The Wize Way

Episode 91: The Secrets to Making of a High-Performing Team

• Wize Mentoring for Accountants and Bookkeepers • Season 1 • Episode 91

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Ever wondered how to assemble an accounting or bookkeeping dream team that thrives on every ledger line? 

In this episode of The Wize Guys Podcast, Jamie Johns with Kristy Fairbairn and Tim Cuasbrook explore the secrets to a high-performance team structure. They tap into the synergy of matching personality types and drawing inspiration from Jim Collins, they delve into the journey of placing the right people on the bus, steering towards career growth and potential. It's about fitting into the team as seamlessly as a star player takes their position on the field, and we're here to coach you through it.

Tune in to this insightful conversation for valuable insights and strategies for creating a powerhouse team that not only meets but exceeds expectations!

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Wize Mentoring:

From Wize Mentoring is The Wize Guys Podcast, a show about accounting and bookkeeping practice owners and the many stories, lessons, and tips from their experience of transitioning from a time-poor practice to a business that runs without them. I hope you enjoy and subscribe!

Kristy Fairbairn:

Hello everyone, welcome along. Today's topic is the making of a high-performing team. Looking at our new topic being people, this really drives us into the high-performance team and how to create that in your business. So I'm very excited to jump into this topic with you, Jamie, as you're living in the ideal team structure there. Can you talk us through what that looks like to have the right team structure?

Jamie Johns:

Yeah, well, at a high level. Kristy, it's funny. It always says grinders, minders, and finders. I always say finders, minders, and grinders. So doesn't matter which way you say it, but essentially that's what you've got to have and that's our sports team, if you like that's how the position's on the field and you've got a higher people to the position and just like a sports coach, would play someone in Australia here. Of course, we've got the AFL, we've got the full forward and the full- back and we've got the Ruck and the Ruck Rover. And for our Canadian friends, we could go into AFL quite deeply, although I'd probably have a debate with some New South Wales and Queensland people about rugby league and all those positions wouldn't be Tim. So look, for many years I played a lot of AFL. I'm about six foot two and a half and the coaches would always play me. Even at 17 years old I was playing Ruck. So if your natural ability is to be tall, they always played me in the Ruck because you had to be tall and you had to run everywhere. So it's very similar to our Wize ideal team.

Jamie Johns:

Particularly foreigners or client managers, you really have to be, I would say, a people person. I love the analogy that Carl Jung created, that famous I think he was a Swiss psychologist, from memory, but he said personality types are you're either born an introvert, what they call an ambivert, or an extrovert. So an ambivert is sort of someone who's a bit of both. So I think if you're a people person, you're probably a bit of a maybe an ambivert or an extrovert maybe. And if you like dealing with people every day and if you get energy from dealing with people, then you're probably best as a foreigner or a client manager. But then you do have other people who just love to get that satisfaction of balancing the books. You know getting that warm glow when you reconcile a set of accounts or you've got the financial statements finished and you just get, you know, a high from that. So I think fundamentally the right team structure is made up of putting people in the right seats. I'm an avid reader. I've read thousands of books over the last 30 years and one of the best books I read was Jim Collins and Good to Great. If you haven't got to copy that book, it's a great book, Jim Collins, and actually I saw Jim speak. He came to Australia in Melbourne not that long ago and Jim Collins is quoted as saying you know, what you've got to do is find the right people, put them in the right seat on the right bus, get the wrong people off the bus and head the bus in the right direction. And now, essentially, that's what we're doing here, Kristy we're going to try and find the right people. When I say that the, you know the bus was the analogy of your team or of your business, so it's really at the core, I would say. You know today's discussion is at the core of trying to grow your firm or trying to move forward, and you know a big part of this too is career growth. You know that's extremely important for people to have career growth and, in the bigger picture to fulfill their full potential.

Jamie Johns:

You know I started out in bookkeeping. You know my very first job was doing my dad's bookkeeping, my dad's books on the farm. That's just what I did and I learned and I remember back in those days I think I've said it before, it's probably talking 30 years ago now but we used to have a program called Quicken. Some of the bookkeepers here might still use Quicken, but when you see the keyboard, it goes kaching and it'll go to the next transaction and then you'd manually reconcile your books. You'd look at your bank statement and you tick it off and then you tick off screen. So that's the bookkeeping was absolutely foundational for me.

