3 Ways to Motivate Your Team To Step Up So That You Can Step Away
You didn’t go to corporate leadership school to learn how to lead in business. You were left to learn for yourself on the mean streets how to become a leader because, as a small business owner, you had to.
You also didn’t start your business just so it could become a job you own. You wanted the time and freedom you thought it’d provide you. In order to get that dream though, especially if you want to scale your business, you need a team to help you run things so you can take that time off you need.
But how are you going to lead and motivate your employees (most of whom are probably part-timers) to run your precious business successfully? In this episode of the Pleasurable Profits podcast, you’ll learn about three ways you can motivate your team to step up so that you can step away.
3:09 - The mistake I made when first trying to motivate my employees
7:08 - Why you want to create a culture where failure is expected and appreciated
10:22 - How to build confidence in your team
Find me on Instagram or LinkedIn or email me at hello@lesliedlyons.com.
As Mentioned In 3 Ways to Motivate Your Team To Step Up So That You Can Step Away
The 5 Love Languages by Gary Chapman
“How to Run Team Meetings That Inspire Your Employees”
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Transcript for 3 Ways to Motivate Your Team To Step Up So That You Can Step Away
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. I am going live on these YouTube streets, man. If you're going to be listening to this on the podcast, you need to follow my Leslie D Lyons page on YouTube if you want to see me live and in the flesh. Well, today I want to talk about three ways to motivate your team to step up.
If you own a pole dance studio, a dispensary, or any other nontraditional business and you're a reluctant leader, a leader who got into leadership, not because you wanted to but out of necessity because your business was so successful that you had to hire other people, but you don't have the corporate background that taught you how to lead them folks, that's why I'm here. I'm your girl.
I want to talk about three ways that you can motivate your team to step up so you can step away. What I have found is that as brick-and-mortar business owners in unconventional industries, we didn't start our businesses, y'all, because we want to work 24/7. If you did, kudos for you. Hope that works out for you. But for me, I know I started my business because I wanted to have time freedom.
That's what I hear most of the time when I talk to other brick-and-mortar businesses. Like, “Yeah, I never wanted to own my job, I wanted to build an asset that will give me time freedom and would be worth something later on.” If you're going to scale your business, if you're going to make your business less dependent upon you, if you haven't figured it out by now, you know that you're going to need a team to do that.
I know that it’s difficult to find what I call your star player, your A player, the person who can replace you in your business and a sea full of part-time employees. Because a lot of the businesses that I service, you or maybe one other person is the only full-time employee, the rest are part-timers, and you start to think how are you going to motivate them enough so that you can trust them to run your precious, precious business.
I'm going to give you three ways that you can get them to step up. The first way that you can get your team to step up is first of all, you need to learn what motivates your team. Now, if you know Gary Chapman, you've heard of his book, The Five Love Languages, but what you may not be aware of is that he also has transitioned his program to fit corporate spaces, and as opposed to calling them love languages, he calls them appreciation languages.
There are five of them. What you want to do is avoid the mistake that I made when I was first trying to motivate my employees. What's that mistake, Leslie? I'm so glad you asked. That mistake is assuming that your people are motivated by the same things that motivate you.
One of the appreciation languages is gifts. That's my appreciation language. If you ever want to help your girl out, I literally have an Amazon gift list, wishlist that I can shoot you at any point in time. As that great prophet fabulous says, if you stay ready, you ain’t gotta get ready.
When I first decided that I was going to really start trying to reward my people, I was really going to start showing them appreciation for what they did for our business in the hopes of, number one, not only would they feel appreciated but they would be inclined or more apt to want to step up and take more responsibility, I was like, “Okay, so here's what I'm going to do.”
The first thing I'm going to do, because in my pole dance studio, recurring revenue is a major thing, so we sell memberships. I had set a pretty audacious goal for the number of memberships we wanted sold and I was like, “I'm going to set my team by giving them a bonus on every contract that they sell. Yeah, that'll do it, because who doesn't want to make more money?”
