# The Office: Training Your Team To Get The Job Done Without You: Nate Grahek - MicroConf Remote

Channel: Rob Walling
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kd9kOrioxec
Duration: 15 min
Language: English
Words: 2996
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/Kd9kOrioxec

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[0:00] [Music] now here in the studio once again socially distancing it feels like you're so far away i have nate groshak he is a uh st paul local yes so it's amazing to have you join me here in person even during these non-travel uh covid times so nate actually is the the focus of the most downloaded startups for the rest of us episode ever and i believe i mean it's probably 200 episodes ago but it's how a non-technical founder built a seven-figure sas app if i recall something that's right so nate is uh the founder of sticky albums and he founded that in 2012. he's a former portrait photographer and a

[0:40] corporate trainer and he loves anything radio controlled not like cars and airplanes it is yeah that's cool yes uh so he and i are gonna dive into a topic that i think inspires both fear and perhaps some aspiration and many bootstrap founders it's the ability to delegate responsibilities to your team so that they can get the job done without you hovering over them so i think you have some email rules or tips for empowering your team thanks for having me man just driving in hey that's weird yeah reflecting on the last nine years of running my business listening to story of squad cast just really brought me back to how

[1:15] grateful i am for this community you've created so it's an honor to be here to give back and even a little bit uh thinking back i grew to a million in arr in two years so that really relating to that all of a sudden where's my life what kind of balance semblance i had two new kids and i learned these lessons haphazardly so uh i think the first thing i learned is the right type of communication has to happen on the right channels so right now let's just talk about email and i think that for for as much love as slack gets i still think there's some good things about

[1:52] email even internally instead of just interrupting each other all the time so number one i set these rules with my team if you want to get a quick response from me it has to pass the yes test what i mean by that is and for any of you if you want to send this uh try to get attention to somebody a vip or just to give these rules to your new team or new and growing team uh make sure that when they send an email it passes a yes test meaning we can all use our imagination how great is it in gmail i think this is a labs feature

[2:27] where it gives you those three suggestion buttons i've got to love those i love hitting yep that's perfect yeah and it's done guess what those emails get replied to first so i want walk through these three rules number one give me a good useful subject line uh don't use the word urgent because if it's urgent it shouldn't be an email number two give me what you recommend and even though we typically will give the whole context give the story of the issue uh what's happening and then we'll wrap up with a recommendation i tell my team to put that at the top so i can just glance it i know what is

[3:09] you're going to try to do or what you recommend and then if i need to i can scan down to the recommend the needed context and that's the third element and so i say give me screenshots don't don't assume that i'm on my phone i'm on vacation maybe i don't have time to log into which facebook group something's happening in or which system just take a screenshot and put it in the email and it's there if i need it and then i can respond with yep that's awesome i'll also walk them through [Music] give me so make sure you don't put in too many to do's

[3:47] this is a big one for a while uh my team thought they were being helpful by giving me like the summary but for a lot of us still for better or worse our inbox is our to-do list in some ways and so what was happening is if i had an email with five things i had to do they'd have to sit there until i got all five of them done instead if you just break it up into five emails i can knock those out really quickly so for those of you watching the tricky part here is how do we deliver this message how do i get my team to follow

[4:19] these rules right um so i think the biggest one is just to be to use some some humor some humility and apologize when um having a one-on-one and going you know what look i'm really sorry i owed you these emails or uh i should have got back to you sooner this is what if we follow this this set of rules it'll help me empower you to continue to do the work and i think that's the that's probably the bigger point here is like just really learning how to delegate right i think that it's fun for a while when you're in the weeds you get to do everything but the more i

[4:59] would if i let's just take an example of a bad email hey nate uh so and so said something on facebook what should i do about it i don't know which which where on facebook who like what's the history what's the context that then i would just go do it because it was it felt urgent to me and i'd want to go just solve it but i was conditioning my team to just give me alerts they weren't actually doing and solving it themselves so when i switched to this this system it really empowered them to do the work and it feels so good to be there's i think uh you you

[5:33] and sherry talk a lot about the value of vacation and taking a breather and it's such a good stress test for your business and for your team to step away and i personally take such pride in being able to see the team handle it and me just say you got it and it empowers them the next time they know what to do and it just starts to snowball in the right direction right very cool it reminds me of um you know the kind of the managerial adage of of bring problems not solution yeah and that's in essence what you're saying is you're trying to level people up

[6:08] look i remember being i was right out of college i was 21 years old i think and i got a job as a project manager and i would i was in a project i was a project coordinator or something which is like below and i go to project managers and i'd say oh my gosh i there's something wrong you know what i mean because i didn't know what to do and and so it took me a few years to learn oh start thinking i started learning from what these project managers would tell me and i was realizing oh here's they're they're thinking about it in a systematic way

[6:36] and they're and they would give me a few you know solutions and i would go back and implement one and i realized why can't i start doing that i'm a smart person right and so that's what you're doing you're like leveling up your own team with this yep and it's it's real it's i think it's a double-edged sword you have to really trust and be okay that your team can do it at least 80 to 90 as good as you can it's always going to be different but being able to see their thought process the other thing is think about and this is a message you can deliver to your team

[7:04] too when implementing this say look um let's just pretend i'm your uh your diving coach i can only help you so much talking about it or me showing me doing the dive and showing you what to do but where the real growth comes is when you just get up and start jumping off the diving board then so that's the connection here is when your team starts giving you their recommendation that's the big risk right when they say i recommend we should do this yep at first they're going to be insecure about it so you have to be gentle about what critiques you give and say look

