Managing Made Simple

Kris Plachy: Hello, welcome to this week's podcast. I am so excited to have you here. I'm gonna actually be sharing with you very, very practical insights on this podcast. Just really down, down and dirty simple on managing people. I know that there are so many of you who tune in to this podcast and you are running your team trying to figure out how to get more work done, and over the next series of podcasts, I wanna give you those tenants that I know that you need to pay attention to as a woman running a business.

So this week we're gonna talk about how to really make managing people simple. I think that we overcomplicate issues. And we do that because we all have brains. Brains can be trouble. So I'm sharing with you a recording that I did actually on Instagram a little while ago and I hope you find that it's useful.

And then as you go forward, I wanna make sure that you know a couple of things that are happening. How to CEO, as it is today, is starting the middle of February, 2023, February 16th. If this is something you've been considering, I really wanna encourage you to get on the wait list. So go to krisplachy.com/ceo.

And the reason you wanna get on the wait list is we're going to be running some pretty cool early registration opportunities in December. We're also going to be increasing the tuition, the cost, in 2023. So if you register before the end of the year, you benefit from the current pricing and we are going to start offering our clients who do How to CEO and who are in the lab. So if you're any of those people right now, this will also apply to you. We will begin offering management training to people in your company who manage your people. There's a lot to say about this that I will continue to say. But what we know for sure, having just done our CEO immersion, is leadership in your company is an ecosystem. It is not just up to you. And while I know that's incredibly obvious, it's kind of one of those, 'I wish I had a V8' moments.

So I have been teaching managers how to manage for 28 years and we have an entire program designed for managers. And Michelle, who is my chief operating officer, is also an expert in how to be a manager, and work for a founder, which is a unique twist. So when you register for How to CEO for February, we're going to be offering this upgraded version of How to CEO for you to put anyone who's in a management position in your business through management training while you are doing the How to CEO program, and I think it's gonna change your life.

So if that's all of interest to you, I really wanna encourage you to get on the wait list, Krisplachy.com/ceo. And without further ado, I'm gonna put you into how to make managing people simple. Let's go.

Hey there. So I thought I would talk about how to make managing people easy. We talk a lot about why managing people's hard around here, because it is, but I've been thinking a lot about why managing people is so hard for so many people. And why honestly, it even gets hard for me. And so I thought, okay, I'm gonna do, really like, the four reasons why managing people is easy and simple. But we kind of don't, we don't teach this stuff, so I wanna really give you as much as I can in the shortest amount of the time. I'm gonna try and do this in 20 minutes or less.

So here's the thing, like, I don't know about y'all. I learned math. I used the word "learned" loosely. I had to take math, right? And I remember word problems and word problems were awful to me because it was like, "Okay, so if there's four peaches and there's 12 oranges and six apricots, how fast is the train going and when will it get there?" Right? So overwhelming to me. And so for my whole life, I avoided most things math. I really thought it was, "I couldn't do it. I'm not made for this. It's bad for me." and so from my perspective, I would just read a, a word problem around apricots and peaches and oranges and think, I don't like fruit. Can I skip the assignment?

And I had a similar experience when I started my very first job, which was a sales job. Started the job. Thought it was really hard. Hated it. Found it really, really complicated. Thought I should quit. Thought I was bad at it. Thought I should never be in sales. Until one day I had a realization of what it really meant to sell, and I adopted a process that I sort of created, which eventually I come have come to know it was called the assumptive close. Then selling became math, right? Just became math for me and wasn't hard.

And then when I got promoted to be a manager, same, I have a very consistent story here. I had a little bit of a tantrum. I shouldn't do this. I suck at this. This is bad for me. I'm not good at it. And then I had this realization of like, "Okay, wait a minute. I just moved who my client is from who I was selling to, to now my team. I know how to do that." And I figured out the math.

Now I've been leading and managing teams for a very long time, and I still have moments where I want it to be hard. But then I remember that there's math. There's math to managing people. So let's talk about what the math is. There's really four things I'm gonna cover. The first one is that as a manager, so whether you are managing one person or you have a company that has 200 people in it, if you have direct reports, you have management responsibility. There isn't any way to call that anything else. Okay, so let's just call it what it is.

If you have direct reports, you have management responsibility. But one of the things that a lot of us fall into when we manage people is we think that we should be able to have control over what other people do when they work for us. So the first core principle of making management easy is to truly, truly tell yourself the truth. You have absolutely no control over other people, nor should you want it, not your job. Right.

