How to Protect Your Team From Themselves
Almost 50% of people who quit their jobs leave due to burnout. It’s no surprise why. From the retail and fast food industries to front desks at office suites, employees can easily get overwhelmed with all the responsibilities and to-dos of the job that seem to add up daily.
And while sometimes employers can expect their employees to do too much, other times the overwhelm that your team experiences can be self-inflicted (or just further aggravated). So you, as the head honcho, need to develop a plan for how to protect your team from themselves.
In this episode of Pleasurable Profits, you’ll learn some key things to beware of in order to protect your employees from themselves. I’ll share how I learned this the hard way, reveal examples of why they’d choose to take on too much, and tell you what you can do as the CEO to make sure they don’t.
1:27 - How I made the same mistake as a CEO in an Undercover Boss episode
4:06 - Why you need to protect your team from themselves
6:35 - The habit you need to adopt before you ask your team to do anything
9:21 - What you shouldn’t expect your team to do
11:36 - Why your employees might inadvertently burn themselves out
13:38 - An example of how I’ve always tried to protect my staff
Find me on Instagram or LinkedIn or email me at hello@lesliedlyons.com.
As Mentioned In How to Protect Your Team From Themselves
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Transcript of How to Protect Your Team From Themselves
Hey boss, I am Leslie Lyons, your embodied leadership and sales coach, and this is Pleasurable Profits. This podcast is ideal for owners and leaders of tattoo shops, permanent makeup studios, cannabis businesses, movement studios, sex toy shops, and other industries that are too often left out of the leadership conversation. If you’re looking for a woo meets strategy approach to defining your strengths and values, designing a business that supports you, and creating a soul-driven, and of course, pleasurable plan for profitability, then let’s get started.
Hey, party people. Good morning. Happy Friday, it's flourish Fridays, and today I want to talk about protecting your team from themselves. Sometimes you have to protect your team from self-imploding. I read a statistic earlier in the week that almost 50% of people who quit their jobs voluntarily (who left their jobs voluntarily) left due to burnout.
It got me to thinking about how do we protect our people from themselves. I remember probably, I don't know about four years ago, I saw an episode of Undercover Boss. If you've ever seen this show, let me know in the chat if you've ever seen the show. Well, what's super cool about Undercover Boss is that a lot of times we, as the owners of our business, make policies, we come up with ideas that we think are just amazing policies, amazing ideas, only to find out that it's not practical and it doesn't work.
How this happens is we're so far removed from the work that sometimes we forget how things should go. I'll never forget on this episode of Undercover Boss, this was a restaurant and the boss had come up with these wait times, like how you had to get things out at a certain time and you have to keep certain things clean. He had this timeline.
If you know the premise of Undercover Boss, you know that the boss goes in and people don't know it’s the CEO. The employees don't know it’s the CEO because they change their appearance, and I always say 9 times out of 10, most folks don't even know who their CEO is in those large companies anyway, so they could have walked in as themselves and folks wouldn't have known, but they change their appearance, they come in, they apply for a job, and they're like, “Oh, okay, I'm just here to work,” so they start to do a job.
The guy was trying to work the register, keep in mind, with the policy that he created, and he could not get it done. He was like, “Oh hell, maybe this wasn't the best idea after all. Maybe this wasn't the best idea after all.” Now, that was a TV show. Let me bring you to real life where I made that exact same mistake.
I'll never forget our studio was growing like crazy. We were a one-room studio. That meant that time was of the essence in order to maximize the number of people who could take classes at our studio. I had come up with this bright idea that as opposed to leaving 30 minutes in between each class, I was going to reduce it to 10. I'm like,
“We got a front desk person. We got instructors. This should not be that hard. We can do this. Yay, team. Let's go. High five. Let's do it.”
Here's the thing. Nobody on my staff complained. If you're taking notes and you're a leader, this is why this is titled Protect Your Team from Themselves because not everybody is going to speak up when something's not working, especially if you don't invite them into a conversation around it, which I did not.
I always tell people, “If you just stick with me, follow me, and listen to me, you will learn more from my mistakes than maybe even what I teach, because I'm so honest about my mistakes.” Ten minutes, we could do this, go team. Nobody complained. I did not inquire about it. That was my mistake.
If you're taking notes, anytime you implement a new policy, you need to follow up with your team and ask them, “How's that going for you? How's this working out? Is this really efficient as I thought it was? What issues are coming up? Invite your team into that conversation so you're not making decisions from the ivory tower.
Anyway, back to me and my dumb mistake. My 10 minutes, we got it. Well, my front-desk person called off sick one day and I had to go in and fill in for her. Imagine my sheer horror when we were trying to transition classes in 10 minutes, people were stopping at that desk, they had questions, folks want to buy stuff, all this, and I'm like, “Oh my God.”
Now the doorbell is ringing. I'm trying to buzz people in because we got this little buzzing thing in the back. The phone is ringing. I was like, “Why didn't anybody tell me how crappy of a policy this was, how crappy of a decision this was?” Your team may not always speak up, but they will quit.
They might not tell you or you might not find out the reason until they are on the glass door talking about you. Or maybe they're bold enough to tell you in the exit interview. Or maybe sometimes they don't even know why they're so burned out. But as a leader, it is your responsibility to maintain the culture.
That is the first thing I want you to be thinking about. The second thing I want you to think about too is please get in the habit, turn to your neighbor, and say, “Please get in the habit of not asking your team to do anything that you would not want to do yourself.”
Hear me good. Don't ever get in the habit of asking your team to do something you would never do yourself. What's an example of that, Leslie? I'm so glad you asked. I always say if I'm going to tell my team that they need to be there 30 minutes before their class starts, if I'm having a meeting with my team, I model that behavior by making sure that I'm there 30 minutes before our meeting.
