0:00:00 A: I’ve been trying and, you know, I’ve been tested. Welcome to the Friends in Business podcast with your hosts, Ben Wright and Jemima Ashley. Ben, known as the sales strategist, and Jemima, our resident visibility expert, are here to share their wealth of knowledge and experience with a little fun along the way. Whether you’re a leader, entrepreneur, or aspiring business owner, this is the podcast where we share everything we know about business to help you succeed.
0:00:31 A: Let’s get started. Welcome to the Friends in Business podcast.
0:00:43 Jemimah Ashleigh: Morning, Ben. How are you?
0:00:45 Ben Wright: Excellent, thanks, Jemimah. I have heaps of energy today. One of those mornings when I woke up and I just felt good, you know, sometimes you wake up, you’ve had a good night’s sleep and everything’s been fine. You ate well the night before, you didn’t drink. You know, you’re no exception.
0:01:00 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, Thai food, there was no alcohol. Yeah, got it.
0:01:02 Ben Wright: But, yes, but sometimes you wake up and you still feel a bit drained and other times you feel really good. And look, I don’t know if there’s any science that can actually deal yet with the human body just being the human body, but I notice that I definitely feel good when I have great flow around what I’m doing. And yes, it’s pretty obvious, but what I find is that it doesn’t just impact me at a mental level, it actually impacts me at a physical level as well, when I’m not stuck behind a computer all day, when I’m not doing things that I don’t like doing. So when I’m doing things that give me energy, I just wake up and feel great. Like this morning, it was 5:30, I was out the door, I was in the pool, I was in the water by 10 to 6.
0:01:38 Jemimah Ashleigh: And you’ve been insufferable since you got home for sure. Kidding. It’s in love. But yeah, it is one of those things that, when it’s going well, when things are. When you are performing as you need to do in workplace, in your life, in your personal life, in your relationships, this can fall. You’re a lot more energized, aren’t you?
0:01:57 Ben Wright: Yeah. Yeah. And I think for me, it’s a time when I’ve got to make sure that I really focus on the important things because I’m feeling good. And you can apply yourself in a mindset that’s really positive and you’ve got the physical energy. It’s kind of like during your days, you know, when. Well, I know in my days, I know I’m most productive in the mornings.
0:02:12 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:02:13 Ben Wright: You get me in the mornings. That’s the best time to do it. It almost goes at a more macro level that across a month, when I know there’s periods when I’m going to be feeling better across a week or a month, that I go really hard during those periods to get things done as well. So that when the times when I’m not as productive come, that I realise that I just have to take a break.
0:02:30 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah. Is it possible you’re just full of energy because we’re podcast recording today? We’re doing this podcast. Is that it?
0:02:35 Ben Wright: Do you know what at least you didn’t say to me, is it not possible you’re full of energy? Cause I’m here. But yes, it could be. Podcasts are good fun because I know that I’m taking personally, I know that I’m taking. I’m 41. I’m taking 23 years of university and workforce experience, jamming it into threes and fives in terms of tips on how to do things.
0:02:58 Jemimah Ashleigh: Because we can’t have fours. Fours can’t be done. We all know that one podcast a little while ago, Ben had a conniption when he had four things. So that was pretty funny.
0:03:06 Ben Wright: Yeah. Yeah. I know I’m unique, but I love being able to pull together all of that great information.
0:03:12 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, to share that knowledge.
0:03:13 Ben Wright: Yeah. And just share it. So if it can save people a bit of time in their learning journey, then great. It justifies them spending 23 minutes a day, a week with us and they.
0:03:22 Jemimah Ashleigh: Get to hang out with us.
0:03:23 Ben Wright: Yeah, Great. Excellent.
0:03:25 Jemimah Ashleigh: I don’t think I’m making the sales, which I think I am, but here we are.
0:03:28 Ben Wright: And speaking of hanging out with people, those we work with, we do spend a lot of time with the same people regularly across really extended periods of time, actually, when we’ve worked in a business for a really long time. And so what I want to talk about today is around building high performing teams.
0:03:44 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes. Oh, goodness.
0:03:46 Ben Wright: We hear about high performing teams all the time. It is a bit of a buzzword and there’s so much literature out for me. I really pride myself on simplifying the complex. It’s something I’ve done as a leader for 15 years and all the teams I work with recognise that that’s my approach. So I want to bring today a simplified approach to how we build high performing teams.