Jamie Johns:

Then, even when I went through university and got through university and got my degree, what was my first job? It was bookkeeping. I worked in a furniture manufacturing company in a little hometown where I came from and I did bookkeeping and so you know, I think most of us are born out of, as Ed said, the division for production. So you know we do our apprenticeship or whatever you want to call it. You know, and I used to do accounts payable, accounts receivable, used to do payroll, used to help with the stock takes and all that sort of thing, and then that career progressed and went into public practice and you know so forth, and so finding out where you sit on the team can take years.

Jamie Johns:

It's a career. It can take years to work out. I think you know we're your happiest on that team and that's why I love the Wize ideal team because you want to find where you're most happy. And when you run your own firm as well, you've got to then try and find the strengths and weaknesses of each of your team members and Then, you know, put them in the right seat, and that's a process. It's not like it overnight, you know. Bang it happens, you know. So it is a process and it's great to have that team structure Just like this. You know the sports analogy that I started with.

Kristy Fairbairn:

So yeah, I think it's great when people know their position on the team. They don't need to worry about the other positions. They have their area to focus on and they produce the results for their role, and then they have team members to lean on for the other areas. It's great to have that balance in the team and not expect a Generalist to come in to do everything and to have someone who can specialise in their role.

Jamie Johns:

Yeah, that's right. And that's really the old model, Kristy, where all the unconscious model or by default model and you know I was caught in that, I was trapped in that, you know. All those years ago, before I sort of met Ed, I would just hire people and then I would just expect whoever I hired to essentially do everything. So you know, I wanted to talk to the clients, I wanted to get the work done, I wanted to review work, I wanted to do everything. And you know, essentially I was looking for superstars, yeah, and I'll know about you guys, but I wasn't any superstar. Like you know, I was technically okay, you know, not that good technically. I battled through and you know, most of my conversations in the early days with clients were "Look, I don't know, but I'll find out. You know, it was probably not the best situation, but most people were patient, but I just wasn't in the right seat.

Jamie Johns:

And I think Ed tells a story where he's never in the right seat either. He, you know when he, I remember he's often tells a story where he just couldn't work out why. You know he wasn't happy, you know, because he was always in production. So yeah, it's pretty fascinating, I think one of the most important things you can do is to understand yourself. Unexamined life is not worth living, so it's really important to understand your own strengths and weaknesses, and even more so if you're a leader. So if you're you know, an upcoming client manager or owner, it's extremely important to understand your team's strengths and weaknesses. You know, some of the biggest failings I've had is expecting people to do things that just couldn't do it.

Jamie Johns:

You know, may or not mention, but like multi-million dollar deals that didn't work out. So that's what we hear to learn from those experiences. So yeah, absolutely.

Kristy Fairbairn:

And, Jamie, can you talk us through some of the policies, procedures, and cultural elements that have been successful in developing your high-performing teams?

Jamie Johns:

Yeah, I was just thinking about that a few seconds ago, Kristy. Yeah, there are some really key tools in the process of getting these high-performing to teams work and before I go into those, the other thing I'd love to touch on is my favorite book everyone probably knows is The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People and you know. I was introduced to that back in 1991 the highest level of maturity, Dr. Covey says, is teamwork. It's important to recognize it. You know that's where the magic happens and so it's sort of like the Holy Grail of what you want to call it. But essentially, teamwork, that magic is what we're going for and you see that across. You know all types of movies or true stories. You see where teamwork just plays an absolute role in achievement. You know in human achievement. You know when the Apollo missions to the moon are a classic one. You know the amount of people that are involved. You know achieving a goal, it's just all about teamwork. But essentially, you know, bring it back down to a practical level.

Jamie Johns:

These aspects apply to your own clients, and businesses, mind you I remember when I started talking to some of these concepts with my own clients they were like they couldn't get enough of it, particularly the clients who had just had no time in their business. So one of the things is what I would call the No-bypass policy, which is sort of reflected behind me as well. That's extremely important. I think multinational companies sometimes call that direct line reporting. So in a deep and narrow team, that would probably be the foundation of a great team, the no-biopass policy Kristy. Another one would be the 80-20 rule. So there are different ways to explain it. But you know you want to get leverage from your intellectual property, from your people. So what actually happens in the No-bypass policy or in a deep and narrow team is leverage.

