230: It's not you, it's not your team, it's your systems

Lia (00:00)
You're allergic to process. You don't want to feel corporate. You don't want red tape. And yet you're experiencing some really frustrating things in your team. You don't really know if people are working on the right things. Maybe you lost a high performer. Unexpectedly, you felt totally blindsided. Maybe you don't really feel like you have a good pulse on how everyone's doing in general. And you are making every single decision or maybe more than you really should be. And you're thinking, gosh, how did I get into this situation? And more, how the heck do I get out of it? Well,

The answer my friends is through systems. When you're feeling stuck, when you're feeling like, gosh, like I know that this shouldn't be this hard. I shouldn't feel like I'm swimming through Jell-O or I hired good people. I'm paying them well. Like why is all this happening? It is not you and it is not your people. It is your systems or your lack of systems on your team. Now, I'm not just saying this as a former corporate team ops person.

I drove team operations at Microsoft, at Google, at Apple. And so, yeah, I've seen a processor too, but I'm not saying it because it's like something I'm interested in. I'm saying it because in those environments where they had the highest, highest stakes, I'm talking about shipping the first iPhone 10 when they got rid of the home button, HoloLens, the world's first holographic computer. I worked on YouTube shorts in these environments where we are really like literally.

behind the eight ball to deliver, to meet our competitive need, to just be there. It's the moments when we are feeling so, so stressed, we don't have enough resources, that is where we need to rely on systems. Now, working in these large environments, I understand not every system is the right thing for every business. And so when I talk about systems, I do not mean, you know, rolling out some really complicated thing that would work for an organization of, you know, 10 or 20 or a hundred thousand employees.

I am talking about understanding what is needed to create seamless flow of information through your company. And that's what we're gonna talk about today.

So when I say systems or process, I kind of use those interchangeably. I'm talking about the repeatable steps that you take to get from point A to point Z. Now, when you say, I'm allergic to process, I hate process, you gotta think about it. You're actually using process every single day in your life. A morning routine. You get up, you have breakfast, you have your coffee, you brush your teeth, you get dressed, you get ready. That is a set of steps that gets you from bed to work. You're following a process. It's no different.

Now, if you woke up one day and you first brushed your teeth and then you had breakfast and then you forgot to get dressed or whatever, you'd be all like kind of discombobulated. Well, that's the result on our team when we don't have systems or processes. People just kind of feel like, well, wait a second. One day you wanted me to have a really detailed presentation for this meeting. The next day I didn't need that. One day this review was 20 minutes. The next day it's two hours. And these kinds of challenges show up in businesses big or small.

These kinds of things show up whether you have a team of two or maybe you're in a corporate team where there are tens or twenties or plus thousands of people. We can have a team with a lot of systems and we're not following them. So I'm talking about what are the things that we need to do to feel like we understand how to be effective and successful. When it comes to, gosh, I don't know what my team is working on all day and are they working on the right things? That's a signal that...

We're not really utilizing kind of a work tracking system in a way that's usable for us. A lot of us implement a tool that's got a lot of features, lot of bells and whistles, and we're confused by it. We can't take one look and see, okay, I know exactly what the status of projects are. I know exactly how much bandwidth folks have. We feel stuck. So it's not the right tool for this solution. not answering the question that we have. It might be helpful for individual project teams and things like that.

but it's not answering our question. So we're still feeling stuck. Now for that example specifically, my snippets tool that you can get free at liagarvin.com slash snippets, it was answering the question so many leaders came to me with. They said, ah, I need a bird's eye view. I don't want the tasks. I wanna know what's getting done week by week. I wanna be able to celebrate teams wins. And most of all, I wanna know where people are stuck and they haven't said anything. And so snippets literally has folks fill out those three things every single week.

And that's how we have a bird's eye view. And so literally, if you're stuck with that, head to leagarvin.com slash snippets because that is going to unlock so much clarity for you. What about if you're stuck making all the decisions, feeling like I'm trying to empower my team. I think I'd show them I trust them, but they're always coming to me to verify everything. And like, if I go offline for two hours, I have 45 emails and things are just waiting. Like what? When we run into that situation, which again,

I've seen that in small businesses and I've definitely experienced that in the corporate world. We need a system for understanding how decisions are made. Who makes what calls? Where are people factored in the conversation? And when we have that, people can make decisions without you. Starts to free up a ton of your time. Now that's the power of systems. They're not just, you don't just, again, not process for process sake, which is like a hilarious thing I've heard people say as if anyone's just implementing process for no reason.

These are money saving strategies. Every single time you notice a bottleneck or someone doesn't call that client back because they didn't get the answer that they should have already known because it was in your inbox or someone, two people are working on the same thing because they thought you meant this or whatever. All of that costs you so much money. I had this kind of ops playbook calculator I used to show folks. It was

I love spreadsheets, a little bit too much for, too much information for a lot of folks, but I actually calculated across all these different areas, what does it cost when meetings run over? What does it cost when two people work on the same things? What does it cost when you don't have an onboarding system? So someone starts and they're not really sure what to work on. And it was literally the lack of systems was costing businesses with maybe five people or so paying people only $20 an hour. That was kind of how I calculated this. This was costing people.

between 20 and $40,000 a month, literally, because simple thing, because they didn't have a meeting agenda or they didn't understand, okay, here's how we're gonna decide who comes to what form and what comes out of that and how next steps are tracked. These are simple things. And you can literally, it's never too early to think about these things for your team and for your business. I don't care if you're managing one person. I don't care if you have a thousand people.

