Five Things My Team and I Do to Stay Productive and Reach Our Goals

0:0010 years ago, I made the decision to build my personal brand that was elevated, yet approachable, and reflected who I was, not just what I did. I created my website with ShowIt because it's true drag and drop freedom so you can easily build and update your site. Plus, their real human support team, game changer. Want to try it for yourself? Head to jasminestar.com forward slash show it for a 14-day free trial and first month free when you subscribe.

0:39Welcome back to the Jasmine Star Show. You know, this warm place on the internet and in your audio buds talking about business mindset and anything and everything that can help you achieve the life you very much deserve. Okay. So in this episode, I'm going to pull back the curtain and I'm going to give you a little glimpse on what it's like on the inside of the social curator team. Whether you have a massive team, contractors, one team member, a network marketing team, or you plan on growing a team in the future, you're in the right spot. My goal for this episode is for you to walk away with something that will empower you to become the best leader you can be.

1:12And make sure that you stay until the end because I have an action step for you based on what we're learning today so you can immediately start and deploy against this. So without further ado, here are five things my team and I do, well, things that we do and don't do that help us stay accountable and productive at reaching our goals. And I'm going to pause here. The reason, let me say this in the shortest words possible, this podcast is about meeting in reaching and exceeding your goals as a team and in the process becoming a better leader. Okay. Number one, we don't have meetings just to have meetings.

1:46Number two, we embrace feedback. Number three, we take monthly mental health days. Number four, we never settle for mediocrity. And number five, we refuse to gossip. Oh, yes. Yes. Pour yourself a little warm drink. We're about to get into it. Starting with number one, we don't have meetings just to have meetings. and I learned this the hard way. I was a solopreneur for almost a decade, which meant I never had meetings and I didn't know how to run them. When I graduated college, I worked as a manager at Nordstrom and I, you guys, so many times, I found myself in meetings where I just wanted to poke my eyes out with toothpicks.

2:20Now, there was like a group of people who always spoke too much, dominated every meeting. You know, it was like their voice had to be heard. Then there was a group of people who hardly cared about what was being said and like on their phones talking to each other and another group of people who were diligently paying attention. They probably had their notebooks and pens out because they wanted upward mobility in the organization. I found myself so frustrated in these meetings because an hour long meeting would have been just as effective as a succinct email. From that day forward, I promised I am never going to sit in a meeting like this again.

2:49But I actually never thought I would be in the position to actually host these types of meetings. I learned the very hard way that running a meeting is an art form. I hired my first team member in 2016. And by 2020, we had a team of 18 full-time employees. And as the team grew, we needed ways to communicate our message company-wide. Being a virtual team meant that most of our communication was done in all team meetings, like all hands, like everybody was there. But the tricky part about having 18 people in an all-hands meeting is that not everybody needed to be in the meeting at the same time.

3:22So it slowly dawned on me that these meetings looked and felt a lot like the meetings I used to attend when I worked at Nordstrom. I became the perpetrator. So when we tried having meetings with smaller groups of people, now then there was team members and there was like, oh, we feel left out. And then there's other group of people like, wait, wait, wait. It was like, I'm not even being communicated with. Or there was a lot of mixed up communication. He said, she said on this day, on that day. And so suddenly I found myself straddling the line between having meetings to talk about meetings, to talk about meetings, and then meetings that were truly effective.

3:54You know, things that were gonna move the team forward. Believe me when I say that unnecessary meetings can have a detrimental impact on both productivity and morale within the organization. Forbes actually wrote an article about this. And in that article, they mentioned a recent study that found a third of meetings are unnecessary and impacting the bottom line. So just think about the last three meetings that you had with your team. Guess what? You could probably do without two of them. So how does it affect the bottom line? Well, there are a lot of reasons, but I'm going to go over three of the top reasons why they affect the bottom line, which is what we all care about.