Jamie Johns:

There's another guy from your time, Archimedes said you know, give me a lever and I'll lift the world. I think there's actually a business game called leverage, something like that might have been Brad Sugar's who brought that out, the business coach, but it's all about leverage. So you know, and another concept with that is the 80-20 rule. So you know I always say, well, you do 80. You know I might say when I work with Selina or Dani or anyone you know anyone who knows me I'll say like you do 80, I'll do 20. Or you do 90, I'll do 10. You know you've got to be a figure like that all the time and then be supportive as well. So you know, have you got the tools to do what you need to do? When do we need it?

Jamie Johns:

You know roughly how long should you spend on that job as well. So that 80-20 rule is really at the heart about delegation. So you know, if you're not used to delegating, learn the five steps to delegating. So high performing team definitely has leadership that knows the crucial five steps to delegation. You know, I think it was a great analogy Ed said to me years ago. He said, and anyone can try this, but I think I actually tried it and I had a bit of a laugh to myself. But Ed said delegation is actually a skill and it's a management skill. It's not something that we have to do until we start delegating and we're in that leadership type role.

Jamie Johns:

I said Ed, well, it's pretty hard to learn to delegate. And he said, yeah, he said it's like you know which hand do you brush your teeth with? And I said you know right hand. And he said well, you know, get up the next day and try and brush your teeth with your left hand. You know, and I think you tell a story like we'll put the toothpaste in my eye. So it's habit. So you've got to keep trying every day, because will you fail? Yes, you will, you'll fail.

Jamie Johns:

It's difficult, particularly when you come a leader and a you know, a client manager. And then you've got to delegate work or, as the owner of FM, delegate your work. You've really got to become a Jedi Knight, as I say, in the art of delegating, you know, and there's a lot of other tools. That Ed talks about is, look and don't listen, don't have videos behind your eyes, because a lot of cultural aspects will come into the dynamics of team and a lot of emotions too. So you've got to sort of avoid the negative type emotions and you know you'll have aspects when team members aren't getting along. I've seen it all. I've seen it, literally seen it all. So you've got to know when to navigate that.

Jamie Johns:

There are a lot of things in the WizeV ault, Kristy, around situational leadership. So in the WizeV ault, there's a great one to know. You know when there's an issue in the team or between people, when do you get involved, you know? So you've got to ask yourself, well, when should I get involved? And there's a great video and whatnot there about situational leadership. And you know another great one I think I learned from Rachel Robertson. I remember having a chat with Rachel years ago. She used to live down at Geelong, which is only about an hour from me. Then I spoke to Rachel and, yeah, we spoke about the No triangles policy. If you haven't got into the vault now, someone might be able to tell us, which, I think at depth, 16 or 17. But if you haven't gotten into the vault around this topic and done a deep dive into these leadership steps, definitely do it. So you know the No triangle policy, another one Christie around just getting teams working harmoniously together. So, yeah, you know.

Jamie Johns:

And the other thing probably the final thing, and then I'll shut up but is your meeting rhythm and your routine. I believe the meetings are where the magic happens. So when you get people together in the same room focused on the same objective, that is synergy, that's where the magic happens. And so the meeting rhythm and the routine is the absolute epitome of teamwork. And so well structured meetings with an objective, with agendas, with goals. It's fantastic.

Jamie Johns:

There's a guy who wrote a book by Vern Harnish scaling up. He says meeting rhythm and routines will give you more time, more and more freedom, and something else. And actually, years ago I actually got eliminated and I stuck it all up around the wall when I was probably overly enthusiastic at some point in time. But yeah, that's what Vern said and it's very, very true. So if you haven't got a good, healthy diet and discipline of the core meetings in your firm, you'll want to definitely get onto them as well, and I think they're the epitome of teamwork. You know you'll have a lot of people say, oh, I don't want another meeting, or whatever. That just means you're not doing the meeting right. So it's the devil in the details of the meeting preparation. Dr Covey actually spends about three pages in The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People just on how to prepare for a meeting.

