🔥 This Week’s Agency Insight

From Jordan Ross @ 8 Figure Agency

January, 7th 2024

You’re shrinking your business if you are the manager of a department when you don’t need to be

Building management is the make-or-break point of many businesses

Here is how to build management training that works

Define purpose

The purpose of management, by my definition, is to do three things

A- Execute operational plans

B- Develop talent

C- Retain talent

When you onboard or promote a new manager, one of the first things you must do is to define & review expectations for this role

Lucky for you, I am defining these items for you

1- Execute operational plans

The main reason we have managers is to execute the operational plan of a department 

In order to execute an operational plan, management will need four things:

A- How benchmarks and goals are set

B- How goals and data are communicated

C- How they should be reviewing the plan with the team

D- How they should be holding the team accountable to

A- How benchmarks and goals are set

It’s the responsibility of senior leadership to set benchmarks and goals per department

If you do not have this, it's critical you set up this process before onboarding a new manager

The simplest way to do this is by introducing:

• Annual business planning meeting

• Quarterly/monthly business review meeting

During the annual & quarterly business review meetings, this is where you set very specific goals for the company that are based on logic

If your monthly churn percent last year was 15%, maybe make it 12% as a minimum goal and 10% as a stretch goal

On a quarterly/monthly basis, you review each goal and identify if it is still the right metric to be tracking and pushing for

Do this for all metrics and put them into a dashboard for management to follow and execute

B- How goals and data are communicated

For managers, you can communicate the goals to them via meetings (including them in quarterly and monthly business reviews) or an email that gets sent out to the team after these meetings with the updated metrics and goals

C- How they should be reviewing the plan with the team

The manager will then be responsible for taking the data leadership provided and ensuring they have a plan to hit it

Example:

The ops manager reviews the entire client roster for this month, and identifies who they will:

• Potentially Churn

• Churn

• Keep

If this manager knows the goal is 12%, and he has 100 clients, he may build a plan to put added emphasis and TLC on the accounts that may be at risk for churn

It is your job as a senior leader to train management on this step

Management must step into their role understanding your philosophy on how to strategize the monthly benchmarks into weekly and daily actions

From here, they will have a meeting with their team to share specific actions & points of emphasis on a monthly and weekly basis 

D- How they should be holding the team accountable to execute the plan

This will be the second point management will need to be trained on, and it may be the most important

When reviewing accountability and performance, my biggest encouragement is to introduce processes and tools they can use to do so

In my opinion, the tools and processes to manage performance happen in a waterfall fashion, each easily leads to the next

• Leadership: Quarterly business review and monthly business benchmarks

• Manager: Monthly and weekly team meetings 

• Weekly operations meeting

• Daily end-of-day reporting 

• Management audits 

During management onboarding and training, we want to teach the manager how to use these processes to communicate standards to the team and hold them accountable

Each one of the audits leads to management developing talent

2- Develop talent

Having a strong process to train management on how to develop talent is critical

There are effective ways and ineffective ways to train

Here is the model you want to 

1. 5-step coaching process

2. 1 on 1

3. Quarterly/Annual Reviews

One of the biggest reasons most managers aren’t effective trainers is due to their patience with understanding what is going on with talent

5-step coaching process

The 5 step coaching process is a formal process management must memorize to effectively develop talent

The 5 steps are:

• STU

• Root cause

• Bridge the gap

• Coach towards the inputs

• Assign SMART input-focused actions 

A- STU

STU stands for seek to understand

One of the biggest mistakes managers across the world make is not going into development conversations curious

These conversations are prompted by auditing & reviewing performance and 99% of the time management has already identified that their team member is underperforming or missing a key results

Emphasize to management that they cannot go into these conversations with assumptions

They must get curious and understand what happened and what their employees' perspective is

This is critical

When leadership does not do this, they begin to create an environment that can be stressful for employees and eventually lead to employee turnover 

Asking questions like:

• I noticed we missed XYZ metric this week, mind sharing why you think we did?

• Mind if I ask you about X account? I saw we were trending below goal. Why do you think that is?

