Transcript of Jack McGuinness' Guest Appearance on Business Credit and Finance Show

Announcer:                   Welcome to the Business Credit and Financing Show. Each week, we talk about the growth strategies that matter most to entrepreneurs. Listen in as we discuss the secrets to getting credit and money to start and grow your business. And enjoy as we talk with seasoned business owners, coaches, and industry leaders on a variety of topics from advertising and marketing to the nuts and bolts of running a highly successful business. And now, to introduce the host of our show, financial expert and award-winning author, Ty Crandall.

Ty Crandall:                  Hello everybody, and welcome to our show today. I'm really glad everybody could join us. So today we're talking about one of the most important topics that you need to know a lot about when it comes to running a business which is going to be starting a team, running a team, managing a team, and everything you need to know about team operation. And in this topic, it's so important that I went out and wanted to get one of the best and foremost experts on the topic.

Ty Crandall:                  So with us today is Jack McGuinness. Now Jack has 25 plus years of experience working with leadership teams at organizations big and small across multiple different industries. After serving as an Airborne Ranger with the US Army's prestigious 10th Mountain Division, he helped build a successful boutique management consulting firm where he served as COO for 13 years. Now Jack also served as CEO of a contract packaging company where he developed the passion for unleashing the leadership capacity of teams throughout the organization.

Ty Crandall:                  In 2009, Jack joined forced with the West Point class to form Relationship Impact, a consulting firm focused on working with CEOs to unlock the potential of their leadership teams. He's also served as senior professional instructor at the John Hopkins Carey School of Business where he teaches courses on strategic management and human capital. He's a contributing writer to Chief Executive Magazine. He holds an MBA from Hagan School of Business at Iona College and a BS in Engineering Management from the United States Military Academy at West Point. So pretty impressive here, Jack. Thanks man. Thanks for coming to the show.

Jack McGuinness:          Thanks so much for having me, Ty. I'm looking forward to talking to you.

Ty Crandall:                  Yeah. And thank you very much for your service, man. I really appreciate what you've done for our country.

Jack McGuinness:          Thank you.

Ty Crandall:                  Let's jump into this. This is your expertise when it really comes to team leadership. In your experience, what do you think are some of the most important traits that you find that team leaders typically have?

Jack McGuinness:          The focus of the work that we do is how to build a great executive team. Right? And so, let's start with the end in mind. There's a few characteristics that, from our perspective, that comprise really good executive team or leadership team. And the first is obviously a laser focus on business results. That would be a no brainer for most of your audience right now I'm sure.

Jack McGuinness:          Number two is when a team is much better collectively than they are as individual contributors. You ever play on a great sports team where everything is just humming and people are anticipating each other's moves. And that feeling of the collective is much better than the individual contributions of any one member. And so, we call that the force multiplier effect.

Jack McGuinness:          The third thing is the ability to, over time, be able to address more complex, more challenging issues as they're thrown at you and do that in a productive and a constructive way.

Jack McGuinness:          And finally, a really true test of a really great team is the ability to be resilient and get back up when you get knocked down and do that in a productive way. Because things, particularly in fast paced startup environments, it's hard. Things don't always go the way you want. You don't get that next round of funding. You're wondering where the money's going to come to pay payroll. And those are stressful situations and how you deal with those as a collective unit of three or four or five or eight people is really important.

Jack McGuinness:          With those characteristics in mind, I'll jump to the number one thing that gets in the way of teams being as effective as they can be is the ability to have what we call productive dialogue and that's adults don't like to confront each other. They don't necessarily like to challenge and don't like conflict. And so, the ability to challenge, debate, confront each other in a productive way that moves the issues, the most important issues that you're facing, forward with minimal relational scars is a key thing in building a team. And it's one of the hardest things to do. How do you get a group of people that are working at a crazy pace to be able to confront each other well?

Ty Crandall:                  Sure, work together.

Jack McGuinness:          That's what we see.

Ty Crandall:                  So in this, what's the leader's major role in the formation and creation of a team? Does it start with hiring the right people to meet this criteria that you know you're asking questions that they have the laser focus and you know they can work well together collectively and they welcome challenges and they`re resilient. Is the leadership role to find people with these traits or is it more of developing these traits in the people that they have?

