Hello, hello, welcome back, we are now talking about passing the baton. So you have someone who's going to start working for you, either as an independent contractor or as an employee, you have a pretty good idea of what they are going to be doing. But maybe not a great idea of how that whole transition is going to happen. So that's what we're going to talk about today, we're going to go into planning ahead for communication with your hire or your team. If you decided to go with hiring more than one person, we are going to talk about using automation to help both you and your team. And then also developing your own standard operating procedures. So this is really helpful when you start to have other people doing work for you. So that you know, first of all, if you hire someone, and then it doesn't work out, you still have all those procedures, like you already know what you're going to be transitioning to the next person, right? Instead of spending all that time and energy bringing this one person up to speed and then having it all go to waste, right. So so, you know, first, planning ahead for communication. So I think about communication as these raffles, like, where are the threshold of where my work intersects with the work of another person. And these raffles are an opportunity for dialogue and for togetherness. And the more complex a threshold is, the more dialogue and togetherness is helpful. The least complex, the threshold is the the, the less need there is for dialogue, right. And wrestles can be complex in the beginning, and then become less complex as time goes on. And as people learn how to do things. So an example. Let's just say invoicing, right? So
coming up with a system, a sustainable system of invoicing that work between you and a bookkeeper would require a meeting, right dialog and togetherness, where you guys decide, you know, how often you're going to be requesting invoices. How, you know, quickly, the bookkeeper will be sending the invoice out once they learn that it is to go out how the communication between the bookkeeper and the client looks. And how whether or not the bookkeeper follows up with you to let you know that the invoice went out. And things like that, right. And then you let the bookkeeper do their job, you you make an agreement about how the work is going to perform is going to happen. And then you let them do it. And you check in on it as it's happening to make sure that it's happening the way that you want. And you can you can ask them to make adjustments as time goes on, you know, maybe they maybe the communication style with a client isn't exactly how you want it to be. And so you're asking them to like, send you the communication to the client first. So you can look at it and adjust it before it actually gets sent out. And then after doing that for a little bit, they learn how you want the communication to be and they can take it over themselves. So we're trying to piece out the work in a way that is digestible for people. But we're also trusting people to be able to do what they're being asked to do. And until until or unless, that that isn't the case. Right? Then we come to them to help them to learn. And then if they're not able to get there, then it may be that it's not the right fit. And we're going to talk more about I have to deal with that, if that happens, but the communication is important to think about, like, what is the cadence of communication that I want to have with this employee, or this independent contractor where we would both feel good about, you know, maybe we have weekly meetings for a little bit, maybe it's bi weekly after that, maybe then it turns to every month that meetings are necessarily, and meetings are really, again, dialogue, togetherness, complex issues, maybe we use phone calls for quick check in the you know, make sure we're aligned on different things that are happening. And we use email for just other kind of factual kinds of things that come up and, and sharing of information back and forth. So there are a lot of ways to design communication so that it is supportive of everyone. But it is important to be intentional, especially in the beginning with how you want to set the tone of that communication and the cadence of the communication. Then, automation has kind of run through this whole thing. But this is another important place to bring it up. Because sometimes the ways that you automate things for yourself are great. And there are also ways to automate things within teams that are great. So using technology to perform tasks, where human input is minimized as what automation is. Scheduling is one of the things that I love automation for project management is another way that automation can be helpful, I use a project management tool, that's called Asana. And so within this tool, I have created all the different kinds of projects that I do with my team. And I can just assign things to them inside of Asana. So I don't need to send an email, I like we hold all of the information for all of the projects in there. So that helps to automate that. And so if this was communication for you, you I prefer to use automation in a way where it augments the team's ability to communicate, rather than decreases the team's ability to communicate, because there are some ways of automating that really, actually make things more difficult. What you want is to automate in a way where things become easier. As people work for you for longer, the more like simple and effective the systems are, the less stress it creates for people and the higher morale you just have, in general. Some other automations to consider? Well, we're gonna get into those in the next section here. Okay. So creating standard operating procedures. So as you are transitioning your responsibilities to this other person, you're probably going to be having some meetings with them, you're going to be describing what they're going to be doing, you're going to be, you know, creating some deadlines, sometimes when they're going to be getting back to you with their questions, you're going to be maybe talking on the phone or maybe emailing. But a part of this that can help. As you're going into explaining what the work is, explaining how you're transferring this responsibility is creating a standard operating procedure that has a step by step explanation of what the person is supposed to do. And this helps you to give those responsibilities over piece by piece. So you may give, you know the first section of it at one time, and then the next section and then the next section, so you help to piece things out. So it's digestible and doable for someone. So you're not just like, you know, for example, with my podcast, I didn't start with having an athlete, my virtual assistant do as much as he does now. We started out with she just edited the audio, but now he edits the audio, she writes the shownotes like, publishes it and schedules it and does all the social media, right? So you can use out part Have things so that they gradually get transitioned over and transferred from you, or just the person starts doing them. And so the key here, actually, before I get into that, there is a way to automate creating standard operating procedures, especially if you are working on a computer. So there is this program that's called bribe. And what you can do with bribe is you open it up in your browser, there's a free version of it. And you literally do the tasks exactly how you want it to be done. And scribe turns that into a standard operating procedure that you can then give to someone to do it for you to do that task for you. So this is really helpful, especially if there are things like where you're working between multiple programs, or you're pulling information from a particular spreadsheet, in order to go into something. And so I recommend it. And then again, we're trusting people that they're going to do what they say that they're going to do. And we're verifying that it's getting done. In the verification phase, it you people can get frustrated, if things are not happening the way you're wanting them to happen. Often, when that frustration is there, it is also there for the person who's working for you. And it often is created because there's some misunderstanding, either you weren't clear in what you were asking for, or they didn't understand what it was you were asking for. Or like there's something that was missed in the middle there. And so in this verify is we're just checking in to make sure that everybody understands everything, and then we're providing more guidance and support, if that is needed. All right. I hope that this helps you to transition your responsibilities to your hour. And I will see you in the next section where we're going to talk more explicitly about feedback. And then also about if things aren't working out how to kind of manage that transition.
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