This episode isn’t about a software solution. It’s about getting solid execution at every level in the business.
“How do we get accountability and traction at the team member level?”
Today’s episode is strategic and tactical and you get a sneak peek into our operations…which is why I’ve brought on Heather Mckiel!
In our interview, you’re going to learn how to…
- Have more effective internal communication
- Give accountability at the task level without getting bogged down
- Improve execution on projects.
Listen here:
Resources:
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Chris LoCurto: Welcome to the Chris LoCurto show where we discuss leadership and life and discover that business is what you do, not who you are.
Chris LoCurto: Welcome to the show. We have a fantastic leadership question to answer today and that is from you guys. We reached out on Facebook to get some phenomenal leadership and life questions from you. So before we dive into today’s episode, I want to answer one of those great questions. And this one comes from Reagan. Reagan asks, “it’s been a few years since a bad business partnership set me back financially and emotionally still hanging on to a lot of resentment. I know how I should move forward, but it’s tough to let go of that. How do I get past bitterness to get that fire again?” Whew. Reagan, that is a whole show. A question right there. This is a big question. I’m going to give you the short answer. So let me just go ahead and give you the best way to get past this. Get your butt to Next-Level Life, serious.
Chris LoCurto: I am not kidding about that. Get your butt to Next-Level Life. Here’s my short answer for this with the time that we have, the thing about holding onto resentment is it, it’s kind of like the old saying, “bitterness is like taking a cyanide pill and hoping that somebody else dies.” The resentment that you’re experiencing right now, the holding onto it is literally poisoning you mentally, emotionally, and believe it or not physically, I would dare say, I bet you’ve gone through some physical health issues along the way as well. Even if it’s just something so small as bad digestion because here’s what’s happening inside of your stomach. All of that resentment is dumping cortisol into your stomach and causing you to lose good bacteria causing you to lose Serotonin, which by the way, you need that. You need that for good rest. You need that for happiness.
Chris LoCurto: It’s stopping up your Melatonin producing process. There’s all kinds of things that are happening inside of you because of resentment, because of bitterness. So holding onto it…No matter what happened, doesn’t matter what happened. It does not matter what happened. Holding onto it is like taking that cyanide pill and hoping that somebody else is affected. It doesn’t happen that way. It’s happening to you. It’s affecting you badly. There’s no point, there’s not going to be anything that somebody is going to come along and said that’s going to change the situation. You know, if that bad business partner comes back and says, Hey, I’m totally sorry, that’s great, but it doesn’t change the financial and emotional hit, right? The only way you’re going to truly get past this stuff is if learn the tools. If you learn how to actually discover where the resentment is actually coming from.
Chris LoCurto: I know you think it’s coming from that bad business partnership, but it’s actually coming from someplace way deeper in your root system and how to get the tools to work past that. So again, the short answer is understand how badly holding onto this is affecting you physically, emotionally, mentally, but also understand there is a process. It’s Next-Level Life that can actually help you get way beyond this and a whole bunch of other stuff too. So hopefully that has helped you out today, Reagan. We really appreciate the question and I’m so sorry for what you’ve experienced. My friend. So praying for you that everything gets better from here on out. Let go that crap. There you go. So folks, many of you relate to this. I know I have related to Reagan situation in my past. That’s why we do what we do.
Chris LoCurto: We’ve been through this stuff, we’ve experienced this kind of stuff and I can tell you it is just a colossal waste of time to live in it. There are ways, so if you’ve experienced this before, if you, if you relate to this, if you know that you’ve got some stuff that you’ve held onto or resentment or bitterness or any of that kind of stuff, or you’ve been through just bad situations, get your butt to Next-Level Life. It is the event that will help you to discover why that stuff is still existing, why it’s affecting you and why it’s affecting your decision making process. The great thing is, is not only do we discover this, but we give you the tools to walk that out. If you’ve been listening to the show for any level of time, then you’ve heard interviews from people that have been through this process and absolutely had their lives changed.
Chris LoCurto: So Chris LoCurto.com/nextlevellife or go on the homepage and Click on what we do. All right, uh, onto other struggles that we experience in life and as leaders, leadership struggles and solutions are so often about people. The symptoms may show up in broken processes or symptoms, but almost always there’s a people issue at the core of the problem and the solution. Today we’re talking about project management software. Yay. Wait, aren’t you really excited to talk about project management software? Of course you are. Guys, listen, this episode isn’t about a software solution. It’s about getting solid execution at every level in the business. And at its core, it’s about leadership and people issues. So let me ask you this. Would you be excited to find out six months from now that execution was happening at a high level in every area of your organization?
