People Management
How To Manage VAs with John Jonas of Onlinejobs.ph (1:18:32)
Business owners and Profit & Loss (P&L) owners must consider that there are 3 levels of understanding:
The factory worker who does just their role in the process (put the front left tire on the Ford Explorer) and doesn't need to understand much beyond it, except to make them feel part of a larger mission. These are the Level 1-3 team members.
The manager who understands how to do a few factory roles, overseeing a section of the factory--- in this case, being in charge of a function, product, or team, but not having strategy level skill. These are the Level 4-6 team members.
the architect who understands the whole picture and can orchestrate operations, software, branding, financial planning, and deal-making. These are the Level 7-9 team members.
If we attempt to teach a factory worker management or strategy, they will be confused. If we attempt to teach a manager the larger picture, they will become overwhelmed.
To be successful in this ecosystem, requires that people move up through the levels-- especially a P&L owner (entrepreneur). Skipping levels leads to problems. Same for attempting to teach ahead of learning and doing first. We need more practitioners who are willing to Learn, Do, and Teach #LDT from experience-- which is to document what they're doing along the way.
There is also a risk that only a handful of people, being in the right level, do the bulk of the work. Imagine if you have folks to focus on their appropriate level, you would get 100X of power easily, which drives sales and business. You want to avoid having a large team while having them do little work. Same for the meager level of communication-- which is
just a few messages a day, often punctuated by days of silence for your VAs. If you had just a few solid, productive VAs, we'd do more than a bunch of folks who eat up our time in chasing and explaining-- a double whammy.
The key is simply getting a few managers who can do daily check-ins, ensure each VA is feeling good, ensure we have frequent/lightweight touches with clients, and other standard operational processes that all companies have and can expect their people to follow.
You'll not need to understand everything in order to take action (which creates paralysis)-- but that also doesn't mean we can skip steps in the leveling system. The good news is that there's no need for the VAs to prioritize when your team members are at the appropriate levels since the level of effort to chase is a multiple of what it takes to actually do any particular task.
So instead of worrying about prioritization for VAs (which is shifting uneaten veggies on the plate), let's make sure they follow Level 1: Do, Delegate Delete #DDD which is reliably responding and executing, instead of ignoring, pusing off to later, or requiring our intervention at every step.
The lack of execution creates build-up and more work for managers and owners to then have to micromanage. The mistake you want to avoid here is turning owners into VAs that have to micromanage communication at each step of a task-- to explain why reliability is so important.
When things build up, we lose track, forget what happened months ago, need to prioritize, lose moral, lose clients, or lose business.
When not much working is getting done (and no communication asking for help), work stacks up-- creating a false "too busy" or prioritization issue. Hence, people quality and management (not babysitting) is so key. Study these 3 classic articles to see how to overcome a problem that all other companies have already solved:
If people don't understand or are not willing to adhere to Level 1: Do, Delegate, Delete #DDD, they can't proceed to Level 2: Communicate, Iterate, Delegate #CID-- team work. And if they don't understand or want to apply Level 2 principles, no way they can move to Level 3 #MAA-- optimization, etc… A few high quality people will get more done than an army of low and medium quality people.