Do you invest in your team?

Our work environments can be fast-paced, sometimes so fast that we forget to make our money work for us. If your focus is cash flow, your employees should have the same focus. This article will teach you how to invest in your team.

Let’s start with the obvious how much time do you invest in your team each day?

Your team is an extension of you, and that’s why you spend so much time investing in them. Through training and education, you can elevate your team. You want your customers to feel like they are dealing with you at all times. Duplicate yourself, as many times as you can, but don’t stop there.

Investing in your team involves giving them skills you might not have developed or that they haven’t developed. Most employees know little about leadership, and when given a management role, it’s rocky at best because we don’t develop leaders early.

Giving them skills outside of your skillset expands the skills that you can utilize as a business owner. All of this can be done by investing 15 minutes a day in your team. As easy as it sounds, why don’t more people invest in the stock market?

It’s because investing comes with risk, sometimes an investment will pay off, whereas other times, you might lose. Investing in your team doesn’t come at a cost, but most business owners fear their employees will leave them if they become self-sufficient.

“Train people well enough so they can leave,
treat them well enough, so they don’t want to.”
-Richard Branson

The reality is, the better you treat and train your employees, the more likely they will build with you. The worse you treat them, the more likely they will opt-in forging their path. You can help them make the business of their dreams and form a deeper relationship.

The social bank account

You have a personal bank account that holds cash. You own a social bank account with every person. You’re either depositing or withdrawing from the social bank account through your interactions. What happens when you withdraw with no funds in the account? Just as you can incur fees, it will hurt your social bank account and, ultimately, your relationship.

What you’re building is trust, by proactively building trust, you make ‘deposits’ into an emotional bank account. To create large reserves in an emotional bank account, you must continually make deposits of honesty, kindness, unconditional love, and patience.

Be wary of your social bank accounts with your team members, too many withdrawals, and you’ve ruined the trust in your relationship. Without faith, your leadership abilities will hit obstacles.

Even if you have to start at $0, start depositing small payments into their emotional bank accounts but stay consistent. The moment you’re inconsistent, your money becomes no good at their bank. It’s easier to manage your business bank account than it is an emotional bank account; these are the most important things you need to understand about money.

Customers and employees

Your customers and employees are apart of the same tribe.
Customers want to make more money, that’s why they’re in business.
Employees want to make more money, that’s the first reason they look for a job.

You should be giving your customers an experience, not a service. Services are of the past; what matters today is how the customer feels about doing business with you. As we automate more of our business process, human interaction becomes more and more relevant.

The best thing you can do for your customers is to invest in your employees. Your employees’ knowledge shows in every interaction, and they’ll be the first ones to come in contact with your customers. Imagine a customer receiving sound financial advice from someone on your team. Most of us didn’t receive formal business education, for most of us, we learn from experience.

The education your employees receive starts with you, there are no longer requirements to learn after high school, and many of us forgo college. The average American will read one book in their life after college. As leaders, it’s up to us to support growth. If you’re interested in investing, start with your personal growth.

Start investing in your family and your future, remove financial stress from your child’s future.

Less stress

Money is the leading cause of stress, so how do we create less stress? Money touches almost everything in our lives, it provides us a freedom that we wouldn’t have without it, and it allows us to stretch ourselves to experience more. Stress is not merely a negative term. There is a growth behind fear. Good and bad stress can be seen as subjective, but ultimately, it brings change.

When change aligns with our goals, it feels good. When it doesn’t, we consider it negative.

Consider a diamond and a piece of coal. Both are made of carbon; the only difference is the amount of pressure applied. The right pressure creates diamonds out of the same material that makes coal.

Your employees need pressure but the right type of pressure, and under the right conditions, otherwise, you’ll make coal and not diamonds.

The key is to reduce the external stress your employees feel while creating an environment for you to apply the right type of pressure. Think back to your social bank account and the cost of a diamond, diamonds are expensive, and if your plan is created diamonds, you’ll need a lot of social equity.

If you educate your team surrounding money, you’ll reduce the stress in their lives. There are three distinct keys to money; how we earn it, how we grow it, and how we spend it. Educating your employees on growth opportunities in each category reduces the friction for you to withdraw from your social bank accounts, the less friction that exists, the less you’ll have to withdraw.

You can remove stress by accounting for major events in your life.

Encourage personal growth

Your team is comprised of different people, completely different people from different walks of life. The one thing they have in common may be that they work for you. I’m simply pointing out that there is not a one size fits all for your employees. You must encourage personal growth individually.

The first step is to encourage them to be the best version of themselves. It starts with our health. In the military, we were required to keep up with specific physical standards, you can’t make it mandatory, but you can create rewards for employees who strive to better themselves in these ways.

