Putting People First: The Key to Operational Excellence

Transform your leadership style and revolutionize your team's performance with the wisdom shared on today's Things Leaders Do podcast. I'm Colby Morris, and I'm thrilled to guide you through the process of putting people first to create an unstoppable operation. Understanding the intrinsic link between an engaged, motivated team and the success of your organization is critical. 

This episode is packed with actionable strategies that promise to enhance your leadership toolkit, ensuring you're equipped to inspire and cultivate a dynamic work environment where innovation thrives.

Tap into the secrets of operational excellence as we discuss the importance of nurturing a positive and inclusive culture that values each team member. You'll learn why prioritizing the well-being and development of your staff isn't just about morale—it's about driving tangible results that reflect in every facet of your business. From boosting productivity to reducing turnover, the insights shared here are designed to elevate your approach to leadership and set you firmly on the path to creating an operation that others will aspire to emulate. Join us and discover the transformative power of putting your people first.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to Things Leaders Do, the podcast that uncovers the secrets of becoming an extraordinary leader. If you're a leader who's constantly seeking growth, inspiration and tangible ways to level up your leadership, then you've come to the right place. Remember, the world needs exceptional leaders, and that leader is you. Now here's your host, colby Morris.

Speaker 2: 0:26

Hey leaders, welcome back to the TOD Podcast. This is me, your host, colby Morris. I just want to say thank you for joining us. Every week, I'm trying to bring you something that you can actually use those of you who are new to the podcast. Basically, the idea is this I listen to a ton of podcasts and they all have great philosophy behind what makes a good leader, but what I'm trying to do is give you some more actionable tools, things that you can take today or in the morning, whenever you want to start, but you can take those and just start. It's a tool you can use and you're probably thinking, okay, why do I need these tools? Because you know what. You can listen to every podcast that's out there, every leadership book that's out there, and nothing changes until you start practicing it.

Speaker 2: 1:24

If I read all the books that were on Jujitsu, but I never practiced it. I don't know Jujitsu, I did not get better at it. I really wish sometimes we lived in that world of the Matrix where they could just download how to fly a helicopter into the back of your head or how to be a great leader, but we don't have that yet. Of course, with Elon Musk, neuralink and all that. Maybe that's coming, I don't know, but we can't do that yet. So my goal really is to just give you those tools that will help you become a better leader faster, that you're not going to continue to struggle trying to figure out how to be a good leader, because you're going to have the tools and the knowledge to be able to do it, and do it quickly. And, again, you're going to have to actually practice it. You're going to have to put it out there. You're going to have to go and take a shot. You got to take a chance at being awkward every now and then if you're going to move forward.

Speaker 2: 2:39

So, that being said, let's get on to our topic, which is great leaders create great operations. Now, if you're a leader, most likely you're responsible for the results of something you usually not just leading for the sake of leading. You have to get results, and I've always said that great leaders create great operations because everything gets better when the leaders get better. Every time that happens. Everywhere I've been, if I work on developing the team, it gets better. Everything does See better leaders. They create better operations because they prioritize their people by by focusing on the well being, their development, their, their engagement of the employees, leaders build a strong foundation for operational excellence, because it's about the people. Yes, you have to drive results. I get that. You have to meet the budget. I get that. All those things you have to meet, you have to make sure you're getting there. But you're going to get there how? Through the people you lead. Okay, through the people is how you get results. So you have to learn to prioritize the people you lead if you want to truly Drive the results.

Speaker 2: 4:16

See when, when your employees feel valued, when they, when they feel supported, they're they're more motivated to perform at their best. And what happens when that happens Higher productivity, a better quality of work. There's so much that that comes into play here. If your employees are engaged and they feel Supported, they feel like they're a part of something. They feel like their leader actually cares about them and knows about them. See, additionally, leaders who prioritize their people, their how would I say they're better equipped to create a positive and a Inclusive work culture. Okay, what does that do? It fosters collaboration. You'll find more innovation and when you have all those things an engaged employee, a developed employee, that Inclusive work culture, a positive work environment you know what you don't have a lot of turnover. You have the opposite. You're gonna find your your employee retention numbers going up, because people want to be where that's happening. People want to be in a great culture. They want to be where their boss believes in them. They want to be where they're part of a team, where the culture is something they look forward to being part of. What you don't want, and I want you to take just a minute to put yourself in your employees shoes. It's Monday morning. No, let's, let's make it easier than that. It's Wednesday morning and they're getting up to come to work. Is there anything about their current work culture, their current work environment, their team, that Makes them excited to come to work?

