How to Have a Team that Loves Working with You

Today’s topic is about creating a team that loves working with you. When you first start your business, you may have started from home—in a spare bedroom or a little office, and you’re just by yourself. That’s good in the beginning because you may be on a shoestring budget, but after a while as you get more and more successful, there’s just so much more to do, in terms of customer service, or in terms of doing things you don’t know how to do. If you want to grow in your business, you must begin hiring other people, whether it’s on a part-time basis of a virtual team member or a full-time person.

We now have a team of about 14 full-time employees. And what I’ve realized over the years is that your success in your business is only as good as your team. If you want to continually succeed and keep growing by leaps and bounds, you must take care of your team and hire people who are super talented, who love working with you and who will do anything to stay at the company.

I believe that we are on our way to creating that kind of team. I would like to share with you some of the best practices that I’ve put together over the last three years that we’ve had full-time people working in our office with us, so here are my six tips. They may seem very simple, but hopefully you’ll find them helpful.

1. You must see yourselves as peers. Instead of seeing yourself as the big boss and that everybody else is beneath you, see yourselves as peers all on the same level.

You have your own unique strengths, skills, talents and abilities, but it is only a small piece of the puzzle. You must surround yourself with people who are really good at things that you’re not good at. When you honor them for their skills and their talents and their abilities and you see yourselves as peers working on the same mission together, everybody gets along and everybody loves working together.

2. If at all possible, have your team members only work on what they love to do and that they’re uniquely brilliant at. Like I mentioned above, you are really, really good at things that you’re really, really good at. Surround yourself with people who are exceptional at doing other things. When you have people who work only on stuff they love to do and they’re brilliant at, they will love coming to work. It’s like they’ll come to work and say, “I can’t believe I get paid to do this!” When you have a whole team that is happy and thrilled to work with you because they’re doing only what they love, you have a super productive team, and there’s no drama because everybody is so happy.

3. This is going to sound simple, but say ‘please’ and say ‘thank you’. They’re not your servants. They are your peers and they are human beings, and everybody wants to feel significant, so say please, say thank you every time you ask for something.

4. Treat them like friends and family. We have a private chef cater lunch every day, Monday through Thursday, and we eat together as a family at this long dining room table in our office. We go around the room. It’s like breaking bread. We share this delicious, healthy meal together and we go around the room each sharing something that’s new and good every day. It really deepens the relationships. It’s one of my favorite parts of the day.

5. Respect their opinion and request their input. Team members don’t like to stay in the dark. They don’t want to be like mushrooms. They want to be part of the big picture. Share with them when you come back from a mastermind group or when you’ve read a book or you’ve gone to a seminar, come back and share with them what you learned. Share with them the bigger vision of what you’re working on. They like to be involved and remember that every single person on your team has opinions and has things that they’re really good at. Request their input and honor their opinion because it matters. It really matters if you want to create a yummy team.

6. Lastly, have fun together. It’s really important that your office be a place of abundance and beauty and respect for everyone there. The more you can have fun together during hours or off hours, the closer you will become as a team. A really close team can create anything. Really, they can create results that astound others.

See what you can do too - even if your team is all virtual. Fly everybody in and do something really fun together because when you do all of these things, it creates a team that is invincible and can do anything.

Your Client Attraction Assignment

Think about what you can do to create a space in your company where people love to work with you and they want to stay and tell others about you.