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Unbound is a weekly podcast, created to help you achieve more as a leader. Join Chris DuBois as he shares his growth journey and interviews others on their path to becoming unbound. Delivered weekly on Thursdays.
0:00
Curious how to leverage tools like Asana to make your team more productive. And today's episode is just for you. Are you a leader trying to get more from your business in life? Me too. So join me as I document the conversations, stories and advice to help you achieve what matters in your life. Welcome to unbound with me, Chris DuBois.
National Sidman is the co founder of IDU, where he serves businesses as an Asana certified consultant. Their goal is to a 1000s of Asana users across the globe to get the most out of their platform. And they do this through a system developed over years of experience. today. We are going to learn more about that. Michelle, welcome, Don.
0:44
Thank you just so excited to talk about productivity. Just my my passion has been for many years now.
0:50
Yeah. And my favorite part is that this is morning for me. And so if this episode goes well, I mean, spend the rest of the day just being super productive. And so let's see if we can make it happen. Let's kick off with the origin story.
1:05
Yeah, so basically, 10 years ago, I started my career as a web developer, as an engineer. And I created a first company, a startup, and I needed to have a tool to organize the company to organize my work. I had to choose between Zoho and Asana at the time, those were the choices I had. And I just chose Asana. And I started using Asana, we got better. We started with my colleagues to help people online, help people on forums and just create content around Asana. And slowly but surely, I started to write books about Asana, and do videos about Asana. And then suddenly someone asked me to help them and pay me for that time. And at the time, I was still a web developer. So it was like a side hustle for me. And it has been for many, many years. And one day Asana reached out to me and said, Do you want to be an actual partner? We have a partner program, you could create an actual company, and you could do that for living? And I said, Yes. So I partnered up with a friend of mine, who was also an Asana consultant, we created a company. And we now have a team of about a dozen people. And we help companies around the world, just use asana and get the most out of this work management solution.
2:23
Awesome. So we're gonna go right to the chase, get into your experience here. Where do you see the companies typically have the biggest opportunities for improving or optimizing operations? I think that's what everybody's just like, How can I? How can I fix this today?
2:42
Yeah, so usually, they know they have a problem. And usually, the problem lies on the fact that they use XML for everything, they use email, they use XML, and they reach a point where it just doesn't scale anymore. It's not possible anymore. So this is where they usually contact us, they realize there's a problem to fix. And very often they chose Asana already, because they, they try the different tools, and they reach out to us and we can help them implement the tool properly.
3:11
Gotcha. So what are some of the signs I guess? I mean, they're, they're gonna see some signs right, working in Excel and just pulling their hair out, probably. Is that how you got there? Yeah.
3:22
No, no, it's broken. Didn't know it's broken. I do have a funny story, though. One day, because usually we asked the client, what what was the tipping point? What made you decide you needed something? And one of my clients said, I was explaining the way we work to a new employee, and I was ashamed of the way we worked. It was shameful. It was so complex, we had so many spreadsheets everywhere. And like that, yeah, that shame, feeling, pushed them to say, Okay, we have to do something, we have to fix something. And that's when they decided they needed a tool like Asana.
3:55
I think I've heard that story, like not that specific story. But like, instances of that so many times where it's just like, Man, I don't even know what to tell you. It makes onboarding a lot rockier, that's for sure. Yes, yes. Some examples of just some of the operational inefficiencies he come across frequently with a task management, stuff like that.
4:20
So basically, if you're not able to tell me who is doing what by when very easily, then you missing something you're missing a part of, of missing a work management solution. If you don't know as an individual, if you don't know what your priorities are. You're also missing something. If you only react to whatever is being asked to view is basically the last thing that comes in is the first thing you work on. You have a problem you have no way of knowing what to do first, and this is the problem that Asana fixes, you will finally have a single list of things to do with this specific order. You can change the order you can ask people to organize in and Tuesday or there, but then you work from top to bottom. You can't do multiple things at the same time, it's very inefficient, you have to start somewhere. So where do you start? The problem is that list changes all the time. And without a tool to track those changes, it's almost impossible to do the right thing at the right time. This is why you usually need Asana. And you could do that with a single Excel spreadsheet. But the problem is very often what you do is blocked by someone else, you are blocking someone else, you have a lot of dependencies, and you have people who can help you, you can help other people. And all of that is made easier in a tool like Asana or any other project management solution. Right.
