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For Love of Team™ is THE podcast where Leaders Simplify Teamwork, helping you: SURROUND yourself with others doing work they LOVE. Business mentor and strategist, Winston Faircloth believes that it is your love of TEAM, and not just your love of products and customers that sets you apart in the marketplace.
The visionary leader always has more ideas and bandwidth. And many severely underestimate the time it takes to complete tasks. So once delegated, they're moving on to their next visionary initiative. And for team members who are more process or checklist oriented, this endless stream of priorities is not only stressful, it can be demoralizing. Hey there, it's Winston Faircloth, and I'm your host for the Love of Team.
Winston Faircloth:This is the podcast dedicated to helping you grow a team you love, multiplying your impact, income, and freedom in business. Unlocking the what and why so essential to attracting and keeping A plus team members. So here's a fun quiz for you today. I'm going to give you a list of cities and I want you to guess what they have in common. Ready?
Winston Faircloth:Nashville, Tennessee Toronto Cleveland, Ohio Saint Augustine, Florida Arlington, Texas Newport, Rhode Island Davis, California Springfield, Massachusetts Palm Springs, California Canton, Ohio and Cooperstown, New York. Well, this is probably giving it away a little bit for you as you hear some of those cities there towards the end. But let's just talk about what they all have in common. They have three capital letters in common. H o f, hall of fame.
Winston Faircloth:Alright. So let's just look at those cities again really quickly and give you, what the hall of fame location is. Nashville, country music hall of fame. Toronto, the hockey Hall of Fame Cleveland, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Saint Augustine, the World Golf Hall of Fame Arlington, Texas, International Bowling Hall of Fame Newport, Rhode Island, International Tennis Hall of Fame How about Davis, California, US Bicycling Hall of Fame, Springfield Mass Basketball Hall of Fame, Palm Springs, the Motion Picture Hall of Fame, Canton, Ohio Pro Football, and Cooperstown National Baseball. So HOF Hall of Fame.
Winston Faircloth:And today we're talking about how you can create an HOF team. These are all shrines to outstanding achievement. There are places that we remember and recognize legends in sports, business, the arts, and many of these accomplishments focus on individual achievements. Others recognize collective team efforts. Imagine for a moment what it would be like to be on a Hall of Fame team.
Winston Faircloth:Well, here in the city of champions, Tampa Bay Tampa Bay, Florida, we've been part of three world championships in less than twelve months, and we came very close to a fourth in Major League Baseball. There's nothing like celebrating a winning season, and this is the culmination of hard work and dedication to a single focus. So when I think about focusing on building a business I love, I always think first about building a winning culture and a team that I love. So today, I'd like to focus on another use of the letters h o f. And now they're the opposite of the hall of fame work.
Winston Faircloth:Can you guess what this h o f stands for when you think about teams and culture? What could it be? HOF. How about hair on fire? Have you ever been part of a hair on fire organization?
Winston Faircloth:What does that feel like? I bet you've probably seen one. You observed one if you're a customer of certain organizations. Maybe you've been on one in prior part of your career. Here's some examples.
Winston Faircloth:The urgent items of the day overtake the important. Having back to back Zoom meetings with little or no breaks. Here's one. How about when internal emails, if they're not answered immediately, it's a sign of disrespect. Oh, the shiny new object that bumps last week's priorities.
Winston Faircloth:Every situation seems to require custom response. You get multiple answers to the same question. How about little accountability for others' deadlines and every person for themselves? Well, I hate to point the finger, but you know, our teams really reflect the leader, how we show up in business. And so sometimes the visionary leader can be a significant contributor to a Herald on Fire team.
Winston Faircloth:Earlier in my career, I once worked for an idea who loved to be the idea generator, loved ideation. And he prided himself on being able to generate lots of solutions to issues. He used to brag about how he could always come up with 20 ideas, throw them against the wall, and hopefully one of them will stick. Well, if you've ever worked for a leader like this, you know how exhausting it can be. Last week, our priority for the quarter was hitting our sales goals.
Winston Faircloth:This week, it's redoing the website and the marketing plan. The visionary leader always has more ideas and bandwidth. And many severely underestimate the time it takes to complete tasks, so once delegated, they're moving on to their next visionary initiative. And for team members who are more process or checklist oriented, this endless stream of priorities is not only stressful, it could be demoralizing, trying to keep up with the shifting timelines and directions from the top. Now I'm not pointing my finger at you, the visionary leader.
Winston Faircloth:Hey. I'm looking at myself in the mirror when I say this. It is a superpower to be able to create ideas on the fly. It's why you started business because you saw an opportunity that no one was solving, and you took the leap of faith. You took the pivot.