Jack McGuinness:          It would be nirvana to say that you could go out and find five or six people that have all those traits and that are going to be the best team players that you ever wanted. Things just don't happen like that. You start a business with three people. One of them is really laser-focused on building a technology. The other one is really good at raising money. The others ones are great at getting customers. And those are different skills with different motivations behind them and different styles of interacting and all that behind them. So a long winded way of saying we think the leader's role is yeah, you want to make sure as best you can is to get folks that fit that profile that we talked about earlier. But really, the leader's role is to model the behaviors that you're looking for to develop as a team. So the ability to accept feedback. The ability to listen. The ability to get people talking to each other rather than just relying on you as the intermediary or the boss authority.

Jack McGuinness:          We believe strongly in a developmental approach. And we're often asked, "We've got this guy. He's just not a team player but he's a great technical contributor and he's really good at what he does." And we believe, and we've seen in the work that we do in the last 10 years, and before that in experiences we've had, that yeah, you can develop. Even as an adult over 50 years old, you can develop the capability to be an effective contributor to a team.

Jack McGuinness:          To get to the other part of your question of what's the leader's role? It's definitely to model the behaviors you're looking for but also to set the foundation, set the structural foundation, for the team to be able to thrive. And so, what that looks like is really making sure that roles are clearly defined as best you can. And again, I recognize in a startup environment where you're just ... people are doing multiple things. But as best you can at creating some clarity around boundaries and interconnections of roles is really important. Establishing the foundation for how the team is going to meet and talk about strategic issues versus the tactical day to day issues. We see that as a very difficult challenge for organizations that are growing fast in a fast paced environment because you automatically go to ... we're sitting down to talk about our plan for the next year, and automatically we jump into fighting fires because that's what we have to do.

Jack McGuinness:          So how do you build the discipline in to deal with the strategic versus the tactical? And I have to tell you, Ty, one of the biggest things we spend a lot of time with companies on is how do you manage a meeting effectively? I know it sounds stupid. It sounds silly. But do you have an agenda? Do you keep to topic? Do you get in the weeds versus staying on topic? Do you write stuff down and follow up on it? And it doesn't have to be pretty, it just has to be disciplined and structured.

Jack McGuinness:          And so, the leader's role is really important in building that structural foundation because without the structural foundation, the relational dynamics that we talked about earlier can get off kilter like that. Just think about it. You have a meeting without any ... a meeting that doesn't have any structure to it and you have roles that are sort of clear, not very well defined. And you have people tripping over each other to get ... all with good intent, about getting the right result ... but they're tripping over each other. They start making assumptions about hey, I thought I was supposed to do that and that guy's stepping on my turf. And he's doing it a different way than I would and the relational dynamics get out of whack like that. And they're really hard to repair if you don't focus on them. And so, we see that happen quite a bit.

Ty Crandall:                  So it really sounds like the leader has several very important roles. One being finding the right people. Second is modeling what should happen and the way it should look. And then, creating an environment for collaboration. And you could have this productive dialogue that's so important.

Jack McGuinness:          Yeah.

Ty Crandall:                  So do you find that there are traits that you absolutely should not hire somebody if they have these traits or don't have these traits? Like you mentioned, there's people that just don't work well in a team and that can happen with time and conditioning but is there just traits that you're just when you see it, when it comes in a team, it's just absolutely cancerous, it's poisonous. You should avoid these things at all costs if you see them in a potential hire?

Jack McGuinness:          Absolutely. There are integrity, a sense of character, not overly selfish. I say overly because you want people that have a drive and a want to succeed and they want to move forward and they even have maybe a money motivation. There's nothing wrong with that. But too much of that at the expense of the team and the organization can be cancerous. And so, integrity, character, and the ability to have the potential ... which this is a really hard one ... to have the potential to put yourself aside for the good of the team and the organization. Now, that's hard to evaluate, I would argue.

Ty Crandall:                  Sure.

Jack McGuinness:          But there are some ways you could get to that.