4:27Money in our pockets, running an effective business, having profitability. Number one, wasted time and resources. When employees are pulled away from their work for meetings that don't serve a clear purpose or an agenda, it can lead to inefficiency and lost productivity. Number two, decreased focus and disruption. Constantly adding unnecessary meetings can really interrupt everybody's concentration. This is especially critical if they are in a creative role because creative people, when they switch between tasks and it interrupts like the cognitive process, it disrupts their ability to enter a flow state.

5:00And when your creative team is working in their flow state, they produce better work faster. Number three, resentment towards leadership. When employees are held up in meetings and their to-do list doesn't get any smaller and then their goals aren't getting met, that leads to frustration, leads to an anxious team and like in a high employee turnover. No, thank you. Now, before I come across like I'm a meeting hater and I don't like them. No, I'm totally not. I love meeting with my team and I love meetings that are really productive. It's pretty much the only time that we get to see each other is during a meeting, but we all have work to do and we want to get back to doing that work.

5:36So we are productive and hit our goals. So this is what we do now instead. We each have access to a document well beforehand any meeting, and we each have a designated space to fill out two things. Number one, informed topics. And number two, discussion topics. We don't need to discuss informed topics. They're literally on the agenda just to inform the team and the team reads it on their own time. So what would be an informed thing that somebody would list on a meeting? Number one, if people are going to be out of office, if there's updates on projects, like nothing's needed. It's just like an update.

6:10So we all know status of announcements. Like what are we announcing? Like a product roadmap? Do we have promotion dates? That's all in inform. I'm informing the rest of the team that this is going. Discussion topics are things that need input, advice, or ideation from key stakeholders. These are exactly what they sound like. A team-wide discussion on how we might achieve our goals and clearly define roles in each project. So an example of a discussion topic, like let's say we have a launch promotion coming up. What we're gonna need is we need the team speaking into it. We need who's owning what project, who reports to two, what are our deadlines?

6:43So those are the difference between the two. Now here's the thing. The team is responsible to check this meeting doc in advance of our all hands meeting in any meeting. Any meeting we have, we have a doc in advance so that we know what we're talking about in the meeting. We should all arrive to any meeting knowing what we're gonna discuss. It should nothing should be a surprise. In fact, it's so very common for team members to leave questions or notes in the meeting in that meeting doc before that meeting. So we can jump in and get to the main point and then we want to use our time in that meeting as efficiently as possible.

7:15So just imagine you see a discussion topic and then other people are writing their questions or adding these bullet points. So when it comes time for that person to talk about it in the meeting, they say oh and kitty asked this and jamel asked that and jd asked this. So I want to get all of that boom. We're already off to the races. is. Now, if there's just a few things on the document to discuss, that's totally okay. We just want to make sure that everybody has a chance to be heard and there's no excuse for a lack of communication. So here is the team meeting formula that you can use. I wish I had learned this earlier on.

7:4525 % of the meeting, like that time is spent on gratitude and sharing wins from the previous week. Now, this is like, might sound weird to a lot of people, but I have a deeply rooted gratitude practice. And when I started realizing that we got on team meetings, we went all to business, which is great. And I loved it. But oftentimes meetings are a really great way to get connected to people. So when we go through a gratitude, it could be one share, like something that had been really great in that work week that you're proud of or liked, or it could be something personal. This is so many times where I hear about people's vacations or reuniting with a parent or a really great date night.

8:19And all of a sudden you get to know the human part of the team. So while it sounds a little crazy, 25 % of this meeting is really about expressing gratitude and having a space to celebrate each other. Then 50 % of the meeting time on that agenda are the items that need to be discussed. And 25 % is on value. Now I'll pause here because this is something that I implemented probably about a year and a half ago. And we're going to get to team feedback in a second, but I got a piece of team feedback that there was a person on our content team who said that she discovered things about me and my skillset and my mindset and my approach and my leadership style by watching the keynote presentations I was giving.

