If you’re frustrated by underperforming employees,
you’re probably asking yourself...
What Good Is It To Be The Boss When You Have To Work Harder Than Ever?
What Great Managers Are Doing Differently
To Create Reliable, High Performing Teams
And Remove Themselves From The Day-To-Day
What separates great managers from the merely okay ones?
Why do some managers become superbosses, leading and developing high performance teams, while others get stuck cleaning up after sloppy, disorganized direct reports?
And how can a manager like you copy the greats, creating dramatic improvements in your own team?
The answer to these questions can be found by looking at the behaviours of growth oriented, data-driven, high performance teams.
And after working with managers in more than a dozen businesses over the last two decades, in organizations of every size - from startups to publishing companies with annual revenues in excess of $200 million - I’ve found that great managers in organizations do three things.
These traits, when combined, create a culture of results.
Their Revenue Was Down 30% Year Over Year,
But When We Implemented The Tools That Great Managers Use…
It’s amazing what can happen when a business has its back up against the wall.
Standing in front of his business partners and senior executives, my client predicted that his once-star business was quickly falling apart.
They were as shocked as he was. Just three months earlier, the business had closed the books on a record year of growth.
And now, he revealed to the room that it was nose diving.
Revenue was had plummeted by 30% year on year.
His staff were failing to get tasks done on time.
And the critical, revenue-generating projects weren’t getting done, despite multiple meetings with key staff.
If something didn’t change soon, my client feared they might lose everything he and his team had worked so hard for.
And it wasn’t that they lacked the ingredients for success. The business was headed by a talented executive team who wanted to win. They were selling great products that solved the real problem their customers were struggling with. They’d proven their business could do great things.
But like most championship teams, they were struggling to make ground the year after setting a new record.
The business had to be rescued, and fast.
And to do this, the team had to come together.
Transforming A Team
Begins With The Fundamentals
That Create A Culture Of High Performance
It was early in the afternoon when I shared what we should do with his team.
“What do you think a good coach would do with his championship team if they’re 25% of the way into the new season and have a mediocre record?” I probed.
"If I were the coach I’d focus on fundamentals. I’d have the entire team doing drills they probably consider below their status, I’d get deep into the activities and training of the individual players to see what they needed to change, and finally, I’d challenge them.
I’d get in their faces. I’d problem solve with them and I’d tell them they can and must do better. I’d look for a way to bring them together as a team and get some success under our belts that we could build on. One big defensive stand. One big drive. One big win."
This was something my client could grasp, immediately seeing how it would pull his team together, and lift the company out of the nosedive it was stuck in.
But the broad strokes wouldn’t be enough. If you want to transform a team, you have to explicitly state what fundamentals it needs.
“Right now,” I continued,“the key members of your team need focus, goals, support and accountability.”
We need to prioritize some things then make sure the right guys are tasked to the correct, limited goals. We need to ask more of each of your key people, but we need to tell them exactly what we need from them. They need to know what true north is as it relates to their specific role."
It was time to make a plan, bring the team together, and get the business back on track.
But before you learn how we turned his business around, and just how much we achieved in the process…
Read This If Your Team
Has Ever Failed To Deliver
The Dramatic Results Expect Of Them
Momentum is a fickle thing.
When momentum is working in your favor, it’s like there’s magic in the air. Things just seem to come together. The business is growing. Coming to work is fun. And, most likely, your team flow together like a platoon of special forces soldiers.
But, when momentum turns against you, it can feel like everything’s falling apart.
You have to work longer and harder just to keep your head above water. You hired new team members to support your department’s growth. But now you look at your employees and wonder why you’re the one that’s always cleaning up the messes your employees make or why ALL the good ideas ALWAYS come from you.
And if, like my client, momentum has turned against your team, I want you to first understand that I truly empathize.
I know how difficult it can be as you have to keep dragging yourself to the office day after day, dealing with staff that get nothing done, and doesn’t want to be there.
As serial entrepreneur and business executive for over two decades, I’ve learned firsthand that this struggle is quite common.
Fortunately, I also learned how to turn momentum in my favor, and even better, how to never lose momentum in the first place.
In fact, you can systematically remove the blocks that stop you from generating momentum, and create a high performance culture that frees you from the day-to-day grind.
The Benefits Of
Regaining Business Momentum
If you’ve found yourself in the second category as my client did, I want you to stop for a moment.
Take a minute, right now, and imagine what your business could be like if it started thriving again.
Instead of you being overloaded as you work longer and harder than ever before, while getting little to no recognition, your team would operate like a well-oiled machine without you having to take care of every little thing. Walking into the office, you would feel the energy as every member of your team worked to propel the business forward.
