Stepping Into Leadership

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Whether you are a business owner preparing to bring on a team or a corporate professional getting ready to lead a team for the first time, this is an exciting step. You are expanding your impact, you're creating space for growth and stepping into a new level of leadership. But here's the thing: hiring or leading a team doesn't automatically make things easier. In fact, if you're not prepared before you hire the team, it can actually make things more overwhelming, confusing, and stressful. That's exactly what we're diving into on this episode of Leveraging Operations and Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Tanya Dee Harrison, and my goal is to help you lead with clarity and confidence by connecting strong leadership practices with the systems that make them work. In this episode, I'm walking you through five things that you should do before bringing on a team. These steps are going to help you build a value-driven culture, lead with structure, and set your team up for success from day one. Because leadership isn't about just hiring people, it's about preparing yourself to lead them as well. Let's dig into it. The

Values Define Culture

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very first thing, and this is going to sound cliche, I already know, like, oh, it's a nice thing to say and do, but it's often overlooked and it wreaks havoc in the end. You want to define your values and shape the culture right from the beginning. The very first thing you need to do before bringing on a team is define your values because your values shape culture and culture drives performance. This is one of the things that often gets missed when people are hiring the team. They just don't realize the value. So I am going to reiterate that this is step number one. Your values determine how decisions get made, how people treat one another, and how success is defined within your team. And if you're a business owner within your organization, when you're clear about your values, you attract people who align with them. And that's how you build a healthy culture from the start. When you are laying this groundwork and you are defining the values and the culture, you want to think about the experience that you want the people that you serve to have and the experience that you want your team to have. If you say you value excellence, collaboration, flexibility, respect, all of those things, those priorities should show up in your processes and the way you communicate. To get started, ask yourself a couple of questions. What are the non-negotiables that define how we work? I share this in another episode how valuable non-negotiables are when it comes to protecting your value. But first you have to know what the values are, and then what those non-negotiables are because you want to protect the values. So ask yourself, what are the non-negotiables that define how we work? And we're talking about a team. Next, ask yourself, what do I want to be known for as a leader? How do I want people to perceive me? That's extremely important. And knowing this is going to help you start putting your values in action. Values are meant to be lived out, not just written on a wall for people to see, not just written on a website because it's a nice to have. They're meant to be walked out. So their values in action. The other question that you want to ask yourself is how do I want people to experience working with me? So one of them is what do I want to be known for as a leader? But the other one is, how do I want people to experience working with me? What do I want that experience to look like? Values and culture, they don't just happen. They're created through consistent choices, day after day after day. The choices that I make and the actions that I take. When you lead with clarity around your values, you build the kind of culture people want to be a part of. And that's how you build a team that lasts. I understand that sometimes this may feel a little challenging when the overall culture of the organization may not be the same, but you want what you have control of, meaning your team, you want that culture to be there. You want those values to be walked out. That's number one. Number one, clarifying those values and starting to define the groundwork for the culture that you want for your team.

Put Values Into Action

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The second thing is audit your systems and workflows. This is about getting your house in order. You don't want to invite somebody into your house and it's chaotic and things aren't in place. If you want your team to thrive, you need order. Teams don't thrive in chaos. Document your key processes, standardize how work gets done. Even if it's just checklists, templates, videos, give people the structure to succeed. Even if the people that you are hiring are coming on board to help you do some of this stuff, you should already have some things in place because you've been doing them. Before we start hiring a team, you have already been doing a lot of the processes. They shouldn't have to come into a blank slate. There should be something there. Think about what it is that they're going to be doing and how you can create some type of structure around it. You can document some type of things and then go from there. Optimization is about creating a rhythm that supports productivity and performance. When your systems are strong, your leadership feels lighter because you already have these things in place. The other thing with making sure that you have some documentation, some systems and workflows already in place. If you allow somebody to walk into an environment where there's nothing, absolutely nothing, in place, nothing documented, they are going to consume more of your time. And you're going to feel like hiring a team may not have been the best decision because you're going to feel drained. Whereas when you have something in place that you can refer them to, now they have a starting point. And they don't have to constantly ask you questions because you already have given them something tangible that they could use to get started. Okay? So make sure you have these things in place. Make sure you audit your workflows. If there's an opportunity to optimize them, optimize them. And then when your team comes on board and they're actually doing this day in and day out, they may find opportunity for improvement and you can continue improving it over time. But don't let them walk into nothing, okay? Or just chaos. Because if not, you're going to spend a lot of your time trying to train them and get them up and going. So help them and help yourself. The third thing is understand your resource readiness. And this may look a little different from a business owner to a corporate leader, but at the end of the day, what it means is making sure that you have the resources to bring somebody on, not just to be able to pay them in the short term. And for my corporate leaders, understand what your budget looks like, right? And understanding what your budget looks like is going

