Voice Over: Hey, listeners, it’s time for Leadership Happy Hour, the podcast for leaders that want to lead better, lead smarter, and get shit done. Grab a cold one and let’s get ready to groove. Here’s your host, a leader who’s been fire baptized and is mother-approved, the unconventional leader, Chip Lutz.

Chip Lutz: Well, here we are, ready for another action-packed episode of Leadership Happy Hour, my favorite time of the week and perhaps yours too. You know, I always maintain that we tend to romanticize the whole leadership role, that…

Chip Lutz: If you’ve been in a leadership position for any period of time, you know that there’s nothing romantic about it, that it is not all cotton candy and lollipops, that you have to have a heart for it. And there are a lot of lessons that we learn the hard way. That is why I love this week’s interview with Barbara Turley. She is the CEO of Virtual Hub, and she shares some of those lessons she’s had to learn the hard way, and she also shares some great tips on managing virtual teams and hiring the right people.

Chip Lutz: And getting things right, the importance of process and getting things done. I know you’re gonna get a lot from our conversation. I got a lot from our conversation, not just from a leadership standpoint, but from an entrepreneurial standpoint as well. So I want you to kick back, pop yourself open a cold one, and enjoy.

Chip Lutz: Well, hello friends, and welcome to Leadership Happy Hour. This is Chip Lutz, the unconventional leader. And today I get to talk to somebody—today, but it’s tomorrow there—which is kind of cool. I get to talk to Barbara Turley. She’s an investor, she’s an entrepreneur, she’s the CEO of the Virtual Hub, and I am, like, super stoked to talk to somebody from Australia, because, like I said, it’s already tomorrow there. Like, she’s living my day tomorrow when I’m still here today, which is, like, freaking me out. But welcome to Leadership Happy Hour. Big cheers to you.

Barbara Turley: Hi, Chip. Big cheers to you too. Now, I bet you didn’t know I’m actually not Australian, which adds another little flavour to the conversation. I’m from Ireland. Don’t toss the baton in the air!

Chip Lutz: See, I was thinking that when you were talking before. I’m like, that doesn’t sound Australian. That sounds Irish to me. But I was like, what the hell do I know? I live in the Midwest of the United States. I don’t know what.

Barbara Turley: Yes, so I’ve lived in Australia for 17 years, but never lose the accent. Oh, this is actually tomorrow here. It’s already tomorrow.

Chip Lutz: I know, that’s what’s so cool. You know, so obviously I know a little bit about you, but for my listeners, if you could give them, like, the hot skinny, the 411 on Barbara Turley.

Barbara Turley: Sure, the hot skinny, wow. Well, of course, the first part is that I’m Irish, originally hailed from the Emerald Isle, but I have lived in Australia, in sunny Sydney, for 17 years now. So it’s an amazing lifestyle down here. Came for the weather, stayed for the lifestyle. My background—you would sort of think, running a company like the Virtual Hub, that I would have, like, a big HR background or recruitment or something like that. I have none of the above.

Barbara Turley: I actually started my career out in investment banking, and I spent about 10 years working on the equity trading floors of some of the biggest banks in the world, mainly here in Sydney. Yeah, then I ended up taking my career sort of into asset management sales, but I always wanted, excuse me, to run my own company. So today I have this company called The Virtual Hub, which I always say I kind of started it by accident, because I didn’t really mean to launch a company in the Philippines, with coming up to 100 staff now, to help clients all over the world basically with their digital marketing task lists, if I could put it that way. So yeah, that’s where I’m at today. That’s the very quick rundown.

Chip Lutz: That is so cool. And I think it’s cool that you started kind of like by accident, that when I talk to a lot of people, that’s how a lot of genius kind of just starts. It’s one thing that kind of spurs, you’re like, well, this just might be a thing, and then it just builds a little bit. So it’s kind of neat that you didn’t, like, when you were growing up, say to yourself, one day I’m going to start a company called the Virtual Hub, and it’s going to be all over the world.

Barbara Turley: And you know, even growing up, funnily enough, I didn’t even have an entrepreneurial… like, you know, the whole, when you’re on entrepreneurship podcasts, people always say, so, you know, were you the one with the lemonade stand and the crazy ideas as a kid selling candy at the school? And I was like, no, I was always heading for the corporate career. I had no interest in, I had no kind of inclination to do my own thing at all. I always saw myself as a corporate career climber, and I did that for most of my career.

