Lot of times, the dangerous part here of wanting to let go and empower team members is we abdicate. Hello and welcome back architect nation. This is the Business of Architecture podcast, and the question we're tackling today is, how do you help your team members grow this episode is sponsored by Smart practice, the world's leading step by step business training program that's helped more than 103 architecture firm owners structure their existing practice so the complexity of business doesn't get in the way of their architecture. Because you see, it's not your architecture or design skills that's holding you back. It's the complexity of running a business, managing projects and people dealing with clients, contractors and money. So if you're ready to simplify the running of your practice, go to Business of architecture.com. Forward slash smart to discover the proven simple and easy to implement smart practice method for running a practice that doesn't get in the way of doing exceptional architecture.
Hello, listeners. We hope you're enjoying our show. We love bringing you these insightful conversations, but we couldn't do it about the support of our amazing sponsors. If you're a business owner or know someone who would be an excellent fit for our audience, we'd love to hear from you. Partnering with us means your brand will reach over 40,000 engaged listeners each month. Interested in becoming a sponsor, please send us an email at support@businessofarchitecture.com
Joining me today is my co host, Ryan Willard. Ryan, how are you today?
Fabulous. Thank you very much. Enoch,
so this question came up on our Design Council call today, which is the call that we lead with our highest level firm owners and firm leaders. And one of the constant conversations that we're having is, how can I grow my team? How can I have my leaders step into more leadership potential within my firm? And this desire is really rooted in a number of problems that that you may face as a firm owner. Problem number one is, you're just stretched thin. Let's face it, way too many things to do in the day, too many hats to wear, the marketing, the business development, the team accountability, the hiring, making sure the invoices go out. I mean, just reading the list of everything you have to do as a firm owner sometimes can just be exhausting. So it may have come up in your head, Hey, how can I delegate some of this? How can I turn this over to others? Problem number two is this inherently puts a limit on the growth of your firm. Now when we're talking about growth, we're referring to not just the size of the firm, but this leads into problem number three, which is the limit on your impact, your influence and your income. Now that third one, the income, of course, that could be that's not necessarily hard and fast rule, because just because your team grows doesn't mean your income grows. Oftentimes, what we see is because firm owners aren't trained in proper management techniques, when the firm grows, they actually make less money. This can be extremely frustrating. And then problem number four here is the risk of losing an employee that you put a lot of time, energy and money into as a firm owner. This may be something that keeps you up at night most maybe you have the Die Hard Allegiant of your team members, but you know that if one of these team members was to leave the firm, it would be a crushing setback, because you've invested so much into this person, and so your mind may be thinking about the following potential, which is, hey, how can I help my teamers stay so Ryan, walk us through the possibilities, sir. I just went over the problems that generate here. What are the possibilities?
Well, first of all, would be having a proactive, self motivated, self directed team. And I think that's the kind of possible, Ryan. It's the organization that everybody is deeply desiring, but so few have. But you know, we've got clients where we where we've seen it, where you've got inspiring leaders. I know there's plenty of architectural offices where they know that they've got inspiring team members there, and just seeing and having people feel the freedom to take full ownership over a project, over the team that they're managing, over the clients, over communication, or anything else is something that many architects, you know, they would absolutely love to happen. So that's the first possibility, having a self motivated, self directed team. The second possibility is actually you've got time in your business, you've now got time to design a business to deliver on the things that bring you the most fulfillment. I really enjoy the kind of cycle sometimes we see here at Business of Architecture, where we have a a owner of a business come to us. They're stretched thin. They're exhausted. We help them free up their time with effective delegation, and they're able to make the business work better. They can focus on more of you know, what we might call the CEO role. They're able to focus doing that. Guess what happens? More money? Starts happening in the business, the more money starts happening in the business. Now we've got agency. Now we've got freedom, and with that money comes more time. And people who do that well, you know, we've got a client at the moment who's they've created a fantastic business. They've been the CEO. They've taken that CEO role very seriously. And now they've got a team in place who can take the reins of CEO, which means that they can go and indulge themselves in being the creative mastermind in in the office, and can really enjoy an architecture practice that is delivering on things that are important to them. The other possibility is actually having the growth of the business maximized, so the growth potential is reaching what it could. There's nothing worse than you as a business owner, feeling like your business is just sitting on so much