5:40
And the benefits, I feel get pretty clear, you know, for whoever the business owner is business leader, they're like, we need to do this before the team who doesn't necessarily see the bigger picture all the time, they sometimes are opposed to the change, right of switching to a new tool switching to a new mode of doing things, how do you help them with like change management and actually adopting a new platform that everybody is on board with?
6:08
Very often people notice a problem. And very often they need help, they know that something has to be fixed. So we are usually welcomed as saviors within companies because we're going to fix their problems. What we try to do is to show them what an ideal world would look like, what's very clean Asana project, what's a very clean Asana account and how people collaborate. And we share stories. And I think that's what people want. They want to hear how other companies are doing. If you work with a marketing agency, we tell them how other marketing agencies are very successful. They're very happy with the way they work. And what's very important in our case is our own team uses Asana as well on a daily basis. I have great clarity on what I have to do. Everybody's super calm. There's no stress, we know exactly what we have to do. And we have a ton of stories to share on why you can actually change your life to choose the right tool and being helped to implement that specific tool.
7:09
And I'm sure that's helpful too, for being able to pull up your, your instance of asana and be like, No, I look, this is how you do it and like, and someone can just see, like clicks faster.
7:21
Exactly. And over time, we built that amazing demo space where we have a lot of different use cases, we can show the client and then when we have workshops, we jump into their account right away, and we make improvements on what they have, or we build something together. And they usually walk out of the meeting with actionable thing to do. And, yeah, I think we do change lives. Like really, we have people come to us after weeks or months of work. And they tell us, it's amazing, I completely changed the way I work. I'm not stressed anymore. I'm not overwhelmed. I know exactly what I have to do. And sometimes people are overwhelmed, because they just have too much to do. We can't change that. But we can help them realize that they do have too much to do, and have them delegate some of this stuff to other people. One of the benefit as well for employees is to finally be able to show the managers, all the stuff they're doing, as well as all the stuff they're supposed to do. Like it's overflowing. I can't technically do that whole Les, there's too many things. What should be the order? And that thing you asked me to do that super important? How where does it sit in that list? Please tell me without this kind of discussion without Asana, you just being pushed things you have to do and you just react, and you just have a stress level that rises through through the roof. Right?
8:41
That's actually a great one, I have a concept I call the pressure paradox, where you want to apply pressure to your team and keep them moving. Because if you're if you hire the right people, right, they want to do their job, they're going to be excited, having hard, challenging work is gonna motivate them. But same time, if you push them too hard, they're gonna break, right, they're gonna burn out, they're gonna have all these issues. But if you don't give them enough stuff to do, then everybody gets kind of complacent. You just stop paying attention to all the details, and you have more mistakes happening. But so with Asana, your central saying, Hey, we can the leader who isn't necessarily seeing how busy the team is, because they're just they're going to hell, right? Any entrepreneur is going to be like, No, let's go for it. But the team is actually doing the work. You can, like have too much on my plate.
9:29
Yeah. And what we do every morning, we have a daily meeting with the team. Someone shared their their Asana screen, we look at one project we have together, and we check in with everybody. How do you feel? Do you have 20 things to do? Yes, I do. What do you want to delegate, I want to delegate this, this and this. And we assign those tasks to different people and the workflows between people flawlessly, and then the work to get done, that person gets notified, they can start working on something else. It's just amazing to see that in action every single day,
9:59
right? Have you actually you coach companies on kind of the systems around stuff? Productivity wise, not just like, hey, we're gonna set up Asana for you and show you how to use it. But like, Hey, these are the kinds of the rituals you should be doing.
