How to Build a Team That Runs Without You with Madi Waggoner

Madi: [00:00:00] by default, things are hidden. They're invisible. And what I mean by that is because we're not in a physical location, even if we're in occasionally a... the same location, we just don't see the things that are going on. If I had a really bad day, you wouldn't know that unless I actively told you so.
Madi: Or if you had really good things happening, I wouldn't know that they were happening unless you told me. Same thing goes for our work.
Intro - Outro: You're listening to the 7 Figure Leap podcast. We're here to leverage rich relationships and smart strategies to take your business to the next level. Here's your host, Dustin Riechmann.
Dustin: How do you actually lead a remote team effectively? this has been a topic that has been very top of mind for me, really over the past four years in the evolution of 7 Figure Leap, but especially in the last year, and I'd say even [00:01:00] more so, in the past six months.
Dustin: And that's in no small part due to the guest that I have the pleasure of introducing you to today. So Maddy Wagner, is a client of ours. She's been part of our community for a long time. She's also part of our 7 Figure Leap Mastermind. And in the context of today's conversation, I just want to be really upfront that Maddy has helped me directly.
Dustin: I've paid Maddy to help me answer the question, and actually implement what I feel like is a much better team structure and team communication, and just make us a much more effective remote team here at 7 Figure Leap. So I'm really excited to introduce everyone to Maddy and start to dig into the richness of this topic, and I think it's something that just doesn't get talked enough, talked about enough in entrepreneurial circles.
Dustin: So I think this is gonna be a really unique opportunity to get one of the, the best experts on this topic that I've met and I've had the pleasure of working with. So Maddy, thank you so much, first of all, for being here as part of the podcast. I'd love to give the mic over to you for a minute, kind of give people a sense of, who you are, what you do, and, then we'll start digging into this [00:02:00] topic of remote work.
Madi: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, Dustin, for having me on. As you know, I'm a big Dustin fan. I've been around the community and the Mastermind for a while now, and it's had a huge impact on me, so I'm really excited for this conversation. I have been a remote leader for the past 15 years, helping to, as I say, liberate leaders and help to elevate their teams into what I call powerhouse teams.
Madi: Oftentimes in remote work, there are so many factors that a lot of leaders and team members aren't even aware of. And so what I do is I come and work with them to make them aware of them, but then also put structures into place to make them even stronger, to maximize their strengths and be able to work better together.
Madi: And as I said, liberate those leaders, because oftentimes they're still wrapped up into too much work that they shouldn't be doing anymore. And by freeing them, it also frees up the team and the entire organization is elevated.
Dustin: Beautiful. Yeah, so much to unpack here. thing that comes to mind with me whenever I was seeking this help, and I listened to podcasts and read the books and all the things, right?
Dustin: It seems like there's sort of this [00:03:00] gap, because people talk about leadership as this sort of, like, ethereal, high-level thought leadership, you know, sort of thing that belongs in a book. And then you have delegation and, like, hire a VA, and there's sort of this very rudimentary version. But I think the reality for most of the people in our audience, and my reality, is something in between, where maybe you start with that first part-time hire and you do some delegation, you kind of get a taste of it.
Dustin: but there's so much more available between that starting point and then sort of, like, the background that a lot of us have in sort of corporate, in-office, bureaucratic sort of machine versions of teams and leadership. And so I think maybe a, a place to open up the discussion here, Maddy, is to talk about what makes remote work different.
Dustin: I know you talk a lot about, like, the three defaults of remote work, and I think it'll start painting a contrast of, like, what do we mean by remote work and why is remote work, like, a unique challenge, but also a really unique opportunity for entrepreneurs. Do you want to talk a little bit more about the defaults of [00:04:00] remote work?
Madi: Yeah. Yeah. So the first one is, by default, things are hidden. They're invisible. And what I mean by that is because we're not in a physical location, even if we're in occasionally a... the same location, we just don't see the things that are going on. If I had a really bad day, you wouldn't know that unless I actively told you so.
Madi: Or if you had really good things happening, I wouldn't know that they were happening unless you told me. Same thing goes for our work. If we're not very clear about where we're putting our work and making it visible to everybody on the team, we don't have information and context, and that can create a lot of anxiety for leaders in particular because they don't know what's happening.
Madi: They don't know if things are done. And so we have to pay attention to this default that things are invisible and then make them visible. the second one is that there's friction everywhere. We all have different perceptions and ways that we approach life and work, and because also the, with the invisibility, it just adds in additional friction, the way that we communicate, the way that we see work, the [00:05:00] way that we interpret a message from someone else.
Madi: Just even in the communication, there's a lot of friction. And then when we're starting to pay attention to the way that we work together or the things that we view as important, if we're not actively addressing that friction is everywhere, then we're not going to be able to work as well as we could.
Madi: And the third one is that things naturally move from order to disorder, and so we need to th- put things in place to help create a very simple structure to help make it easier for us to stay at this elevated level where things are in order rather than in disorder. And those are the three defaults of remote work.