You wouldn’t be stuck making every micro-decision about what to do and when anymore, either. Instead, your high performing team of growth oriented employees would know what was expected of them, and work towards it every day. Their daily, disciplined efforts would create the momentum your business needed to generate revenue breakthroughs.
And finally, you wouldn’t be spending long nights in the office cleaning up after another employee’s mess. Rather, you’d be at home with your family in time for dinner and enjoying the lifestyle that your successful, growing business provides.
In short, your team’s success wouldn’t rest solely on your shoulders, trapping you forever in a world of stress as you’re forced to deal with every little thing.
Through your employees, your team would be seeing breakthrough after breakthrough as a result of the momentum created internally.
And I know what you’re thinking…
“That sounds great. I just need to find (and hope I can afford) better employees who can deliver.”
Sure, great employees are better than mediocre employees, but even a team filled with A-Players can experience a nasty shift in momentum.
Just look at the many all-star roster sports teams that fail to live up to the hype.
Here’s what you really need to know about a team transformation like the one I’ve just described:
Building The Kind Of Momentum That Supercharges Team Performance, Produces Huge Results, And Makes Work Fun Again Does NOT Require New Or Better Employees.
The fact is, It’s much easier than that.
What you’re about to learn is so simple that it defies everything you’ve read about managing a team.
But when my client and I implemented it, the momentum it created was undeniable.
By introducing just one of the proven operational tools you’re about to learn, his executive team were focused on the fundamentals within four weeks. This was the beginnings of their culture of success.
Just a few short months later, the momentum had shifted so much that business delivered it’s second best month in company history. And, by year-end, profits were up year over year.
And within three years they were the undoubted juggernaut of the industry.
But before I share what we did together…
How To Engineer Momentum
Into Your Team Or Department
If you want more positive momentum, let me introduce myself and share what I can do for you.
My name is Matt Smith. I’ve owned and run businesses ranging from start-ups to organizations with over $200 million in annual revenue.
Working in a dozen industries over two decades, I’ve seen first hand how a lack of momentum will overwhelm a manager as it piles on stress, eats into his personal life, and eventually forces him to quit or be fired.
But simultaneously, I’ve learned that great managers use a small handful of tools to rescue their teams - and themselves. They use these simple tools to jumpstart their team’s performance, driving it as momentum builds on itself every single day.
These are the exact same tools that I implemented with my client’s team, turning their performance, pulling the business out of a massive downtrend, and eventually making it the 800-pound gorilla of his industry.
Today I want to share three of them with you, one after the other.
Let’s begin —
How Great Managers Create An Unstoppable Culture Of Results
To create a culture of results, the greatest managers I’ve worked with do three things:
-
Create an environment of trust and accountability, simultaneously providing their employees with the support they need to succeed, and the level of accountability that drives them to achieve.
-
Focus their team on identifying the friction points that destroy momentum in the organization, whether internally or externally, and aggressively work to solve them so that they are no longer impeded in delivering business results
-
Continually ensure their team is deeply aligned, all working towards the same strategic goals, so that they are not derailed or distracted from their core objectives
But here’s the catch…
Knowing what these great managers do to create a culture of results isn’t enough.
Instead, you need know how they do it, and then use it correctly in your own team.
Only then can you reap the benefits of creating a culture of results - one where growth oriented, data-driven, high performing individuals propel the business forward every single day.
And that begins with…
1. Using Clear, Direct Feedback To Drive Results Through Your Employees
The surest way to kill your team’s performance? Do everything yourself do that you can avoid giving clear and direct feedback.
Not only does it create a bottleneck for how much your team can produce in a quarter, but it ensures that your staff are never empowered.
And even worse, you’re robbing your staff of what they want from a manager. According to Harvard Business Review, your employees want clear, direct, and constructive feedback at a roughly three to one margin when compared with praise.
But sadly, nearly half of all managers fail to hold their staff accountable according to Harvard Business Review.
So if you want to start seeing team members achieve their goals on a regular basis, you need to start giving clear and direct feedback while holding your staff accountable.
While working for one of the most recognized North American franchising companies in my early twenties, I was taught to get results through other people by using the GS&R. It was later referred to as "perhaps the most high impact meeting type" Cameron Herold, former COO of 1800-Got-Junk, had ever used.
The meeting itself is quite simple, while its impact is profound.
Held weekly for 30 minutes each direct report, the GS&R enables you to finallyget out of the day-to-day work and leverage your direct reports.
This is done through setting primary and secondary goals for the week, giving clear and direct performance feedback to develop employee capabilities, and pre-emptively addressing any housekeeping issues.