10:11
Yeah, so we started to consult on Asana, not only on Asana, but very, very fast, you get pulled over into discussions that are broader than this. And we are so passionate about this, we want to share the way we work as well. So daily meetings, running meetings, management, leadership, all of those are topics we'd like to talk about, and we'd like to share our experience. I'm not a leadership consultant or expert, but I can tell you the way we manage our team and the efficient ways we found to use Asana to do this specifically,
10:46
right, I mean, that usually that message goes further being able to say how we do it, versus how you should do it. Yes, stronger, right, because they know you're actually putting it into into play, not just that, that 22 year old life coach who's throwing stuff out there.
11:04
I can also share with them the other examples of other successful companies, I have seen this work in other agencies. And this is something a lot of companies, a lot of clients want to know how others are doing. Are we doing the right things the right way, and how others are doing so we get valuable to share those stories with them. Gotcha. So
11:24
I guess you guys work primarily with Asana? Do you ever come across situations where maybe a project or something isn't a good fit for the platform, and you have to kind of work with with the individual to decide what they should be doing to kind of manage that project.
11:41
I think Asana is very generic. But you need to understand the way it works. And I like to explain Asana as a set of building blocks, you have to put together the right way, there's a couple of ways to put the blocks together, there's the right the right way, a couple of wrong ones. So we need to we try to help people find the right way to put the blocks together, to set up their accounts, to set up to set them up for success and make sure that the solution scales. So very often they come with a problem and we tell them, maybe you need to do one project to project that looks like this that works this way. And we try and sometimes we fail. We try it again, until they have something that's working for them and that we know will scale over time.
12:26
What kind of metrics are you looking at? Like even within Asana, you know, as the team's getting things done, to be able to know that one, the system's working, but then then separately to know your team is actually doing the right things.
12:39
I think one mistake would be to look at how many completed tasks you have. Because in Asana task two tasks could be completely different in terms of size and scope. So you can't judge someone on how many tasks they actually complete. You can't judge someone on how many tasks they create or delegate. So I think the best metric is the feeling the team has to save, they feel overwhelmed, they feel stressed to they feel productive, and then how fast you deliver something. It's easier in companies like agencies, when they do marketing campaigns, they know that they do like 50 campaigns a year, they know it takes them about that amount of time to do a campaign. So they can see the before and after easily. It's not the case, we just try to see how happy people are and how productive they they feel like they are.
13:28
Now, this is probably company specific. But are there any integrations that you recommend people do consider when when adopting Asana to add in to kind of just get that extra boost for for productivity? Yeah, like higher ROI?
13:42
Yeah, it really depends on the other tools you have in your ecosystem. Asana likes to place itself at the center of your ecosystem, so everything should be around it. There's a lot of native integrations between the tool, we try to look at them one by one, making sure it does provide value. For example, connecting like a slack and an Asana is not always a good thing. You don't always want to have your son on notification going to Slack or the other way around. Because they are different tools, you might want to be able to create a task from slack into Asana. But having those notifications flow between tools is not always the right solution. So we try to explain this to the client and really look at the entire ecosystem, and help them decide what's the best way to connect those tools and how the data will flow between the tools. Right.
14:33
So I get for companies that are already using Asana, but they're not seeing those those results. What are the potential? I mean, you mentioned like building blocks and making sure they're, they're stacking the right things in the right order. What are some of the common themes that you're seeing as as people are using the tool now getting frustrated that they're just not getting what they expected from it?