Dustin: That's really interesting. if anyone's watching the video, they see my head like bobbing like a, a bobblehead 'cause I'm like, "Yes." I can think of so many just specific examples as I have sought to build a team and then lead a team, and we've had s- we've had made some pretty substantial changes to the team and, the turn of the year coming in here.
Dustin: And I think the one that really stands out to me there is the hidden or invisibility part of [00:06:00] it. and I think for anyone listening, as a leader, as someone who ha- has everything, has, like there's sort of this cliche when you're a solopreneur before you start to build this team is like the whole business is in your brain, right?
Dustin: And of course, you wanna get the business out of your brain and make it, to where other people can help with it and it has value outside of you. But I think to me that's something I've struggled with, is just the awareness that the stuff remains invisible, right? It's like, because I know it so well and I live and breathe and it's my baby and I created it and all these things and, so what are, maybe it kind of gets into the second piece where you talked about communication, but like maybe we can start to talk a little bit about the antidotes to this, right?
Dustin: Like, how do we overcome the fact that these are the realities of remote work, that they're hidden and invisible within that team structure, that there's friction everywhere, especially when it comes to communication, and then thirdly, left to, its own natural [00:07:00] devices, there's sort of this decaying that happens where you have order and then things naturally go to disorder unless you're like proactively protecting against that.
Dustin: So you have any just sort of, I don't know, practical examples or tips or, takeaways or something like that, that the, the audience could think about in the context of maybe their current team that would help to combat the downsides of those three realities?
Madi: Yeah. first of all is awareness of these things.
Madi: Oftentimes when I start talking with a leader, I start explaining and tell telling some stories. One core story that I share around the invisibility piece is I was working with a client and I interviewed all of his team and I came back to him after I'd done that and I said, "So do you have challenges in this particular area?"
Madi: And he said, no, we're good there." And I said, "Really? Three of your team members just told me that you have actually pretty significant issues in this area." And part of the, the challenge with invisibility is in remote work, people have to very proactively communicate when they see challenges. And in order to [00:08:00] encourage that, you have to create what I call spaces.
Madi: They're dedicated spaces where, you have an area where the purpose of it is we're going to talk about challenges or we're gonna talk about wins or it's a guaranteed area where something is welcome. And if you think about this in person, if you go into a, like an in-person networking event and it's designed for some, a group of people that's entirely misaligned with you, you're gonna feel very out of place.
Madi: The same thing is true for when we're trying to have our team proactively share challenges. If we don't create a space for them to do so, if we're not actively asking questions and being very intentional about the way we're asking questions, you're likely not gonna get that information. Even if you have really strong team members, oftentimes they will start to feel like, "I don't know that I should bring up a challenge every two minutes or two hours, even though I'm seeing these things."
Madi: And so being aware of them and then starting to create those spaces can really help to surface information And it's also applicable for the leader too. [00:09:00] If you have like a, you know, CEO updates space, I typically talk about Slack for this, but you can use other tools as well. If you have a CEO updates, whenever you get new information on, let's say you have a big client that you're working with and you get some really key information, if you just drop it into that channel so the team has access to it, then they're aware of what's going on, and you're also leading by example by creating visibility just by sharing information.
Madi: That's one of the biggest things I have clients start with, and then we start looking into other areas of the business like project management and making sure that's visible to other team members.
Dustin: Yeah, if it's good with you, maybe we can use Seven Figure Leap as sort of a live case study, and I say that 'cause obviously I know about it, but Maddie, I could-- I opened with, has been working with us this year and helping us overcome some of these challenges.
Dustin: And for me personally, sort of reimagining what's possible for our remote team, which has included some restructuring and some of these very practical applications like how do you structure your Slack channel, to protect against invisibility and, [00:10:00] remove some friction. And so just like a quick example on that first point, we created a water cooler channel and it's like, okay, that seems almost a little cheesy.
Dustin: that's-- honestly, that's kind of what I thought at first. I'm like, "Is that really useful?" But then just last week we had a team member who had, suffered a pet loss, and it was really sad and, you know, there's not like a good way to communicate that to the team, right? like proactively it seems kind of weird to make that a central point because you don't wanna like make her feel awkward or, you know, make the team feel awkward.
Dustin: But in that water cooler channel is a really nice place for her to sort of give a tribute to that, family member and then for everyone to have empathy and share their own perspective and things that they've experienced. and then sort of on the other side of that, we had a team member recently who had a really substantial first win, with our company and, to be able to have that sort of be public within our Slack channel allowed everyone else to give that congratulations and that [00:11:00] support.
Dustin: And I know that's-- it's very nuanced, but a year ago had these things happened, I would've known about it. But had I proactively, you know, not reached out to each person in a DM and said, "Just so you know, this has happened and this has happened and this happened," we just didn't have a central place for this very important but not necessarily like directly project relevant information that it-- you would naturally get in a in-person environment 'cause people know or they see or they talk to each other around the actual water cooler.