0:04:06 Jemimah Ashleigh: Love it.
0:04:07 Ben Wright: And it’s built around four key levers, but they’re really only three because the fourth one is the result you get out of it. So my Brain.
0:04:17 Jemimah Ashleigh: I’m all on this podcast that you said.
0:04:18 Ben Wright: So my brain is clear because we have things at three. And by the way, for those listening now, the reason I do stick to threes and fives is because typically odd things, when we say odds, threes are generally much easier to remember.
0:04:33 Jemimah Ashleigh: That’s really true and I know that I tease you a lot about that because it is quite funny. I wrote a list of four and Ben’s like, add another one, people will never remember. And you’re right, like when as soon as you start getting to threes and fives, you really start nailing the memory of what those things are. So for sure there is real science and education.
0:04:48 Ben Wright: There is. And I’ll go and find some statistics to back this up.
0:04:51 Jemimah Ashleigh: Thank you.
0:04:53 Ben Wright: At a point in time. So what I work off here, and I will say this is a combination of lots of things that I’ve learned across my career. Lots of models that I’ve pulled together. But I work off strategy, talent and energy leading to peak performance. So let’s just slow down and break that down again. So to have a high performing team to give yourself every chance of having a team that’s going to work well together, there are three in particular elements that we need to get right for that team.
Number one being strategy, number two being talent, and number three being energy. Look, it’s a similar model to ones that have been out there in the past with some changes around in particular energy. But for me it all starts at getting your strategy right.
0:05:39 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:05:39 Ben Wright: So a high performing team is really clear on the strategies they need to nail. So they are the goals that they set. They are things like pricing the product that they have out in the market, who and where they’re selling to. So their ideal customers, the geographies that they’re selling in, the type of products or services that they have. So are they product only? Are they product and service? Are they, do they have an installation arm to their business? Are they a business that sells a SaaS technology but then has a maintenance program that rolls in behind that, a support program that rolls in behind that? They’re a business that they are very clear on how they perform lead generation, they have sales, they know how to handle objections. Right.
0:06:23 Jemimah Ashleigh: This is all set by the workplace. Right. This is like there’s usually team buy in at this level, but the workplaces have gone, this is the agreement, this is what we’re doing and these are the strategies we’re going to implement here.
0:06:32 Ben Wright: So yes, so the organization will have your top level Strategy at a broad business level, they will then generally drop down into your functional level. So sales and marketing and legal and regulatory and delivery and customer service, who will build their own strategies based around that broad umbrella strategy. And then the teams, the really effective businesses and teams together, they actually allow them to build their own adventure here. So you know those choose your own adventure books that you used to.
0:07:02 Jemimah Ashleigh: I loved those as a kid. No wonder I went into law enforcement.
0:07:06 Ben Wright: I also love them, but I used to actually go to the end, work out what solution I wanted and then backstep through which pages I had to pick.
0:07:13 Jemimah Ashleigh: So you were like, I’m going to strategize now to get what I want here.
0:07:17 Ben Wright: Yeah, yeah, I cheated. Yeah.
0:07:18 Jemimah Ashleigh: So potato, potato. I like my strategize to get the result you wanted. Cheated. Cool. Might go to the casino later and strategize the end result that I want.
0:07:27 Ben Wright: Yeah, yeah. That doesn’t work for me. I am a horrible punter. So what I’m talking about here is allowing teams to build their own adventure there, but more importantly is when we get the strategy arm of our business. Right. That’s one out of three done. And I have lots of literature around building out high performing teams, particularly around strategy, talent and energy.
0:07:47 Jemimah Ashleigh: And I know, I’ve talked about that a lot on the podcast as well. But I also know that you’ve got tons of this stuff on your website.
0:07:53 Ben Wright: Heaps there.
0:07:54 Jemimah Ashleigh: Heaps there You’ll find it. It’s amazing.
0:07:55 Ben Wright: So it’s actually called the Team STEP process. So what I’m talking about here called Team STEP, if you ever need to work through it. Every good team needs to have a strategy behind it. So that’s the strategy piece covered out. The next part is all around talent. So talent are the people that we have in the team.