But the way that we know that you want to control other people that work for you is you say things like, "Yeah, but Kris, okay, that's okay. I get it, but how do I get them to do their job?" You don't. Now I know you're gonna watch this and be like, "Huh. How? What am I supposed to do?" That's not your job as a manager, to control people. We'll talk about what, how, and what your role is, but that's not it. So the first step to making this a lot easier for you is let's just drop the pretense that you ever had any control in the first place, and that it is not your job. And that's good news, that it's not your job to manage other people. To control other people. This is good news. I don't want to do that. I have a hard enough time with myself.

The second piece we have to remember to make managing easy is that other people have no agency over how you feel. Your emotional health is your business, not theirs. But the way that this gets tangled up is people do stuff that work for you. They miss deadlines, they make mistakes. They don't follow up, they don't show up. They quit by text. They call out by text. They come in. People do all sorts of really, really jacked up stuff at work. I know this to be true.But what other people do has nothing to do with how you feel. What other people do gets translated in your brain and how you choose to define what other people do determines how you feel.

Now, what we all have as humans are triggers because we all have habitual thoughts that we think about people who do certain things. And a lot of those beliefs and thoughts have been unchecked. So we think that people who are late are disrespectful. We think that people who have missed assignments are lazy. We think that people who call out sick all the time don't respect us.

We think that. Okay. But we don't know that. What we know is they just didn't show up on time or they missed a deadline. We don't have to actually have an emotional tantrum when other people don't do what we think they should have done. What we need to understand as leaders is we have a tremendous responsibility for our own emotional health, and it isn't other people's responsibility to take care of our emotional health. It's ours.

It makes things a lot easier when you stop giving that assignment to the people who work for you. Cause you know what? I don't think they're very good at that. I don't think people who work for you are very good at taking care of your emotions. Am I right? So let's stop doing that. So those are the two things you have immediate agency over right now.

And this is why so many leaders need to be working with a coach because you have all these truths that you believe about the world that you've never really checked. And those truths, while they feel so important to you're, they're not real. Right? They're not. They're your thoughts. They're not the truth.

Okay. The third thing is that we hire totally wrong. We think we hire people to do work for us to do what we want. We do not. We hire people to achieve a result. And the truth is, we actually, when we hire people ,are extending an invitation. We are inviting people to a job, a role, a compensation package, goals and deliverables. That's what we're inviting people to. So when we invite someone, we have to be really clear, "Hey, I'm inviting you to this role at this comp level to execute on and achieve this result. We're also inviting people to a role and to a compensation level, and to align with these values and these behaviors of this. If you would like to accept this invitation, I would love to have you."

But one of the things that happens is we are not clear in the terms of our invitation, and so one of the ways to make managing people much easier is to clean up your invites. Everybody that you hire, the extent of the relationship is that you are hiring people to deliver on the promise of a position. That is an invitation. Simple. But let's just say that you sent out invitations to people to come to your house. You just said, "Hey, come to my house." So you wake up at four in the morning and there's someone at your house in your hot tub drinking the beer from your outside fridge. You go outside, you're like, "What the hell are you doing here?" And they say, "You invited me. There was nothing on the invitation. There was no date, there was no time, there was no rules, there was no purpose. It was, just you said, 'come on over'. So I was up. It was four. I needed a hot tub and a beer." But you get upset because who comes to someone's house at four in the morning and uses their hot tub?

You know who does? Somebody who got an invitation with no rules, with no expectations, and that's what a lot of us do when we hire people. "Hi, could you please come here and help me? I just need help. Please could you. I'll pay you. Could you come?" And then we lose it when they don't do what we think we hired them for that we didn't tell them.

Are you feeling confronted?

So that's step three to making managing people easy. We just have to clean up the invitation. And then the last piece is, if we did make an invitation and our invitation was clear, "Hi, I wanna hire you for this position at this comp level in this to achieve these results, to make this happen in my company." If I'm really clear, and I want you to, these are the values and the behaviors that we follow here in my company, and if people don't align, it's okay. It's just you. It's time to rescind the invitation. It's okay. It's not a big deal. It's not personal. If you feel angry, it is not time to release someone.

Anything you do out of negative emotion does not work out well for you or for other people. But you don't have to have negative emotion if people don't meet the terms of your invitation. It's just not working out. It doesn't have to be dramatic. But listen, if you don't follow the math, you get the drama right? It turns into a hot mess in your brain. You wish people were different. You wish they would just listen. You wish they would just do their damn job. You just wish, wish, wish, wish, wish, wish, wish. Instead of just, "Oh wait, this was the invitation I extended. This is the result I'm getting. Mm." Or, "This is the invitation I extended. This is amazing." You're blowing it out of the ballpark and you acknowledge that, but managing people is not hard.

What makes it hard is when we don't follow the math, and I have been doing this for forever and I still want it to be hard sometimes. I still wanna fight in my brain for why can't they just, I don't understand. Isn't it just, I go through the same process?