Often, workaholics will allow their health to suffer to get the job done. While this person appears to be doing well at work, they are expending unnecessary extra energy that you’re paying for. We should be working smarter, not harder. But today’s work environment encourages personal sacrifice at the cost of personal health, do yourself a favor and do the opposite.

Encourage a healthy lifestyle. Our health is wealth. By promoting a healthy work environment, you’re reducing sick days, reducing medical costs, and giving your team more energy. There are a few ways you can promote a healthy work environment.

Education: Hire a local nutritionist/trainer to talk to the team about eating habits.

Make it the natural choice: Keep fruits and vegetables in the break room. Make a natural choice, the healthy choice.

Team activities: Plan an active day where your team can bond by doing something physical.

When our health suffers, so does our work. This can have a big mental effect on an employee. They may feel trapped in their work. Never caught up and always behind. If your employees feel trapped, their work suffers, and you pay for it.

Professional development

Personal growth affects our confidence, and professional development affects our efficiency. But you can’t have one without the other. If we don’t believe in ourselves, we won’t seek opportunities to better ourselves.

Professional development begins the moment we recognize ourselves as a professional.

The easiest way to build this professional is to find the motivation behind each employee. Some are motivated by the money, while others find satisfaction in praise and recognition. Employees can be self-directed and self-motivated. Your job is to find out what motivates them.

Another big part of professional development is allowing your team members to grow into another position. Not everyone’s meant for the job they interviewed for, and you may find that over time, some employees need more. They need to be challenged in different areas, and their creativity needs room to grow.

Your employees’ professional development is dependent on you, while personal growth is dependent on them. Professional development can stay focused on three areas writing, speaking, and thinking.

Writing is refined thinking, whether we communicate verbally or over email or we’re taking notes, it’s a skill that pays dividends if you learn. Consider your imagination, it continually is stretching the reality around you, but if you tried to draw your vision, you’d find it a struggle. The process of writing is reducing the friction between the ideas you have and describing them to reality.

Speaking is a constant that we all deal with, even the timid and shy. Employees talk to customers, coworkers, and vendors. Communication is the key to all good relationships. Communication gives us the ability to traverse any environment we find ourselves.

Thinking is something we all learn how to do but don’t refine, because the world we live in is continuously telling us how to think and what to think. When we don’t practice something, we lose the strength we had in it, but it stays with us like that saying, “Riding a bike.” It’s harder to get back on, but once you get the hang of it, it comes naturally. Fighting the initial resistance that meets you when you decide to think for yourself is the hardest part.

These are necessary skills that can build us and help us get the job of the future.

Change the environment

Change happens in two ways when we change the environment or change your identity.
If you find yourself in an environment that continues to challenge you, you’re able to grow from it, but if your environment is suppressing you, you’ll want to change it.

Changing your identity is an easy way to instill change because, as human beings, we have a huge desire to stay in alignment with how we define ourselves. The more out of alignment, we are, the more we suffer emotionally and the less motivated we feel.

Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives,
and few can raise themselves above the ideas of the time.
-Voltaire

If we don’t change the environment, it usually changes us. You have control over the environment you build your team in and can prepare them for the future situations they’ll encounter.

Build a culture

Don’t just create a team; build a culture. A culture needs multiple elements in place to come together. A culture needs a mission. Your mission statement should be clearly defined and posted everywhere as a reminder.

Our cultures need to encourage positivity so that our employees remain open when we’re open. We seek to build new relationships and participate. A negative work environment puts us in a defensive state and hinders our ability to build relationships.

The best way to build a company culture is to communicate values that represent the mission and values your business embodies. McDonald’s corporate motto is Quality, Service, Cleanliness, and Value providing all employees with a framework to interact with the customer. The framework guides daily interactions with the customer and assists in building the culture.

Impactful meetings

If you’re like most business owners, you don’t have this additional time to invest in your employees, but we make time as entrepreneurs. Take your current meetings and restructure them, most meetings are a waste of time, time is money, and yours should be spent investing.

An impactful meeting has a purpose with a clearly defined goal, information-based meetings drag on and don’t provide clear solutions, let me explain using two examples.

In an information-based meeting, there is a discussion. The information needs to be presented before the meeting so a conversation can take place if necessary. Thinking on the spot or thinking out loud means we haven’t refined our ideas and ultimately shouldn’t be taken into consideration. You wouldn’t make important decisions about your business without thinking hard about it, don’t allow the same thing in your meetings.

Your meetings should result in the outcome of a decision. An action item without a clear choice or direction quickly becomes no one’s responsibility. If all you did was discuss reorganization, then you’ve wasted your own time by not making a decision and communicating that decision clearly to your team.