Barbara Turley: Until I kind of got near the top and went, I don’t really like the view up here. Maybe I’ll do something different.

Chip Lutz: That is so cool. That’s funny, because I never really thought about that before, because as an entrepreneur myself, when I look back when I was younger, you know, I was always doing—I never had a lemonade stand, but I was always doing something, whether it was, like, talking people into mowing their lawns or shoveling their driveways or selling things that my brothers left behind when they went off to college.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, most entrepreneurs have that. Yeah, most of them have that flair. I wasn’t any of those. I was studying academic, and I was always heading for that kind of high-achiever-type corporate thing.

Chip Lutz: Which is probably better because, like, you know, that’s been, like, the hardest thing for me, is, you know, learning some of the other stuff that, you know, you learned in the corporate world, you know, because it’s a completely foreign world to me. So I want to talk about the virtual, you know, your business. I want to talk about some of your leadership experiences, but before we get into that, I just thought I’d ask some kind of random question just to get our conversational juices flowing. Since you are kind of like an international person, been all over the world, you know, what is one of the strangest things you’ve ever eaten, not on a dare?

Barbara Turley: Oh! That’s a tough question because I’m such a chicken when it comes to weird food. Like, I just look at something and go, nah. Like, even if you dared me, I’d be like, I don’t care. I’m not doing that. So I’ll have to think about that. What’s the strangest thing I’ve ever eaten? No, you’ve really got me there. No, I don’t have a good answer to that one. Can I click next? Is that terrible? Look, I’m such a cork. I’m such not a crazy person.

Chip Lutz: Can you click next?

Barbara Turley: I should lie and say, like, a cockroach or something in Thailand.

Chip Lutz: That’s an awesome answer just in itself. “Can I click next?” That’s the perfect answer right there. Yes, you can click next. So let’s talk about the Virtual Hub. You say it started a little bit by accident, but I mean, what all does it encompass? I mean, you kind of gave us a high-level view when you were giving your intro, but I mean, what are the nuts and bolts? I mean, what is it about?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, so mainly at its core, we recruit, train, and manage virtual assistants, mainly in the digital marketing implementation space. The word implementation is very important because we don’t do strategy. For businesses all over the world, so we have clients in the US, all across Europe, the UK, Ireland, of course, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, all over the place. And mainly our clients are small to medium businesses that either have a digital strategy or have a strategist they’re working with. And they’ve realized, man, look at the list of tasks that need to be done. Like, great, I got a strategist, or great, we have this strategy, but it’s costing us a fortune to implement because of the amount of people involved in the doing.

So we provide a very scalable, highly leverageable, cost-effective solution in the Philippines, where we actually find great people, perfect English, the right work ethic, all that sort of thing. But the key thing is that we train them. We don’t rely on the client or just give you a person that then needs to be trained. So we get the client about 70 to 80 percent of the way there with the training before they ever even meet any of our VAs. So that’s a huge sort of selling point that people love. We take care of that pain point.

Chip Lutz: So in that kind of strategy, what are some of the things that, just so I understand fully, like your people actually execute then?

Barbara Turley: Sure. So starting with the most basic stuff. Let’s say—and, you know, we have quite a few marketing agencies that use us as well, because they’re great for us, because they know what they’re doing. So that’s a key thing. And they usually have their own processes, and they just need someone to execute. So, for example, one thing we do quite well is the painstaking job of link building. Now, anyone who does SEO will know that SEO is quite technical, but there are parts of it that are very process-driven and quite repetitive.

That’s a perfect task. We’ve got tons of people doing that and doing that quite well. Same with social media content calendars. Like, you know, if any entrepreneur out there is listening to this, if you find yourself tinkering around with Canva, Photoshop, putting your blogs out there, creating little things for social media, I mean, really that’s like a $10-an-hour job. That’s not a $100-an-hour job. So you shouldn’t be doing any of that sort of stuff. Even if you can do it better yourself, it’s still not your job to do it.