Kristy Fairbairn:

So there's some difference in the team and you know it really impacts that team culture and having a high- performing team by having them connected, creating that interdependence, by having that solid meeting rhythm and routine. If it's not getting as you say, you know the video is behind the eyes, that they're not tuning out. Everyone is actually participating. And those in the meetings need to be there. It's not just yeah, come along. It does not come to the opening of an envelope. It's the purposeful intention behind it all.

Jamie Johns:

That's right. There's probably a good you know dozen sort of tools that you can mention. Another one is you know Ed always says in it. So true is micro train, don't micro manage. You know, no one likes to be micro- managed Like, feel like you get it. People are hovering over you all the time, you know. Just give them the tools, give them the skills, be supportive, give them the frameworks and timeframes to get the job done, and then get out of their way.

Kristy Fairbairn:

Yeah, absolutely, Tim. I'd love to hear from you for a little bit on how you go with managing the communication and production traffic in your team.

Tim Causbrook:

Yeah, thanks, Kristy. I think the first thing is it's important that everyone in the team knows how they fit in that team. So managing communication traffic and production traffic starts in the firm. It's not about managing the client so much as knowing who does what, and then from there you can start to educate the clients. But the key thing is really that the client manager and the production manager know who's in charge of what kind of email. The production manager, but it's really client communication type traffic question that is relevant for the client manager. They forward it on and vice versa. The important thing is that I just do it myself and deal with myself because it's quicker at the moment because it creates a lot of chaos. So there's a lot of cc, but we found that it doesn't take very long at all before the clients realize oh, that's a, that's a quiet manager question. And acknowledgment letters are really helpful. We have direct communication traffic so we found that the acknowledgment letter which we would send out when we're scheduling the job and requesting information, is a kind of an education tool we use to let the client know who to go to in the team for what, because it can be kind of confusing.

Tim Causbrook:

Clients can say well who? There's like four people in the same. Who do I? Who do I go to? We always say your first port of call should be the client manager and what I found is really effective teams. The client manager delegates more and more communication to the production manager and they're able to assist them in that way and this really goes to the heart of the deeper, narrow team.

Tim Causbrook:

If you've got bookkeepers, even if they're offshore Jamie probably is more experienced than I do, but even the bookkeepers offshore might still be having client contact if it's low- level production contact, if that makes sense, and that's really a way of having you know you're not having the client manager bottleneck every single client contact that needs to occur in the business, because the admin team will also be contacting the client on things that are relevant to them, might be collecting invoices or sending out invoices or other things like IRS or ATO correspondence and whatnot.

Tim Causbrook:

And so when you think about it, there might be, you know, as much as four different people in the business contacting clients at any given time, and that can get confusing if you don't know internally who does what, to begin with.

Tim Causbrook:

But it is a really powerful tool to build a million- dollar team and then you know you can add another layer of complexity when you start installing assistant client managers as well and they can look after you know C&D or simpler clients, and it's all just ways of trying to leverage and protect the most expensive, most leverageable person in the team, which is usually the senior client manager.

Tim Causbrook:

So, yeah, if you don't have internal policies, if you haven't don't have internal training, if you've got a bunch of accounts who don't really know, they couldn't answer the question what kind of emails do I respond to? What kind of emails would the other people in my team respond to? It's probably safe to say you haven't done a great job yet of educating your own team and you can't expect the clients to know what to do if your own team doesn't know to begin with. Yeah, that's, my first step would be to have that conversation with your own team and then look at tools like acknowledgement letters which detail all the team members and what each of them does, as a way of beginning to educate the clients. Thank you.

Kristy Fairbairn:

Yeah, that's a really great point, Tim, and I know. For us with recurring bookkeeping services business, we send a welcome guide to all of our clients who have listed who their client manager is and who the support team members are on the team so that they're somewhat familiar with the names. I'd like to think the client reads it end to end so when they receive communication from someone they go oh yeah, I remember seeing them in the welcome guide. So it's just how to build that relationship because it can work against you having lots of people communicating with the client if you don't manage it well, but if you do manage it well, it's such a great reason to be working with you because, oh, there's a whole team that helped me and I know that I always speak to Tim or Kristy or whoever the client manager might be, but I've got this team around me who help get things done. So it creates a great connection if you manage that relationship well.