Once we begin the conversation with curiosity, we can move to point 2 which is the root cause

B- Root cause

Training management on root-causing problems is a great skill to have

Not only for developing talent but for your entire business

Root-causing problems is the concept of getting to the CORE of why we missed 

The easiest way to do this is training management on the 5 why question format

Training management on asking why until their employee, or themself, cannot go any deeper is the simplest approach to root-causing

The simplest way of explaining this process is to ask why something went wrong until we can't ask why anymore and have the root cause 

Example of such conversation:

Management: I saw we were trending below goal for Jordan’s account. Why do you think that is?

Employee: Click through rate was about 2% over the last month when the goal is above 3%.

Management: Why do you think it was that low?

Employee: It would either be the thumbnail design or the titles

Management: Have you tested either in the last month?

Employee: Yes, we have been testing titles weekly when underperforming. I did notice his best video from last month was a thumbnail that didn't actually include his face

Management: OK, so what I'm hearing is that the reason we're missing click-through rate is either title or thumbnail, but we think we have an opportunity to test thumbnails first with no picture of Jordan, is that right?

Employee: Yes

In this example, the root cause of the issue is probably a combo of thumbnail or title, but it seems like the next area of improvement is thumbnail

The manager didn't even need to begin coaching because the employee already understood the next steps. It only took two whys and one follow-up question to identify the probable root cause. 

The main thing management needs to learn when leaving your training is how to effectively ask questions about the root cause of employee performance

C- Bridge the gap

Once management root causes their talent’s underperformance, they must show them what the difference is 

In this step, management should ask for permission  to show their employee what they have identified

Quick example: “I think I understand why we missed this metric. Mind if I show you?”

Few important notes to train your leadership on:

The manager said “we” rather than they

Great managers display their teams' performance as a reflection of themself. This shows unity and builds trust

The manager asked for permission

Of course, this manager doesn't need to ask for permission to show their talent what went wrong, but signs of humility build deeper levels of trust with employees and keep them around longer

From here, this is where the manager trains the employee on what they could have done better 

The final two steps are to:

• Coach towards the inputs

• Assign SMART input-focused actions 

We always want to coach towards inputs

Inputs are the things we can control. This means when an employee receives feedback and coaching, they have a highly tangible item they can focus on moving forward

From there, want to assign actions to our team members that are:

• Specific

• Measurable

• Achievable 

• Relevant 

• Time-bound

At 8F, whenever we do this, I have team members include these new ad-hoc actions in their project management tracker so we can follow up on them easily without losing sight of them

To keep this on the shorter end, I won't dive into how to conduct a 1 on 1 or an annual performance review

Follow jordan_ross_8f to keep getting my content or watch my video on how to hold an annual performance review here: 

3- Retain talent

Now that management has a foundation to develop their talent, we must focus on keeping them

There are four main areas we need to track in order to keep employees long-term

• Income goals

• Personal goals

• Professional goals

• Plot twist: Love Language 

When we onboard new employees (or for those of you with no strategy, you can hold a 1 on 1 this month to learn these things), we want to ask each of the following questions:

• What are/is your 2-year income goal

• What is your 5-year income goal

• What are your short-term personal goals

• What are your long-term personal goals

• What are your short-term professional goals

• What are your long-term professional goals

When we receive these answers, we should be documenting these in an internal team member management base

Every month, during a manager 1 on 1 with their employee, they should touch on each one of these items as a check-in

The manager's responsibility here is to help project, manage their goals with them, to support and develop them to hit their goals

In addition to this, we want our team members to take the 5 Love Languages test

When we know how our people want to be treated, we can manage them in a way that makes them feel great

Some people want you to give them small gifts (love language: gift)

Some people want you to help them out (love language: acts of service)

Some people want you to acknowledge them (love language: words of affirmation)

When your managers know how their people want to be treated, and make a monthly checklist to acknowledge or support their team members with their love languages, people will feel seen, heard, and valued

Combine this with the tracking of professional and personal goals, and people will never leave

There will be a part 2 in the next week on some of the components above, so be on the lookout for my next email.

Thanks for reading. 

P.S Want to build an hands off, no stress profit generating agency? 

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Killer Content (My favorite pieces of content from last week):

• Podcast: Ultimate: I’m Building a Holding Company, Here is How & Why

• Long Form Youtube: How I 20x A Business After A Single 30-Minute Call

• Short Form Youtube: $20K to $100K A Month Profit in Two Months

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Jordan Ross

CEO & Founder @ 8 Figure Agency

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