Ty Crandall:                  Even just asking a flat out question of where's an example of where you put the team before yourself. Somebody that doesn't have an answer to that probably doesn't fit the bill.

Jack McGuinness:          Right.

Ty Crandall:                  What about the opposite side of things? Are there people that you've found that personalities or traits or characteristics that when put onto a team together, they just mesh really well? Meaning are there ideal members of a team or ideal personality traits, per se, that you look for that when you see you're like that person's probably going to be a really good fit within?

Jack McGuinness:          Absolutely. Absolutely. Ty, that's a great question. And the simple answer is those that are curious. People who are curious and don't feel like they have a lock on the right answer about everything will really be good contributors. There's a great article that just came out over the last couple months. I think it was a summer edition of a Harvard Business Review called The Case for Curiosity. And it was really all about that. And it talked about the ability to be a good team member. To not think that you have to have the right answer and to not think that you are always right is really important. And when confronted with feedback about something that maybe others don't think you're doing well or questioning why you're doing something, rather than being defensive about it, taking a curious approach and saying well, tell me a little bit more of what you're talking about there. I'm not sure I understand where you're coming from and I'd like to know more. Boy, when you can get players like that playing together on a team, man, we see things really hum for sure.

Ty Crandall:                  So how do you do this? What are the things that you do to set ... We've talked a little bit about hiring and finding the right people, what to avoid, what to look for. We've also talked a little bit about what's important with the team, of having a goal and having a vision and these types of things. So what do you think are the characteristics of a good team? This is all you do. So, when you look at a team, what do you look at as the characteristics of a strong team versus a team you guys come into and say this is broken because it doesn't have these characteristics?

Jack McGuinness:          Right. So well, let's start back to the beginning. It's focus on results, having the force multiplier effect, the ability to learn, and the ability or capacity to address more complex problems over time. And then, to be resilient. Those are key characteristics.

Jack McGuinness:          Now, you don't start with that because at the foundation of the productive dialog that we talked about earlier that's really important and central to a team really excelling and achieving those characteristics is trust. So trust is a loaded word. There's a lot of people ... It means a lot of different things to a lot of people. But it is foundational in terms of building a team. So you talked about leader's role and you talk about what do you do to get a team off to the right start. You step back and you think about how am I going to get this group of people to actually trust each other when they maybe don't know each other, they come from different experiences and environments? They view the world differently. And so, getting folks to recognize each other's strengths, their challenges, their capabilities, and stepping back as a team and spending a little bit of time to understand what motivates each of us and how that's similar and how that's different.

Jack McGuinness:          And then, after a while when you're working together, you start seeing the blemishes and the blind spots that each other has and when you build some of that trust to begin with and you gain that understanding that there are some differences and similarities and how I approach Bob versus Jane is a little bit different ... it should be a little bit different if I'm trying to get to the right answer. You know, trying to get to a good level of collaboration. And then, it's the foundation for being able to provide some feedback to each other. Because when we trust each other, we're a little less hesitant to confront each other and challenge each other a little bit which is really important to being able to hold each other accountable. And so, trust is foundational.

Ty Crandall:                  And I've seen a lot of that. It's interesting that you say these things because for example, one of the problems that I've seen in the past is that I'll come in or somebody on our team comes in and goes, "Okay, this is what we're going to do." And then, somebody else says, "Well, why?" And then, the person that says this is what we're going to do is like don't challenge me, right?

Jack McGuinness:          Right.

Ty Crandall:                  But the other person's not trying to challenge him. The other person just needs to understand the why to work better. And it's the same thing with I see this or I feel this. That's something else I've noticed that's interesting in a team where people say, "Look, I feel this way." And then, somebody else goes, "Well, I don't see that." And it's like they're talking two different languages. And it's interesting because when we've realized that and linked it where the person says, "Why do you feel that way? What makes you feel that way?" It's like you're talking about feeling. He's talking about what he sees. She's talking about what she hears. You're talking three different languages.