potential. We hear that a lot from practice owners that they know if they could just lift their head above the parapet, then they know that the team could do great things. And it's frustrating as well to see team members underperform who you know are great. So having a business where people are people individually, are reaching their potential, who are stretching themselves, you get to have the enjoyment of seeing people you know go through that, go through a struggle, and then come out on the other side, like, like a like a butterfly, and transformation really, really great. And finally, is having team members stick around for long term growth, having a high level of retention of your staff, and you know, really having team members in your office under your stewardship, developing themselves as leaders for the majority of their careers. Now, I think that's a great testament to an organization, particularly nowadays, where young architects are being trained to, you know, career advisors, just change, just change career. Just change job. Every couple of years. There's a lot of you know, we've spoken about this before. Then the reason why that's so popular is because it works, because you can, you can boost your salary very quickly by leaving and going elsewhere. But we want, we want to have a possibility where people can do that inside of your organization, where they can grow their careers and they can have surges in their salary, because the business has been set up in a in a way where there's a transparency, or there's some mechanics where harder you work, you can get rewarded financially for kicking ass, rather than and then that's that stops people having to look outside when they know that they can be rewarded for putting in the hard work that either with a, you know, more responsibility, more money, more benefits, more bonuses, more time. Great. That's what we want to be creating. This
brings up a crossroads that we know that many firm owners face, which is growing a firm that gives people opportunity. One of my favorite quotes that I've mentioned here on the podcast before is by by Gary Keller, the founder of Keller Williams real estate. And Gary Keller says that his goal, in terms of teams, is to make his world so big that everyone else can build out their worlds within it. In other words, this is what we're this is the removal of a glass ceiling. There are many architects that start their own practices because they reach the limits of the growth and progression within their firm, and so their only option is, hey, look, I'm not going anywhere here. I'm going to jump out and go here elsewhere. So as a firm owner, this puts you in a difficult spot, or you have to make a decision. Let us put it that way, have to make a decision, because if you're going to grow. If you're going to provide opportunities for people to continue to grow, that means that your firm is going to grow. So you have to find opportunities for the firm to actually grow in size. And you know, depending on your vision where you want to go, many firm owners, and it's completely okay. You're just, you just don't want to do that. It's fine. You know, you're like, you know what? They can go start their own firm. They can start from elsewhere. But I want to keep this lean and mean team here, and I just want to design this so it works for me and for my life. I
think that's really a great paradigm. Is creating something which is big enough to house other people's ambition, and I think that says a lot about certain types of of leaders to be able to have the capacity to think that big, or to, you know, I like to see architectural practice owners who encourage entrepreneurship. You know, we had, I've been in conversations with Mancini Duffy over the years. And how they've incubated new departments in their office, from, you know, ambitious individuals, or we've got our own clients who have encouraged their you know, associates to literally, kind of start a satellite office, for example, and they get to be part owner of that satellite office, and they get to go through the process of growing and building out a business, but they're doing it within the safety of the umbrella of the of the parent company. And that takes that takes some vision, and I think is really rewarding for both for both parties, and is a great way of retaining talent, because, you know, you're you're thinking in alignment with the ambition of your team members. Why the hell would we not? Why would the hell would we want to be losing ambitious team members?
Very costly, very costly for a business. I mean, it's expensive to very expensive to lose a team member, Ryan, one of the top, one of my best memories of this interview I did with art Gensler years ago, when I was chatting with him, was he talked about the first time they opened a satellite office. He had a young woman on his team who had sort of reached that glass ceiling. She was looking for more opportunities, and they had gotten a big project in Denver, and so he said, Well, hey, why don't we do this? Why don't you just move out to Denver and and start up an office over there? And thus began the growth trajectory. But it takes us, it takes a certain kind of leader to be able to do that, to be able to say, okay, hey, look, we're going to find opportunity for you. We're going to grow here. It takes certainty. It takes belief that you can breath the work is going to keep on coming in. If you're in a place of scarcity, worrying about when the work will come in, you won't want to grow the practice, because you'll be worried that everything will collapse with the next recession, you'll hate the idea of laying people off. And so it takes a lot of self belief, takes a lot of certainty, takes a lot of compassion, takes a lot of direction, a lot of vision to be able to effectively grow practice and empower your team members to be part of that growth.