Dustin: so that would be like a quick example and just how we've structured our asynchronous communication in our case, Slack. so that's really good. And then, and then on the like friction- decay, kind of s- steps two and three, I have a, an example there about, how we've made some major strides to combat that, because I was really feeling the brunt of it.
Dustin: I don't know, Maddie, do you have any, like, comments on the first part before I kind of get into the, the next phase in talking about what [00:12:00] we've done in our team with your assistance to kind of remove some of the silos and some of the barriers that we have in our, have had in our communication?
Madi: D- do you mean, comment again what you shared, or more specifically on friction and order?
Dustin: yeah, just maybe let's ta- maybe,I didn't ask that very well. Maybe a, a simple way is, like, based on what I shared about how we have started to improve our asynchronous communication about things that aren't project related, is that typical? Are there things in there that you're like, "Best practice.
Dustin: Actually, Dustin, I thought this was a horrible idea, but you did it anyway." Like, just sort of commentary, 'cause you've been behind the scenes with us as we've made some of these changes. I think it's just helpful for other people to kind of see this as a live case study of maybe some things they could implement today very practically in how they're doing that asynchronous communication with their team.
Madi: Yeah. Yeah, so there's also this kind of yin and yang between asynchronous and synchronous. And so for people who aren't familiar with these terms, asynchronous is the communication essentially that happens outside of live meeting time, and then synchronous is synchronous, when you're together in one [00:13:00] room, live together.
Madi: And they really do work hand in hand, and I see in my work of doing this for 15 years, I've seen so many challenges where people aren't connecting them, where teams aren't connecting them. And so, for example, with you guys, when we were bringing on one of your more recent team members and we were doing the onboarding process, part of my process with that has been to make sure that we have live synchronous time so that I can surface and evaluate and pay attention to anything that might be-- where there might be friction, either with you or your new team member.
Madi: And then what I do is I bring in a central asynchronous channel, so we created a channel for you guys in Slack, and what that does is it removes the friction for that new team member to share anything that, could be smoother or more information they need. and then that makes sure that you and other team members are aware of it, so again, making it visible.
Madi: So in those situations, by me being aware and then being able to create, bring what I learn from the live meetings into this asynchronous space- [00:14:00] The entire team is brought together. So even though it was a one-on one, we bring it together so that everyone's, ... It's visible to everyone. And what that also does is it helps to remove you as the central bottleneck, which can so often happen in remote environments because, like you were saying, a year ago, all these DMs, if we bring it into a central place and we encourage people to use it, it helps to build relationships between team members so that the relationship isn't just between you and that person, and then you have to pass information along.
Madi: And that might be personal details, but that also might be project work, too, or ongoing work. And so when they start, when we start to create these connections between team members, it helps to create relief for you. And then the other benefit to that, too, is there's a lot of studies around if people have a best friend at work or if they're close to people at work, they're more likely to stay, and they're also more likely to get problems solved from their other team members.
Madi: There's so much benefit to creating those relationships there, and I don't see a lot of teams intentionally thinking about how do asynchronous and synchronous work [00:15:00] together in order to help solve that, too.
Dustin: Yeah, super good. And we sort of started zoomed in to, like, communication protocols just 'cause that was very top of mind for me.
Dustin: But I think to step back a little bit and talk a little more bigger picture about organization, I really wanna give Maddy credit. she was presenting at our mastermind last fall. So we had an in-person retreat last fall, and... Or was this-- Yeah, I think it was last fall. Yeah. and M- Maddy was there, and she did a presentation, and there was this graphic that I can still see in my mind's eye, and it's like, just imagine you're the CEO, you're the founder, right?
Dustin: You're at the center, and there's this sort of left to default human behavior, and people like me who control things and, you know, created things, and then you start adding people to this mix that around you, like, you get these lines, and all the lines point back to the CEO, right? So if team member A needs to talk to team member C, the line goes through the founder or the CEO to get to, from A to [00:16:00] C, and from C to D, and D to B.
Dustin: And you just get this kind of rat's nest, but the thing that you see visually is that all the lines go to the center before they can go anywhere else. And so I saw that, and I'm like, "I feel that." Like, that, that feels, like my reality. And then n- next to it was, the Maddy version or the, you know, her, the, the part that she helps founders achieve.
Dustin: And there were, you know, same diagram with the dots, one dot in the middle with the CEO and all the team members around it. And there were still, of course, some lines, usually dashed lines, that went to the CEO because they're, you're the CEO, you still have decisions to make. But many lines went around the CEO and did not require, a path through the CEO to communicate or get things done.
Dustin: And so I don't know if you have a name for that or if you wanna describe that, 'cause I wanna talk about, like, how I, how that hit me and changes I made with your help, going from last year to this year in our team structure and even who's on our team and who's not on our team any longer as a result of learning that from you.
Dustin: Do you wanna de- describe that reality maybe, [00:17:00] better than I just did?