Chris LoCurto: Would you be excited to know that things weren’t falling through the cracks? Would you be excited to see your team members getting more productive as their tasks are organized and taking care of in a timely manner? Now I bet you would love these things and see your team collaborating like never before because you actually used a great project management software in the way you were supposed to. You know, all leaders ask, how do we get accountability and traction at the team member level? Now we have these huge initiatives and Stratplans that we do with companies, you know, and they’re asking, how do we get these things effectively done? How do we successfully implement after Stratplan or during a full day meeting? What do we do with this stuff? That’s one of the reasons that we use Asana. Now listen, we are not an affiliate, which really they should have us as one.
Chris LoCurto: They really should, uh, but maybe they should be paying us for the amount of people we send their way. This is a phenomenal tool that we use. When we do Stratplan… We use it all through our business. We use it in our Next Level Mastermind. When we do Stratplans, we actually have the company, this is a software package that we have them use. It’s easy and we load it up like crazy with all of the things that they need to do to successfully pull this off. So today’s episode is strategic and tactical and you get a sneak peek into our operations, which is why I’ve brought on Heather Mckiel. Heather, welcome to the show.
New Speaker: Well thank you!
New Speaker: It is so good to have you on. It’s been a while.
New Speaker: It’s good to be back. I actually sit behind the scenes but…
New Speaker: It’s not like they’re not always around. It’s just great to actually have you on the show.
Chris LoCurto: So as we look through how to get solid execution at every level in the business, we’re going to be talking about how to have more effective internal communication, how to close out your day, how to give accountability at the task level without getting bogged down and improve execution on projects. So before we do all of that, today’s episode is brought to you by the Next Level Leadership LIVE Event. I’ve never seen a leader that’s had everything that they wanted. Out of thousands of leaders that I’ve coached most are probably a lot like you. You wish you saw greater productivity and less drama from your team, That you didn’t spend your energy putting out fires, that you had more time to invest in your family and the things that you enjoy and you felt more equipped to lead your team to success. The only thing that’s holding leaders back from the results they desire is having the right tools and you can get those tools at the Next Level
Chris LoCurto: Leadership LIVE Event. So if you’re young, old, new, experienced, struggling, or really successful, this event is for anyone who is ready to learn from 25 years of best practices that get proven results. It’s not about short term fixes. In three days. I’m going to teach you how to have sustained revenue growth to generate greater productivity from your team and get immediate momentum toward the results that you want. It’s going to be detailed, practical, and loaded with how tos. From the we’re teaching, our clients have seen an average of 46% increase in gross profit in one year’s time. That’s one year’s time. These clients run normal, everyday businesses and your business can have the same level of success. So if you’re ready to see those results, go to Chris LoCurto.com/events and get your tail to this event and invest in your leadership and your business. I can’t wait to see you there. All right, so back to Heather. Hi Heather.
New Speaker: Hello again.
Chris LoCurto: So again, so excited to have you on. This is a lesson. This is something that you taught back in one of our Next-Level Mastermind retreats. Well, how long ago was that? Was that only six months ago? It was only six months ago. We’ve helped so many of our clients go through this process of implementing a project management software to help them get accountability. Now everybody listening, you’re all struggling with two major areas: communication and accountability. Every single business that we work with, everyone, every single business struggles with communication and accountability. And they usually come in going, oh no, we’re, we’re great at this. Trust me, you’re struggling with this. That’s why we teach our clients to use Asana, which is a project management software. Super easy. Well, I think it’s super easy. It’s very user friendly. So here’s what I want to know. How do I know as a leader or business owner if I need a tool or a system like Asana?
Heather McKiel: Yeah. Well here’s a quick check. If you have had communication with your team and possibly emails have gotten lost or there’s been conversation where, “hey, I didn’t get that email,” or “I don’t know where that attachment is right now. I thought it was in my email, but it’s disappeared.” That’s a sign.
Chris LoCurto: There’s never been a leader that’s ever heard that from a team member ever.
Heather McKiel: Yeah, I didn’t get that note.
Chris LoCurto: I don’t remember that conversation. I don’t think we had that conversation. That’s the one that used to drive me nuts in my early leadership years with somebody going, we never actually talked about that. Oh my gosh. We talked about it three times already.