Absolutely, I think that leads nicely into the kind of principles here for helping leaders grow. The first one being, we were kind of discussing earlier that laissez being laissez faire, or creating space, and that's exactly what we're what we're talking about here is, is being able to create space for other people to grow. A lot of architecture firm owners unintentionally smother their employees because they are so what's the word? Maybe micromanaging, in terms of how they want things to be done? I fully appreciate the trauma that can be associated with, kind of letting go of the of a project, and then having one of your leadership team take on the project and then not do it as well as you could, and there being mistakes, and then you happen to pick up the pieces, and you know that can leave a kind of post traumatic stress disorder From many architecture firm owners that they tried it, once they let go the reins, we nearly got sued. That's what I'll often hear what Ryan, we nearly got sued last time I did that, because so and so made a mistake. But there's, there's kind of letting go responsibly to somebody who's competent and who has got the the ability to be able to to run with it, and then there's kind of, you know, being able to guide and train people, but that, that ability, that where you were just all those qualities that you were just attributing to Art Gensler, you know of being able to have that confidence and certitude, to be able to let go and to have somebody else go off and and do it great leaders, that's what they do. They they can hear the leadership potential in somebody else when even that person can't themselves, and they've got a tolerance for the risk that's involved, and then I'm gonna get then I'm gonna get upset about
it, yeah. And as you mentioned, there's a difference between abdicating and delegating, and so a lot of times, the dangerous part here of wanting to let go and empower team members is we, we abdicate. In other words, of course, they abdicate. Means like the king or the queen abdicates the throne, I'm just going to leave everything in the hands and they'll sort it out, right? So what we don't want to do is it's you got to make sure that you're not just putting things on people who haven't demonstrated their expertise and their ability to pull that thing off. You delegate them. You support them with tools so they can be successful in the accomplishment of that. Moody.
There's a process to delegation. Okay, so you're talking about this idea of abdicating responsibility, just dumping it onto somebody and they're not ready for it. There's often a kind of series of different ways of empowering somebody to be able to be competent to do something there is, first of all, just being very directive. Okay, so when you're giving somebody a new task, yes, you might need to hold their hand and show them a steps, A, B, C and D, how to do it. Or you've, even better, you've got a manual or some processes that have been well documented, so somebody can walk themselves through that process again and again and again. Okay, so you might need to do that to begin with, with somebody, certainly, if it's someone who's Junior, who's not never done the thing that you want them to be able to do. The second part would be you being more coaching in your language and your mannerisms around this person. Coaching is now, when you're taking a you know, you're like a little league coach, you're you're not up there batting with somebody, you're from the sidelines. You're giving support, you're sometimes you're giving instruction, you're giving guidance, but it's a kind of done with you, sort of scenario. You're not doing it for them anymore. You're not kind of showing them anymore. You're doing it with them. You know, they're coming back, consoling them. There's the next level, which is kind of supportive, which is just more hands off now, so you're just listening to them when they've got mistakes. And then finally, that leaves us in the position to be able to delegate which, you know, they're now empowered to do the task. You're confident that they're the right person for it, and you can hand things over. Yeah, beautiful.
And that is, that's, that's a framework that we teach right there in smart practice about, you know, coaching, supportive. And you know, even below coaching, you have directive like where you're literally over their shoulder telling them what to do, and then you're coaching them what to do, then you're supporting them in the task, and then finally, you can enter into true delegation. Now, earlier on the call today, Ryan, that prompted this conversation. We were talking with a firm owner who is looking to help his team members twirl and and we have these conversations every single week, and oftentimes what happens is the team member, when we talk to the team member, the team is like, Ah, well, I really don't want to do that, or I have no interest in leading, or I That doesn't sound like something I want to do. So one thing that's not uncommon is to find firm owners who have big visions in their team members, and they want their team members to take this responsibility, when, in reality, team members, they don't even really want that. They just want to sit in a corner somewhere and and do drawings and get off at 5pm and go home and and enjoy a nice show, or go to the play, or go out for walk the dog in the park or whatever. And understand there's nothing wrong with that. But the key here the principle, is that it needs to be built on what your team members want. You're never going to be able to place the seed of the growth mindset in someone who isn't built that way and they're not worried that way.
