7 Traits That Will Help You Build Great Teams that Deliver Amazing Results

Happy Monday morning. It’s John Garrett coming to you with another episode of Green Apple Slices. And back with me is the Accountants Group Leader for Sage Canada, Rachel Fisch. Rachel, how are you doing?

Rachel: Good, how are you doing John?

John: It’s like way too early for that big of introduction on a Monday morning, isn’t it?

Rachel: Yeah, you used your outside voice there a little bit, yeah.

John: My outside voice. Well, my apologies to everyone’s ear drums. But yeah, I’m just excited to have you back. I know that you’re on the way to the airport to head to Vancouver.

Rachel: Heading to Vancouver, great city, yeah. Love Vancouver. Yeah, tomorrow we’ve got an event going on with Sage called Sage Sessions in Vancouver. It’s kind of like a one-day mini conference with some great speakers and Michael Hyatt will be joining us on the Keynote who’s pretty fantastic too so yeah, I’m excited about it.

John: Very cool, very cool. But I’m glad that we’re able to squeeze in some time here to talk through an article like we do every week and this one I found on inc.com called 7 Traits That Will Help You Build Great Teams that Deliver Amazing Results written by Gordon Tredgold. And you can catch the link if you want to read the whole article at greenapplepodcast.com but yeah, he goes through and he forces it to be seven E’s which is kind of interesting.

Rachel: That’s a lot of E’s.

John: It’s all good. But yeah, I thought that there were some good ones in here. I mean how to help your teams as a manager. Be engaging, be empathetic, be enthusiastic, be enabling, be empowering, be encouraging, and then execute. And honestly, it sounds like five of those are kind of the same word.

Rachel: There’s a lot of the same — yeah, there is a lot of the same kind of principles involved there so basically, get out from behind the desk, get involved with your staff and help them be the best that they can be. So basically, that’s all you need to know about the article right there.

John: Right, that’s it. That’s the super fast Rachel version right there. Yeah, but it is something that I think that a lot of people forget about is maybe like the empathy side of it where different people have different communication styles and a lot of people have things going on outside of their lives and just taking a moment to take the foot off the pedal and just find out about your people and what they’re genuinely interested in are things that might be going on in their lives because that affects their work.

Rachel: Yeah, absolutely. For sure. And actually, at Deloitte, we had a whole training. I think it was like a multiple day training session on the art of empathy and how to identify where you fit on the scale as well as how to identify the people who you’re with on the scale so whether you’re meeting with peers, whether you’re meeting with clients, how to make sure that you’re communicating with them.

And I think we talked about this just a little while ago, how to make sure you’re communicating with them in a way that they best communicate because everybody’s going to default to their own so just kind of putting yourself in those shoes without being patronizing but just letting them know that you know what they’re going through and how you think you can help.

John: Yeah, no, I mean that’s so fantastic and then two of them that I thought were really, really great too were just enabling and empowering. And I talked with Brian Wagner at Stratagem. He was on the Green Apple Podcast a couple of months ago and really, really great partner there that’s doing some really cool things of just asking people where do you want to go and then helping them get there, and that’s something that I think a lot of managers forget about and a lot of leaders forget about because they want to keep the people under them because they make them look good as a leader and it’s like no.

Rachel: Yes, absolutely.

John: I think that the best manager is someone that everyone that was under you is now also a manager.

Rachel: Yeah, and when you’re interviewing, and this is actually something that came up just recently in some meetings that I was in. When you’re interviewing somebody, don’t just think about the role that you’re interviewing them for but where you think that they could go within the organization.

I think in some cases, I mean managers are so limited by the gaps that they have in their organization charts and they just need to fit a body in a role that I think the better success comes when you think of a little bit more broad, how does this person fit within the organization as a whole. You know, what are the other areas that can be benefited by this person or vice versa?

John: Yeah, the foresight there is just really great too. Just something where you have someone to think through yeah, what are the next steps? It’s not just, what are the next six to 24 months with this person? It’s where are they going also.

Rachel: Yeah, and then helping them get there.

John: Yeah, so good which is actually why I asked you to be my co-host because without you, I would just be rambling on and on.

Rachel: To nobody. Nobody would be —

John: To nobody. Ouch! Ouch! So I know you got to go catch your flight. But have a safe trip and have fun in Vancouver and can’t wait to hear about how Sage Sessions goes so yeah, have a good rest of the week, Rachel.

Rachel: Thanks. You too, John.