0:08:14 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:08:15 Ben Wright: Now that doesn’t necessarily mean we have recruited into the team only the best talent.
0:08:22 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah. Because gonna ask this because people, I think, make this assumption, you’ve got to get the best of the best. I was like, I’ll take the energy and the personality higher with potential over the best every single time.
0:08:31 Ben Wright: Yeah. So for me, I actually think there’s a blend here.
0:08:35 Jemimah Ashleigh: I agree.
0:08:36 Ben Wright: So we will bring in hired guns into the business. So they are people who have proven capability at being leaders or technical experience or experience with our particular customers. Almost like a sporting team where you will have senior players who are leaders who have proven ability to be able to do what they need to do. Right. So we’ll have that element of the team, we’ll have junior players of the team who we’ve bought in because we see that they have potential future capability, but also because we genuinely just need base level tasks completed in a business and we don’t always need experience.
So talent will have a blend there. We will also have those in the middle of this spectrum and they’re often people that are career roles. So people who don’t necessarily want to progress, they’re not as ambitious as others, but they do a very good job at what they need to do and they are seen as leaders at their craft within the business. So we’ve got a few areas there around talent. But talent also extends to things like how we train and foster growth within our business, how our teams learn together. All right. Really, really important how we coach our teams. Right. So talent isn’t just about bringing the right people in or training the right people.
0:09:54 Jemimah Ashleigh: It’s also about being talented.
0:09:55 Ben Wright: Yeah. And developing them as a business. Yeah. Being talented as a business. Incentive structures, remuneration, everything that goes around that broad spectrum of developing people.
So again, we can look at a sporting team here as a great analogy. They will bring in all different types of people, but then they’ll have excellent coaches around them, successful sporting teams. Their team members will buy in to what they’re trying to achieve. They’ll have great salary packages for those people in there. They’ll have a training program around it. They’ll have a rehab program for the football teams in there. They’ll have the right equipment.
0:10:33 Jemimah Ashleigh: Our backgrounds are really different. And you’re like rehab and I was like injury and I was like drugs and alcohol. We’ve had very different, very different lives.
0:10:41 Ben Wright: Well, look, and for some sporting teams, drugs and alcohol rehab. Yeah. Do become part of it. These people have so much money so early, talented people, but they don’t know what to do with that money. And sometimes you can, you can get led down the wrong path. And look, that also applies to businesses is that we have a team that doesn’t have bad apples in there.
I actually am a believer, controversially, I guess, that teams can handle a lone wolf or the occasional brilliant jerk as long as they have a corresponding upside that can be managed. So you’ll often see that in really, really effective hunters, salespeople that know how to find business is there’s often some downside behaviors from them. But if you can really capitalize on those strengths that they have and manage those weaknesses, then that brilliant jerk philosophy can be filtered out. Right?
0:11:30 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, I love that because I think A lot of businesses will immediately say, oh, they’re, they’re a bit difficult, but if you’re getting the results, maybe it’s relevant. I actually had an interesting metric and I’d love your idea of like the metrics of this because one of the things I’ve always done is only hired anytime we’ve had to bring new people in. I will, as a general rule, I don’t care. I want them to have a university degree. I almost do not care what that degree is in. For the simple reason they’ve committed to something for three years, they’ve seen it through, they’ve been able to get through the baseline of what they needed to do to do that. And I’ve done uni degrees and I know they’re not always pretty. Yeah, I’m almost not fuss what it is on.
0:12:08 Ben Wright: Yeah, for me, that’s important in some roles. So some businesses in some roles, you will want to see that the talent you’re bringing in has evidenced ability to apply themselves at a technical level in particular for other roles, not so important. So for me, if we look at sales roles, customer service roles, what I want to see there is that someone’s got evidenced experience at dealing with people. That is going to trump a university degree. And there are other roles in operations, for example, where I’m going to want to see that people have dealt with adversity through their lives. That’s probably going to trump a university degree because during operations rollouts you have to deal with uncertainty a lot. So for me, there is a Horses for courses piece here.
0:12:51 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, I love that.