You've got to have something so folks understand, okay, this is how we get things done. Now, a business owner I worked with a few years ago, we implemented the Ops Playbook for her. She felt like, gosh, she ran a PR firm and she said, I feel like I'm the only person working to run this business. Like, doesn't my team members know that if we're not bringing in new accounts, like eventually they can't be paid? And she felt so frustrated. And she said, hey, everyone, like you kinda, I need everyone to be growing.

you know, the business here, but they, yeah, okay. They said, sure, I'm gonna try. But once we implemented the Ops Playbook system, everyone understood the expectations of the roles. And immediately, literally within 14 days, her two account managers had brought in each of them about $13,000 of new business because they understood the expectation and they knew what to do next. Another one of my clients runs a med spa and she was paying folks thousands of dollars a month in overtime.

because there was no system in place for deciding, you when do we do overtime and when do we not? So through our work on the Ops Playbook, we implemented like a priority list of what's going on every single day, what has to be done and what doesn't, what qualifies for overtime and what doesn't, and got everyone on the same page around it. These are the kinds of wins that you have immediately when you have a system in place. And it's not complicated, it's clarity, right? We're not creating...

new things, you enter it in here, you ask this, we're saying like, what is the easiest way to understand how to be successful? So I'm all about removing steps. I'm all about saying, hey, why is this thing clunky? Why is this hard? Do people think they need budget approval for every $2? No, let's make that higher. Let's figure out the thresholds. It's figuring out with you and your unique situation, okay, what makes sense to you? Now, my Ops Playbook clients, they're saving, you know, 20, $30,000 a month on these optimizations.

These are things all of us can be enjoying by thinking about, okay, what are these kind of nuggets of clarity I need to be making with my team so they can be right there with you? That's the shift we make and it's immediate. And I wanna cue you in on something because I've found this, I found it working, team operations at Microsoft, working on HoloLens. I saw the same thing working at Apple and the design.

the design team, the human interface team that designs all the iPhones, Mac, all that stuff, found the same thing working at Google, is I think sometimes we can believe people don't want process, but we the leader, we don't really like it, but the team is hungry for it. I wanna tell you something, across implementings, SOP, systems processes, across tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people in the companies, the size I was doing this at. I...

would get probably 10 % of the pushback is from the team and 90%, maybe five and 95 is from the leadership is other folks that have to actually overseeing the system. Your team is hungry for clarity. They want to know how to be successful. They wanna know how to be prepared for a meeting. They wanna know they're working on the right thing. So if you have decided I don't want any systems, I don't want any process because you don't like it.

you're doing a disservice to your team who's hungry for it and you're leaving all that money on the table not to mention. So it's not should you have systems or not, it's what are the right systems for you? How do you find the right tools that don't feel like they've complicated things? How do you find the right partner to work with if you wanna work with someone external that makes it easy to use and safe and comfortable, right? And then it's about, okay, what are we gonna roll out so that everyone understands what this is about?

Now, the last thing about systems, the most important thing, and this is I will tell you, this is a huge, huge lesson I learned at Microsoft that I re-implemented back at Apple and then at Google again, is when you are getting folks to shift from doing something one way to another, this is a change management 101, but it is especially true when it comes to process. Folks are going to say, I feels like thrash, I don't wanna change, I'm used to this. They're gonna have all sorts of...

complaints and you're gonna go, I knew it. I knew they didn't want the process. That is not true. They don't wanna feel like am I doing this for no reason because I'm being monitored or some, know, assumption that's being made. It's not that they want the process. They want the benefit. They don't see the benefit yet. So what I learned and I implemented over and over and over is you've gotta anchor into

what are we solving and how will this make their lives easier? And you reinforce that again and again and again, and you will get people so freaking excited about whatever process you're talking about. I remember this at Apple, when I had folks on the design team first going from like, I don't wanna look at the bug tracking tool, it's ugly, like we make this beautiful UI and that's some engineering thing over there. I went from that to people excitedly entering their tasks telling me, look,

and they were like doing it on their own, no reminding, because I landed what's in it for them. We've got to do that. I already said it with anything we're communicating. Really, at any point, we always want folks to know what's in it for them. But when it comes to process, because that's where you can get this pushback, which will give you the false signal, they don't want process, they just want to kind of wing it. Not the case. They want to know what's in it for them.

and they will follow you to the end of the earth. I've seen it before. And that's, I think that deep understanding honestly is why I've been so effective at implementing the ops playbook with so many types of businesses from med spas to insurance companies to agencies to production to home building, because we have to get under that. And that's where you get folks bought in. So I want us to close with not being afraid of systems and not feeling like, I don't even know how to figure out what I need.

It all originates at the pain point, at the stuck point, at the thing that you know should feel easier, but it just doesn't. And literally we open the flood gates from there. And if you want support for your team, reach out hello at liagorva.com. Ops Playbook is my signature, my favorite thing to do with teams because when we implement this, that's when you start saving that 20, $30,000 a month. What can you be doing with that? You can make a senior hire one of those people that you have been...

dying to bring on your team, that's what we free up because we get rid of all this waste, all this confusion, all this stagnancy. You can be reaching out to more clients, you can be retargeting past clients, you can be hiring a marketing agency to scale, you can be running Google and meta ads. That is what you can reinvest this money into, things that are gonna help you grow, but you gotta get it from somewhere and it's going to come from the inefficiencies happening on your team. All right, see you next time.