Madi: No, that was great. it's a visual representation of this natural default of order to disorder, where you just start adding people onto your team, and because of how you brought them up, you're the main person that you're, that they're talking with.
Madi: And so when you start out that way, you're building this expectation and a habit for all of you that everybody just talks to you, talks to the founder, talks to the leader. This is, doesn't just apply to founders, it applies to leaders of departments too. So if there's a new department that gets started and there's one person running everything and then they start to hire, it's the same thing, where if everyone is communicating to that one person and we're not proactively creating relationships between other team members and putting things in place across their day-to-day and your day-to-day and even changing your own behaviors, it's gonna go naturally to that disorder, and you're gonna start to feel more pressure.
Madi: And what happens when I start getting in with teams and working with them We start seeing liberation of these leaders. It's why my assessment is [00:18:00] called that, because they start to see, "Oh, I don't have to take everything on," or, "Oh, I don't have to be the one to lead this meeting." Like, there's one story I love to tell of a leader who had a team of eight and was previously running all of their meetings, and I said, "We're gonna do something fun, and we're going to actually do a round-robin structure, where we're going to rotate between different team members leading the meeting so that they can get awareness, they can understand all the work that goes into this, and they can also build that skill."
Madi: And so they had to put together an agenda and share it out and get feedback, and then lock it in before the meeting, and then they had to run the meeting. And if anyone was going, a little distracted off a particular topic, they had to cut them off and say, "Great, let's talk about that in another meeting.
Madi: We have other things to get to," and then capture action items. And then by week three of doing this, that leader went from leading and talking 80% of the time down to 5% of the time. Because part of what that did is it changed the mentality for everyone, because they were owning the meeting, because they were taking turns leading, and they also had more [00:19:00] of an understanding of everything that needed to be covered.
Madi: And then they started asking each other and solving each other's problems and bringing up challenges so that they could work together. And I remember talking to this leader, and they're going, "What? What? I don't even
know what happened here. This is amazing." But it's that relief, it's that liberation that they start to see, and that's just in one particular team-wide meeting.
Madi: If you start applying these different concepts to everything you do, it's why my teams start to see things going faster. The leader doesn't just get liberated and feel relief, but the team starts to be more proactive, and they start to be able to move faster, and they see results faster.
Dustin: Yeah, and as you were describing that, there...
Dustin: It's a tension that I felt that I'd say largely overcome. There's still, remnants in me, if I'm being honest, and there's this, it's around the theme of ownership, which is like a word that you just said. And to me, like, ownership in one-- on one hand it liberates the leader because they don't have to own everything, [00:20:00] and on the other hand, though, you have these powerhouse teams and like I struggle sometimes with this mindset of, is it fair for me to give them ownership?
Dustin: D- You know, if they're a contractor and say they work a part-time schedule and that was our agreement and they are responsible for certain, deliverables or outcomes, it's sort of a different level to say, "Well, you own this." Like, you now are responsible for this as a whole and not just the task under that.
Dustin: And so if I may, Maddy, I talk about, my lived experience with that over the past year and then where I'm at now, and maybe you can coach me a little bit on kind of the, the next phase of this. 'Cause I will... I suspect that a lot of people listening to this have been through a journey where they're the solopreneur, and maybe they hired a VA part-time, right?
Dustin: And then maybe they hired another contractor to help with some marketing, and then they hired another contractor to help with sales calls. And you sort of developed this quote unquote "team" that wasn't [00:21:00] actually developed as a team. They kind of came piecemeal and each person signed up as a contractor to complete specific tasks on the team.
Dustin: and that's where I found myself last year. I'm like, "Everyone's doing their job." "Everyone is checking the boxes that I hired them to check, and yet all roads lead through Dustin. This doesn't feel very liberating." And I was like, "I need people to have ownership of things." and so what I did at the end of last
year is I went to a couple of these contractors who I love and they're friends and I would never say anything negative, but I had a really frank conversation.
Dustin: I'm like, "Hey, here's the reality. This is what you signed up for and you're doing it. Good job. This is what I need, right? And it's slightly different. I'm not... it's 90% the same, but there-- the nuance is really important because what I need you to do is own the outcome of this function that you've been doing."
Dustin: and a couple people in that mix were not really up for that. And so I had to make some painful decisions and said, "Well- That's what we need. So you're no longer my contractor, and we left on [00:22:00] good terms, and I referred them to other people that needed task mastering. and then I proactively hired replacements, and part of that hiring process was like, "Look, I know you're only working here 15 hours a week and you handle, let's say, email," but we had a whole meeting in the on- or in the hiring process about the tasks to be done.
Dustin: But then I had a whole separate meeting to say, "Here's what ownership means for this role, and here's what your scorecard's gonna look like, and I want you to be comfortable that you can do this, you wanna do this, and that the compensation I'm giving you covers you having a fuller role than just sitting in a silo and shooting stuff back to me to review, 'cause I need you to be part of this more cohesive team that we're building."