Or if I was teaching a class, I made sure I modeled me being there 30 minutes before class, because it's real easy for us to get into the habit of what my mama used to say sometimes, “You do as I say, not as I do.” But here's a rule of leadership that you need to remember to retain, people follow what is modeled.
If you want your team to do something, you need to model it. I tell people this all the time, especially when they're hiring their first management-level employee, don't hire somebody to do all the b*llcrap that you don't want to deal with. If you would not want to sit on the phone all day and be cussed out, don't put a person in a position where that's their only function all day is to be cussed out.
If that is part of their job, like they’re customer service or whatever, make sure that you're building in breaks for them. Make sure you're building a time where they're off of the phone so they can do something else and take care of their mental health. Make sure that you are not asking people to do things you wouldn't want to do.
People don't want to be dumped on. Your quest to delegate as a leader and your quest to scale, we want to make sure that we're caring for our people and we're not dumping on them. Think about how you would feel doing that.
That's the first point. Don't ask people to do something you would not want to do. Don't dump on your people. Second is don't expect your team to do everything you would do. Now I know you’re thinking like, “Okay, wait a minute, you just said don't have your team do anything you wouldn't do and then you're like don't expect your team to do everything you would do.”
Here's the point of the matter, honey bunches of oats, come real close to the screen, come real close, it's your business. You are taking the lion's share of the profit. Of course, you're going to do more than your employees do and you are setting yourself up for mental torture if you compare your team's performance to your performance.
If you want to keep yourself in bondage mentally, if you want to keep yourself disappointed with your team, if you want to keep yourself frustrated, put the requirements that you have for yourself on your team. Nobody should ever work as hard as you do in your business. Nobody should ever do that.
Even when you have as many people in place as I do where I have management team, and I have a large staff, I have all those things, I still feel like I work the hardest. Why? Because I come up with the strategy, I come up with the vision, I’m creating the new product, I'm taking on all the risks.
Even if I'm not physically doing the work, trust me, I'm carrying more emotional and mental weight than my staff. Don't expect your staff to take on the same level of responsibility as you carry on your shoulders. Because if you do, you're going to be disappointed. Make sense? Yes.
Then finally, you must protect your people from themselves. Let me give clarity and context around how you protect your people from themselves. Remember the statistic that I gave in the beginning that over 50% of people who quit their jobs quit due to burnout?
Some of these people really don't realize how burnt out they are. It is your job as the leader to keep a bird's eye view on your people. You have to care enough about your people to know when they're overworked. Better yet, don't let them get into that position in the first place.
It's kind of like a kid. A kid loves chocolate cake. A kid who loves chocolate cake would eat cake for breakfast. They would eat it for breakfast. They would be like, “Yes. Oh, I love chocolate cake. It's so great. My dad is great. He gave me a chocolate cake for breakfast.”
They will sing the song. They will be so happy until their stomach hurts, until they start to get cavities, when their teeth start to fall out, those sorts of things, and then they will look at you like, “Mom, Dad, why did you give me a chocolate cake? I'm just a kid. I don't know any better.”
Now I'm not comparing our employees to children but I am saying that sometimes people will do something that's not good for them because they think it's pleasing you. Or maybe it's a situation where an employee has a financial goal. They want all this extra overtime because they got this goal, whether it's to buy a home, pay off some student loans, whatever it is, and they're like, “Yes, yes, yes. Put me on the schedule. I'll take more classes. Give me more classes. I'll work 14 shifts. I'll work 80 hours this week,” because they gotta go. But they're wearing themselves out.
I had a rule in my studio that no instructor could teach more than two days a week. You probably think, “Well, that's because you got a staff of over 30 people, you were able to do that.” No, no, no. When I had a smaller team, that was still my rule. What did that mean? That means that I made a little bit less money than when I could have because I didn't have enough team to teach all those classes, but I refused to let my team get burned out.
I know what it's like to lose your excitement for a job because it becomes a job. In most boutique businesses, especially in unconventional industries, people ain't making crap tons of money. They're doing this because they love it. I want to keep my people loving it. I want to keep my people engaged. I want to keep my people involved. I want to keep my people protected mentally and emotionally as well.
Even though they have a good heart, even though they may have a goal, even though they may want to, you as the leader have to say no. If you want to keep people around and my tenure is just unbelievable for the type of business that we run, my people have been around six, seven years, unbelievable.
Especially when you ain't making crap tons of money because you're working for a small business part-time, this is how you keep people around. If you want to step away from your business, and you want someone to step up in your place, you have to learn how to nurture and care for the people in your space.
For those of you who are just joining or who watch this on the replay, yes, podcast listeners, I am doing work smarter, not harder, I'm doing this live on Instagram, this audio is going to be ripped and put on a podcast, if you want to see my pretty face, you can go over to Instagram and watch the video there as well. Because this is one of those ones where you might need to listen a couple of times.
But to recap, never ask employees to do something you would not do yourself. Number two, never, never, never, never expect employees to do as much as you would do. Thirdly, don't let your staff put themselves in situations that would harm them emotionally. Protect their peace, be the leader that you're called to be.
Alright, my loves, until next Friday. I only go live on Fridays because it's all about your flourishing on Friday. I hope you guys have a great weekend. As always, there's nothing more valuable than your time so I don't want to waste it. If this has been helpful to you, share it with another entrepreneur who needs it. If you're unemployed, thank you for being here. Share it with somebody who needs this.
If you happen to be an employee who's listening to this and you think your leader needs to hear, anonymously say, “Oh, my gosh, this woman, I found her on the interwebs, what do you think about what she's saying? Do you agree?” Engage them in a conversation, but thank you so much for being here. I pray that you guys have an amazing weekend. Until next Friday, grace and peace.