Audit Systems and Workflows

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to be instrumental in who you hire and the skill set. If you can only pay somebody $15 an hour, then you need to really be thinking about what your level of expectation is from that person. Understanding your budget is critical to who you hire and how you hire. So many times people try to hire people and they want them to have a master's degree and 20 years of experience and all of these things, but the budget only allows for $20 an hour or $15 an hour. That's out of alignment. Let's be realistic. We want to pay people for the value that they're bringing. And if you can't afford, if your budget doesn't allow you to pay somebody that has that master's degree and 20 years of experience, then you need to think about okay, I'm going to bring somebody in that may not have as much experience. That means I may have to do a little bit more training. That's it. The other thing which falls right in line with this, so aligning your expectations with your budget is defining the roles and responsibilities, making sure it's crystal clear. Before someone joins the team, define exactly what they're responsible for, how success is measured. I can't tell you how many times this is missing, and how you'll communicate. This may look like creating a role profile with specific outcomes instead of a laundry list of tasks. Or it may mean ensuring each role is aligned with the department goals and expectations. Either way, when the person comes on, they should know what it is that they're responsible for, how it's going to be measured, and what success looks like, and how you're going to communicate with them. Making sure that communication plan is tight is going to be helpful. When people know what success looks like, they can own it, they can be accountable and you can hold them accountable. And now, because that level of accountability has been built in, you don't have to worry about micromanaging. Right from the beginning, you've already said, here's what you're responsible for, here's what success looks like, and here's how I'm going to communicate with you along the way. Now they have no excuse, and you have no excuse. We're eliminating excuses right from the beginning. Clarity isn't about control, it's about an act of empowerment. We want to empower our team. The more clarity we provide for them, the clearer we are with our expectations, the easier we make it for them, and the easier we make it for ourselves. In general, people want to be successful, and we want to tell them how they can be successful when we hire them. How can they be successful in this role? And we want that to be laid out and clear. The last thing, number five, is prepare to lead, not just manage. This is where the real shift happens. When you step into leadership, you're no longer responsible for doing all the work, you're responsible for creating an environment where others can thrive. That requires a mindset shift. You'll need to learn to delegate effectively, give feedback that builds confidence and communicate with consistency. A couple of questions you can ask yourself is how will I set expectations and hold people accountable? Again, remember clarity. Also, how will I recognize wins and address challenges early? I find that many times we are better at addressing wins than we are at addressing challenges. We'll tell somebody when they did a good job, but we're hesitant on telling them when challenges arise or when they are not doing what's expected. People need to know if they're doing a good job or not. The sooner we address

Resource Readiness and Budget

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a challenge, the sooner the person can now fix whatever it is and move forward. You don't want somebody thinking that they're doing a good job, and behind the scenes, you're thinking that they're not doing a good job, but you haven't communicated this to them. This is why I say one-on-ones are so important because it gives you an opportunity to have that face-to-face conversation on a regular basis, and you can share this during the one-on-ones. Of course, yeah, they're doing well, we want to share that. If there's areas of improvement, we want to be sharing that, and we want to be sharing it early out the gate. We want to give them an opportunity to do a good job. If you don't tell me that I'm not doing a good job, I'm probably gonna think that I'm everything's okay. You haven't said anything. So be fair and communicate these things early. Another question to ask yourself is how will I protect my own energy while supporting others? I'm pausing because this right here is one of the things that leads to overwhelm and burnout. Because we don't think about ourselves as leaders, and we have to be able to pause. We have to be able to think about what are the things that we're going to do to replenish our energy, and this is a real question, especially when you are preparing to hire a team. You're going from it just being you and you doing everything to now, yes, I'll have help with doing the work, the task, moving everything forward. However, it requires that I support them. What am I going to do to protect my own energy? What does that look like? Making sure that you have some things already put in place. I have to tell you, this is extremely important, and it's something that we don't think about. As leaders, it has to be a balance, right? And I'm not saying it's always always 50-50, but just like we think about our team and we think about how we're going to move things forward and success and all of that, we have to think about ourselves as well. This question right here, how will I protect my own energy while supporting others? You want to answer before you hire your team. Just a quick recap. So we have five different things that you need to do before bringing on a team. And the first thing is to clarify your values and start laying the groundwork for the culture that you want within your team. Number two, audit your systems and your workflows so that people are not walking into chaos and they are not starting from a blank slate. They actually have something that they can

Define Roles and Success Metrics

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build upon. Number three, resource readiness and alignment. What does that budget look like? And making sure that you are aligning your expectations with what it is that you can afford. Fourth, define roles clearly, making sure that you have outlined what the roles are, what the responsibilities are, and what success looks like. And lastly, how am I going to communicate that? The last thing is prepare to lead, not just manage. What are you going to do to prepare yourself to now lead from this next level? For those of you that have not had leadership experience, you want to go out and start gathering some of that, understanding what type of leadership systems you need to have in place in order to support you as a leader so you're leading with more confidence and clarity. Successfully lead the team as you want to lead them. When you approach leadership intentionally, when you build a lot of these things in place, you create a team that performs with purpose and precision. And if you're preparing to lead a team or stepping into leadership for the first time, my leadership shift coaching program is designed for you. It's going to help you build confidence, create structure, and develop the leadership habits that turn stress into strategy. You can learn more by heading over to signalpartners.com slash the shift. I know that there are a lot of podcasts out there, and I'm glad that you gave us an opportunity to listen to us. And until next time, make sure you leave a purpose, operating precision. And if you have 30 seconds, I would really appreciate it if you leave us a review, bring up the podcast, and also show it someone else who makes benefit of the content of this shit. Until next time, stay blessed.