9:00And she said, I wonder if you could share a little bit of that in our team meetings. And I was like, oh my God, she's essentially asking me to show up in this meeting like a tiny microcosm of what I teach people on stage. She was right. Like I get on stage and I don't identify with being inspiring or empowering. I don't even identify as being like a teacher so much. But what has happened is that it's how people have identified me on a stage and the team responds really well to it. So 25 % of the meeting, I use it to try my best to inspire the team or teach them something I've learned lately. I want the team leaving that meeting feeling empowered.

9:45Now y 'all know that I don't do nice sandwiches, right? Like somebody had explained a nice sandwich is like, uh, if I have to say something that is like feedback based, well, I'm going to put that in the middle of a sandwich and put a bread on one side and bread on the side. That's like a nice sandwich. I'm not a nice sandwich kind of person. And these meetings aren't intended to be warm and fuzzy, but I am a girl who will serve you up a hot steaming empowerment burrito. You know, I'm like totally here for that. That's what I use this time in the meeting. Now, the second thing my team and I do to hit our goals and remain productive is to embrace feedback and directness.

10:13And I want to be very clear. We don't just accept feedback. We don't just implement feedback. We embrace feedback. We know that feedback, even when it's not what we expected or even what we wanted to hear, makes us stronger and it saves us time and it helps us reach our goals faster. And the thing is, employees want clear feedback. Nobody wants to waste their time doing things that don't work. Employees want to improve or the right employees want to improve. Now I want to share a way of creating productive feedback. When it came time for annual evaluations, each person was given anonymous feedback from team members who they had direct contact with.

10:52So just imagine if you were on our team, you could maybe get feedback from a division director, a manager, or a teammate. all these people have access and have worked with you. The criteria was that they had to work directly with the person who was being evaluated. When the annual evaluation was being prepared for, we would review the anonymous feedback and we would share common trends, similarities, and ways to grow. So we'll pause here because there's one thing about saying, well, what I have seen over the past year is you're doing a great job embodying our core values, which is fine. But when you are literally sitting with a team member and saying, hey, this person described working with you like working with a unicorn, this person really appreciates the way you go above and beyond to have clear communication.

11:39Now, there's also a way for us to see trends. In one particular example, we had a manager and her team really respected her. But I saw as I was reviewing these a common thread. And the common thread was, it would be nice if this person were to thank us or express appreciation for the specific things that we're doing. And I just didn't say that once. I saw three people mention it. And it wasn't a bad thing. It was not anything. And I know the manager, when I shared it with her, like, hey, the team would really appreciate if you just maybe said thank you a little bit more. And she's like, so I want to be clear.

12:15I should be saying thank you for people doing the job. job? And I said, yes, they're getting paid to do a job, but appreciation goes a long way. And she's like, I got it. It never occurred to me. Great. That's what these annual evaluations allow us to do. So I'm going to share the exact questions that we use in the questionnaire in case you would like to do the same thing for your teams. I have found that this is incredibly helpful to get direct, kind, and powerful feedback. What this is, it's on a Google form, it's anonymous and then it spits it out into a Google sheet. So question number one, on a scale of one to 10, how would you rate this team member's performance over the last year?

12:53One, extremely poor, 10, highly superior. Question two, please elaborate on why you assigned this rating. Three, how would you describe this experience working with this team member? Four, what is one highlight from the last year that you experienced while working with this team member? Question five, what would you identify as three key strengths that this team member possesses which relate most to his or her current role? Why do you say that? Six, what is one area that you feel this team member could improve upon to make them more effective in the role or on the team? Seven, have you experienced any obstacles or challenges working with this team member, i.e.

13:34communication barriers, personality conflicts, team effort? If so, please explain. Question eight. On a scale of one to 10, how would you rate their embodiment of company core values? Please explain. Okay, that's it. Just eight questions. Those eight questions from three people who we are working with the annual performance evaluation have had the most impactful way to give clear, kind, and great feedback so that together as a team, we are consistently growing and hitting our goals. Now, Brene Brown, she said it best. To be clear is to be kind. So how do you build a culture that embraces feedback?