Dustin: And so I feel like we've largely gotten there. But yeah, I guess the question there, Maddy, on the table is, man, how do you make that transition if you find yourself listening to this and you realize you are the disordered leader, you are the center with all the lines going to it, and you have to change something in order to get to a powerhouse [00:23:00] team?
Dustin: Like, what are some of the maybe, like, higher level, tough leadership decisions that people need to make to get from disorder to order? I know that's a really big question, but I just feel like it's gotta be in the back of minds of people listening to this who have already created something that feels chaotic, and they don't know how to fix it.
Madi: Yeah. the way that I look at this, the way that I look at teams and people in general, like for me personally, my kinda life mission is to galvanize people to be the best version of th- of themsel- excuse me, the best version of themselves wherever they are, so that's in their work, that's in their personal lives.
Madi: So for me personally, the way that I look at teams and individuals is that you should always be growing. You should always look to be the best version of, version of yourself. So when you learn some new information, you should bring your team into that and say, "This is where we've been. This is what I've learned.
Madi: This is where I wanna take us." And growth-driven people are generally motivated by that and want to be a part of that, [00:24:00] especially if you invite them into it, especially if you ask them those questions of, "What's your feedback? What's your thoughts? Like, if this is the direction we're going, what do you think we need to change, and what does that mean for you in your role?"
Madi: I mentioned earlier creating spaces to invite people into it. Questions, intentional questions are part of that. And so I just listed off several and how I would share that in that type of conversation. And I actually think that's a great opportunity for you to refine and make sure that your team is aligned with this direction you wanna take your business.
Madi: And there are times where team members that you've had for a long time might no lo- or a short time, long time or short time, might not be a fit anymore. And it's actually a gift for you to bring them into that conversation. If they decide that's not aligned with where they wanna go, that's a gift for them.
Madi: They can then make that decision. You can part on good terms, and if you want to, you can, you know, help them out with getting their next role or whatever it is. but having those open conversations can create so much richness [00:25:00] in how you operate your business and the way that your team is connected.
Madi: And if you're working with contractors, and let's say you're paying them hourly before, but now there's some other things around, like team cohesion, maybe you add a little bit of a base on top of it to cover that, and that also is a reflection of your values and a respect of them and who they are and their time.
Madi: And so there's a- actually a lot of opportunity, I think, in that. And in the things that I teach my clients, there's also, what I call cadences. It's a, like, a recurring event that you check in on things or you evaluate or you brainstorm on something in particular that needs to be adjusted. And I set my expectation for clients that if you are a growth-oriented team, we're going to be addressing some of these things and putting them in place so that you guys are always getting better.
Madi: And that's the kind of baseline that I start with, is when I work with teams, whenever I've done hiring, whether for myself or for clients in the past, my main focus is I'm looking for driven, growth-oriented [00:26:00] people, because when you bring those people into your team, you can do a whole lot with that.
Dustin: Yes.
Dustin: That's beautiful. Well, that's maybe a good segue, 'cause I wanted to make sure we talk about your business. I mean, part of what I think makes this podcast unique is we bring experts on and we teach their expertise, and we're gonna get back to that, and we're gonna talk about the Liberated Leader Assessment and the different archetypes so people can really start to take practical action.
Dustin: But I think as a, a little sidebar here that, which will also be really useful for people listening, tell me about who your ideal client is and how you like to work with people and I'm happy to share my experiences working with you in a couple different capacities. But, I'd love to hear in your words, like, what's Maddie's business about?
Dustin: Who do you serve? And, like, where do you love to meet people that really lights you up, so that you can do your highest and best work?
Madi: Yeah. So I've worked with people in a variety of different, like, sizes of teams, but my main thing is you have to be growth oriented. You have to be willing to hear feedback and evaluate, "Oh, maybe I'm not doing this [00:27:00] well," or, "Maybe we as a team are not doing this well," or, "Here's where we are doing things well."
Madi: That's where I start. And then I look at leaders and then teams that... I mean, I've worked with people with teams as small as just one other person on their team to teach them this material, because it has such an impact. So as long as you have at least one team member up to generally 20 is kind of my sweet spot.
Madi: If we go any larger than that, then I wanna break it out into, smaller groups because the, there's a lot of benefit in bringing smaller groups together and helping them to, The, the way that I work with teams is I ask very intentional questions, and I have everybody in the same room And ask them to reflect and share, and it creates such an awareness of, "Oh, I didn't know that about this person.
Madi: Oh, that was something that was hidden 'cause I didn't know that." Or, "Oh, I can see how th- that's gone from order to disorder for you," and, "Oh, here's some ideas for how we can make this better for all of us." I had a client I was working with recently where they had-- They were adjusting one particular part of their client experience, and there were a couple of team [00:28:00] members who weren't directly involved in that project.
Madi: But what I called out to them is, those two people have very unique strengths that you guys need to bring into the brainstorming of this in order to make the client experience up to that next level because of their unique experience. Even if they're not directly involved in delivering at that point, they have strengths that they clearly see in their own work, but we might not often think to bring them in.