Winston Faircloth:You took the risk to begin to pursue fixing and overcoming these challenges that only you saw. But taken to an extreme, and especially when you start dealing with other people and you go beyond that solopreneur experience, that same strength can become an Achilles heel. So if your team is a reflection of you as the leader, what can the visionary leader do to prevent your team from becoming a hair on fire organization? Well, here at For Love of Team, we use a tool called the multiplier max, and I think of it as a simple decision making discipline that is ideally suited for the visionary leader. Here are a few simple steps that can help you go from and be able to harness all those creative ideas for good, for good for your organization and good for your team.
Winston Faircloth:Step one. Get out a sheet of paper. Yeah. We're going old school here. I want you to capture down all the ideas that you have that could help the situation as you see it today.
Winston Faircloth:The opportunities that you're seeing, the pivots you may have to make. You are uniquely situated as we talked about last time. You're uniquely situated to be able to see opportunities that others do not see. This is your strength. This is the asset that you bring to the organization.
Winston Faircloth:But as I said, it can also be a challenge. So think of this as your thought download. Don't edit, ponder, or think too critically yet. Just capture as many of these ideas and download them all onto a single piece of paper so that you can think of all these ideas and get them out of your head. And let's begin to take critical stock of them.
Winston Faircloth:Step two. Let's look at all these ideas that you just generated. Let's go back through all of them, take a review. Perhaps there are themes or ideas that have been generated that can be combined. And as you glance over all these ideas, are there any of them that leap off the page to you?
Winston Faircloth:Are there one to three that just stand out as something that really grabs your attention, grabs your creative juices, the ones that you think would most improve the situation or move the needle forward over the next ninety days, circle these. And now step three. This is where you begin to sell yourself on the idea before you involve others. This is the critical step. This is the part that can help translate your visionary leadership in a structured way that best harnesses the the most excellent of your ideas, the ones that are most consequential, the ones that can move the needle the most.
Winston Faircloth:We want you to start selling yourself on the idea before you involve others. That's probably the key takeaway here. Here's how you do it. You complete a MultiplierMax worksheet for each idea and we'll share at the end of the podcast how to get a copy of yours. MultiplierMax focuses on a series of questions in one piece of paper.
Winston Faircloth:First, what's the desired result? Second, why will this make a difference? Third, what are the consequences for not taking action now? Fourth, what are the benefits of taking action at this time? And then fifth, a series of short observable actions that define what does success look like.
Winston Faircloth:Now as the visionary, you've got all these ideas. But if an idea or solution doesn't warrant ten to fifteen minutes of your time to think this through and to clarify your thinking, I would submit it's probably not a good enough idea to share with your team. That's gonna sound harsh. You know, we love I love generating ideas, but this is a discipline I'm now beginning to take as a leader, and I'm seeing such great fruit from doing this. The visionary leader does their team a huge favor by going through this process, sorting and sifting all the many potential ideas that you have.
Winston Faircloth:And it's pretty easy to see in working through the Multiplier Max that some ideas are not as worthy, not as well developed, or consequential to the business as others will be. I see Multiplier Max performing two primary functions for the visionary leader. First, it filters out great and important ideas from underdeveloped ones. By selling myself first on why I should progress with one idea over another, I've saved my team an enormous amount of time and distraction. So this filtering process, separating the wheat from the chaff, if you will, is an amazing process of saying this idea advances over the three or four others that I've got.
Winston Faircloth:It really does my team a great service. So that filtering and selling process is amazing. But even more importantly, idea number two is that a well conceived idea through this lens of the Multiplier Max provides a one page communication tool enabling strong collaboration with my team. Because I've already spelled out the key what's and why's behind the idea that I've decided to advance over others. Now don't get me wrong, I want you to continue to act in your superpower of being an idea factory.
Winston Faircloth:This is your strength. This is what got you to the helm. This is what helped you take the leap. Yet I also want you to be a great steward of the talent that you've attracted to your team, harnessing the power of your ideas that you've predetermined and pre decided that you wanted to advance because you've invested in the process of selling yourself first before bringing ideas to your team. And not only will your great ideas advance more quickly, your team's follow through and focus will improve tremendously.
Winston Faircloth:Why is that? Because now your team has a clear focus, They see your commitment and your follow through to developing the idea more fully and they no longer have the weight of helping you sift through weak ideas, that pile of weak ideas that you're throwing up against the wall to find that diamond in the pile of the ideas that you can generate every week. Using Multiplier Max, in effect, you've become a fire chief. Avoiding potential hair on fire moments with your team by preventing fires and instead laying the foundation for a future hall of fame team as your prescreened ideas convert into action. To get your own copy of our Multiplier Max tool, check out the show notes for this podcast.
Winston Faircloth:We'll be happy to walk you through how to prevent fires within your team by selling yourself first on great ideas. A business you love supported by a team you love. What could be better than that? For love of the team is a leading indicator of your future success, multiplying your impact, income, and freedom in business. I'll catch you on the next episode.
Winston Faircloth:Be blessed, friends. We'll catch you soon.