Yeah, this can be quite challenging, actually, and frustrating for a lot of business owners, where they might see the potential in somebody, and that person just does not have the desire. They don't have the hunger for it. They're not they don't have the growth. You know, I want to improve. Well, sometimes they do, but it's just in a different direction. Okay? So we'll often see, and like architects, we'll often see architects who really brilliant technical people. They might be fantastic designers, and they just want to go deeper and deeper and deeper into a very niche or specialism or technical expertise, they want to just kind of, you know, just refine and develop their detailing prowess and get better and better at doing amazing concealed gutters and, you know, doing wonderful build ups For flooring details, etc, etc. Okay, there's nothing wrong with that. And there's a place in teams for that kind of expertise, and they can be as well. They can be rewarded as their mastery expands. I think that's really great. We need to have these kinds of experts and masters in a in a team. But if it means becoming a leader. Being a leader is is, is involves people. It's not uncommon in lots of different industries, as well as architecture, that there's often this ceiling that people meet in their careers when they don't then when they don't want to be a manager, or they don't want to be in charge of a team, or they. Don't want to be in charge of people. They don't want to lead people. And being the leader is a different set of skills. It's communication skills. There's a lot of soft skills that are involved. Sometimes we see leadership positions as well being dominated by those who speak the loudest. Okay? And that can also be frustrating, and as us as business owners, need to be very attentive to you know, we use the DISC personality profiling system, and we know that the the D's are the most likely just to assert themselves as the leader in a situation without being asked. And they might not be the best person suited for it, but they often just feel it's their, their their life, right? If you like, eyes are also very similar. They're very good with people. They can command a crowd, a group of people, you know, that kind of much more extroverted personalities. We see them dominating in these sorts of leadership positions. But the introvert has an ability and set of skills which can be very powerful for leadership as well, sometimes a lot a high level of emotional intelligence and understanding where people are coming from. And it's a different kind of leader. But we want to be able to make sure that there are opportunities there, and it all comes from them being hungry for it. They've got to want to do it. And the kind of next question is, well, how do you make sure that people want to do it? That's in part down to your own culture that you've built in the business. Do you have an ambitious culture? Do you have a culture of of growth and of personal development, okay, or personal growth in you know, in your organization, is it something that you celebrate and encourage and and train? Do you market it? Do you advertise it? Do you have publications or content that you produce that demonstrate and show off and showcase your culture of of growth and aspiration, because if you do, then you'll start attracting that kind of person in in the first place, which leads very nicely to our next principle, which is around hiring. And
it starts with hiring. So on the call today, we were talking to one of the firm owners who's been very successful in mentoring and coaching his team members into leadership positions, but also keeping them long term. And and he said, yeah, it starts with hiring. He's like, at the moment, I hire them. I'm not only looking at technical expertise but also personality. And I think that most for motors, they do this intuitively. But one thing we need to be aware of is oftentimes people who are interviewing for positions that are going to put their best foot forward. And so part of the principle here is you need to make sure that you have a hiring process that vets people, that you're taking the right amount of tests. One of the things that is part of smart practice is we call them little mini tests that are part of the hiring process where people actually have to pass these hurdles, some of which they don't even know are tests, but are a normal part of the process of vetting someone to make sure that they are a fit. So it really starts with just the very beginning, from the moment, the moment you craft that first, that first job at and you put it out there, the before that you craft the job role, and even before that, when you craft the mission, the vision, the principles of the practice, yeah,
it becomes interesting as well. If you're looking for people to to grow into a role as well, and having long term employees, the question then becomes, okay, well, what sorts of character attributes are you looking for that could demonstrate that somebody has a kind of growth mindset? How could you How could you test for this? So again, I know when we've done hiring here, Business of Architecture, for example, and the process that we take our own clients through is one that's, you know, we'll do personality profiles for for a particular role, and we'll be kind of making an extensive list of the attributes and qualities and characteristics that we want to see in somebody if We want to have somebody who is a growth orientated person, then we might be looking at some parts of their personal lives. What kinds of things do they do? We might ask them in the interviews, what kinds of plans do you have for your career? Where do you want to go? What does your 10 year plan look like? What does your five year plan look like? Have you ever done any personal development? Have you ever done any self initiated leadership training, and if so, why? What? You know, what are your bigger personal aspirations in, in in life? You know, just really getting into well, what does somebody want for themselves? What's important to somebody Okay? And that that's partly that's you know that you could do that in your interview, and there are people who are already in that world. They're kind of they're living their life like that, and you can create it as a culture in your office, so that you're helping and training and assisting people to ask deeper questions about where it is they want to go and what it is that they want. You know, it's not uncommon that I'll see architecture practices and I'll speak with some of the younger members of the team, and they've never really thought about what it is that they want. And you know, if you're 20 years old or why, who cares they want to, you know, I know what I was like when I was 20, and what my what my aspirations were, and that's fine, but we can start planting seeds and creating a culture of of growth, creating a culture of personal development, personal growth of leadership. I think that's really, you know that is the domain of the leader of a practice is to create that healthy garden where team members want to flourish, and there's a culture of talking about, where am I going in the future? What do I want to come what's important to me? How can I best support the things that are important to me, and I also put with this, this kind of aspect is making sure there's a healthy conversation around money in the business,