Madi: And so the ICP, why it's so important for them to be growth-oriented is because of that. They need to be able to feed off each other and grow. And I have had clients before where we've had some team members who are not growth-oriented, and that comes out very easily in those, conversations, yeah.
Madi: They're just like, "I'm not here for this." Yeah.
Dustin: it's like, it's great, but now we both know you're not here for the next phase of what this business and this team, you know, requires. Yeah, that's super. That's-- Yeah, so growth-oriented, like one to 20 team members, and I know there's different things that you can help with.
Dustin: I mentioned, like at a high level, Maddy really helped me [00:29:00] identify just the reality of my business and how the team had ad hoc got created over time, and how I was showing up as a leader in that. and then one of the things we identified in there as I started to kind of right, not right size, but right, right place the team and really define what winning looks like for each of these roles and where we're going and setting that vision and getting the right people in the right seats is, like I identified there was a missing seat, right?
Dustin: There's like, oh, here's a very clear gap where I'm not in my unique ability, but I own a function. In this case, it was sales. and I was like, now I'm both excited because I know that this is the right next team member and honestly a little scared because I've screwed this up several other times and I don't wanna make the same mistakes.
Dustin: And like, man, how do I like define the right role and the right description and then of course hire the right person and then bring them in and
onboard them? And it's, I guess the way I would put it, Maddy, is once I realized the [00:30:00] value of what we've built and the team was functioning well, it's like if I felt a higher calling to get the right next person in the right way and, you know, not disrupt what we had already created and also make sure it's the right person to be additive to this process versus, something that could potentially create disorder again.
Dustin: So I guess the question in there, in sharing my experience. So Maddy helped me with that whole process and it has been a stunning success. It's been really good and I've been very grateful for her direct help and involvement and
again, helped me define the right organizational structure, find the gap, identify what that role should actually be, write the job description, and then go out and actually hire which was a whole process over the summer.
Dustin: hire the person and then onboard them, and then we've been in this phase, recently of the onboarding and all this sort of, tuning, I guess it's like, of communication and understanding how they fit in and what makes them tick versus makes me tick and h- how do we [00:31:00] handle some of these default realities and the yin and yang,of our interactions.
Dustin: So is that typical? Like, so let's say you work with an, a leader and like maybe e- a better way to pr- ask this is like what's your process? So i- if they're a growth-oriented leader, they know they need some help, they're, they see a higher potential for their team, they're committed to that, but, they're good at like the thing they did when they started the business.
Dustin: They're not necessarily feeling the best about their leadership skills. Like, what's a typical process, and is like filling in team members on the org chart a typical part of that, or was I sort of the exception?
Madi: so the thing that I always start with whenever I work with a leader and their team is I have them go through, for the leader it's the Liberated Leader Assessment, and part of that asks some open-ended questions about the work that you started out doing in your role and what you're doing now and the things that frustrate you and the things that energize you.
Madi: And that creates, for me, what I do with that is I create an ownership snapshot, and what that is that's a [00:32:00] tool that I've used for the past 10, 12 years to help create clarity on these are the things that maybe we should look at delegating. And it's a conversation starter typically off the assessment, and then I dig into it further and we start...
Madi: It's pretty easy for me to identify here's some gaps of where you're still trying to manage this work and it doesn't make sense for you to do this anymore. And team members also have their own, what I call the Unlocked Team Member Assessment, and it's a similar assessment, but specifically for team members.
Madi: They also get an ownership snapshot. The ownership snapshot is a tool that I use all the time to create clarity on someone's current roles. The reason why it's a snapshot is it's a snapshot in time Of what you're currently managing, and then I typically pair that with a, what I call the quarterly momentum check in, and that's essentially evaluating, this is how things have changed over the last quarter, and how we, how the role has changed, and does it make sense for us to delegate?
Madi: Does it make sense for us to hire? I've had plenty of times myself when I was working [00:33:00] full-time work, and now with consulting, where I've looked at before and after three months, I'm going, "Oh, that's why I feel like I have so much work to do. My role has doubled." And it's a very clear insight for leaders and their teams of, oh, we need to make some changes.
Madi: So that's typically where I start, because we have to start with clarity, and I know this is something that's important to you, too, 'cause I've... We've talked about it in the mastermind. We've talked about it in the Podcast Profits Accelerator. It's such a core piece to making decisions that when you have that clarity, you can start to see, and then you can start to take action.
Madi: And as far as hiring's concerned, the main issue that I see a lot of leaders make is that they're not being intentional with the entire process, and I don't mean that, they don't care. It's just they have so many things going on, it's really hard to prioritize, "Okay, now that I have this clarity, do I need to have some other people ask me questions?
Madi: How do I create a job description? How do I create the application?" And there's so many different pieces to it, and it takes so much time that [00:34:00] oftentimes the big issue I see is that a lot of leaders will just hire who's in front of them without creating that structure first, and then they end up staying on the team for a long time, and it just isn't creating that really strong powerhouse team that all leaders wanna have.