When run correctly, the GS&R does more than foster a high-trust relationship with employees.
It also eliminates 80% of the issues that create organizational dysfunction, including lack of staff direction, unnecessary communications, and weak relationships with direct reports.
By eliminating these issues, you free up your employees’ time so they can focus on higher-impact, and more business critical assignments, while affirming them that they have your support.
Since learning the GS&R, I’ve gone on to use it to manage the growth every single business I’ve owned.
And in each case, it has enabled me to start multiplying the input received by the business, creating exponential outputs that generate increases in momentum.
2. Systematically Solve The Business Critical Problems That Threaten Your Team’s Performance Every Single Day
One of the key limitations I see in most managers is an inability to have their team operate in line with reality.
Skyrocketing costs aren’t recognized, failed marketing campaigns perpetuate without accountability, and the most critical of business problems aren’t identified.
Your team may be guilty of these behaviors, and I doubt it is because you don’t want to see them succeed. In my experience, behaviours like these stem from not having a system for dealing with reality productively.
And that’s where The War Room comes in.
I learned The War Room from a business competitor in the early 2000s. At the time I used it in my advertising agency to turn mediocre campaigns into home runs, generating substantial profits in the process. I’ve since used it with teams in multiple other industries, including publishing, technology, and software.
(And the competitor who I learned it from? They later sold to AOL Time Warner for $435 million.)
Used daily, The War Room is a systematic approach to solving the business critical problems that occur in a dynamic, ever changing environment.
It focuses your team on a single problem, such as designing profitable advertising campaigns. And every day, it asks specific questions to highlight the opportunities where you can improve your team’s results in this area.
In short, The War Room will identify and eliminate the friction points that would otherwise make it impossible for your team to succeed.
This unlocks new sources of revenue for your organization, increase process efficiency, and improves your team’s overall contribution.
The result? With no friction holding your team back, they can finally begin building the unstoppable momentum they need to be successful.
3. Ensure Your Team Is Deeply Aligned, Working Towards The Exact Same Goals
Nothing kills momentum faster than letting your work team pursue projects in different directions.
If you want your team to achieve any kind of meaningful results, you must ensure that they are all moving in the same direction.
So what stops your team from being deeply aligned?
In my experience, teams are not aligned for one of two reasons:
- The manager doesn’t clearly articulate what the team should be working towards, or
- There is no process for constantly ensuring that the team is deeply aligned and working towards the exact same goals
Most teams have been told what they’re working towards, but over time they’ve been loaded up with so many priorities that they don’t know where to focus anymore…
It’s not hard to imagine how this can quickly drain momentum.
To ensure constant alignment in my businesses, I use a process called the Weekly Alignment Meeting.
Held with the members of the leadership team, this meeting ensures that there is strategic alignment between the goals of the organization and the day-to-day tasks that are taking place.
And perhaps more importantly, the Weekly Alignment Meeting acts as a defender of your team’s momentum.
It ensures that your team is constantly deciding what to say “no” to on a regular basis, and constantly refocuses everyone on the goals that matter.
When your team is completely focused on working together, with the same focus, you can’t help but build momentum.
How These 3 Behaviours Of
Great Managers Reactivate Momentum,
Create A High Performance Team,
And Generate Business Breakthroughs
The three behaviours above, when treated as a disciplined practice within your team, will begin creating momentum almost immediately.
Together they create the Flywheel Effect, as documented by Jim Collins in his must-read book Good To Great.
Here’s how it happens in basic terms:
The first few times each behaviour is used, the payoff may not quite seem worth the effort you’ve put in. You might even question whether it’s worth continuing.
But if you stick with it, the payoff begins to show itself in just a few weeks.
Your team becomes more focused. The business’ performance improves. Your organization as a whole becomes more efficient as the practice builds on itself.
And before long, the practice is swept up in its own momentum. Each week is a success.
This happens because these behaviours create accountability throughout your team. In turn, this develops a culture of achievement.
A Word Of Warning:
You Need To Do This Consistently
Although I hinted at it above, I want to be explicit. Momentum cannot be treated as a one-off project in your team.
This is because when a manager treats “building momentum” as a project that can be checked off and archived, the momentum soon dies.
When this happens, your team reverts to drifting through the days.
Performance drops. Team members are sloppy, showing up late to work, and failing to hit their goals. You find yourself once again working long hours, cleaning up after those employees, and wondering what went wrong.
But it does not have to be this way.