What I know is I don't take action until I feel like I'm clear about the math. And as soon as I know the math, there's this many oranges and apples and peaches, and the train's going this fast. It makes it so much simpler, right? So first we have to believe, you have to try and believe me that managing people can be easy and you have to be willing to invest in yourself to prove that. And that's what we do in our How to CEO program. That's what we work with, women who run their own businesses. We help you resolve this team part, because if you stay in drama with team, you cannot effectively lead and manage and you won't get the results that you want.

And that threshold seems to hit people at several points in their growth. But what I know for sure is, if you don't do this earlier than later, once you're at the point of being at seven figures and you have a couple few people working for you, everything that comes after that will be done through the lens of the woman you were before. And if you haven't resolved, your angst with managing people, your growth will only increase it. So I encourage you strongly to think about investing in who you are as a leader.

If you're running your own business, we have a couple themes. So I wanna take the other opportunity now that I'm live and I don't do this very often, to let you know a few things. We're starting our next How to CEO in February and it will be under a slightly different name, but it's still the same content and program.

And so right now we're gonna be doing a few early registration opportunities for the February. There's some benefits to registering early. First of all, you will have, we are gonna give you a few preparatory bonus assignments. Things you can work on over the holidays so that when we start in early February, you are ready to go and really prepared. It'll give you work you can do right now to solve problems you're facing right now, which I'm super, super excited to be able to give you.

Secondly, we will be offering 2022 pricing through the end of the year, and then we are gonna increase the investment in 2023. We've held out as long as we can, but given just some things cost more. You all know this as business owners.

And the last thing is, if you are looking for a little bit of a tax write off, this is your education. This is an investment in yourself. This is an incredible opportunity to make that investment in yourself and take the tax benefit for 2022.

The last reason I would really, really emphasize your interest in joining now is I have already scheduled all of my Hawaii retreats for 2023. I'm hosting a New Year's retreat, January 9th through the 12th, which I'm super excited about. It is old school. I'm going OG on how I did my Hawaii retreats when I very first started, and what we made then were vision journals. They were vision boards and the people who did that work with me created honestly these little magic blueprints, including myself. I wrote in my very first journal that I made in 2012 that I will be leading retreats in Hawaii with high performing successful women and I've been doing it for 11 years.

It's insane to me how people have gotten married to people they didn't even know. People have started businesses, written books, moved halfway across the country cuz or the world because that was their goal in life to do so. You investing in you and your business. I really wanna sit with you for four days and do this deep work. It's so transformative. It's nothing like you're gonna experience anywhere else.

I,think if you follow me, you know that I love the magic, but I like practical magic. I know that with intention and clarity, you can create just about anything. But what you lack is time for intention and clarity. And where we do this work in Hawaii, it's, I don't understand it, but that's why I keep going back.

I'm also hosting one in April and I'm hosting one in the fall. Those will be a different version, but similar. And in order to come to Hawaii, you have to be a current client or a former client. So as soon as you register to start and How to CEO, you have access to registering for the Hawaii retreat, and I can only tell you that it will change your life. Everyone who comes says the same thing. It is a magical experience and I really, really would love to invite you to that.

And lastly, I am currently meeting with women who are running multiple seven-figure businesses who are really at a point in their world where their business is thriving and it's less dependent on them. And so now you're wondering, "What's next?" And this is called the SAGE CEO Program. And SAGE CEO is really for women who are already in a prominent role in their industry, their field. Other people come to them for their expertise. Other people seek them out for their wisdom. But what I've come to know, because I know quite a few of these SAGE women, is there are very few places for those women to go to work through their next steps, to work through their next transformation, to be a little vulnerable, to allow themselves to be seen in a way that they don't feel like they can in a lot of other parts of their life.

So the SAGE CEO is a very personal program. It's invite only. And I have to do a consult with every single person who's interested before I extend an invitation. But if that calls to you, I invite you to check it out. You can, go to krisplachy.com/sageinfo to schedule a consultation and fill out a questionnaire.

So, so much I covered today, but let's just go back really quickly and remind you the four steps to easy management. You can't control anyone. Other people are not in control of your emotional health. You need to extend clearly defined invitations so that people know what's expected when they say yes, and you need to follow up on the progress that people have made on the terms of the invitation.

I hope this has been helpful for you, and I would love so much the opportunity to work with you. So check out Krisplachy.com/ceo to learn more about joining me in the February group. Take care.

Hey, entrepreneur, you started that gorgeous business of yours to do some really good in the world. You probably didn't start your business to manage people. But here you are having to figure out how to manage people to get work done, and maybe it's not going so well.

So head on over to krisplachy.com/howtoceo, and let's talk about how we can help you learn how to lead, manage, hire, fire, and all the things so that you can build a team that expands on your amazing dream.