Speaker 2: 6:18

Now, the reason I ask that is because, as the leader, you are directly responsible For that environment, for that culture, for that team, because you set the expectations, you set the environment and the culture. It starts with you, the leader, and it doesn't matter if if it doesn't happen in any other department, in your, in your organization or in your business. You're responsible for your Department, you're responsible for your area, wherever it is your circle of concern. That's where you come in, okay, and the more that you invest in, in your people. You're gonna create a workforce that is, that's empowered, that's Engaged, and they are going to drive and I mean drive operational success, because they're going to start self-policing, they're gonna start Evaluating each other, they're gonna hold each other accountable because they become and they develop great leaders. Now, that's just kind of part one here. I'm gonna I'm gonna give you some more actionable tools that I really feel like you could use at this point, okay. So let's look at Some of these, these tools, okay, and how they can truly drive your operations in the hands of great leaders.

Speaker 2: 7:51

The first thing is, you want to make sure that you're using some, some data-driven metrics Okay, to look at and to measure performance and to really drive improvement. So, the first tool Then most of you are hopefully using this or your KPIs or your okay, ours, which are one you use for the sake of this. I'm going to use KPIs, where I'm a little more familiar, okay, key performance indicators. What you can do is, you know, identify the metrics that align with your business goals Okay, and track them regularly. It's not enough to check them at the end of the year. If you're checking, only checking things at the end of the year. You're not serious about success, you're not serious about meeting your goals, you're not really trying to reach that, that high point of operations. So check them regularly, at least monthly at the. At the longest, Go monthly. But you need to be on top of them.

Speaker 2: 8:58

Now, if you want to create some internal competition, which I love to do, I Like to implement a dashboard. I like to create a visual that has some Metrics on there about how all the other people are doing. How are they competing against each other? How are they? How do they match up? How do they measure up to each other? Okay, if it sells, how are they doing compared to each other? If it's Over time, hours or labor costs, how are they doing compared to each other? And, and so I kind of put these leaders into these roles. Or even if it's just, if you only lead frontline employees and you don't have any leaders under you yet, you can still do the same thing, okay.

Speaker 2: 9:46

But whatever, whatever you measure them with, you can make, make a dashboard. You can make it weekly, monthly, whatever, but you'll be surprised, with a little friendly competition will do to drive the, the performance, okay, nobody wants to be at the bottom, nobody does, and when you have that, that dashboard, they're gonna try to make sure they're up on the top. I can promise you Now and you make that. You want to make sure it's visible? Okay, you can make a printout. Put it on the you know, the the wall outside. You can, if you are lucky enough to have some sort of screen that you can display it on. Put it up on the screen. Make sure it stays up all the time. You want to make it visual? Right, you don't want to make a, a dashboard that only you can see. Okay, keep it visual for everyone to be able to track, talk to each other about. Okay, eventually, that's going to create an environment that will lead to Enhanced teamwork I guess is probably the best way to set and higher productivity.

Speaker 2: 11:00

Now let's talk about some ways that you can really stay on top of things. Okay, you need some sort of tool that will help you track how things are being done or where they are in the process, so kind of like a project management type tool, but not necessarily always a project management. Sometimes you just need to know where your team is Currently at in and whatever they're working on. Okay, so instead of having multiple meetings. You can track progress through some softwares, okay, so something like a sauna, if you're familiar with that, or Mondaycom or Trello, you can. You can assign all their tasks. You can track their progress, because they have to Put if they're complete on certain things, or sometimes they can move it to another day with an explanation of why they couldn't do it today, that kind of thing. But you can see your team and in one shot, snapshot of where they are in their Progress of completing something in that project. It's a great way to track it. If you are unfamiliar, you need to look at it. There's a ton of YouTube videos on all these so you can go through and watch, see which one you like the best, which one works best for you and no, I'm not sponsored by any of those, obviously, but they they really create great outcomes because it's visual and it's a lot easier than having to Schedule a ton of meetings just to track the progress or give the progress updates.