Well, I quickly found out a lot of folks. Especially folks who come to work in small businesses, they typically come because of your mission, your vision, your values, your principles are in alignment with what they do, but they aren't salespeople at heart. They are just really bought into what you do and they want to be a part of that growth.
But I was like, “Oh, yeah, I'm going to incent them. I'm going to give this to them.” Well, here's what you can imagine: everybody seems excited in the team meeting, like, “Oh, my gosh, I can make extra money? This is great.” I'm laying the vision out. I'm like, “Think about what you can do with an extra couple of $100 a month. It could be nice.” I'm doing all the things.
Everybody's like, “Yeah, we can do it. Go, team. High five.” Then they walk out and a couple of weeks later, I'm noticing membership numbers aren't really changing. Ain’t nobody really knocking it out of the park, and immediately I'm like, “What did I do? What did I do? Was I not clear with the vision? Maybe it's not enough money.”
While all of that was this, my people aren't motivated by gifts. Some of my people were motivated by words of affirmation. Others were motivated by acts of service. I was trying to motivate them the way that I wanted to be motivated and it fell flat because it wasn't what they were motivated by. That's the first thing I want to give you.
If you want more information about this, listen to previous podcasts because I do talk about appreciation languages, or look up Gary Chapman's book, and you can go deeper there but you got to motivate people in a way that they want to be motivated if you want to get results. That's the first thing.
The second thing that I always talk about is, and this is so important, and quite frankly, a lot of leaders don't like this themselves, and that is you got to get real comfortable, real acquainted, really best buds with failure. You have to create a culture where failure is expected and appreciated.
I know y’all just logged off. You’re like, “Okay, what the heck, man? Who wants to be around a bunch of people who ain't winning? Leslie, that’s stupid. You're the worst leadership coach ever.” But stick with me. Here's what I know to be true: if you aren't failing, you aren't taking enough swings. If you aren't failing, you aren't taking enough risks. If you aren't failing, 9 times out of 10, there ain’t much creativity in your space. Where there lacks creativity, there lacks growth. Those two things go hand in hand.
You want to create a culture where failure is accepted and appreciated, meaning that you're encouraging people to take risks because one of the key things, hear me well, that keeps employees from stepping up is they're afraid to disappoint you. They're afraid to fail.
If you can take the sting out of that by just saying, “I know you're not going to always knock it out of the park. I know we're going to fail but we’re going to fail fast and we going to fail forward. That means failure is okay, just don't make the same mistake again,” you'll find that people are more apt to take risks.
What are the things that keep you bound in your business is when people have to come to you for every decision they need to make. Every decision, they can’t make it on their own, they gotta run it by you first, and that becomes a bottleneck in the process and you get decision fatigue, which makes you even more tired than you already freakin are.
If you can teach your people, use your best judgment. I hired you because you were smart. I'm giving you this responsibility because I trust you to figure it out. Make the decision. As long as it doesn't burn down the shop, it's okay. These are my rules. As long as it doesn't burn down the studio, doesn't burn down the shop, or doesn't get the police called, we can work it out. We can lose money and make it again. Seriously.
By removing that fear as much as you can, well, it will encourage people to step up and take ownership in their role. Because what's the worst thing that could happen? They mess up. It's a learning opportunity. We, as coaches, as leaders, walk them through that so they won't make that mistake again.
Then the third thing that I want to tell you to do is that when you're trying to build confidence in your team, you have to catch them doing things right and lavish that with praise. Lavish that with attention. Be on the lookout to catch them to affirm that they're doing a good job.
One of the things that I work with people in my Unshakable Leadership engagements, which is a one-on-one container that I host, that I'm in, that I host, that I lead, that I coach women through is really helping people to understand that you got to meet with your team if you want to get people on the same page. We talk about the cadence of meetings and the three different types of meetings that every small business owner should have.