14:11So here's a quick framework. Phase one, hiring. Ask your candidates specific questions about giving and accepting feedback during the interview process. This not only helps you find better candidates, but it sets them up exactly on what to expect when they're hired. Making feedback not seem personal or an attack. It's just part of our team culture. So I wanna pause and give a little bit of an example. during an interview. Most of the time, the way our interview process works is the division director who will be working with that team member will do a preliminary interview. And then we will do like a test assignment.

14:48And then that person will review it. If they feel like they're a strong candidate to get hired, then I will go through and do the final interview. I interview every single person who's been on the team. And during this time, I like to ask a very clear question. I was like, on a scale of one to 10, how do you give feedback to other people? Number one, being, I like to keep it as kind and soft as possible. And number 10, I say it exactly as it is. I will tell you that the way that people answer this question immediately from the outset will let us know how good of a culture fit they're going to be.

15:20And then I ask on a scale of one to 10, how do you like to receive feedback? Number one, soft, kind, and slowly. And number 10, direct and straight to the point. Those two things help us really calibrate and set expectations if they are to move forward with the team. All right, now let's move into phase number two. How are we building a team for great feedback? Training. Give as much as possible during the first 90 days. Give as much feedback and tell them and teach them. This is how we get feedback. This is how constant it is because if they can't handle that feedback or maybe they get defensive or they don't know how to improve or they just don't improve, well, you've done your part and it's best to know this early on.

15:57It's okay. It's nothing personal. It's just this is the standard and caliber at which we work if it's not a fit, no problem. Phase number three, and to go back to the no problem, we try to do this and handle this within the first 90 days. It's not fair to the person who's there to work past 90 days and figure out like if this is not a fit for them. And it's much easier for the team to say, this is just a training period and it's not a big deal. This is just how it's done. Phase three is systems. Set up processes for giving and receiving feedback. Because when the feedback is systematized, well then employees have an idea of when and how they're going to be receiving feedback.

16:31It comes on the regular. Phase four, celebration. Recognize the feedback-driven improvements. I cannot stress this enough. When a team member embraces feedback, acknowledge it. Why? Because it's positively reinforcing that this is what we do. They're going to keep getting better and better and better. Eventually, with the very thing that they struggled with, it's going to become a strength because we keep on encouraging, we keep on building it. And when that happens, you're not just improving your team, but you're helping them build resilience and reach the next level on their own. And I think that's priceless.

17:03Okay, so we have talked about 86ing unnecessary meetings, embracing feedback and directness. Now moving on to the third thing my team and I do to stay productive, which is to take monthly mental health days. I'm just rolling right through that. Now I have to tell you, when we talk about embracing feedback, there was a team member who said she had a friend on a different virtual team. And on that virtual team, they had instated a mental health day. And I was like, interesting, explain what a mental health day is. A mental health day is just a day for you to do something to focus on your mental health.

17:39Huh, I loved it. When she told me about it, we implemented it literally a month later. I read a recent study that said 76 % of a group of 2000 people reported work-related stress has negatively impacted their relationships and 66 % report losing sleep because of work-related stress. And 16 % said they had to quit a job due to stress. I don't know about you, but I don't want a business that affects people's lives in this way because it serves absolutely no one. This is exactly why we have incorporated monthly mental health days. And what I found during these mental health days is that sometimes it's used as a catch-up day.

18:19There are people who are working on a mental health day because they wanna catch up, they wanna get ahead, whatever it is. and because maybe that is what's best for their mental health. So they have like a free weekend. And sometimes they opt to never open their laptop and go get a facial or a massage. It is completely up to them how they choose to spend it. But there is zero, and I mean, zero expectation to communicate or work. If this is something that you're considering implementing, here are three things that I've learned so far since implementing them. Number one, schedule the mental health days instead of letting everybody choose their own.