0:12:51 Ben Wright: But I think the macro version of what you’re trying to say is that there are prerequisites for what we’re trying to hire, and that might be experience, but we need to look broader around some of the softer things, like your agility, your resilience, your grit, your ability to deal in difficult situations, or customer service experience, for example. Right. Or dealing with people. There’s lots of different prerequisites.
0:13:14 Jemimah Ashleigh: I think I would 100% if you’ve done more than three or four years in the service industry and done and got glowing reviews from restaurant managers, people that you’ve worked with and you’ve been like, right, level stuff, doing that. Forget the university degree, I’ll take that person. Every time. They have dealt with every version of people, every sort of adversity, every bad day possible, you’ve dealt with things being thrown at you, names being called, and you still got a job and people say good things about you. 10 out of 10.
0:13:37 Ben Wright: Yeah. Yeah. So broadly speaking, that’s the talent piece, although I will add to that before we move on, is that there is a real art to that recruitment process. And I’ve dealt with people. Grant Buttress from the Butterfly Effect comes to mind. It really brings methodologies outside of a broad interview process, using metrics, using some much smarter technology to really ramp up your hiring process. But look, that’s probably for another episode.
0:14:03 Jemimah Ashleigh: I wanted. So delve into that. I really want to delve into that. We need to do another podcast.
0:14:07 Ben Wright: We’ll get on that one day. So, okay, so the team step process, we’ve looked at strategy, we’ve looked at talent. Last one being energy. So energy. For me, this is. There’s an obvious part to hear. It’s the day to day energy that your team brings. So it’s having a team that will ride the bumps, that will celebrate the wins, but not go over the top. We’ll recognise that when things go wrong, there’s progress to be made out of that. And this comes down to things like how the team celebrates together, how the team acknowledges progress together. It comes down to our broad based cultural approach to our behaviours, things we will be known for, the 10 things that this team will stand for every day. And you know, we seek permission before challenging conversations. We get back to customers within certain periods of time. We train as a habit. These are the North Star behaviors that guide a team. Right. They’re defined, they’re known within that team so that we have a predictable way of working, but we bring an energy that is consistent and positive to the business. This also goes a step further to when we talk about energy, to how teams work together across the business, how teams engage with customers, the language we use, how we dress, how we present ourselves is all part of energy. And for me, this is often seen as an afterthought to something like having the right strategy and having the right talent. But the reason it’s so important is because your energy drives your approach to everything you do. When we’re recording podcasts, I remember distinctly, about eight weeks ago, we had a podcast where my microphone wasn’t positioned correctly. It was against my neck, so it was being muffled.
0:15:54 Jemimah Ashleigh: I thought it was funny.
0:15:55 Ben Wright: You thought it was funny, but I didn’t because I felt like I’d let the team down because we had to rerecord it. And that impacted me. It actually impacted me for a couple of hours. Not because it was small mistake, but because I felt that I was letting the team down.
0:16:08 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, I understand.
0:16:09 Ben Wright: And that type of culture, whilst it’s not healthy to beat yourself up too much, but when we have a team that’s accountable and feel that they need to be making their contributions to the broader team, that’s the type of energy we want, for sure.
0:16:24 Jemimah Ashleigh: And I think what’s interesting, we’re using that exact specific example. So because I walk out to this, I had been on another. I had to take another call and I came back and you were sitting in your special place, which is relaxing, and Ben had his. He had your hand in your head and he was like. You’re like, can’t. I can’t do this. This is. I was like, is everything all right? I’m sorry, I’m five minutes later than I thought it was. And we had a laugh about it and I just went. And I think this also just talks from my perspective of the things I’ve dealt with from a team perspective, because being in law enforcement, everyone going home at the end of the day was never a guarantee. A 30 minute rerecord for me, that’s easy. It was annoying, don’t get me wrong. We had a very long couple of days of podcast planning and we’re doing other. Other business stuff. It was a very long couple of days. It was frustrating and it was like, this is less than ideal. 2But from a level where I have seen catastrophic people not going home, death, destruction, these kind of real life things in my day to day. I know I’m sort of joking about talking about this, but this was legitimately my job. That is a nothing impact. And I think that’s also why this team is working really well. Because if two people are going, oh, this is the worst thing in the world, let’s just get on with it. And I think that’s also why a lot of people in the situation that we’re both in are high performers, because they’re just like, well, this is frustrating. I can understand. I can spend the next 20 minutes thinking about it or we can spend the next half an hour doing it.
