the implementation is the really hard part!
But...
🫡 What exactly you need to do?
Here are 2 ways to look at the possibilities of what to do exactly...
if you don't have a team yet but want to
if you already have a team and want to make the most of them
Let's start right away with the first one, I'll try to write a checklist of what I would do, then feel free to add your own experiences. ✅
1️⃣ If you don't have a team yet but would like to
1. Look into what exactly you need a team for, what do you want to achieve?
2. See what you can't do!
3. Write down the skills you need!
4. Write down what you could give them to help you.
5. Find places where you think there are like-minded people and where you can meet people with the skills you need (Facebook groups, Discord servers, Offline events, Book Club, etc.)
6. If you find such people, talk to them first and get to know them.
7. If you like them, tell them your idea.
8. Ask them if they would be interested in such a project?
9. If the answer is yes, then go on to the second part of the question!
2️⃣ If you already have a team and want to get the most out of them
Congratulations, you already have a team, let's look at what you need to be aware of, in order to get the most out of them. 🙏🏻
10. Make sure members get to know each other (joint calls, joint activities)
11. Set precise rules for team behavior (it's company culture, you know what else is tolerated)
12. Define a vision!
13. Break it down into smaller goals.
14. Write a plan to achieve the first goal.
15. Divide tasks among people with specific deadlines.
16. You as the team leader are responsible for ensuring that everyone has the tools and knowledge to complete the task.
17. Give each other feedback along the way (good and improvable) It is important that you get feedback!!
18. Constantly try to deepen the trust in the team through joint activities and events. More trust = More performance!
Suddenly I was able to write down these 18 steps, if I missed something feel free to write it in a comment and I'll include it! 😉
I know it was very long, but extremely useful – believe me!
🔥 Challenge
Edu and Kokesz were here at the beginning of the week and we set our goals for the next 2-3 months. We filled a whiteboard with full of ideas. 📝
For example, this team meeting was exactly what I wrote about above! Shared experiences (skating), shared stories, shared jokes. Besides the fact that we made a lot of progress, we also built confidence in the team! 😌
The biggest challenge was to prioritize them and break them down into smaller units. But in the end, we managed to write an Ultimate Checklist that will be a great help in the coming days! 🤓
📖 What have I just read?
I've finished Rory Sutherland's Alchemy; I have to say it's one of the few books that has reshaped my thinking on certain subjects. This book has helped me to try to think irrationally on one or two topics, because however silly it seems at first, it can be brilliant because of that. Human psychology is very hard to figure out and sometimes 1 or 2 silly ideas can hit a very powerful psychological button. 🧠
Just like on the travel search sites that SLOWED down the search engine, there were more bookings as people thought because it was so slow therefore the best deals would be found.🙃
I also continued reading Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. Brilliant book about evolution and the history of mankind. Although I only read the illustrated history edition, which tells the story in comics, but I admit it suits my mentality better, as I'm a visual learner most of the time. 🦧
What I've learned from it now is that humans stood out from other animals for 2 things:
One was gossiping, - yes, you read it well, gossiping -, the fact that they could gossip about each other helped them to know who they could trust and who they couldn't. This allowed them to form much larger groups than other animals. (Chimpanzees live in herds of 50 at most because they can only trust around 50 of their mates) 🐵
And the other thing is making up fictional stories, ghosts, religion and I could go on. The point was that they believed in a higher power that they could collectively trust and that also helped them to organize into larger groups. I swear it's brutally interesting to read about (however I hated biology and history in school) 🙏🏻
🎧 What did I just listen to?
I've listened to quite a lot of blog articles now, as the Refined App has good recommendations, the problem was that I didn't have time to read them all. BUT I just found a site that reads them all for me and saves them to Apple Podcast or Spotify. It's called Ad-Auris, all I know is that the first 30 days are free, I'm still using it!
I've been reading up on AI behavioral science and such utopian views on where the world is going and where we will be by 2030. I like reading about topics like this because it helps me think and come up with new ideas. Sure, there may not be flying cars and teleporting people in 2030, but that's not the point. The point is just to get out of the reality of now and let your imagination soar. 🛸
✍🏼 Top quote
"I'm not proud of everything I did, but I'm pretty sure I'll do it all again." ~ The Bucket List Movie