10MINMC.Ep21.V1.AUDIO
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Trey Sheneman: [00:00:00] The best teams don't win because they have the best talent. They win because they have the best leadership. And in today's episode, I'm gonna teach you one of the greatest leadership lessons I've ever learned.
Welcome to 10 Minute Masterclass, your weekly mic drop for Business breakthrough. I'm your host and lead MC Trey Sheneman, and each week it's our goal. To teach you timeless business principles translated to solve today's business problems. Now, we do that through a framework that we teach called the Core four Drivers of Growth, because no matter when I was running startups like I am right now or heading up growth inside of large national organizations, growth always stalled or excelled because of one of four areas in the business, [00:01:00] marketing, sales, operations, or leadership.
So it's our goal on this podcast to take each one of those sections of growth and teach you content. Each month in each area. So week one's always marketing of the month. Week two is always sales. Week three is s, and week four is leadership. So it's a week, four week right now. And so we are talking about leadership, and today I'm gonna talk to you about a lesson that I learned from leadership from my friend Mark Miller, who is one of the visionary leaders.
Uh, behind one of, I think the top two or three browns on earth, the Lord's Chicken Chick-fil-A. Uh, the story behind Chick-fil-A is quite profound. If you've never read up on Truitt Cathy, or if you live in a part of the country that doesn't have Chick-fil-A yet, which is like. I don't even know is that, if that's a thing.
But if it is, welcome. Chick-fil-A sells chicken. Really good chicken. I had it for breakfast this morning, actually. Um, and Mark, uh, a friend of mine, Mark, uh, he was, I think his title Mark, if I, if I botch it, I'm sorry. I wanna say it was Senior Vice President of Leadership Innovation, you know, something like that.
[00:02:00] But Mark's role at Chick-fil-A, uh, if you think about it, if you've ever been in a Chick-fil-A. The average Chick-fil-A has somewhere between 80 and 150 employees, which sounds like a lot, but when you think about it, they have a lot of part-time young people that worked at Chick-fil-A. And so developing a leadership driven culture is a huge part of what Chick-fil-A is all about because they're constantly having to mentor and grow people up and uh, you know, they're gonna have seasonal turnover as any quick service restaurant would, so on and so forth.
But when you look at what Chick-fil-A's. Growth arc has been, I think last year they did something like $23 or $24 billion. Which is wild considering they're only open six days a week, uh, not open on Sundays. Uh, I think the average Chick-fil-A does like 6 or 7 million a year in revenue. Crazy. Uh, yeah.
So they're doing something right. And my friend Mark Miller was really, uh, a huge. Catalyst in the way they drive leadership innovation and leadership culture at Chick-fil-A. And he's written a bunch of books. [00:03:00] And my favorite book that Mark has ever written is called The Secret of Teams. And in today's episode, I'm just gonna go over some of the things that I learned from that book and in talks that I had with Mark,
after that book. Um, that really changed my outlook on how I think about leading teams and leading a small business. Um, here's, here's the truth of the matter. Everyone talks about wanting to have great talent. Everybody talks about wanting to have a players, but what most leaders miss is that at the end of the day, it is.
Singular in who the most talented person needs to be. And that's the one that you're trusting the lead, the one that's gonna be responsible for keeping the rest of the parts of the ship, uh, doing what they're supposed to do. And so just if you've not read it yet, you know, bear with me. I'm gonna take a few seconds here.
I'm gonna kind of recap the book, the story of the book for you. Absolutely think you should get it. As a matter of fact, we'll include a link to get this book in the show notes from Mark's website so you can go watch it or watch it. Excuse me. It's. It's 2025. Trey, I, maybe you can watch it, read it. It's a book.
You should read it. [00:04:00] Um, and so this, the book follows a story of Debbie and Debbie's a corporate leader, but she's struggling to improve her team's performance. And she assumes it's because she has a lack of talent on her team. Um, but she ends up getting this really cool mentoring relationship with a leader at another organization that's doing really, really well and.
In that mentoring relationship, Debbie ultimately learns the three points of the book, that the three ingredients to really building really, really great teams are really good talent. Yeah, you do need to have talent. You gotta have the right people, but that's just a starting point. Number two is skill development, which is a function of leadership.
You have got to be investing in that really good talent to continue to develop them into the leaders that you need for the future. And then the third one, which you cannot ignore at all, is the. Community, the leadership community that you're building around your team so that they care enough about each other to want each other to win together.
That is the ultimate mark of a really great leadership. So the big aha here is really figuring out the math or the [00:05:00] formula behind how to do all this to together. So let's kind of break each one of these. Down here, you know, let's, let's start with talent and how to, how to get the right people in the right seats.
Well, the first step in getting the right people in the right seats is making sure you've done that personnel review step that we talked about a couple of episodes ago. Uh, here in the process here, it's something we do in our compass method, but you want to make sure that you've got some core areas around your personnel.