Heather McKiel: Yeah. Cause the communication and information tends to get lost in your emails or apps. We use so many apps and programs that were scattered all over the place. So our team doesn’t know “wait, where did I save that? Was it here? Was it there?” You know, and they’re having to search for it. You find that deadlines get missed, things start getting missed or work is getting repeated. So you’re seeing that your team isn’t executing efficiently and the way that they should be. And so that’s another clear sign that hey, something’s going on.
Chris LoCurto: It has been one of the greatest things. So when we implemented this with our StratPlan clients, we’ve had it, we’ve had this with next level mastermind clients for a long time. What our folks that come through StratPlan…when we put this in place to say, all right, we’re going to load up. You just spent three days here as we went through the whole business, found all the things that are holding you back, found all the great revenue opportunities you didn’t even know were there or were not even thinking about here’s all these processes and steps that we want you to do to go solve this in your business. When we put that in place, folks that had been coming through StratPlan, multiple events, cause we have a lot of people that will come through every year. We’re like, oh my gosh, this was a game changer because now it put a process in place that everybody on the team that was a part of this big strategic plan, the Stratplan, moving forward, they had tasks, they had accountability, they had great communication, they had the ability to shift on the fly if they needed to. Where before people would go at this process or any strategic planning process usually and put things together and then it’s you’re waiting for somebody.
Heather McKiel: Yeah, you have so much more cross communication going on. I’m not going back to my office and everybody’s going in their separate corners and doing their own thing and nobody knows what the other person is doing. With this we’re working side by side with one another and I know if a deadline changes for me that affects somebody else. It’s working together. Um, and so that’s another a good, I guess pulse or a good reference to go, Hey, are there silos going on in my organization or where there isn’t cross communication going on, people aren’t talking across departments on what’s going on and, and how they’re being affected.
Chris LoCurto: Yeah. I know for me, I’ve always taught accountability. You worked for me years ago and our meetings were so heavy set on accountability. So this is a good question to ask you because you’ve, you’ve seen both sides of it. You were there when we were doing, you know, heavy accountability meetings with multiple team members and they were incredibly successful and now we don’t have to spend the amount of time and payroll in those meetings. What’s the difference between then and now?
Heather McKiel: Yeah, I would say the big difference, between then and now is the communication is ongoing. It’s happening. I’m not having to wait for the meeting to get that communication or to get the answers that I need.
Chris LoCurto: We’re going to have to pull everybody at one time into one meeting to get specific answers.
Heather McKiel: Right, right. Cause I can just put a note, in the project that I’m working on and it pings, you know, the other person that I need the information from and they’re seeing it, they’re responding, giving me the information I need. And so it just allows us to work more efficiently, like I said, and add a level of excellence and we get more done because as a result of it.
Chris LoCurto: I think that was one of the happy things for me is that we’ve spent years teaching people how to have great, you know, accountability and communication in their meetings. And this was just a great piece for us to push in there and say, okay, we’ve been teaching you this, we’re going to make it even easier by implementing this process. So first thing in getting better execution is getting better communication. Every single business struggles with this. Whenever we do again Stratplan, we’ll have people come in, we ask them on the first night we’re having dinner and it’s like, hey, how’s your communication? It’s just a random question that we’ll ask and everybody’s like, oh seven eight eight I think it’s an eight I think. I think it’s eight every single time this happens. And then in the middle of the afternoon on the next day, I asked the question cause we go through this whole communication process and I ask them again, Hey, what do you think your communication is now?
Chris LoCurto: Almost every single Stratplan that we do this. The answer is 2, we had no clue that our communication was this difficult or this, that it sucked this badly and we thought we had great communication. So getting great communication. A big part of that is not getting bogged down with communications…I think every single leader listening to this show has been overwhelmed by their inbox, their email inbox. We used email a ton for communication on tasks before we really dug into Asana. So what’s changed about our internal communications after implementing Asana?
Heather McKiel: Yeah, here’s typically what you see is happening with communication if you’re not using something like Asana is I’ll send a text or maybe I’ll send an email or I’ll maybe pick up the phone and call the team member and ask for what I need and then that team member goes, sure I’ll get that done. And then it never gets done
Chris LoCurto: Maybe you hear from them, maybe you don’t.