Madi: I
Dustin: love that. Yeah, and I've been guilty of that. And so- So far today we've talked, we've kind of highlighted a bunch of, potential issues, that, you know, leaders experience when they are building and managing and leading and thinking in the future of their remote teams in particular. but it sounds like the universal starting point, so people are going to have a different path because we're all different, we're building different things, we have different personalities and goals and business types, and you are able to,meld your services to what that individual leader needs, which is, you know, why you do an in-depth, engagement with your clients.
Dustin: But it sounds like the common starting point is clarity through this assessment. So I'd love to talk in our remaining time [00:35:00] about the Liberator Leader, Liberated Leader Assessment, which I've taken and has been super insightful for me, and, I realized in taking it that Maddie had sort of had me take it in its unofficial form, you know, in the early parts of the work that I described before.
Dustin: But for the benefit of our audience, it's now, a thing they can go take, and we're going to invite them to do that at the end of the interview. But yeah, talk, talk to me about the Liberated Leader Assessment, and more specifically, maybe we can walk through some of the archetypes, some of the, like, results
that people could get, so we can just give people some, a sense for what this assessment will do for them, what kind of clarity they're going to get, and, because that will really drive the next appropriate action for them, right?
Dustin: So yeah, tell me more about the assessment and the archetypes.
Madi: Yeah. So there's five archetypes, and the way that it, they're laid out is actually kind of a ladder of Here's how desperate your situation is or here's how liberated you are. There, it starts with the switchboard. So if you imagine an old switchboard, it's someone who everything's [00:36:00] coming in and you have to redirect it.
Madi: Oftentimes that means you're doing project management. You might be doing all of the communication between your team members. You might be doing all the communication between team members and clients, and it's just a very exhausting role to be in as a leader. And I've had some people tell me, "Well, yeah, okay, I'm a switchboard, but I don't quite have the ability to hire more than what I already have."
Madi: There's a lot of things that you can adjust with your existing team to help relieve that from yourself. So switchboard is the first one.
Dustin: Switchboard's the lower rung of the ladder, but it's not a judgment, it's just a reality check on clarity and what your function is as a leader currently.
Madi: Correct. And it, the whole thing around this is creating awareness, right, of where you can create opportunities for improvement and freedom for yourself.
Madi: The second one is stabilizer, so this is one who's a little bit out of that, like, switchboard mentality and isn't having to direct quite so much, but they're the ones who's catching all the issues. They're the ones who's kind of hovering and, like, waiting to review things and make sure that it's high quality before [00:37:00] it goes out.
Madi: In some cases, what I see with those is there's a lack of trust, and so there's some things that we can adjust. It might be either team members or it might be just communication and proactive communication from team members that helps to relieve some of that. but the stabilizer is still kind of a Our, our nervous sy- system is pretty dysregulated 'cause they're just kind of hovering all the time.
Madi: the third one is compass, and so a compass is someone who a lot of questions and decisions are coming back to them. Most of the work is being done by other people, but when there's things that come up that people aren't sure what to do with them, it comes to the compass and they create direction for where people should go.
Madi: The, the fourth one is kind of a silly name. I call it the fog walker, and the reason why I say that is because you're walking through fog. You don't have visibility. You might be pretty out of the day-to-day work, but we still also have a dysregulated nervous system because you don't know what's happening.
Madi: You don't know if there's issues. You don't know what wins your team is having. You don't even know how your te- team is making [00:38:00] decisions, which creates this sense of, "I don't know what's happening, and so maybe I need to get back into it so I know." And a core adjustment for that, a lot of the work I do is making your team more proactive in a lot of different ways.
Madi: And for the fog walker in particular, it's more about the communication and helping the team to understand this is what life is like for your leader, and this is how you can help in a easy, simple way that isn't gonna create a lot of extra work for you. And then the fifth one is what I call the trailblazer.
Madi: So this is someone who is typically addressed. they have, like, a pretty strong team. They delegate pretty well. But there's still a lot of opportunities for adjustment within that. Oftentimes, part of the reason I love this assessment is because not everybody is gonna select the same answers that 100% they're a trailblazer.
Madi: There's always some answer that leads to there's other refinements that we can make in their business, whether it's oftentimes it's how do you handle questions and your team coming to you with problems. [00:39:00] A real simple thing that I recommend to all of my clients is when someone comes to you with a problem, you turn it around on them and say, "What do you think we should do?"
Madi: Very simple question. Oftentimes when clients start using this, they have to say it maybe three times to a single team member before that team member starts coming with a solution first. And simple things like that throughout the entire workflow, creating the right spaces, it starts to make it so that we can liberate leaders so that they can do things like I've seen with my clients, where they're able to take a month or more away from their business and things just keep chugging along.
Madi: That's what the liberation looks like.
Dustin: Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah, I, and I didn't have the before and after version of this, but in listening to your descriptions, I'm like, I was probably, last year at least, before I worked with Maddy at all, I would say I was very much like stabilizer, maybe compass, you know.