0:17:48 Ben Wright: Yeah. And look, I think, I mean, there’s a couple of things out of that. One is the teams here that succeed well. And we can stay with that example if you like, because that was never going to stop me doing it again. I was just pissed off. Where you have teams that can balance each other out, that energy works really well. But where you have teams that are accountable to performance, I think is the main message here, is where we tend to get that high performance level.
So to get all of those three of those, right? So if we get the right strategy in place, we know where we’re heading, we’re listening to customers, we’re continuing to improve our offer and our service model out to the market. We’re balancing that with the right talents, having the right people in the right spots at the right times and we’re building on that talent and then we’re bringing the right energy in from those teams. That’s where we get to peak performance, which is right in the middle of all of those three dynamics. At a theoretical level it sounds very straightforward. Yes. But at a practical level, there’s a lot behind it. And look, the literature I have, it is about eight pages, I think, on the team stepp and all the things you can cover to really build that out. So I definitely encourage people to have a good think about strategy, talent and energy at a leadership level in particular, at a small business owner level in particular. But to make this work for your team, because I want to be really practical outside of here is the way that I’d be looking at doing this is get your either your leaders together if you’re a larger business or are the important people in your business together if you’re a smaller one, and sit down and work through each of these levers. Right. Grab that resource. I have it strongersalesteam.com, download it, work through all the checklists. It’s free, there’s no obligation there, it just gives you a checklist to tick off.
0:19:23 Jemimah Ashleigh: It’s a good checklist.
0:19:24 Ben Wright: And then work through where you have gaps. I talk a lot about the systems and frameworks that I recommend businesses build are there not only to guide how they operate each and every day, but also to help them determine where they have gaps. Because when you know where your gaps are, you know where you need to get to work. So that’s my big ticket item out of today is take these three areas, build them out within your business, work out where the gaps are and then get to work improving them.
0:19:54 Jemimah Ashleigh: All right, tell us this story again, please.
0:19:55 Ben Wright: Okay, so Team STEP framework.
0:19:57 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:19:58 Ben Wright: So to get to peak performance as a team or a high performing team, we need to get strategy.
0:20:02 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:20:03 Ben Wright: All right. So that’s how we operate out in the market. Talent, that’s the people that are sending our business out to the market, and energy, that’s how we all operate as a broader business. We need to get those three levers humming. We do that, we have every chance of hitting peak performance.
0:20:21 Jemimah Ashleigh: Alright, what’s the silver bullet for today?
0:20:22 Ben Wright: Silver bullet was to make sure. That you take the strategy, talent and energy levers.
0:20:27 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:20:27 Ben Wright: Sit down, find the gaps. Yeah.
0:20:29 Jemimah Ashleigh: Love that. My silver bullet might be a little bit off because I think we’ve naturally done this in the teams that I’ve historically built. I just don’t think we’ve ever put it down significantly on paper. And I think it’s interesting because I’ve always driven with the energy. What are you bringing to this? Are you malleable? Can I teach you this? Because strategy, I think you can teach the skill set, I think you can largely teach ,energy, and playing nice with others, I think is a lot harder to teach. So, yeah, I think we’re about getting that formalized process and it should be down.
0:21:00 Ben Wright: Okay, so your silver bullet here is make sure we get energy, right?
0:21:04 Jemimah Ashleigh: Absolutely. And also just make sure that you’ve got it down properly, that you actually know exactly what you’re looking for. Because I think I’ve been always driven to the feeling of it, rather than the, oh, we have to make sure we’re ticking that box. And I think the box ticking is really important in this scenario.
0:21:16 Ben Wright: Okay.
0:21:16 Jemimah Ashleigh: To get that high performing team.
0:21:18 Ben Wright: Excellent. Well, that is an episode that can genuinely redefine your business when you get those three pieces right. They’re very difficult though, to implement straight off the cuff. It’s not like some of the other episodes where you can make an immediate change with immediate impact. This one will take some time, so be patient with yourselves when you’re out there. If you get stuck, you’ve got two friends in business here who are happy to help you at any point in time.
Otherwise, we really look forward to speaking with you again next week.
0:21:43 Jemimah Ashleigh: See you then.
