TLDR: When you can make your remote team members feel cared for, supported and working in a safe space it’ll repay you (and your company) a million times over.
The year was 2008, I was fresh out of university and launching into my management consulting career at KPMG Sydney. Wide-eyed and excited to live to dream of travelling the world and even potentially working in Singapore (or even Switzerland to ski down the Alps on weekends) I distinctly remember the very first meeting I had with my performance manager out at the client site.
Little did I know it was going to be some of the most profound wisdom I’d ever receive (and go back to time and time again during work, business, and even my love life!)
As we sat down sipping on our coffees (hot choc for me since any coffee gives me a headache…) he talked a lot about how I needed goals, how I should think about starting an MBA immediately otherwise it’d be difficult later on. Yet, it was this one piece of advice about how to succeed at KPMG that I now know is applicable anywhere in life.
He told me
If I just focused on how to make my boss’s life easier on the job that’ll see me succeed.
That’s all…
So for the next 8 years of my corporate career I just kept following this single piece of advice and shared it on to my juniors and boy did I see a huge difference in how people responded and even took notice of my performance. I started to then apply this in my relationships, thinking about how I can make my partner’s life easier, how I can make my other relationships easier and things truly started to blossom.
It became my mantra, my unspoken motto.
It was what the Ultimate Freedom Systems was all about!
How could I make your life easier for you?
Now, I see the fruits of my labour in the remote team I’m building as part of The Leverage Group and how much it’ll repay you with your team.
It all came to this one special Monday, not every 2 weeks or so I have individual 1-on-1 meetings with my team to ask them just 4 simple questions to keep my finger on the pulse (I’ll share with you what these are in a later post). So every 2nd and 4th Monday my day is just smashed with meetings and it wasn’t until I was sitting (virtually) with the first person I hired in the company.
She asked me about our incoming pipeline of work and why it was low. I went on to explain how our team was shifting into a new product line and with that shift means we are also targeting a new audience because the existing product was not profitable. I even jumped into her shoes to focus on what her worries might be, so I even said.
“It’ll be fine, it just takes some time for this shift. Don’t worry. You’ll be paid your salary.”
What happened next shocked me… she spoke up and said
Richard, I’m not worried about that, I’m worried about the future of the company. I want to see TLG stick around and grow. That’s all.
I was sooooo surprised to see the commitment beyond her own welfare that she had displayed here that I couldn’t, but help feel that warm tingling feeling in my heart. This wasn’t the only thing that came up that day!
In another of my 1-on-1 meetings, a recent hire, was chatting with me and in our regular routine she flipped the tables on me and asked
I want to ask, does anyone ask you these questions Richard?
What can I do to make your life easier? Because I’ve noticed that you’ve become a little more stressed lately.
To which I joked with her surprised that she was able to notice the stress levels in my voice change over the weeks…
It may seem minor to some, but to me, just seeing these two examples shows me that we’re building a great culture within the team. One that is focused on creating that safe space to fail, but also creating a culture where people want to show up for work.
I used to manage audit teams and as you can imagine auditing is not that fun, sometimes we’re required to pull some all-nighters to meet tight deadlines. Sometimes we have to do work and not charge for it. It’s never easy to tell someone to stay back late for the work. But it’s always easier to ask when they feel like you’ve done soooo much for them that they’ll want to help out because it’s about YOU and not the work…
My aim has always been to make the lives of everyone else around me easier. By making your teams’ lives easier it’ll help cultivate a closer bond to pulling in the late hours, going above and beyond to improve the company and most of all them wanting to show up giving their best and staying with the company for the long-haul!