14:54
What we see very often is companies that did not set up things properly from Under start, so it works. At first it works when you have a couple of projects and then it grows and then slowly but surely it just doesn't work anymore. And it's a lot of maintenance, a lot of manual work, because your system doesn't scale. For example, in Asana, if you use tasks and subtasks too much, you will end up facing a wall that's really hard to go above. So you might want to take a step back and restructure everything by using more project more portfolios, basically going higher to have an overview of what's happening. Also, what we see is that people are not trained properly. Just like people are not trained on how to use email when they should. People are usually not trained on how to use Asana properly. In Asana, you need to learn how to manage your task. What's the right task name? How do you assign something properly? How do you organize your tasks, how you should empty your inbox, how you should read your notification and archive them. All of those best practices, someone has to teach you how to use those. And sometimes they have to show you how successful they are by applying those best practices. And that's when we come in.
16:13
Here is this asana have like a similar onboarding program to like HubSpot, where you if you are paying for the tool, you also have to do be on boarded, either by the company or by a solutions partner.
16:27
You don't have to do anything, you can use the tool right away, which is good, but bad at the same time. Because because people would have bad practices, asides building a lot of content on their academy in the guide that they have. But very often, companies will turn to experts like us partners like us to help them deploy the tool. Right, make sure it's very the thing. The thing with Asana is, very often one person at the company will start using asana and then that will grow from that person. If I think it doesn't happen with HubSpot, you don't have that person from accounting, just starting to use HubSpot for fun, it just doesn't happen. But it does happen with Asana. And it slowly grows and nobody's looking at training and deployment because it just grows organically. And then one day, you realize, maybe I need to train people and have some conventions and best practices among the teams. Right?
17:21
And so that individual who are just trying to make themselves more productive, whatever system they set up for themselves is now it spreads across the company and might not actually be the best for a team. Yeah,
17:30
exactly. And they become the asana champion, they have questions from everybody. And they are being held accountable for the success of the tool. So this is where we come in, and we can have that person really manage everything and do the maintenance that's required sometimes.
17:46
Okay, so as a leader, and different companies, right, like I just wanted to be able to see the kind of like a holistic view of what's going on within my organization. How do you help, you know, the business owner, the business leaders, kind of just seeing what, what's going on, so that they don't have to necessarily, like, get in the weeds and everything. But they can get that big picture view and just be then move on to their tasks.
18:12
The Asana tool is organized around something called the pyramid of clarity. So basically, you have the tasks, then you have the project, the portfolio's the goals, and then you have the mission of the company. So everything is organized around that concept. So we try to set up the bottom of the pyramid in a way that will allow us to have a functioning top of the pyramid. So we want to make sure that the right tasks are placed in the right project, and that we have the right structure, so that we can place projects in portfolios and give managers and leadership the right overview. By using the native features that already exist. We try to not be cornered into a use of Asana that will prevent us from using portfolios and goals. And because we know the tool really well, we are able to push the teams in the right direction, knowing that then they will be able to use the other layers of the pyramid that would benefit leadership and managers.
19:08
Right. So So I'm curious how much of a, like standardization of processes do you rely on versus kind of given finding the balance right, where the team can still be flexible? And like have some some wiggle room in how the site is set up specifically for them? Like, is it hey, this generally works for everybody do this? Or do you want to leave some like some room for them to kind of fit it to their needs?
19:36
I think some processes have to be standardized. If you organize a webinar every month, there's no room for flexibility. It's always the same thing. You always have the same steps. So in Asana, you put that list into a template and you reuse that template. When you have a marketing campaign. There is no flexibility when you launch or finish the campaign but I think in the middle you have some wiggle room to do Whatever is applicable. And that's what we do as well. Within the template, you might have the first steps, the last steps. And then you can do whatever you want in between as long as you start and finish properly. So the tool allows you to have the right templates, whether it's projects or tasks, and then you still have room to create or remove some of the steps if they don't make sense. And
20:21
when you're deciding which ones to to go through and template first and stuff, or do you have a process for prioritizing based on like I don't frequently impact for which processes you're starting with.