[7:41] this is you did great here here's a slight thing to add make sure you copy this person or let's do this too but awesome recommendation so that conditions them to continue wanting to do it and empowering them to to really do their job without you yeah it's at the end of the day what we really want so so what were the rules again number one you need a useful subject line okay number two add and make sure they include what they recommend number three any retired required context with screenshots instead of links to things got it um why not links what do what do links do what how do links make things

[8:18] more complicated for you um it breaks the yes test so i tell people there's here's the the tricky part to walk is uh i want people to know i want them to pretend like i'm on vacation almost right and you have to be delicate delivering that message but you bring it back to what they want they want growth they want to stay productive they want to show you that they can handle it and so you focus on those things that's why i don't want links is because i am on my phone and i don't i don't have the password or it look it's not a mobile friendly if

[8:53] there are any of those still a mobile it's like a really bad interface that i don't want to go digging in just give me the screenshot because i don't really need to know all of it i can just scan and see it with a screenshot right and that's the thing i mean this may sound crazy if if you're a team of two people or a team of three people but you get to where you're managing six eight ten people and suddenly this is a big issue because even if you're not on your phone you just can't respond you can't solve everyone's problems all the time right exactly you should be

[9:20] getting yourself as a manager or ceo or founder into a position where only the fi the real bad fires are coming up to you and it's that can be tough because then all your whole day is just fighting really bad fires and i've been there but um but if it you know the better you make your team the more they can they can handle these so okay so you talked a little bit about like the beauty of doing it so you can go on vacation and kind of have more freedom or or get more done are there any other like in your experience why did you need to

[9:49] make these rules any other reasons beyond that yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna add like a bonus concept in here because it's one of my favorite analogies i think that i have so we had a very agile team of like three people in product and two or three people in support and we were all on a two week on hands dev call that was our best two-week call and i'm i wanted to eliminate all of the direct interruptions i really think it's so important to protect people's uninterrupted time and i said we need to pretend like the developers are on a ship with no communication they're coming

[10:25] into port one for one one meeting we get to load them up with everything we need them to do because for the first couple years i was constantly changing my mind i was the biggest offender right these rules were for me too yeah yeah and i said nope we're gonna define these objectives for these two weeks we're not going to ship course because that's where we lose so much not just productivity but mental health and people just don't they get burned out when you're constantly redirecting them so i said we can't add to do's to them uh during that the sprint once they're gone they go out to port

[11:02] guess what their phones will work back to us for emergencies for like hey wait what's the clarification on this thing and then we can connect and really quick solve it but we're not gonna change to do's we're not going to change priorities and what they're building this for this sprint and that was really helpful also yep very cool so i'm curious you have you know what they should always make a recommendation what about an issue that is is perhaps so complex or so challenging or someone's like i think there's like one of four things maybe it's almost kind of needs a whiteboard of brainstorming sessions what about those

[11:34] issues what should they do with them yeah i think that comes down to this one extra rule is making coaching your team to use communicate the right message in the right channel and i made this mistake as an employee too where in a one-on-one it's i i love doing them i love being you finally get the boss's attention i really enjoyed the one-on-one time i would dread it leading up to it because it meant i have to stop what i was doing but like i really did enjoy developing my team um so but when they're there there's that connection that i think a lot of rookie employees

[12:14] will take that same energy and tone of the meeting and they'll try to keep talking to me that way over slack and it's like what no that does not gonna work like i think naming it you just have to name it like look this is our time to do this so i would on our we would use trello where they could keep kind of a an inbox for themselves of things that they wanted to talk to me about during their one-on-one that way they weren't just hey nate i have this idea yeah that's a and that's a real danger of slack um i kind of the rules that i've made with my

[12:49] teams over the years since slack came around is if you need something if something is truly urgent and is blocking you and you need an answer in the next 20 minutes then slack me yep but if you can wait uh i don't know two to four hours then email me and frankly i'm faster than that if they give me email like this i'm way faster than right and then um i don't remember what overnight is i don't know carrier pigeon or something but okay cool so as we wrap up we have a couple minutes left um obviously this can be a big change for folks and you can coach them into it

[13:18] but are there other ways to to implement this how would you advise that you know a founder listening to this role this out yeah so i put together this morning because i was like huh this is good for you guys to know you want but i put together a quick training literally like before i came in this morning and i'm going to share it in the slack group i'll give it to xander he'll post a quick 10 minute training and i delivered the same content but direct as if it's a training for your team to watch so you could just hear the link and say hey guys i what do you think about this

[13:46] new strategy to help us to help me uh give you answers faster but i think the bigger thing is just having humility apologizing i think some of the best things i did as leaders apologize when i made a mistake like look guys i'm new at this i'm sorry i'm sorry this i i dropped the ball here um i i was i just i tried to get too much in the weeds and i cuz i like it but you know what i hired you for a reason you're super talented at what you do you should just go do it and so to these rules are as much for me getting

[14:21] out of your way as they are for you to be productive and really enjoy your job i think that's a really important way to think about it too so we will get those into shindig we'll get it to producer xander as well as the microconf connect slack awesome nate graham thank you so much sir good to be here man thank you so much thanks for all of the investment and the time and energy to this community i know this is weirdly remote but man what this is such an honor to be here and it's so cool to see you still making an effort to bring what can be

[14:49] like lonely as entrepreneurs i think this is really important that we're doing this so thanks a lot thanks sir [Music]

[15:11] you

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