Jack McGuinness:          Yeah. And talking over each other. And so, our bias is that ... And there's some great research that's been done on teams. I think it's by the Center for Creative Leadership. I think it's less than 10% of leadership teams view themselves as effective. And that's a crazy stat, right? I mean, in terms of productivity of organizations in general. But that one statistic tells a lot about the fact that teams don't necessarily know how to be teams. And just by throwing really talented people together or sticking a charismatic leader in front of a team, doesn't mean it's going to be effective.

Jack McGuinness:          And so, our bias is to just take some time for the individuals on the team to, number one, define how they want to work together. And this is not flaky stuff. It's like how are we going to make decisions together? When we meet, are we ... just simple stuff like is it okay for folks to be on their cellphones while we're meeting? Just simple stuff like that because defining the behaviors of how we're going to work with each other is really important.

Jack McGuinness:          And then, secondly, it's take a little bit of time for folks to get to know each other, like peel back the onion a little bit, at a different level of understanding. And so, there's lots of great instruments and tools out there to get the dialogue started around these similarities and differences in people. They're called psychometric instruments like Myers-Briggs or DISC or Insights. There's a lot of great tools out there. And we use them as discussion starters. It's just you see the world this way, I see the world this way. That's a good thing. But when we're interacting with each other, we need to recognize those things.

Jack McGuinness:          So the classic example is you got a really strong technical person that is great at solving problems and digging in to the research and the analytics behind an issue. And then, you've got someone who's a salesperson that just wants to go out and talk to people and get the next sale in and build a relationship. Those two people come at things from much different perspective. One wants to just go do it. The other one wants to really figure and get to the right answer. And those two types of folks, if they don't recognize those differences, can very quickly get into clashes like well, he doesn't care about the facts. He just wants to get a sale. Or he doesn't care about building the business, all he wants to do is build his little app. Right? And those kind of things have a way of getting out of whack very quickly.

Ty Crandall:                  You talked a little bit, and we talked several times, about the importance of goals, of knowing what the team is there for, them understanding the clarity of what the purpose is. How do you measure that? What do you find is some of the best ways for a team to measure the effectiveness of how they're reaching those goals?

Jack McGuinness:          Yeah. So there's two sets of metrics that we think are really important. Obviously, first and foremost is defining purpose of this team as it relates to leading this business. And so, there are obviously business metrics associated with it. There's sales goals. There's new product launch goals. Whatever that organization or those particular goals are for building that particular business or that big business unit. Those are obvious in terms of how we measure the effectiveness of a leadership team. We think there are more predictive metrics as well that will give you a sense for are you building towards those characteristics of a great team so that you're building the foundation to be able to get the business goals achieved?

Jack McGuinness:          And so, there's various ways of doing this and we use a great diagnostic instrument that measures seven structural components of a team and seven relational components of a team. And they give you some insights into are we building resilience? Are we able to confront each other well and have constructive interaction with each other? Do we make decisions efficiently and effectively? Do we have roles of team members clearly defined in a way that we understand their functional roles, their enterprise roles, and the interconnection between them?

Jack McGuinness:          And so, the ability to measure that is a good predictor of whether you're going to get the results that you're looking for. And so, our engagements are typically four to six, sometimes nine, months long. And we do this at the beginning and towards the end of an engagement to give folks a sense for how they're developing and where their development still needs work.

Ty Crandall:                  You know, you talked about different viewpoints, different views. How do you encourage that? How do you encourage these diverging, these different, viewpoints without actually causing mistrust or creating gaps between the team members? How do you do that? Because you know how it is. There's people that don't even want to speak up because they're afraid of how it will be viewed? How do you get past that to get them to want to voice their opinion and then, to not get other people to not negatively criticize them to shut them down?

Jack McGuinness:          So it starts with the leader. It really does. And we talked about a word. I think you called it modeling before. I'm not sure which one. But modeling is big. And listening, modeling curiosity, modeling being open to different perspectives, modeling taking feedback well and giving it well. When a leader can set up the construct for that type of interaction, the opportunity for it to flourish in a team goes up dramatically.

Jack McGuinness:          And I think it's important, it doesn't always need to just be the CEO. It can be another member of the team that has influence that is modeling that type of behavior and can call a timeout when we're getting off track because people are getting offended by each other and say, "Look guys, let's just listen to each other. Bob's got a good point here. Just listen to what he has to say. And you don't have to agree with him, but just listen to what he has to say and ask some more questions about it." And so, when you can get a leader that is able to model that type of behavior, then your opportunity to build that kind of interaction goes up dramatically.

