Episode Transcript

What’s up, everybody? Welcome back to THE a.m guys, welcome back to five minute rants.

Well today, guys, one of the things I want to talk about is skill sets, and the way that I want to talk about this is from a leadership perspective. And I want to talk about leading through people.

So when you’re building and creating and you’re in a leadership role, one of the hardest things to do is actually lead through people. And this is what I mean by that you have a whole list of objectives, goals and technical things that need to happen in order to accomplish something, in order to build something. So you’ve got a whole list of objectives, and then those objectives break down into like actionable items, right? And those items have to get done. Now what happens is, is you’ve got to start leading through people once that list becomes so big, once it becomes too big for you to do by yourself, you got to start leading through people in order to accomplish those objectives and goals.

And what begins to happen. And this happens naturally. A lot of us do this, and a lot of companies do this, and they don’t maybe understand what they’re doing. They just know this is how it works, is you begin hiring people with skill sets to accomplish the actions, to actually perform the actions, to achieve the objective.

And I really want to talk about it like this. So if you’re in a leadership perspective, I mean, if you’re in a leadership role, I would like to frame this from this perspective that the team skill sets become your skill sets. They become your skill sets to where, if you think about it from a body perspective, it’s like you’re the head. You’ve got the eyes, you can see the goal and the vision. And then you’re directing the hands, which are your team members, to begin performing the work and to begin performing the tasks that need to be completed.

And so that being said, when you’re leading through people, it’s important to know who they are as people first, and skill sets at an equal importance. Not one is more important than other. You need both. Because not only could you have the right skill sets and the wrong person in the wrong seat, like as a person, right? They are poor with fit for culture. They’re a poor fit for teamwork, they’re poor fit for multiple variables as a person, but they’re a right fit for skill sets. You could have it flipped as well. They’re a right fit as a person, but wrong skill sets, and at that point, the second variation is easier to deal with, because then you can be like, okay, cool. Do we train them up in the skill set we need them? Is this something that we want to invest in that we believe we should invest in, to train them up in to the person that has the skill sets to accomplish the objective, or is it somebody that we have to look past?

And I’m saying all of this because I found in my journey hiring and firing is not always the easiest deal. Finding the right people and finding people who are bought in, who have aligned heart positions in the work and how things need to be accomplished is a big deal. And so looking at people from their skill sets, are my skill sets, and they’re an extension, and we function as a team.

And so if you think about any sport, this is how it operates, right? Going into soccer, right? I’ve watched more soccer honestly than I’ve watched football. For anybody listening, I’m sorry, but it’s just how it is. It’s just the way I grew up in life. And so anyways, looking at soccer, the center skill sets are the forward skill sets, and they’re not the same, right? You have strikers and you have all of this happening, and they’re different skill sets for different people. And so all of that being said is this, that as as you’re leading and guiding, you’ve got to think about this from multiple aspects to where people are an extension of a team, and the more that you can actually conceptualize this and have a healthy perspective on this, the better the team’s going to be.

And it’s very interesting, because treating a team as an extension of yourself. It helps you see where cool the team’s failures are actually my failures. Because within the team you have a couple things. You have individual responsibility, and then you have holistic responsibility, so the team is fully responsible across a holistic scale, and then also the team is individually responsible for their tasks and how they’re going to support the team and follow through with the team, and the better that you understand that we’re actually extensions of each other, working together for a unified goal, the better you’re going to be able to manage a team, the better you’re going to be able to lead a team, the better that you are going to be able to move through the work and accomplish goals and be an effective team.

And the way that you actually measure effectiveness of a team isn’t just the technical execution, it’s the cohesiveness and the efficiency with which the technical executions and the goals and objectives are met. And I think it’s so important that this idea of team and this idea of work and skill sets, we tend to parse them out and to see them across the board, more holistically, is so important, just for the conversation in general, with teamwork.

So anyways, guys, I’m out of time, and I’ll catch you later. Peace.