Four Mistakes I Made When I Started My Business
💡 And how you can avoid making them in yours
💥 1. I didn’t clearly define any of the jobs in our organization, creating a vague, wing-it type work environment with little structure and zero accountability.
💡Every job in your organization should be clearly defined in writing with clear deliverables, goals, and how each role is measured. If you have a hard time defining a job for someone who you’ve already hired (retrofitting this advice essentially), have your employee write it for you OR write the job description for their replacement. This exercise alone is worth it’s weight in gold in terms of identifying crossover in duties and what your actual expectations are for your team versus what they might think they are.
💥 2. I hired randomly - people with great personalities but no experience in our industry or with no prior work within the job functions I needed.
💡 Avoid this by hiring people with experience (duh) and also PAYING THE MONEY for experienced people. I could have saved myself a lot of time, money, and aggravation if I had hired (read: just paid for) experienced people early on.
Also, as a leader it’s easy to not want to reveal how little you know (thus we hire inexperienced people to accommodate our lack of experience ourselves)
💥 3. I didn’t off-board team members when they didn’t perform and instead either created new roles for them internally or lowered my standards to accommodate the gap in skillset.
💡 Hire slowly, fire quickly. Have 5 key core characterizes that you hire to, fire to, review to, and reward to and stick to it.
💥 4. I didn’t fully step into my power as the leader, allowing entitlement and lots of masked-giver bullshit (cc @adamgrant and the note below)
💡 If you’re the leader, be the leader not the friend. Everyone needs friends but your employees will never, and should never, be your friends despite how much they might lead you to believe otherwise.
Bonus: 📚 If the above is landing with you, I highly recommend reading Give and Take by @adamgrant. It gave me tremendous perspective on what was happening in my organization and the inspiration to pivot.
Holly Meyer Lucas is an award winning, top producing real estate leader and the founder of the Meyer Lucas Real Estate Team at Compass. Based in Jupiter, Florida and servicing the Palm Beach area of South Florida, Holly and her team of agents use cutting edge marketing techniques and analytics to drive their luxury home sales. While Holly is known nationally for her work with professional athletes and their families, she and her team treat every client like an MVP. To learn more about Holly and the Meyer Lucas Team, including seeing our current listings, please visit http://www.meyerlucas.com