18:52Like, trust me, I know it seems like it would be great to let everybody choose on their own. No, no, no. I made that mistake. But when everybody has the same day off, it reduces stress, confusion, overwhelm, and the team can actually relax without feeling like, oh, I need to check in because other people are checking it. No. Number two, be strategic about planning your mental health days and give people like plenty of time notice so they can plan accordingly. For us, like they kind of rather they fall on a Friday when the following Monday is a holiday. Oh, so the team gets a four day weekend. Our mental health days fall on a payday.

19:24I get a little spending cash or they fall on a Friday after a launch. Like your team will notice and appreciate when you schedule them strategically. And number three, when possible, as a leader and a CEO and a founder, take the day yourself. Show your team that you're not checking in. Show them that you're getting massaged, spending a day at the beach or whatever it is you're doing. This gives them extra permission that they might need to take that day off. Part of leading by example is demonstrating boundaries and breaks. Because by doing this, you're providing a subtle encouragement for your team.

20:01You know, they wanna recognize you. You're prioritizing their wellbeing as much as your own. Now, I once heard this and it resonates a little bit. Half of me was like, okay, I get where this is coming from. And the other half of me doesn't. I'm gonna explain that in a second. But there's a hypothetical scenario that's often used to demonstrate like this idea, this idea that like leaders should demonstrate it. And it goes a little something like this. There was a manager who noticed that some of his employees seemed hesitant to leave the office at the end of the day. And he was concerned that they might feel pressure to work late because he was working late.

20:32So he started sitting in his parked car outside of his office building at 5 p.m. And then he waited there until his employees had left for the day. Now seeing their manager leave the building, oh, it reassured the employees that, hey, it's okay for us to leave at the end of our shift. Now, this may tell some of us that leading by example means not only working hard, but also demonstrating that it's okay to take your lunch break, to leave on time, to take your designated days off. And here's where I'm going to pause. Because I heard this adage, and I agree with it to a certain extent. But there is another part of me that as a leader, the team I want to foster is we don't have a judging environment.

21:12if you get your work done, I don't care when you take your days off. In fact, at Social Curator, we have an unlimited vacation policy. How many days you want to take off? Go ahead. As long as you are getting your work done, as long as your role is continuing to push us forward, I don't mind if you leave work an hour early. I don't. I'm not even paying attention to it. So for me, I understand the embodiment of that idea, but I also want to cultivate a team that has so much swag and independence and charisma, or as the kids say, riz, do you. Be on my team, handle your trash, and do you. That's the kind of business that I want to build.

21:47And if you need me to lead by example, I will, but I'm not trying to foster that as a team. Oh, did I just come in high? Yes, I did. Okay, moving on to the next thing that we do at Social Curator to increase productivity and hit our goals is that we never settle for mediocrity. Now, I know, it's like eye roll moment, like, okay, who settles for it? Well, employees don't want to work for a mediocre company. They just don't. People want to be proud of where they work and they want to work with other people who work just like them. If you don't want a high performing team, you got to hire other high performers.

22:14This gives them a sense of pride and security at work. Now I want to get one thing straight here. This doesn't mean that we wait until something is perfect before we take action. We start messy. We start right where we are. Every single time we start with one blank Google doc. Not settling for mediocrity means constantly pushing others to improve and innovate and help them. No man left behind. I was raised by a Marine, y 'all. If you stuck, you're going to keep us all stuck. So I'm going to help. I'm going to drag you across to wherever we need to go because I want all of us to achieve beyond what is just satisfactory.

22:49This means embracing the journey and doing things to the best of our potential, knowing that each step is moving us forward, no matter how small that step is. It's bringing us closer to our goals. Have you heard of the Pygmalion, I think it's called the Pygmalion effect. Okay. I can't even say it. The Pygmalion, Pygmalion effect. I don't know how to pronounce it, but this research is about teachers and students, but it also applies to bosses and employees. It shows that employees can change as a result of how their leaders see them. When the leader has high expectations of their employees, it creates team members who believe in themselves and excel at their work.