Heather McKiel: Right. And so again, things get lost when you’re working with Asana. It becomes your central spot to communicate everything and it has a trail. So I can always go back and find it so it never goes away. And we know that’s where we go to communicate. That’s where we go to find the answers. That’s where we go to. I can send a note just like, you can in a Facebook instant messenger and it’s going to send that note to that person and there’s a trail there so nothing gets lost.
Chris LoCurto: And I would say a big piece for us as leaders is a lot of that communication is now, not in our email inbox. That’s one of our big things is hey guys, communicate inside. It’s, we’re not using it as a tool like a messenger. The point that you’re making is that it’s all there, right? The key is this isn’t your, Hey, I want to ask you what you’re doing for lunch today. This is every bit of communication that is in line with the project, in line with the task line with the initiative, whatever the thing is that you have set up in Asana, all communication lives there, right? Even to the point where, and I’m sure we’ll talk about this as well, that you can use like Gmail. You can move stuff out of your inbox into Asana and assign it there so that you’re keeping all of the communication in the right spots, which is huge because I know for me there are days like we do, I keep talking about Stratplan.
Chris LoCurto: I’m locked down for four days straight where I’m not getting to my email. And so if anybody is waiting on something on me, which of course the team knows, the team’s already set up to be successful and he was so they’re not waiting on me for anything. But if they were, it might take me four days before I get to my emails. So if you sent something that’s like I need this answer and it is not in the project, which you know, Asana has its own inbox, what you would go to that doesn’t have all the rest of your email, doesn’t have all these distractions, doesn’t have, you know, your, your email from your best friend sending you the cat playing the piano. If you’re waiting for that communication, it’s in one place where for me, I could come out of a Stratplan and have hundreds of emails that I’ve got to go through because I’ve been locked down for four days. And so if it’s in there, you’re hoping that I’m getting to it as soon as possible, it may take me a little bit to get there. So I think that’s been a huge piece of communication wise and helping us to not get bogged down. The information lost, the questions lost, the answers lost, all that kind of fun stuff.
Heather McKiel: Yeah. And I would say too that it helps us better serve our external clients because then what happens is our team, internal communication is done through Asana and external communication is done through our email. And so the two of them become separated. And that way there, you’re not getting overwhelmed with 20 emails from an internal team member and an external client is not getting the service that they need because their email is going lower and lower in your inbox. So it just, again, I can’t stress the amount of efficiency that it has allowed us to be able to operate at
Chris LoCurto: and I’m sure Asana is listening to us right now, so affiliates…you should pay us for this. So another way to stop the cycle of overwhelm when it comes to communication, that keeps people from executing is closing out your day and setting up your day. It’s something that I teach as a part of Killing The Leadership Crazy Cycle, closing out your day. So many people think that all I need to do is figure out this time management thing and it’s so not correct, but there are phenomenal tools to set you up for success so that you don’t get stuck in overwhelm, and this is one of the, you know, again, killing the leadership crazy is the number one lesson we pushed to all of our next level mastermind clients and strapline clients. So, what does that look like in Asana?
Heather McKiel: Yeah, so Asana has some great tools that we utilize to set up our day and part of when somebody comes on and onboards with us and trains, we teach them how to close out their day every day and what that looks like. And they have a cool little feature called calendars not unique to anything that we’ve ever seen before.
Chris LoCurto: What is this calendar thing you speak of?
Heather McKiel: But here’s the fabulous thing about Asana is at the end of the day when I go and I reset my day for the following day, I can see in a calendar view the tasks that I have not completed. I can also see what I have on my plate for the rest of the week. I can look at my calendar and see what meetings I have and I can quickly drag and drop those appointments or those tasks to whatever day and I can lay out my day based on the Times that I have available, and so it’s just a quick and easy way for us to be able to move. I can apply tags to prioritize. I can set times, due times that I want these tasks to be completed by. There’s so many different ways that I can set myself up for success with managing my time and my to do list in Asana where you know if you’re writing it down on a piece of paper or if you’re working from a calendar, again, things are going to get lost because you’re not able to see everything.
Chris LoCurto: Right. You just heard Heather talking about closing out your day at the end of the day of setting yourself up for tomorrow. This is a part of the lesson in Killing The Leadership Crazy Cycle. You need to get your butt into understanding that stuff. Killing the leadership crazy cycle. Something you to do. When it comes to accountability, we’re huge on that. We are big on teaching accountability. We are big on helping our clients experience what it’s like to have greater accountability in their business. Accountability and execution. We teach it a ton. So how can a leader be more successful at holding their teams accountable with a tool like this? Because there’s a lot of tools out there. But why is this one so great?
