The Power of Building the Right Team

 Faisal Ensaun: The power of building the right team.

Actually, that was one of the conversations I came up with at the event that we were in and I'll share a couple of stories around this because I can tell you how important this piece is, and when I say team, I'm going to kind of focus on the business side of things, but the same principle applies in your home or in your personal relationships.

There's no difference because ultimately we're talking about human relationships. I'll share a couple of stories about this. One I can share a story about my own development within my company. When we started off, we were 16 members and we went at it for a good year, year and a half to close to two years, and it felt like a drag, and when I say like it felt like a drag, it was like we were having fun, we were growing and stuff, and actually we were very aligned in terms of some of the values, but what we weren't feeling was movement.

What we weren't feeling was progress in our business and no matter what we did, it always felt like we kept getting blocked in one way or another. It was either a marketing challenge or a sales challenge, or there was a problem within our operations or the finance was out of whack.

 We were building some of the skillsets. We had the general skillsets and a lot of these guys are coaches too. They are very much into leadership and all that stuff but for some reason, it was not moving forward. Fast forward two years, and what we realized was, first of all, one of the team members dropped off because she was not seeing a lot of progress

so it was building a lot of resentment, and we weren't seeing that she was giving the value that we were kind of imagining in our mind within our company. She dropped off and then we're like, okay, well that's a one-off thing. We're like, okay, well we're gonna move forward. So we made some changes, we moved forward, and then another team member drops off.

Okay, now that's not a coincidence, there's something off with the culture here and what's missing here and we made some assumptions there and one of the assumptions was that just because we think similarly, we look at the world a certain way we are very aligned and that was not the case.

So we did some work when we started our business on the vision side of things but very surface level and then we jumped in, started doing a lot of stuff. That was a disaster. So what we did was we stepped back. In fact last year we took a few days out. We actually met in person after two and a half years of just being in business.

We met in person for two and a half days. We're gonna figure out what we're doing here. We went deep, very deep into the business vision and we tried to understand what we're trying to build individually, and then we laid out a strategic plan around that and we literally pulled out each other's calendars.

Okay, this is what we're gonna do, yes, we've been at this for a while, but we're gonna push this. We're gonna push this it's going to be a little bit uncomfortable, but as soon as we did this everything was laid out, we were clear about each other and we got to talking, and pretty much two and a half days was of connecting with each other and understanding each other better.

So since then, up until now, we've made more progress in about close to six months, five, six months, versus we've made more progress in this short amount of time versus two and a half years prior to. It just blows my mind and I work with people around this stuff, and I've seen this over and over in other teams as well.

When there's one team member or two team members, or the culture is not the right fit, and it completely holds the team back and what we tend to do as human beings, we're like, okay, maybe it'll work. We're patient sometimes. Whereas sometimes we're like, okay, maybe that person we make excuses for people

but then what we don't do is we don't step back and analyze how is this affecting everybody. It's your job as a leader if you're building a business if you're moving something forward to see how each member of the team is affecting everybody else. The same dynamic, by the way, shows up in families.

I've worked with families where one family member or two family members are not aligned and it holds the whole family back. They lack joy, there's more conflict, and there's more disconnection because they don't know how to align with that person. Something is off and we're not gonna go too deep into the family side, but if you're starting a business or you're within a team, one of the most important things to do is analyze what's the culture that you're building, what are you creating?

And I wanna go through a few points around that and some of these things came up in the event today too, but it's very crucial and very few people think through this and actually implement this stuff. So the first one is alignment. Alignment is probably one of the most important things for you personally.

But for anybody else, the first one is vision and values. Anybody you're working with especially if they're long term, they're gonna be with you, you need to understand a little bit more than, hey, these are my goals. If I'm gonna do something, if I'm gonna work with somebody long term, if I'm gonna be consistently involved with them, I wanna understand a little bit about what are they creating.

What matters to them? What do they care about? What do they not care about? How do they like showing up as a human beings? Like, are they more disciplined? Do they care about people? And these are things for me. Do they put profit first above care for other people or are they disciplined or are they not disciplined?

Are they distracted? And these are not judgments. These are just, let me see, and there are a lot of ways to figure that out. Maybe you start small with somebody, you spend some time with that with somebody. You start with a small project and you understand people more and spend more time thinking about, okay, tell me your long-term plan.

Tell me your long-term vision and even with that, are they clear about that? Are they just saying, I just want to go towards this? Those things are big, big factors because what ends up happening is you jump into a business, you start with somebody, even if they are very motivated, and after a few months, you see that they suddenly change direction.

That means they didn't have a lot of clarity and people can change their minds. I'm not saying that's not what happens, but that means they didn't have enough clarity and they just jumped into it and now they're completely going a different way or when you're working with 'em, all of a sudden they, without communicating something, they do something that didn't feel good.

These are things to test out in the initial stages and they were very, very important. A lot of people don't go into that. A lot of people actually go toward skillsets which I'll go into a little bit. They go towards, hey, what are your skills? What are your strengths? What background did you come from? These are important things, but they're not gonna be the determining factors. So when you're thinking about that core team.