One of the things that I tell people is, “Please don't get in the habit of the one-on-one meetings, which are designed for two things. It is designed for improvement, but it's also designed to motivate people to do the next thing.” It’s to only focus on things that they can improve.
If the only time you call a meeting with your team, or the only time you'd have conversations with them are disciplinary conversations, improvement conversations, whatever you want to call them, people will start to dread coming to those meetings. Or when I come to these meetings, I get double the work than I had before when I walk out of your office, I'm exhausted walking out of your office, people aren't going to look forward to those meetings.
I'm like, “You've got to get a rhythm with your people that basically they don't know if you're getting ready to critique them or praise them. Because every time you talk to them, it could be a mixture of both.” Get in the habit of less critique, more affirmation.
Because here's what affirmation does: when people get recognized for doing a good job, the dopamine, the serotonin hits, all of those things that come from doing a good job make them want to increase the feeling to get that more so it makes their behavior line up with the desired result.
When you are intentional about building a culture where number one, you motivate people how they want to be motivated, number two, you embrace failure is expected, is appreciated, it's how we grow, it’s how we learn what doesn't work so we can get to the things that do work and double down on that, then finally, when you build a culture of affirmation where you're intentionally catching people doing something right, and really give them detailed feedback, it helps increase your employee's confidence.
What I want to leave you with today is that if you want to step away from your studio or your shop, and you want your employees to step up and take more responsibility, you've got to help your people build their confidence. When they're confident, they'll do more, and when they do more, you can do less. Alright, my loves, I will see you next week.
Guess what, y'all, I am taking on some one-on-one clients this month. I am really on a mission to help at least 10 women in the next quarter get back 10 to 20 hours of their week. Meaning, what does that look like? I don't want you to work in your shop or studio more than three days a week. I want you to be able to live the life that you started this business to support.
It is a one-on-one container. This is not a group thing. This is me and you getting to know your business. It's almost like having a concierge physician. If you know what that’s like, concierge physicians are doctors, obviously, but they work with people on demand.
Then maybe in a traditional hospital setting, they may not be but they will come out at two o'clock in the morning to meet with their clients because they know their clients are busy. They know that things are happening all the time. It can be very difficult for their clients to get into the clinic so they come to them when it works for them. That's what this is like.
Now, I ain’t coming to your house at two o'clock in the morning to talk to you about your leadership issues. I ain't doing that. But what I am doing is I am available for when things pop up, when little fires pop up that you need 911 support with. In this program, not only am I teaching you how to be a better leader through my 3P framework, which is personality, positioning, and pleasure. These are the things that is like leadership training for reluctant leaders.
For those of you who don't have a corporate background, don't worry about it. I have owned my studio now going on almost 20 years. I took my background in HR and my background in sales. I've mined the jewels from that. All the richness without the toxicity of corporate environments and how we apply that in our small businesses in a way that makes sense when you don't have hundreds of managers, HR departments, all the other things that big-box corporations have, how do you put structure in place though that can get you to a big corporate level if that’s your desire?
I have curriculum for that. But more importantly, the real magic comes from us working through your leadership problems hand in hand, brain to brain, eyeball to eyeball so you can get the support that you need, so that you can be the leader that I know that you can be.
If you want more information on that, please send me an email at hello@lesliedlyons.com. If you follow me on IG, and I'll also put the link in the bio, I forget on my YouTube, forgive me, I'll put the link down here in the bio, we could jump on a 15-minute call. It’s not to pitch you because guess what, I don't like to work with people who ain’t ready to work. It really is a true clarity call about where are you at now in your business and how I might be able to support you.
If I can't support you, I might be able to refer you to someone who can. My network is vast. If that sounds like something you might be interested in, go ahead, hit the link in the bio, and get on my calendar. Alright, my loves. I shall see you next week. Thank you so much for your time. It’s your most precious commodity. I hope you took something away from this. If you did, thumbs up this video, subscribe to this channel, and more importantly, share it with another reluctant leader who you know needs to hear this. Alright, my loves. I will talk to you soon place. Grace and peace.