Today I’d like to share another kind of gratitude – a gratitude for the people who support us in doing our transformational work in the world. Our teams!
Introducing Part One of our Team Truth interview series with my team, with my Retreats Manager Jana Rezucha.
In it she talks about how to hire, as well as how to allow yourself to be truly supported (so you CAN be grateful!)
Darla: Hello. Welcome. This is Darla LeDoux of Aligned Entrepreneurs and I am here with Jana Rezucha who is our retreat manager here at Aligned Entrepreneurs.
Jana: Hello. We are on retreat. Yay.
Darla: We are having our own retreat, so our team has the full experience of what it’s like to be our clients and so we are here in beautiful Mexico. Some of our team members are actually out there swimming at the moment. Jana, you want to share your [injury]
Jana: I had a little problem.
Darla: Jana can’t swim right now, so we’re here on the beach and we were planning to come to you live. We’re going to try walking. We’re going to see if we can walk and talk. I’ve not done this before.
Darla: We were planning to come to you live on Tuesday, but we had a lot of different things happen here in Mexico, but so I had posted to get some of your questions about hiring team. I’m going to interview my team members to have them help you answer. The question that we’re going to talk about here is:
How do you hire a team member that really gets you and can support you?
What do you look for in the interview process and how do you really let that person support you?
Darla: I’m going to get Jana’s take on it. She has my full permission to share her experience of working with me and what’s worked and what hasn’t and all of that.
Jana: Okay, in terms of hiring someone that’s going to work well for you, I think what really worked for us is that we had a test project. It was kind of a large test project, but that worked well in just seeing how we do work together. You know, there’s not a lot of consequences or commitments, so if you can arrange some kind of a test project with your potential employee, that would be wonderful. I think we all had test projects actually.
Jana: In terms of being supported, for me as a support person what really matters is that my employer would accept what I offer and of course there would be changes here and there, but if the employer is really changing everything that the support person does, it doesn’t feel very helpful on either account. I think just as an employer understands that people might do things a little differently than you would, but they’ll still get to the same place that you want and it will all work out well.
Darla: Awesome. Do you have any examples of that in our work together of maybe a time when I changed something that you wished I hadn’t or a time when I let us run with something that you had come up with that I, you know, just giving you permission.
Jana: I guess, I mean the thing that worked well was just recently when we had that game at the Essentials Retreat, where it was a true collaboration, where I came up with an idea and you basically added to it and executed, got it into a physical form and that worked really well. There was just back and forth together to come up with an excellent result.
Darla: That makes me think of, so for me some of the learning I’ve had is embracing people’s strengths. Nobody is going to be you, nobody’s going to do it the way you would do it and in fact you don’t actually want that because if that’s the case, then the person’s not going to be complementing your skill set.
What I’ve learned about Jana is that she’s super creative and she’s super intuitive. She’ll come to me with, “I don’t know exactly what it is, but I’m getting something about this.” I can kind of take that, and I’ve learned to trust her intuition, and I’m an executor, right? That’s part of why I’ve created a business is I can turn an idea into an action quickly.
In this particular case, Jana had gotten a download about, we were trying to come up with a game for helping people name their retreat and she had an idea, oh maybe we could do something, I probably shouldn’t share …
Jana: No.
Darla: … in case these people come [to our Essentials Retreat]. For those of you who were there, don’t tell, okay? For those of you coming to our January retreat, you’ll get it there, so I won’t share the details. She had this download of a concept and then I was able to turn that into, oh here’s how we could turn that into an exercise that would work.
Jana: Mm-hmm
Darla: I could say well it’s my responsibility to plan the game, right?
Jana: Yeah.
Darla: Because it is, really, I mean in our system I plan the curriculum at this point. But I was able to tap into Jana’s creativity. She had an awesome idea and then I could have said, okay well she has to finish it, but I know I’m a quick finisher.
Jana: Yes.
Darla: … and so we can kind of partner with one another.
We’re here with our other two team members, Jana and I are both really ‘people people’, we’re intuitive, creative people, and our other team members are much more systematic.
Jana: Yay.
Darla: Much more like let’s have a structure and follow the rules and so we are learning how to use them to complement what we do, so that’s really important. Anything else that feels important for you about deciding where to work?
Jana: Yes, it’s important there’s a lot of laughter involved, because work is a part of your life and you want it to be a fun part of your life for sure.
Darla: Yeah, and even being here and getting to know each other outside of a work context has been super valuable. We’ll let the other ladies share about their experience with that. Jana is a past client and so I tapped her to work for me basically.
Jana: That could be a good way too to hire.
Darla: It’s kind of based on an intuition too, really. The other two ladies that work for me, they both have been OBMs and VAs. They’ve had multiple clients. Some do still have multiple clients. Since they’ve had that experience, I’ll get their take on these questions too, because they’ve worked with a lot of different clients in this space. More to come here from Tulum, Mexico. Wish you were here!