absolutely. And our fourth principle here would be growth planning, so not just taking it by haphazard happenstance, but actually looking at what does the growth plan for particular employee look like? What other career opportunities that they have? What are the opportunities they have to be able to add, bring more value into the business? And not just say, Oh, look, if you bring in projects, then we'll elevate you, but if you're going to say, hey, look, if you bring in projects, we'll elevate you, and you can earn more money. But also, here's our business development training program that teaches you step by step, and mentors you on how to do that. And then they become and they grow, and they flourish into the kind of leader that then starts to create the self directed, self motivated team absolutely
starting to have, you know, clear training programs or curriculums, even we've seen our clients in the past, actually got a client at the moment, who's, you know, who's created a program called Project Manager masters, and it's a, effectively a training program to help younger architects come project managers and then become project architects. And there's a, you know, there's there's training, so they've got to attend kind of more formalized classrooms. There's experience. So they've actually got to have real life experience doing these kinds of projects. And then there's results. They've got to demonstrate competencies and show results in what they've learned in real life situations and projects, and they're clearly laid out. And once those competencies and results have been demonstrated, you now get to wear the badge at Project Manager. And it's really it's great. It's great for the for the person who's gone through that process, because now they can wear that title with pride, in the same way that we went title of architect. Now I don't practice as an architect anymore, but I still pay my fees to get that word that so I can use it, because it was a long slog to get it. It meant something, you know, and I think when there's when there's a kind of exchange that's made awesome training, or something that you've had to work for in order to be able to wear that title. It's much more meaningful. So
the path here, how do you get from point A to point B? Where do we get from the problems that we mentioned earlier to actually having the self directed, self motivated team? Well, as you told, as you could tell from today's episode. There's quite a lot of pieces that go into this. There's culture, there's hiring process, there's how you hire, there's how you vet. There's being able to create growth plans for people. There's understanding exactly where they're at and helping them manage that growth plan. There's being able to make sure you have the certainty to pay them the money that they need. So certainly, you could go away and you could create all this yourself, you could create all this in your business. Or Guess what? That's what we do here at Business of Architecture through smart practice. So smart practice is actually an implementation program where we help firm owners be able to build the self motivated, self directed team. So just a little commercial plug here for what we do here at Business of Architecture. If you'd like to find out more about how you can create a self motivated, self directed team. You can go to Business of architecture.com, forward slash schedule, and you can just book a short little call with us if it appeals to you to be able to have to shortcut the wheel to getting all this done. Because, let's face it, there is a lot that goes into creating this culture so that people in your team can start to grow. Flourish, and you can start to focus on the things that you do best and make less running around stressed out and more working on your best work and building wealth at the same time. And that's a wrap. Hey, Enoch Sears here, and I have a request, since you are a listener here of the Business of Architecture podcast, Ryan and I, we love putting this podcast together. We love sharing information as much as we can glean from all the other industries that we're a part of. To bring it back to empower you as an architect and a designer, one thing that helps us in our mission is the growth of this podcast simply because it helps other architects stand for more. Their value spreads the business information that we're sharing to empower architects together, so architects, designers, engineers, can really step into their greatness, whatever that looks like for each individual. And so here my my simple ask is for you to join us and be part of our community by doing the following, heading over to iTunes and leaving a review of the podcast, and as an expression of our sincere thanks, we would like to give you a free CEU course that can get you one professional development unit. But more importantly, we'll give you a very solid and firm foundation on your journey to becoming a profitable and thriving architect. So here's the process for that. After you leave us a review, send an email to support@businessofarchitecture.com let us know the username that you use to leave the review, and we will send you that free training. On the training you'll discover what 99% of architecture firm owners wished they would have known 20 years ago, and the other 1% well, they just didn't even know that. They didn't know. Head over to iTunes and leave us a review. Now this episode is sponsored by Smart practice, the world's leading step by step business training program that's helped more than 103 architecture firm owners structure their existing practice so the complexity of business doesn't get in the way of their architecture. Because you see, it's not your architecture or design skills that's holding you back. It's the complexity of running a business, managing projects and people dealing with clients, contractors and money. So if you're ready to simplify the running of your practice, go to Business of architecture.com. Forward slash smart to discover the proven simple and easy to implement smart practice method for running a practice that doesn't get in the way of doing exceptional architecture. Hello,
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