Ty Crandall:                  How do you build in feedback loops? That's great if the moderator recognizes there's a conflict. But how do you get feedback from team members to get their insight of how they feel the production of the team is going? Whether it be as a group or individual so you really get to what they really think and feel?

Jack McGuinness:          Yeah, that's a good point. So it all starts with do they feel comfortable. Building trust to begin with is really big because if you ... I'll give you a scenario. You're a leader that thinks they have the right answer all the time and really is not that interested in what other folks have to say. The more you behave like that, the less likely people are going to be open and to put their two cents on the table. The more you model that openness to hearing different perspectives, the more you're going to get feedback.

Jack McGuinness:          But in terms of the group's process, every once in a while, not every meeting, but once a month, once a quarter, just check in and say how are we doing? We said we wanted to operate like this to these set of ground rules. How are we doing for those? And this is a different conversation than are we getting the business results we're looking for. It's more of a discussion of how are we doing as a team? Are we interacting as a team effectively? Do people feel like they can put their voice on the table? Do people feel like people are dominating? Those kind of things.

Ty Crandall:                  What do you do about challenges? I mean, what happens when the team gets stuck. You understand the goal. You're trying to get to the goal. You run into obstacles that are holding you back from reaching the goal. As a leader, maybe you're not sure how to overcome those obstacles. What happens when the thing fails? What happens when you face challenges with the team trying to reach that goal?

Jack McGuinness:          You call it out. You put it on the table. Because everyone knows anyway. It's like the dead fish in the room. Everyone knows there's a problem. Everyone's kind of avoiding it. And the worst thing that can happen is, for example, you're in a leadership team meeting. You're meeting. Everyone knows there's a challenge on the table. No one's voicing their concern. The meeting ends. And then, you see the line outside the CEO's office where everyone's trying to lobby the CEO for their two cents and tell him Bob's point was stupid. And the CEO's response to that is going to be go talk to each other about it. Talk openly in the discussion. If you're struggling with Bob, go try to figure it out with him. If you can't, I'll help you try to figure it out. But calling it out is ... You can't ignore it because when you ignore problems, they get worse.

Ty Crandall:                  It's very true. And it's funny because when I think about an experience that we had with our sales guys where they were fighting over the commission. And both of them were right in a way and we put it back to them and said, "Settle it. You guys need to figure it out. Come back to me only if you can't." They couldn't. And I said, "Okay, here's the resolution." Gave the commission to a third salesperson that wasn't even involved. And I said, "Next time you guys have something you can't work out, feel free to come back to me again." They never came back to me again.

Jack McGuinness:          Yeah, I like it. That's good.

Ty Crandall:                  They worked it out.

Jack McGuinness:          I like it.

Ty Crandall:                  Let me ask you this. Along this line, what happens when they lose focus, they lose energy. How do you reenergize them? How do you keep a team energized where you don't have to come back in and reenergize them?

Jack McGuinness:          It's more of the same. I think when a team gets off track, it's typically a couple things. It's have we lost sight of our focus, our goals? And number two, have we started to build assumptions about why things aren't working that may or may not be true? And so, let's challenge our assumptions a little bit. And so, again, it's just when things are going bad, don't ignore it. Put it on the table and address it and address it openly as a team.

Ty Crandall:                  One of the best quotes I've ever read came from Warren Buffet and it says, "It's good to learn from your mistakes. It's better to learn from other people's mistakes."

Jack McGuinness:          Yeah, yeah.

Ty Crandall:                  That's a large part of business. But what I found in building teams is that you have this knowledge of past mistakes. But then, you build a team and put them into roles and you kind of forget to pass on that knowledge. So how do you channel the past failures that you have, the team has, the organization has, back into the team in a positive way where it doesn't create fear but it actually motivates them to then take those experiences and learn them and do better.