To Generate Momentum In A Systematic Way, Use “Management Rhythms”
Throughout this article, I’ve introduced you to the three behaviours of great managers that build momentum, creating high performance teams:
- The GS&R, an effective weekly one-on-one meeting for stimulating trust, developing employees, and creating a culture of high performance
- The War Room, for eliminating friction caused by the dynamic, ever changing environment your business operates in, and enabling you to exploit new opportunities
- The Weekly Alignment Meeting, to ensure your staff’s day-to-day tasks are aligned with the strategic goals of the organization, and that no distractions threaten your success
These three behaviours are professionally known as management rhythms. They dictate the tempo and direction of your team’s performance.
But knowing what they are is not enough. You need to implement them in a consistent, systematic way, each and every week.
How To Get Your Proven Blueprint For Deploying These Management Rhythms, And Build A High Performing Team Of A+ Players
If you want to turn your team into a high performance collection of A+ players, there are five critical management rhythms you will underlie your success.
And I will be sharing exactly how to implement each one in The Management Rhythms Blueprint’s practical video-training course.
In each module - one per management rhythm - you’ll learn the purpose of a management rhythm, what benefits it brings to your team, and how you can deploy it. It’s two decades of experience compressed into short, to-the-point videos.
And to make the deployment process as smooth as possible, each of the 5 management rhythm modules also includes:
- A step-by-step blueprint that outlines exactly what to do, and when to do it, to seamlessly integrate the new management rhythm with your team
- Proven cut-and-paste implementation templates that do all the heavy-lifting when it comes to organizing roll outs and getting employee buy-in, while guiding you on dealing with any pushback you receive.
- Print-and-follow competency models so that you can track your performance with each management rhythm, improving your ability to deliver it with quick, direct feedback
These are the exact concepts I’ve used to build up highly effective managers in my own businesses, and grow others I’ve acquired.
They’ve also been tried and proven with my private coaching clients, in industries that range from supplements to baby products. I’ve guiding each of them to implement these management rhythms in their business, empowering their teams to generate record profits with focused effort. (An engagement with me is a minimum of 12 months, and requires a commitment of $100,000.)
I’m proud of the material we’ve put together for you in this video training course. And at $497 I believe it is already a no-brainer investment.
But as this is the first time that this course has been made available outside of my private coaching clients, I want to extend an early access offer to you:
When you invest in becoming a greater manager by joining this course before March 2nd, I’d like to give you access to all the material for a discount of over 50% off.
Your investment totals just $247 - substantially less than what you’d pay to have me privately guide you through the implementation.
The only request I have is that you after you’ve used the material with your team, you email us and let us know how the impact it had in detail.
How To Secure
The Management Rhythms Blueprint
For This Introductory Price And Save $250
(Offer Ends Midnight, March 2nd, 2017)
If you’ve read this far, and would like to invest in The Management Rhythms Blueprint before it is released to the public, I encourage you to join by following these steps now:
To secure your special price before it expires, you need to:
- Click the purchase button below to be taken to your payment form.
- Confirm your purchase details, including your name, credit-card number and email.
After completing your purchase you’ll receive immediate access to the entire video-training course, including deployment packages that handle each step of the integration work for you.
Yes! Please Secure My Priority Pricing On The Management Rhythms Blueprint (Saving $250) And Give Me Immediate Access So I Can Transform My Employees Into A High Performing, Growth Oriented Team
Have A High Performing Team
In Just Twelve Weeks
Without Being A Micromanager
I understand that it might be hard to imagine that you could finally have a high performing team in as little as twelve weeks.
And the way I see it is that right now you have two options.
First, you can continue letting things go as they are, hoping that they work themselves out.
Chances are that if you do this, things will get much worse — and they are not guaranteed to get better.
Your professional life will suffer as you struggle with a dysfunctional team, and your personal life will suffer as a result.
(I’ll leave it up to you to imagine the fights and frustrations that will boil over as an emergency Saturday in the office happens once again.)
I’m sure you agree this isn’t ideal. It’s far from it.
The second option you have is to take a moment here and invest in yourself and your career.
Take me up on my offer and use The Management Rhythms Blueprint to put a clear, step-by-step structure in place with your team.
Use my processes for transforming your employees into high performer A+ Players who don’t need you to clean up after them… and who go above and beyond every single time
And if after twelve weeks you’ve seen no improvement, simply ask for a refund. You’ll get every dollar back. You’ve got nothing to lose, and everything to gain.
Secure today’s special price on The Management Rhythms Blueprint by taking action before Midnight on March 2nd, and begin creating your growth-oriented, data-driven, high performing team.
— Matt Smith
Publisher, Early To Rise
CEO, Royalty Exchange