Heather McKiel: I love this feature. One because I lead a small team, and it helps me, but as a leader in this business, as we’re overseeing the whole team, it helps us as a company as a whole. So it allows you to have all your tasks in one spot and communicate about those tasks in one spot. But it also gives me the ability to, if I’m sitting in a meeting and tasks are getting assigned or I’m assigning a task to a team member, I can go in there and I can pull a report based on, and I use this, I do a weekly meeting with each one of my team members
Chris LoCurto: …as you should, as all leaders should.
Heather McKiel: And prior to going in there, I can pull their lists of tasks, everything that’s on their plate. So I know as a leader, Hey, what’s your capacity?
Heather McKiel: What’s on your plate? Where are you prioritizing? I’m able to better lead and guide them because of the tools that they have in Asana for me to be able to sort. I can also go in there and take a look at tasks that I’ve assigned. Hey, where are people in the task that I’ve assigned them? Are they done? Are they overdue? Do I need to get in? Jump in there, do I need to, find out what’s going on? You know? So it again allows me to lead that process, and quickly see what’s going on with my team members.
Chris LoCurto: This is something I love because so many times is it could go both ways. It can be somebody is assigning tasks to somebody. They may not be a part of the meeting and so they could be getting tasks assigned to them. This happens all the time in the real world “oh, we’ll put that on so and so. We’ll do this here.” And nobody is looking at whether or not that’s a smart decision. What is one of the big things about the leadership crazy cycle is that you’re stuck and overwhelmed. We don’t want that. But the other piece is also keeps you from having those team members who are people pleasers who want to take on, oh, I can do that. I could do that. I can do that. I can do that. And next thing you know, they’ve overloaded themselves with tasks, folks, people pleasers out there.
Chris LoCurto: Stop doing that. Leaders out there. You should recognize this. You need to see when people are taking on too much stuff that they can’t actually execute with excellence and what will happen. This happens all the time. You’ve probably experienced this. You’re probably gonna relate to this. What happens when you have somebody who takes on too much is that other balls start to drop and then when that happens, timeframes are missed, clients are affected and then you come along and you’ve been really super happy with this champion who tells you that they can do everything and then you’re like, “hey, what’s going on here? Well, how come this failed? How come this failed?” The response is always the same. Well, you’re putting too much stuff on me. Now wait a minute. You told me you can do this stuff. Well, I can’t get all this stuff done.
Chris LoCurto: This is too much. You’ve given me too much. And it’s like the person that was people pleasing now all of a sudden is in that place of going, you’ve put too much on me. I can’t do this. No accountability in the process. Now we have to fix everything. We’ve got a frustrated leader, we have a frustrated team member. We probably have frustrated clients, probably other team members. So I love this process because it allows you to keep your team members successful in what they can execute on. And it could also help you to see if they’re not pulling their weight, which is another great piece of that Pie,
Heather McKiel: Yeah, it’s two fold. And I think as a leadership team it allows us to take a look at, you know, we’ll be in a leadership team meeting and you know, there are different projects that are on the table on, hey, here’s a new project that we can do. Here’s a new, here’s a new idea, here’s a new product. And we as a leadership team can look back and go, okay, what is on my team’s plate? Right? Right. Do we even have the capacity do to do that? So as we are looking forward and forecasting things that we want to do, it allows us to be able to properly project manage our team and that project.
Chris LoCurto: Yeah. So many of us leave meetings or conversations and everyone is not on the same page and the tasks you talked about don’t get executed on or there’s miscommunication, you know, about the work or whatever. What I love about using this for our Stratplan clients is that now they have the ability to take all the initiatives because we don’t give them one thing to go work on. We give them a bunch of stuff that’s not only going to solve huge things in their business, but it’s also gonna create revenue in different areas. But now they get to have it in control. They get to see it, they get to hold people accountable. You know, it might be one person, a team, a division, each other as leaders. So I love that. So when you’re using Asana, you don’t have to worry about accountability leaving meetings if you’re using it.