Jack McGuinness:          I think incorporating them into the discussions you're having about a potential challenge that you're facing and again, it's like looking at what we're trying to achieve and what could potentially go wrong. And put it, again, it's just putting those discussions square in front of the team and bringing your experience to bear and saying, "Hey look, I've had experience like this where this is what happened and this is what got in the way of this particular challenge moving forward. I'm not suggesting that's going to happen here, but it could, so how do we address that together?"

Ty Crandall:                  Jack, where do CEOs screw this up? I mean, we talked about several ways, right? We understand that not having the laser focus and not having the goal and not getting people that want to deal with the challenging tasks. So we hit on some of that stuff. But where do you just see where you come into organizations and CEOs have just completely screwed it up and they made mistakes that were completely avoidable. What's some of that stuff that you're seeing?

Jack McGuinness:          Yeah. So the biggest one is when a CEO feels like they have to be the central focus for resolving every challenge that comes in front of the team. Whether they're relational, whether they're business and technical challenges. It's that hero kind of leadership style. And because as you know, I'm not telling you anything you don't know. The fact is right now you can't know everything and you can't have all the information. And if you think you do, you're going to fail fast. So the toughest challenges we see are those that try to take the burden of the team on themselves.

Ty Crandall:                  Which is easy to do.

Jack McGuinness:          It is.

Ty Crandall:                  Because as an entrepreneur, that's just by default I think.

Jack McGuinness:          Sure, it is. It is. And it's hard to learn how to delegate too. It's really hard to learn how to delegate. And what is delegation? What does that really mean? Is it just completely blindly giving something that I was doing now over to someone else and letting them go? Or is it, as you talked about before, delegating with development behind it? And as a sales leader, you know you can't do the former, you have to do the latter. When you delegate, you have to make sure there's some development in there as well.

Ty Crandall:                  Sure. And it's a hard thing to do. And as our organization has grown, I just refer to it as things that are taken away from me. Because that's how it feels. All the stuff that I love doing thus far, you have to delegate and eventually somebody does it all. And then, there's this fear of loss like you're not contributing. And it's interesting because some people are startups here. They don't even have teams to lead yet, that are listening, but you will need to know this because eventually, as you said, the organization gets so big that your primary role is leadership. Your primary role is to teach and lead the leaders that lead the organization. So this stuff is invaluable because it doesn't matter if you're a startup or not, at some point in the growth of the organization, this becomes the focus that you have to learn to lead these teams and delegate and have the trust to step back and let them take the reins and run with it.

Jack McGuinness:          No question about it. It's the hardest thing. We don't really necessarily work with startups. We work with more ...

Ty Crandall:                  Established.

Jack McGuinness:          ... established firms because they don't really need our help.

Ty Crandall:                  They don't have teams, right?

Jack McGuinness:          Yeah. They don't have teams in place yet. Or they have a team in name and they're mostly just doing stuff.

Ty Crandall:                  Right.

Jack McGuinness:          But delegation is the hardest thing. It's like you said. You said it the right way. I feel like I'm losing stuff that I was doing stuff before and now I'm not really sure what my role is. And it's hard to do that.

Ty Crandall:                  How do you not become the figurehead in those meetings? Because I see what you're saying. You don't want to shoulder it. But then again, if you're talking about general discussion and group, you're one of the group. You're going to have opinions. But you're the leader, so when you put out those opinions, it's natural for the rest to pull back and not challenge that whatever it is that you put out there. Do you see that that be common where a leader contributes and then ...

Jack McGuinness:          Yeah, we do. And I supported that transition. It's really important for a leader to recognize their position of authority. For a CEO, by default, they have a position of authority. And that's a good thing. But they also need to know ... When they're voicing just an opinion versus this is the way we're going to do it, you need to differentiate as the leader. And simple things like just, "Hey look guys, this is your call. I'm just giving you my two cents on this right now." Versus, "This is the way I want to see this done." Right? And the difference between those two things is really powerful because if you don't do that, people make assumptions. "Well, Bob said this is the way you wanted to do it." And someone will look at it and say, "No, he didn't say that's the way we have to do it. He said that was what his thought was. Right? And so, he didn't say we couldn't pushback on it."