Speaker 2: 12:39

Okay, it's also instead of getting EOD reports or end-of-day reports. This is another way to do that. Now, if you don't have the budget for one of these Asana, monday or Trello or anything else then, yes, you probably need to create some sort of EOD report in today report, where your team basically just send you an email or you can have a checklist that they sign off on, but something that will will force them to have to report to you, ok, what they've done, what they've completed. You can make it in the day end of week, something like that, but it's something very similar, so that you can track progress. Now, I just said, those things will help you without having to schedule meetings.

Speaker 2: 13:31

But we do need to talk about meetings real quickly. You need, do need to conduct some regular team meetings, saying whether it's weekly or bi-weekly, in order to discuss progress, look at any challenges that you're having. What's, what are the roadblocks that are out there, or maybe you just need to brainstorm some ideas about something. Now, if you're unfamiliar with the L 10 meeting that's the level 10 meeting I specifically love to use this one meeting. It is so man, it is so productive because you are tracking the things that matter and you're fixing problems as you go through it. If you've never heard about it, there are videos on YouTube and I'll probably do a video I'm sorry, a video podcast on the L 10 meeting pretty soon. It's through the EOS software employee operating system. They walk you through how to do the L 10 and there are other versions of this, but I really like the EOS version of the L 10 meeting Super productive, you can get a lot of things done quickly.

Speaker 2: 14:46

The whole thing takes about an hour really to get it done and you can really make progress on the things that you're working on. Also, just kind of a side note, if you're not doing a daily kickoff meeting, there's a real brief three minute meeting or something like that. Just kind of hit the high notes of things you're celebrating that day somebody's anniversary, somebody's birthday anniversary, work anniversary, somebody's birthday or whatever and then the high points of what we're working on today. Hey, y'all don't forget that today is end of the pay period we need to make sure everybody checks out, logs out of their time quickly so we can limit our overtime and also end of the sales week. So I need your sales plans by the end of the day, real quick, we don't have to have a long drawn out meeting. It's just hitting the high points with everyone so they can get going and they know the expectations of the day. Okay, all right. So there we go, quick and painless, and hopefully you have some actionable tools If you have any questions over any of these, like the KPIs which, by the way, I meant to say something about the smart goals in there, but we've covered them in the last few podcasts so I didn't really dive into that but really using your effective KPIs, your L10 meetings, specifically, all those kind of things.

Speaker 2: 16:13

If you have any questions, you can always reach out to me. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm on LinkedIn like in my show notes. I mean it's right there for you to connect with me if that's what you'd like to do. And then also I have an Instagram page for the show Things leaders do, and feel free to look back through any of the other episodes. I go through a lot of this, like the advanced KPIs for leaders.

Speaker 2: 16:43

That was episode 10. And I really kind of dig into some of that, and before that was introduction to effective KPIs. That was episode nine. So those two can really help you through those discussions as well. If you don't mind, would you do me a favor right now and just take a screenshot, a screenshot of your phone, and just share that shared on your LinkedIn page or Facebook or Instagram, whatever you share on and just kind of let people know what you're listening to. That way, we can get more leaders involved in the show and we can really drive the progress of so many leaders that need it out there. Okay, don't be selfish. Great leaders are about people, and it doesn't matter who it is. You are about people. If you are a leader, so go out there, drive the operations by creating better leaders. And you know why? Because those are the things that leaders do.

Speaker 1: 17:56

Thank you for listening to Things Leaders Do. If you're looking for more tips on how to be a better leader, be sure to subscribe to the podcast and listen to next week's episode. Until next time, keep working on being a better leader by doing the things that leaders do.