- Hey there, I'm Dan Martell.
Serial entrepreneur, investor and creator of SaaS Academy.
This video I'm gonna teach you how to upgrade your team.
Their talent, I want to teach you how to 5X it using a simple
monthly meeting structure that's gonna be easy and really
powerful and exciting for your team to implement and be sure to
stay to the end where I share with you the link to get access
to my business playbook templates to allow you to have a
documented standard operating procedure for your business to
really allow it to scale.
(upbeat music)
So when I was building my company, Spheric,
one of the biggest challenges I had was to take all
this human capital, all this knowledge,
all these consultants.
We were a big consulting company all over the globe really.
From Warsaw to Washington and make sure that all the lessons
being learned amongst different team members were
kind of shared amongst the group.
And the way I did this 'cause this is back in 2004 was just to
host a monthly webinar.
Essentially it was kind of a GoToMeeting and during that
meeting everybody would offer up new things that they were
learning and they would just teach it.
And we record it and then every month we'd catalog that,
put it in our, what we called The Codex which was our wiki,
and then we just had a backlog of
a bunch of different trainings.
It allowed us a team to continuously up-level our
knowledge, our talent, our experience and really got us
into bigger contracts with customers.
It was an enterprise consulting company focused on portal
development and because we had all these brilliant people
learning new stuff in the simple structure for them to learn from
it allowed us to up-level our game.
What I'm gonna teach you today is the key things we do uniquely
in those meetings to really allow you to get the most out of
the talent upgrade structure.
Step one, democratize the teaching.
One of the things that you need to do right from the beginning
is allow anybody to put their hand up and say,
"Hey, I got something cool to teach and I would love
"the opportunity to share it."
So it's not about executive leadership team
training the underlings.
It's literally saying, if you've got something
interesting to teach, and I've even broadened
it to not even be business related.
I just wanted, for example, recently our designer,
Rich, taught the whole team about typography.
What does that have to do to somebody that
never does any design work?
Nothing but it's interesting
and what's fun is it builds connection.
So one of the things that I highly encourage you to support
is anybody can offer up some unique thing that they know how
to do that they're gonna teach the rest of the team.
So that's number one.
Number two is showcase your bright spot.
So one of my favorite things to do is as I'm interacting with
the team and I see somebody do something real cool I'm like,
"Man, that's amazing.
"Could you add that to the list of training in our next team
"training meeting so that you could
"teach the rest of the team?"
And what's cool about that is it not only as a leader do you
acknowledge the person's work and showcase it and say like,
"Wow, that was really done," but you also kind of amplify
positive behavior or really thoughtful
implementation of some kind of output or project.
And having that added to the list,
'cause most people aren't gonna put their hand up.
That's the reality.
You know the internet's made up of 5% of the world
that produces content, 95% that just consumes it.
So the same thing will probably happen in your organization.
If you had 100 people, there's probably only 5 people who put
their hand up to actually teach somethin'.
What you want to do is have your leadership team identify really
neat things going on in your company
and prompt them to add it to the list.
Encourage them to teach that at the next team training.
Number three, prioritize the queue.
Now one of the exercises you're gonna have to look through all
the different trainings that are offered up.
Typically our meetings are about 60 minutes.
And if there's way more things that people want to teach than
you have time, you're gonna have to prioritize.
And I think it's really important as much as I love
learning about how to play the ukulele we need to make sure
that we top load the training to be things that could actually
move the business forward or that would be relevant to the
largest percentage of the people attending the meeting.
So you want to prioritize a little bit around business
driver and relevance to the group as a whole.
Number four, don't forget to set a timer.
People that are teaching things, especially if they're passionate
about it, they'll just go and go and go and go and go.
Sometimes my videos are 10 minutes.
Sometimes they're a lot shorter.
I have gotten on stage with 20 minutes and ended up walking off
60 minutes later because I'm passionate about the topic and
just keep rambling and going and you don't stop.
So make sure you set a timer.
Ideally the person can see it.
It's what's called a confidence monitor in the speaker parlance.
So that they can see how much time they have.
So they can set their own timer on their phone.
Pull out your timer, start 10 minutes.
Ideally I like to go 10 to 15 minutes.
10 is better if you have a whole big queue.
That way you can get through six of them in an hour and that is
an incredible amount of cross-training and knowledge and
just understanding of new areas of the business
that you might not be aware of.
So set the timer and let them pace themselves accordingly.
Number five, record it.
I can't stress this enough.
You need to record it.
The reason why is what you're doing is you're building a
library of organizational knowledge.
You're building a library of people on your team that know
how to do things that could teach other new employees.
This is the kicker.
Imagine if you had a year's worth.
So you had twelve different team trainings recorded.
Each one of them an hour long, 60 minutes.
Six different trainings from different team members and
somebody's new and they join your organization.
All of a sudden now they're being taught best practices.
They're understanding who in your company knows what about
what, which is a big question.
It's like, "Who actually knows how to do this thing?"
And they get to know the personalities and the interests
of different team members because again people are gonna
be teaching stuff that they're passionate about that may not
necessarily be business related but still is interesting.
And I think that that's just a great way for somebody new to
onboard and to also build this catalog.
So what we do is when we, everybody's training or
they're teaching we just add it to the show notes.
So there's the six different people that went and what they
taught and that is a link to the recording and it's locked and
loaded in our playbook.
So really simple structure.
Make sure that you prompt people to do it and you record it.
So five steps to a really great monthly team training meeting.
Number one, you gotta democratize the teaching.
Anybody can put their hand up, including yourself as a leader,
and teach something cool for the rest of the organization.
Number two, showcase the bright spots.
Things that are going well.
People are doing incredible work.
Ask them to teach the rest of organization how they thought
about that work.
Number three, prioritize the queue to make sure it has the
highest business impact and relevance to the group.
Four, set a timer so they can self pace themselves.
And number five, record it, record it, record it.
Please hit the record button.
If you're using Zoom, it's so simple.
GoToMeeting, et cetera they all have the ability to record.
You grab that, little bit of show notes
and you are locked and loaded.
So as I mentioned beginning of the video I want to share with
you an exclusive download.
It's called the business playbook templates.
It's my core system for the key reference documents.
Standard operating procedures, templates,
systems that you need in your business to really get things
going and the cool part is you can create a new one called the
team upgrade trainings that has not only the recommendations for
the next set of trainings that people want to opt into but also
the backlog, the archive of all your existing trainings.
It's a simple format.
You can click the link below to download your copy of my
complete Google Drive templates.
So you just click the link, opt-in and get that copy for
yourself and create a new one.
'Cause I actually have a system in there
on how to create a system.
You can create your first on the team upgrade meeting structure
and get that deployed to your business today.
If you liked this video be sure to click the like button and
also subscribe to my channel.
And if there's somebody you think this video could serve,
feel free to share it with them today.
As per usual, I want to challenge you to live a bigger
life and a bigger business and I'll see you next Monday.
- [Jaret] Perfect.
- [Dan] It's the whole point is the team upgrade.
Right? Upgrade 'em.
Is that good? Does that make sense?
- [Jaret] It's hilarious.