Dustin: But I'm pretty much involved in every decision. I think I was setting a general direction, but I was very much the bottleneck. when I took the assessment more recently, I'm proud to [00:40:00] say I was the trailblazer, and yet I know even in that trailblazer, sort of rung of the ladder, I got my foot down and then some other ladders, right?
Dustin: Like it's, as you just said, there's nuance, right? And that's why the archetype is really powerful to sort of give you a overall gauge of like, where am I in the, my vision of what I want to be as a leader and how I want this company to run. But then there's always these little, little or big, corrections and optimizations.
Dustin: And the other thing that I think is really important, it's one of the things we opened with, is left to nature and left to time, things will kind of naturally
devolve back to disorder, right? So even if you tune things up and you get it really working well, if you then you just kind of take your focus off of it, it'll naturally start to degrade over time.
Dustin: And so, yeah, so we're going to tell people how to take the assessment, Maddy. And so, Yeah, let's just start there. Let's talk about where do they can take it, and then maybe what they can do with the results, to start making some meaningful changes in their [00:41:00] business if they're leading a remote team or even if they're a solopreneur and they're like, "Hey, you know what?
Dustin: I want a team. I need to make this first hire. I'm drowning, but part of what I'm holding myself back from is I'm scared 'cause I don't really know how to be a leader," right? And that was definitely me for several years. so yeah, where can people go to take the Liberated Leader Assessment, first of all, and then we can talk more about, like, steps after that they could take to, really make some meaningful progress.
Madi: Yeah. Yeah. So it's liberated.buildingremote.co. There's no M at the end. Liberated.buildingremote.co, and that will walk you through all of these different questions. And I've had people who have taken it tell me, "Oh, I had to pause on that question 'cause I wasn't sure how I wanted to answer that." They're very in-depth questions and answers.
Madi: they're still multiple choice, so it's not... I know entrepreneurs, I know leaders. I don't w- I'm not gonna make this hard on you, but it will challenge your thinking. And so I'd really encourage you to take it, and if you're thinking about, like you were saying, if people are feeling [00:42:00] nervous, there's so many little things that you can do to adjust your leadership and feel more comfortable in it, and I'm real big on making life easy for you and giving you simple tactics.
Madi: My whole thing around teams, too, is You and I were talking about this before is the way that I work with teams, it's very similar to creating almost like a mastermind-type setup for the teams to challenge their thinking, to question, "Oh, we had assumptions here. We need to adjust this." And that's part of what the Liberated Leaders- Leader Assessment will do for you is by, is to highlight some of those things for you and how you interact with your team.
Madi: And then if you decide to explore working with me, part of that is I work directly with your team 'cause it makes it easier on you, and I can start to challenge their thinking. All of this is focused on how do we liberate you from the things that are challenging and the things that come up. And even after, like
you've said this, Dustin, in our mastermind before, as you go forward, you might solve certain problems, then you just have the next version of problems that you need to solve, and so things [00:43:00] keep coming up.
Madi: So the Liberated Leader Assessment is not just a one-time thing. It's a check-in point, especially because it's attached to that ownership snapshot.
Dustin: It's beautiful. So liberated.buildingremote.co. highly recommend. It's free, so, like, just go knock yourself out. What I really liked about it is there's a lot of multiple choice questions that, in and of themselves, really make you think because you have to like, "Am I this one or this one?
Dustin: I think it's more this one," right? and just the process of taking the assessment is really enlightening, and there's some qualitative questions towards the end, too, which really give you the space to think on your business, think about your leadership a little more objectively than you probably get the s- time and space to do day to day.
Dustin: This, whole thing took me less than 10 minutes, so it's, doesn't take long 'cause it's efficiently laid out. But I think just the act of taking the assessment will be a huge value add to people and a source of clarity. and then of course, you get your results and action items based on your results.
Dustin: And then if you ultimately are like, "I just need someone to come do this and help me and help my [00:44:00] team, be a powerhouse team," like, I highly recommend Madi. She's been a huge help to us and, and a huge help to people in our mastermind, too, so it's not just me that I speak for on behalf of the direct day-to-day interaction.
Dustin: Madi's a gem and a super gift to me and to my team and to our community. so liberated.buildingremote.co, that's the place to go take the assessment. It's the best next step for anyone listening who is wanting to have a powerhouse team or you already know that's one of your next steps in your entrepreneurial journey.
Dustin: so Madi, thank you so much for being here, for sharing so openly, for giving me some space to kind of process some of these evolutions I've had in my own, leadership and, a lot of it with you alongside me, at least the be- the
better parts of it. So, thank you for being here, and thanks for being a gift to me and to our community.
Madi: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me, Dustin, and thank you for always creating spaces for people to grow and find clarity and be able to grow their businesses, because you've been such a huge help to me in my business and my journey, and I can't thank you enough for allowing me and [00:45:00] inviting me into this space. [00:46:00]