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Excerpt
Sean:
What we’re some of the biggest leadership lessons you’ve learned just from being a one woman team when you were starting this up all the way to today, where I don’t know how many people do you have in the team? So maybe you could share that as well, but we want to know leadership lessons. Right?
Jacqueline:
One of my favorite leadership quotes that I say is leadership is about knowing what to do and when to do it and doing it.
So it’s about having ability to understand the right things that need to be done, but then having the courage to execute, especially when you’re building something with no money, you’re going to have to take some risks. You’re going to have to do things that take you out of your comfort zone a little bit, and not only by faith, but also on a practical level, whether it’s applying a new marketing strategy into your business or incorporating a new revenue generator and learning something you haven’t done before.
But you know, God has really helped me relinquish that trust in him more, that he will bring the right team members, and God truly has. I have, I have a small team, but we’re an effective team and it’s not, it’s more about quality over quantity. Collectively I have anywhere between five and I would say five to seven or eight people working around me. All freelancers, whether they are my core writing team and content output team, are three people. So, four, including myself. That’s not a lot, considering how much content we output and manage on a monthly basis. But then there’s also my development team for the online there’s tech support and then there’s app development and some of – with some of the, you know, technology elements necessary. Small team but definitely qualified team.
The point I wanted to make about the delegation and entrusting God when he brings the right team members, is that they are self-sufficient and that’s important. Your team should not take from your time. Your team should free up more of your time. So they are all, at a point where I can give assignments and then trust that they will execute to the level of excellence necessary and according to how I’ve built the business.
But that was because from the very beginning, you must take the time to train your team. You have to be patient in the training process. I will walk each and every one of my team members, even at my, I have two accounting girls that handle the billing for the company, which of course I did for myself, but I took the time to train every single one of my team members on every single step necessary in their division, in their department.
In their first few training assignments, they made mistakes or errors. I didn’t do it for them. I made them so to speak or required them to go back and make all the corrections because look, we learn by doing. So, no matter who you’re training, if there’s errors or mistakes, you need to be patient enough to be like, “okay you miss this, this, this, and this now go back and do it” and make sure in their training process that they are trained to do it correctly from the beginning. So that they learn the pattern and behavior required in order to execute it.
Training, getting the team member plugged into the same process and behavior or automated behavior pattern. Being willing to not micromanage. I personally don’t like to be micromanaged and I don’t think anyone else does. I think you have to have a level of entrustment or trusting your team members. So, they feel a sense of autonomy as well, you know, so they can take ownership over their division or their responses, and that gives them your team members their own sense of accomplishment. And I think that’s important for individual personal growth. You want to have that culture in your company growing personally, as well as professionally and materially as well. You know, we’re all making money, of course, as well while we’re doing it.