Um. And the main one is, do you actually have role clarity? You as the person that's doing the hiring, do you have role clarity on what your team actually needs? And is that role written out and described in a fair way that somebody off the street could read it and understand exactly what you expect out of a role?
That's number one. So you wanna make sure you have good role clarity and that once you know those good role clarity that you go back through and make sure you haven't made any bad hires already, meaning you've hired people. Into something that you didn't have role clarity about, and now you're struggling because of you, not because of them.
So that's kind of step number one in the talent bucket. Once you've done [00:06:00] that, you gotta always make sure that you're hiring for culture, right? Like every company is gonna have a culture and you wanna make sure that you're putting people in the right. Seats that match that culture. Okay? And then within that culture, you also gotta make sure they have the right talents and streaks for that role clarity, okay?
'cause great teams don't just hire people to come and perform. They hire people that come in, not only want to be better themselves, but want to make those that are around them better as well. Which to me is the greatest sign of somebody being talented is that last part. So that's kind of step number one, is you gotta make sure that you've got the right inputs when it comes to hiring good talent.
Now, once they get in and they're on the team, you can never lead from a place of, Hey, just figure it out. There's so many leaders and managers that I've run across in the path that just think because they hire talented people, which I can, I guess I can kind of see where this mindset would come from that because they hire talented people.
Those talented people are just gonna come in and figure it out. Um, that's not gonna work guys. You gotta have SOPs, you gotta have training [00:07:00] rhythms, you've gotta have professional development hours. You've gotta have other. Examples, maybe it's somebody else that's in a similar role to them that's been very successful, that's gonna help mentor them.
Um, maybe it's running monthly skill building assessments where you survey your team and say, Hey, between these eight areas of our business, if we were to do some extra training this month, which one would you like more training on? And once they tell you. Actually build some skill training around whatever that might be.
Bring in outside coaches, bring in people that they're, um, they're paid to do this. Like they're paid to upskill people. Um, and when you see someone on the team whose skill was maybe a little weak, and that, and that weakness has become a strength, make sure that you're calling them out and celebrating them in front of other people.
That's how you start to create a team culture where they want to get better together. And then lastly, it's this community part of it. It's about building connection, not just connection to the work, but connection to each other. Um, because that is gonna be one of the greatest stress mitigators is when you build connection to each other.
So how do [00:08:00] you build connection to each other? Well, you celebrate personnel personal wins, not just business KPIs. Let me say that again. You celebrate personal wins. Not just business KPIs. I remember we had a steps competition in one of my agencies before and, uh, you know, me and another joker, uh, on our team, uh, took the competition a little too seriously.
I couldn't win the competition 'cause I was the one running the competition. He started really taking great care of himself and inspired me to want to compete with him. And in 90 days, I think he walked 1.1 million steps and I walked 1.3 million steps just to prove to him that the boss could still get it done, if you know what I'm saying.
But anyways, there was this camaraderie community thing that happened around that, and we really celebrated him, uh, when he did that work. So shout out to Jeff. Jeff is actually still on our team now at Herald. So if you ever see Jeff, ask him about the 1.1 million steps, so celebrating personal wins is, is, is amazing way to build more community.
Another thing that I like to do is to, is to pair newcomers with [00:09:00] veterans so that they can kind of give 'em a little bit of that inside baseball, if you know what I'm saying. And, and last. Lee, uh, just make sure you're making room for laughter. You're making room for vulnerability. You're making room for hanging out.
One of our favorite things to do as a, as a team, we're a remote company, but when we get together, one of our favorite things to do, at least it's one of my favorite things to do, and none of them have complained, so I'm thinking they like it too, is we love to do escape rooms together. Small confined space, five or six people trying to solve a common problem under a theme.
You kind of forget where you are for 45 minutes to an hour. Um, and, and we've always gotten out, which is great. So that means we're working well as a team. So just make sure you're making room for laughter, vulnerability, vulnerability. And connection time. So when you do this, it changes your thinking. See, for me, before I read the Secret of Teams and kind of understood what Mark was teaching here, I used to build teams like a draft board.
I used to hire for talent, try and stack the deck. But when I started emphasizing things of like connectivity. Belonging story. Uh, the gel of a team coming together, man, I just really started to see [00:10:00] growth like I hadn't seen before, and people started being coworkers and started becoming a unit. They started becoming a team, and that's where true momentum comes from.
So this week, don't just simply ask, do I have good people on my team? Ask if they have clarity, ask if they have the right skills, and if they don't, what you're gonna do to grow 'em And ask them if they feel like this is their team. Not just your team, but their team. And that answer to that one question is gonna tell you if you've mastered this or not.
I hope you got something out of this episode. Go build great teams. Guys, have great momentum. Thanks for listening. And as always, until next time, we'll catch you on the flip side.
