The success of a business depends on a leader’s ability to align and develop the people who work with them. High-performance teams are built intentionally by leaders who understand the three essential components of growth: alignment, development, and transition.
Natalie Dawson’s new book TeamWork simplifies each of these elements into practical steps that leaders can implement right away to create change. For anyone looking to help their team succeed, TeamWork offers a quick route to building a successful business with a strong culture. I recently spoke with Natalie to find out more about her latest book.
What happened that made you decide to author the book? What was the exact moment when you realized these ideas needed to get out there?
I work daily with small business owners who find it hard to build a team that is engaged and aligned. I assist them in hiring new staff or managing current team members who are resisting change or causing difficulties. I also help them figure out how to remove someone they rely on from their business if that person is no longer adding value.
After having hundreds of these conversations, especially during COVID when many business owners were dealing with a virtual working environment for the first time, I realized that this is the best time to help business owners reset and create this new world of work. There’s a restructure that has come about with COVID and employee expectations, but also as an employer, what does it really look like to craft your culture? To bring in team members who want to help you, who are looking for somebody to learn from, and who are creating this environment that is above and beyond anything that they’ve ever experienced before?
Leaders and business owners have this opportunity now more than ever to think of themselves as leaders and as coaches to every single person who chooses to work from them. But in many cases, they just don’t know how to do it. So this book is relevant for any business owner who is interested and excited by the idea of growing their business but has been struggling to find the right team. So they’re probably nervous due to bad experiences with team members previously, or they’re not feeling confident in their own leadership skills.
What’s your favorite specific, actionable idea in the book?
I dive deep into this process called personal, professional, and financial goal planning for your team members. I’ve had a decade of experience implementing this process and seeing the successes behind it. Right now in our business, we’re going into performance reviews. We’re watching team members who’ve had such granular focus on their goals—usually, people who’ve never sat down and had a goal conversation for an hour with somebody who really cared about them—and they’ve not only achieved those goals but exceeded them. Now they’re setting new targets and looking for their next round of growth, which is what this book is all about.
How do you create a system and a process in an organization to help harness and capture the potential that human beings have when they’re aligned with the right objectives and they see how they can win? What happens when you believe in them and what becomes possible when all those things come together? That’s what I’m passionate about and why the personal, professional, and financial goal planning process is my favorite idea in the book.
What’s a story of how you’ve applied this idea in your own life? What’s it done for you?
Ten years ago, when I started with the first company I ever worked with, I was asked what my personal, professional, and financial goals were. I still have a copy of the goals I wrote down that day. In my five-year goals, I wrote that I wanted to be able to lead a team. I wanted to be able to travel for work. This was all before I did any of these things, and in that moment, I can remember thinking I was a long way off from achieving any of these goals.
At the time, I was driving a 1993 Buick Century, so I wrote also wrote down “pay for my own car.” I bought my first car six months later, and it was life-changing for me. It truly has impacted and changed everything about how I reset myself when I’m feeling unmotivated and how I’ve taught other team members to go through the process of writing down what they want.
That way, it’s at the forefront of their mind when they’re showing up to work every day, when they’re putting extra hours in, or when they’re trying to figure out how to develop themselves. Because the only reason that people will develop themselves is if the picture of where they’re going is big enough for them to make those short-term sacrifices. I’m a living example of how this process transforms someone. I’ve helped hundreds of team members do the same while helping hundreds of business owners implement this into their businesses.