Tim Causbrook:

Totally yeah.

Kristy Fairbairn:

Jamie's going to have a little bit of time to share his screen. Oh, is a second action step a right for?

Jamie Johns:

Yeah. As Tim was talking, I was just reflecting on a slide that I did easily. Yeah, let me see if I can share it. This is in the wise vault, but can everyone see the guy there with his getting rained on? Yeah, so essentially this brings back memories. This is like five years old, but essentially every week I speak to accounts and bookkeeping firms from all over the world and the very first image that comes to my mind is this person here with the ball and chain and with all these things coming to the one person. And so this is really the heart of the problem of trying to get out of your own way as a client manager or a firm owner and you've got a couple of barriers in there and they're a great rule of thumb around the barriers and essentially this is what your systems and processes, but also your team, should avoid. So in a high- performing team, that person should be calm and relaxed. It's good. I think sometimes images really impact and you can see the work sort of hitting the ground there and slipping through the cracks. In a high- performing team, that image there is not what you want. So I just thought I'd share that.

Jamie Johns:

And going back to what you had earlier, Kristy, with the people and the processes and then the performance, everything's like interrelated. So today we're talking about the people, finding the right people, but you can't have a paid audience. Ed says that, so he's he can't have a paid audience. You can't actually get the right people in the right position, but then get the right people doing the right type of work so that you, as the client manager or the owner of the firm, are not the roadblock, not the bottleneck. This is the type of thing that that was me 10 years ago. So that's the type of thing that we're trying to meet sorry, trying to avoid in a high- performing team. So, yeah, I just thought I'd share that, Kristy.

Kristy Fairbairn:

Yeah, I think oh, look, a picture tells a thousand words, Jamie, I think it does we can all resonate with having those issues at some point or another. Even for our senior team members, you know, sometimes the firm only can withdraw a bit and put a senior client manager in. We don't want them to get bottlenecked by the same issues. You need to continue that synergy and flow in your team so that everyone can continue to shine in the right area.

Jamie Johns:

Yeah, that's right, but I just thought I'd share that because it really portrayed the well the problem that we're trying to avoid.

Kristy Fairbairn:

Yeah, absolutely.

Jamie Johns:

Everyone. If you can master just two things, I know it'll help you enormously. And the first one is in terms of this team, this hyper-filming team. The first one is knowing when to hire. Like that is just critical. So, as you continue to grow your firm and you go on this journey because it is a journey You've got to use a capacity planner to know when to hire someone to build that team. So, if you can use that around All the things associated with the capacity planner and particularly productivity, you know, and my story was, I remember talking to Ed years ago and I said, Ed, you know, why can't I get more time, why can't I just like, click my fingers and just get more time to work on the business?

Jamie Johns:

Because I could see the positive things happening with that, you know. But when I first met it, my productivity was, like you know, 80, 90%. You know I was in there dealing with the clients every day and it said, well, you know, if you don't make that a hundred and fifty thousand or two hundred thousand in fees and you cut that off, Jamie, you're gonna send the firm broke. So you know, then it's oh yeah, you're right, ed, I had to do it gradually. So my productivity went from 80 to 70 to 60 to 50, and then, you know, each time I would hire someone and push the work down and delegate to backfill that capacity, all right. So that's really, really important if, when you're going on this journey to grow your firm, you know, and to get to the goals that you want.

Jamie Johns:

That's the first thing I say. But the second thing I'd say, just as equally important, is knowing who to hire, all right. And so what we mean by that is the resource mix. So you know, do you need another grinder, a minder, a senior production manager, or a finder? So if you can answer those two questions on your journey, that's a fantastic feather in your cap, because once you do it with one team, as I did, like I said, I've got the one team right. I thought, oh, you know the penny drop, oh, that's how it works, that's the secret ingredient. And then, of course, these days I've got six teams, right? So once you sort of get one done, you'll be amazed at what you can do once you get that formula. Two parting things are knowing when to hire and then who to hire. And if you can master that, and if I was gonna help you do that. That's a fantastic goal, yeah.

Kristy Fairbairn:

Yeah, absolutely All right. Thanks, Jamie.

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