20:37
Usually, you know that this is something you do often enough that you have to standardize, the more people are involved in the process, the more you have to standardize as well, because you want to make sure that every time you talk to each other, you use the same language in the same steps. It's also very important to standardize when you onboard new people, when you have a new employee come in, whether to like a son, if it's set up properly, they are going to be efficient almost on day one, because they will be able to follow the templates you have created already. When someone leaves the company, they don't go away with the knowledge because their knowledge was were injected into templates already. So everything they know, is already templatized. So everyone can benefit from those templates. So a lot of processes that happen at least once or twice a year should be templatized. I think
21:32
that's a good frame of reference for that. So I'm hoping you agree with this statement. Feel free to disagree. But uh, so I view success like in order to achieve goals, you start with a mindset, then skill set, then toolset, right? Because if someone doesn't, they don't have any flexibility in all the right skills to do so it doesn't matter if they're on Asana or some other tool, right, they're not going to be soft, the tool that makes them. But so starting with the the mindset, do you feel like there's something you have to make sure this, whatever team you're working with that they believe, right, that they actually like, are willing to change their current way of doing things in order to better adopt stuff and how to approach it?
22:14
Yeah, what would we see very often is the introduction of a tool like Asana will reveal problems that the company already had. But it's not the tools problem. So for example, when you try to map out a process with a team, and you realize that it's very complex, you might realize that the different departments are fighting each other, then you know, there's a bigger problem than just the tool itself, then it's up to us to decide if we want to have them go beyond those problems. Or if you want to take a step back and wait for them to fix those issues. Before coming in again, and talk about the tool. We usually come in helping a lot Asana, we sometimes go a bit beyond by helping with the process itself. But we try to sometimes take a step back and let them deal with that internal stuff. So we don't we're not part of the discussion, because we might not have anything to add, we really want them to find a common way to work and then implement that way into us are.
23:17
Awesome. It's been a great, great conversation. I feel like you've packed so much knowledge into just how to approach setting up your product productivity system. I got three more questions for you. With the first being, what book do you think everyone should read?
23:34
The Four Hour Workweek. And it's, it's an amazing book. So Tim Ferriss goes really far into delegating. And I think we don't all have to go that far. But it's, it's really, it's a mindset, like you need to delegate stuff that you're not good at, you need to delegate stuff that just doesn't cost much to delegate. And this is something I've been doing for years and years just trying to identify what I can delegate. In order to delegate you have to standardize and write down the process very clearly. And once you've done doing this, you can delegate, one of the first hire we had at the company was actually an assistant, because we wanted to delegate all that admin work that she's way better at doing than us. And we want to spend time with clients because the client pays a lot of money to have us do something. So it doesn't make sense for me to spend two hours a day doing invoicing and quotes. I should delegate this to someone that I can pay 10 times less than what I'm charging declined to spend time with me. To me that was a game changer delegating as much as you can.
24:44
As I think people will be surprised at how often that book comes up as a recommendation. Podcast. So what is next for you professionally?
24:57
I'm actually thinking about this right Now I'm being coached coached by an app called wave.ai. I don't know if you heard of it. It's basically a coaching made by humans combined with AI. It's very interesting. So I'm having that coaching. on what's the next step for me. And I think to me, the next step will be about doing more content, doing more thinking and doing more networking, and not doing as much client work as they used to do. So I just have to find my place within the company to still help everyone. But at the same time, work on that vision for the company and try to build relationships with people and not deliver as much client work as I used to.
25:44
Finally, where can people find you?
25:47
They can come to France to find montains just next to Switzerland, or they can find me on LinkedIn. That's the
25:54
filter like more people will be interested in taking the trip out to France. Just if they want to. Yeah, awesome. Thanks for Thanks for joining me.
26:05
My pleasure. Always love talking about productivity.
26:12
If you enjoyed today's episode, I would love a rating and review on your favorite podcast player. And for more information on how to build effective and efficient teams through your leadership, visit leading four.com And as always deserve it
Transcribed by https://otter.ai