Jack McGuinness:          But as a leader, particularly as your transitioning from startup to a going concern, it's really important for the CEO to say, "Hey look, I'm just giving you my two cents right now." Versus, "This is the way we're going to do it."

Ty Crandall:                  A lot of great stuff as we get ready to wrap up. What are some parting thoughts? We've talked about mistakes. We've talked about what to do. What are some of the things that we haven't talked about that you think are very important that people listening and watching should know where they're either stuck with building their team or they're kind of in the process of trying to build and structure the team now and figure these things out. What's some of your best advice? And you've given a lot already.

Jack McGuinness:          Yeah. I guess my biggest advice would be when you get to a point where you are building a team of leaders that are managing other people or other parts of the business, take a step back. It doesn't have to be a two day off site or some stupid thing like that. Just take a step back and think about how do we want to structure this team? How do we want to operate as a team? Who are the players on the team? And what are their similarities and differences and how will that impact both positively and negatively? And what do we need to do, each of us, to be a more effective contributor at this point in time for this team moving forward? So it's just stepping back and setting up the structural dynamics, setting up some relational dynamics so that you have a path forward. And then, every once in a while, doing that again because as you grow and add someone new or add another line of business or whatever, you need to reconstitute that.

Ty Crandall:                  Very great advice. And we do the personality profiling for every teammate member that comes in. And we ask them, and they all, 100% of them, say they want to share theirs for the team and they want to see everybody else's. And it's a great topic for discussion because every time that happens, somebody goes, "Oh, I get it now. I understand."

Jack McGuinness:          Right.

Ty Crandall:                  Like you said, as a leader, when you set that and get everybody to know everybody else's strengths and weaknesses and personality, it just helps that team mesh and work so well together. So great advice.

Jack McGuinness:          Yep, thanks, Ty.

Ty Crandall:                  Jack, where does everybody go to learn more about ... what other information can people get? Where should they go to take action and get some more information?

Jack McGuinness:          Sure. So our website is relationship-impact.com. And we think we've done a good job building some good content out there. We have a monthly webinar we do. We write for Chief Executive Magazine. We have blogs out there. We have a lot of good content all around how to build a great leadership team. For your audience, those that are CEOs, general managers, leaders of teams, we have a complimentary assessment that you can find on our website as well that will give you a sense for how your team is working both structurally and relationally.

Ty Crandall:                  Perfect. So everybody listening, remember none of this means anything unless you take action. And I love what Jack just said that there's a complimentary assessment that you could take to see where you stand now. So make sure you go to relationship-impact.com. I will put that URL on the show resources page. I'm going to go ahead, since they do put out so much content, I'm going to go ahead and put a link to their Facebook page and their YouTube channel as well because there was a bunch of great content there. Jack, is that good to add?

Jack McGuinness:          That's awesome. Thank you very much, yeah.

Ty Crandall:                  Okay, perfect. We'll do that. But the first place, the number one best place to go, is relationship-impact.com. And I will put that link on show resources so you can go and grab that complimentary assessment.

Jack McGuinness:          In fact, when the website pops up, it's the first thing you'll see is a link to what's called a quiz.

Ty Crandall:                  Okay, perfect. And not only will I put that link on show resources, I will put a flashing motion .gif image on the show resources page so you can't miss it to get to relationship-impact.

Jack McGuinness:          I really appreciate that.

Ty Crandall:                  Hey Jack, thanks for coming on, man. This was really enlightening. I got a lot of stuff, took a lot of notes on it. I really appreciate your time.

Jack McGuinness:          Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it, Ty.

Ty Crandall:                  All right. And thanks everybody for tuning in. Make sure you visit relationship-impact.com. That will be on the show resources page. And make sure you grab this complimentary assessment to see where you are now and take the first step of building a really, really, really solid winning leadership team. Thanks everybody for tuning in and make sure you visit relationship-impact.com to grab that complimentary assessment. Thanks everybody. Have a great day.

Announcer:                   You've been listening to the Business Credit and Financing Show with your host, Ty Crandall. Watch for our next episode to get even more insight on financing and growing your business. And don't forget to check us out online at creditsuite.com for even more business growth strategies.