Chris LoCurto: And we’d literally sit in our meetings all the time. Somebody has always got Asana up and as we’re talking through stuff, and it’s not me because it’s usually the high Cs, it’s usually the high Cs. It’s not the visionary guy, somebody who’s putting in all the time. And you did the, you’re always doing this, which is always phenomenal, is that you’re always going through and putting in all the tasks, all the details, all the stuff that you’ve got to do for your area. Other areas have people doing the same thing. So I love that. At the the last Next-Level Mastermind retreat, I taught on the seven steps to greater productivity in your meetings. And one of the steps from the lesson we use to teach was getting someone to function as the scribe during the meeting, writing down everyone’s tasks and details. But if you’re using Asana, you know, team members are putting in tasks in real time during meetings, what does that look like?
Heather McKiel: We run all of our meetings through Asana. And so what that looks like for us is Asana allows you to build templates. So we have, for instance, we have a Monday staff meeting. And in that project is our team meeting our marketing meeting, our live events meeting, you know, all those different meetings that we have throughout that day. And in there we dump in topics that need to be discussed, what we need to hit in that meeting. So we have an agenda that’s built right in Asana, we can follow it, team members add to it throughout the week. So they’re bringing stuff to this meeting
Chris LoCurto: And it’s assigned in that meeting or in that group.
Heather McKiel: Right, right. And then from there we’re able to add tasks from those topics, you know, um, if, if there are things that need to be done as a result of those discussions. And so again, it’s a central place for us to have all our communication in one spot and we can always go back and refer to those meeting notes.
Chris LoCurto: So there’s been so many meetings that leaders go into and they bring up something they want to discuss or there’s something they want to brainstorm or whatever. They go into this meeting and they throw the information out. People talk about it and then there’s a quasi, so you got this part, you got this part. Maybe if they do that and then that’s it. I think one of the things I love is that when we do, when we’re doing all of our meetings in Asana is open. If it’s something I need to see and I’ve got my Asana open, I’m literally watching people put down the task.
Heather McKiel: Right. You’re seeing as add those tasks there.
Chris LoCurto: I’m literally seeing, yes, you got that correct. Yes. You, you understand. You know, I don’t have to worry that somebody is going to walk away and do something. I’m literally watching them load up their own information every now and then and you have to give time for this because it’s more valuable during the meeting. Every now and then I’ve got to give you or something, one of the team members, a couple of minutes, you know, not that long. Usually a minute, hey, let me finish typing this in so I get all the information correct. So in the flow of a meeting, sometimes it seems like a, Oh crud, we have to stop and wait for this one minute. Oh my gosh, that one minute is so worth stopping and waiting for, because now you’re not spending a ton of time trying to figure out who was supposed to be doing this. Why hasn’t this gotten done yet? Didn’t we talk about this? I thought this was Frank’s job. Why isn’t, you know all that time that comes out towards it’s so worth it to just stop and go. Yep, no, please get that in there and then I can see it, which I absolutely love. All right, so we’ve talked about better, more effective communication. We’ve talked about closing out your day. We’ve talked about accountability, we’ve talked about managing meetings. What’s another key to execution that a software like Asana helps you with, you know, throughout your entire organization
Heather McKiel: Projects!
Chris LoCurto: Projects! That’s scary that my voice was higher than yours.
Heather McKiel: Happy note for me right there. Yeah. So think about all the projects and initiatives that you have your team execute on or that your team is involved in. So having your initiatives mapped out in projects, you have clear goals, defined tasks, you have due dates, everything lives inside that project in Asana. So when you use that project feature it helps everyone know who needs to do what, by when, and how. I mean, it takes the guesswork out of everything. It’s so clear. The goal is defined in the project. The purpose of the project is defined and what we need, the steps that we need to take to accomplish are all in there. When leadership teams come in and do Stratplan, it’s the very tools that they leave with. There’s no guesswork when they leave here that day on what needs to happen in order for the goal to happen.
Heather McKiel: So for example, if I’m populating a project with tasks, for each task, I’m going to go through and I’m going to ask who will do this task? When does it need to be done by? How should this task be done? You know, do I need to put instructions in the task? What do I need to communicate to set my team up to make sure that this task is accomplished, right? How important is it? What’s the priority? You know, is it low, medium, high for them, and I can set that priority right in Asana. What type of work is it? Is it contract work? Does this task go to the marketing team? Is it content? Is it website? I can break it out based on what type of work needs to happen there. I can also break it out by how long does this task take? You know, is it a 15 minute task or does this person need five days in order to research and map out something? Does this task require approval? There’s another great question. I can set dependencies in Asana on this task is dependent on an approval process. Everything in there is created to make your team successful.