Let's say in the multi-family space, the first thing I would go towards is not the hard skill sets. The first thing is to think about these few areas which connect to their ability to be leaders. One is awareness, discipline, and empathy, because when you're in business, you're dealing with people, and these are leadership skill sets.

What is their awareness? Do they have the ability to communicate better with people? Do they have the ability to be patient, to be respectful? Do they have the ability to listen? Do they have the ability to make sense of things with you? Can they work in a team? There are a lot of people who are very self-motivated.

They can work alone very fast, but as soon as you put 'em in a team, they will struggle. They're not the right people to have on your team or in a team until they develop those abilities. For example, they might show up as very impatient. They might not listen to other team members.

They might not be able to collaborate and come up with better ideas. Why? Because they are very used to working alone and they're not open to working with other people. Some people, even though they're used to working alone, will be very open. Empathy is a very important thing. Can you step back from your skin and try to put yourself in another person's situation?

See what's happening? This does not mean that you put your company or what you're doing in harm's way. This is just trying to understand where people are coming from because every perspective and every experience can add value to what you're doing but these are leadership skill sets. So I would wanna know not everybody has to be perfect.

Not everybody has to be a great leader. Do you have somebody on the team and do they have some awareness of these areas like awareness in themselves, discipline, and empathy? Do they have this awareness? If they don't, it's a red flag. It's a huge red flag and the next piece is what most people look at is their Skillsets and this is where you can, especially if people are jumping into a new path, you need to consider a couple sides of them and even for yourself. Cause a lot of times you're jumping into a new thing. You're like, well, I don't have these new skill sets. Well, you just came from a long career path or you came from a lot of experience in the past.

What skills are transferrable? So we're looking at both things. There are transferrable skills that they can bring from another field and the skills that they're gonna develop, how open are they and do they understand where do they want to develop? For example, if they're a people person, maybe they want to go into, in the real estate world, into capital raising, or in other businesses.

Maybe that's in marketing and sales. If they're somebody who's more analytical and numbers oriented, maybe they have a background in that area, maybe they're more open to understanding deal analysis or something like that or maybe they're more in the operations side. They're more into asset management, and stuff like that

but really understanding what they bring from their past and what are they open to developing or what are they passionate about developing makes a huge difference and then it puts you, because when you're looking at, for example, a real estate world, you don't need multiple different types of skill sets.

You can't just have one person knowing everything. It'll be very unlikely that happens in teams and then one of the last parts is advisors. This is very important. Anytime you run a business. I love my accountant because she does stuff that I don't wanna look at. So sometimes I get a call from the IRS. So IRS is like, the worst version of CRA. CRA will ask you something. IRS will force something like that. So whenever I get a call from the Canada Revenue Agency and when they're saying something, it's like, can you look at this code and here, and there's something off about this.

My tendency is not to go there and look at everything. My tendency is to call my accountants. It's like, call her, can you take care of this? She'll be like there are some general things that she takes care of is like, oh, I can look at it and I can even call them for you, but I'll have to bill you for them.

 Do it, just invoice me, I don't care, that's much easier but in the past, the way I used to work with it is I'd be like, okay, let me figure this out. It would take me weeks of research to try to figure out what to do with that. Very inefficient. That's not my role in my business. So accountants, lawyers, brokers, in your case, whoever are the advisors that can take you directly to the source, and then you can still research it.

You can still make sense of the information but makes a huge, huge difference. So that's not your core team, maybe a peripheral team. That's part of it and I would say a little bit on the personal side, so you can have a very powerful business team, but you might not feel supported at home.

You might not have somebody, whether it's your spouse or maybe the environment that you're living in, you don't feel connected to or they don't understand what you're doing. That is not a good thing for human beings. That's probably the thing that holds a lot of people back. They tend to do more work than they need to.

They tend to feel more alone. They tend to procrastinate more because there are a lot of emotions. Our system goes haywire because we feel like something is off but when you have the support you need, it makes your path 10 times simpler. It's not necessarily easier, but simpler. It's still hard work

and for that what you need to do is develop your own leadership skills, your ability to communicate better, your ability to share your own vision better, your ability to connect better, with the people around you, your ability to challenge the people around you. Hey, this is something that's important to both of us or to all of us.

How can we move towards this? I need help in this area and I can tell you most people struggle in those little areas more than a lot of the bigger things, Including me, those are the things that I struggle with. As soon as I dealt with those things, business is not that big a deal. That wasn't a big challenge and I want you guys to think about it in your own life. So think about either the team that you have or the team that you are building it's one or the other whether it's in your home or in your business, the team that you have, do they have the ability to be conscious, be aware

in your business, are they somebody who's willing to learn? Are they somebody who's willing to grow? Are they somebody who's willing to be open to that or is aware? Are they somebody who either has the skillsets or is in the process of building a lot of the skillsets, are they somebody who has bought into the vision values that you're developing for the company?

Does their vision align with the company's vision? Do they have a vision? They might be completely unclear. Do you have a support system around you? Whether those are your advisors, those are your spouse, those are your friends, or whoever do you have that support system? A lot of people might ignore that and say, well, let me just focus and hustle.

That works in the preliminary stages when you're trying to kind of do things on your own but when you're trying to build an organization, it takes a lot of work with other people. It doesn't just come from you.