Chris LoCurto: So hit this again because this is such a great thing that I don’t think people may not understand by saying you can make it dependent or you can make it dependent on approval or or whatever. This is fantastic.
Heather McKiel: I guess so excited with this feature! It is fantastic. For instance, with the live event that we have going on, there’s so many moving pieces that have to happen in order for tasks to get completed. Like the workbook, just getting the workbook to the printer. There’s so many processes and steps that have to happen. The marketing team has to look at it. The content team has to take a look at it. The graphics have to be done.
Chris LoCurto: The teachers need to create the lessons and write them out…
Heather McKiel: So before that task of send the workbook to the printer happens, all these other tasks have to happen. So I can create a dependency. So I know when I go into this task, if those dependencies aren’t done, don’t move forward with it, then I don’t move forward. I follow up on those dependencies and all right there so I can see it.
Chris LoCurto: It’s more accountability.
Heather McKiel: I’m not guessing.
Chris LoCurto: No, you don’t have a ton of tasks out of order, so it looks like you’re overwhelmed with tasks. In fact, you can put start dates of when you will start on something as well.
Heather McKiel: They have a cool feature if you’re a Gantt fan…
Chris LoCurto: Tons of entrepreneurs and business owners and leaders are always Gantt fans…
Heather McKiel: They have the insta Gantt that you can attach with Asana. So you can map out those timelines and you can really get technical and see what’s going on. I mean, it’s pretty robust.
Chris LoCurto: So it really takes the guesswork out. It takes the, you know, it gets rid of unnecessary confusion and it makes everyone accountable at every level.
Heather McKiel: Absolutely. And if you utilize a tool like Asana successfully, it changes how your team works. It just does. They are so much more efficient. They’re more productive, they’re hitting their deadlines, they’re feeling on top of things, which changes the way that they work throughout the day because they’re getting stuff done, they’re staying on track. Communication is happening. You have a happy team.
Chris LoCurto: Oh yeah. We, I can’t tell you how many of our clients are, they’re so stoked about it because once they put it in place of the amount of productivity increased dramatically, we have one of our clients, Josh Gettig, is like, he’s like, I was so dead set against this. A lot of times a high d is going to be like, nope, not changing, not doing stuff. Nope. Don’t want even want to get into it. And he’s like, I’m the greatest fan, because it made such a big impact for him. And all of our clients experience that. So, so there you go, folks. This is something that we use. It’s a tool that we believe you should be using. I think it’s going to change the way you do your communication.
Chris LoCurto: I think it’s going to change the accountability that you have inside of your business. I think it’s gonna change, the way your teams work together. All the things that we’ve talked about today. Again, we should still be an affiliate for this because we’re, we’re huge fans for a reason. The stuff that we teach is how to do things well, how to do things with excellence, how to get rid of a bunch of the junk and focus on the things that are important. And this is one of the tools that we use. We’ve always been great at doing that. We’ve always been great at accountability and
Heather McKiel: I was going to say for years. I mean I’ve done nothing but produce events for years. And so living in the details, that’s always been my thing. So to have a tool like Asana just makes me work so much more efficiently. It just made my life a whole lot easier. And I don’t mean easier in the sense of, Oh, I don’t have to do anything now. I mean easier in the sense of I know what’s going on, and what has to happen. And I feel so much more confident in moving forward. And that’s what it does for your team. It gives them the confidence to do their job and to do it efficiently.
Chris LoCurto: So there you go. Asana.com. We should have spelled that for you at the front of the show, but uh, it’s something that we believe you’re going to enjoy. Those of you that are our Next-Level Mastermind clients, you are going to be getting this lesson that Heather taught on utilizing it, the whole video lesson in your program, all that kind of fun stuff. So we just love it. There you have it. Put this thing in place. Help yourself to have more accountability, more productivity, getting rid of a bunch of confusion. Now, if you haven’t already, make sure that you subscribe to the show so you don’t miss when we release new content. Make sure you’re getting the notifications and not missing it in a noisy world of social media and email. So go to iTunes or the podcast app, whichever you listen to and just hit subscribe. That way you’re always getting this information and do us a favor while you’re there. Give us a like, give us a comment if you are liking the show, if you’re liking stuff like this, where we help you to improve your productivity, tell us by leaving us a review on iTunes. Well, folks, hopefully this has helped you today. As always, take this information, change your leadership, Change your business, change your life, and join us on the next episode.
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