Getting back to what you were saying about the lessons that I’ve taken from corporate that a lot of entrepreneurs need to learn by themselves is this whole thing of, like, if you want to scale something, you can’t be doing pretty much anything yourself. You’ve got to learn how to delegate and run teams if you want to really get there. So that’s another little job. The other thing is, let’s say that you’re great at writing your own blogs. Loads of people hate doing that. Let’s say you have a writer. It doesn’t matter. Whatever content you’re producing, 20 percent of that job is production of content. Eighty percent of that job is get it up on your WordPress site with all the attached images, get the SEO right, get it across your social media, repurpose it into stuff that can be used elsewhere, get it transcribed, blah, blah, blah. There’s just so much work involved in that. So a lot of that grunt work we do.

And then at a higher level, we do things like, for clients that are using platforms like HubSpot, Infusionsoft, Ontraport, ActiveCampaign—let’s say that you know the funnel, the marketing funnel you want to build, and you can draw out a map of it. You’re like, I want the client to get this email day one, day five, whatever. Our VAs actually are all trained on those platforms. They can build whatever it is you want. They just won’t think it out for you, but they can build in rules, and they can figure out, troubleshoot problems, and stuff like that. So that’s just an example of the kinds of things that we do.

Chip Lutz: That is so funny because when you’re talking about if you’re an entrepreneur and you’re tinkering around with Canva or you’re creating—this is like you just described my day yesterday.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, it’s madness. My God. It’s just, I can’t stress it enough that, you know, I know you can probably do it better yourself. I know all that, but if you really are an entrepreneur—and this is one of the reasons I’ve been successful—I’m like, as an entrepreneur, your job is to build a company. That’s, like—I pause there because the job of the entrepreneur is to build the company. And, you know, the job of your team is to do the doing and run the thing, run the engine that you’ve built through your systems and processes and all that sort of thing. Yeah, I’m very passionate about this topic.

Chip Lutz: That’s really funny. Like I said, there are some aspects of some of the stuff—I like some of the design aspects of my job, finding the right picture and putting a quote on it. And it’s like, oh, look what I have created. It’s kind of like when Tom Hanks was on that movie Cast Away, and he created fire. It’s like, look what I have created. That’s how I feel sometimes when I figure something out. But you’re right.

Barbara Turley: Yes, exactly.

Chip Lutz: It’s—I don’t want to say it’s beneath me, but it’s one of those things where I could spend my time doing other things.

Barbara Turley: Well, it can be. I mean, here’s a little tip though, and this is not really about you. This is more about, like, all of us. When, you know, business is hard—doesn’t matter what business you’re in—business is hard, right? And that could be a mindset thing for me, but I think people need to realize the entrepreneur journey is a tough one, right? It’s fraught with risk and ups and downs. And when we’re in the downs, what we find as entrepreneurs is that we gravitate towards the things that do give us that little lift. So sometimes you can be—

I find clients will—they won’t do the heavy, they won’t do the big work. They’ll get distracted with the little work, the busy work. And that means it’s actually stopping you from building the company the way we need to.

Chip Lutz: It’s like you’re inside my head, Barbara. I mean, it’s like that a lot. I mean, you know, because it is a risky life. I mean, you’ve got, you know, flying high one month, and next month you’re like, all right, you know, maybe I should get a regular job. And you’re going back and forth all the time. And then, you know, when it’s at the lowest, then what you do—you hit the nail on the head—you gravitate to the things that kind of, like, maybe they give you… they’re busy work, but it makes you feel good, like you’re actually kind of doing something. And, you know, but it’s really not as productive as you could be if you were working on something strategic.

Barbara Turley: Absolutely, yeah, and that is the harder work. But you know what? When the strategic stuff pays off in the end, you won’t want to do Canva images anymore, trust me. Go to a painting class. Do it as a hobby.

Chip Lutz: That’s hilarious. Now, with that many workers all over the place and coordinating with your clients—they’re not co-located with them—so, I mean, it’s got to be, in and of itself, a leadership challenge to make sure that, you know, one, your clients are happy, two, people are doing what they’re supposed to be doing. I mean, there’s got to be some challenges there.

Barbara Turley: Yeah. So the big thing, and this is something I guess I didn’t realize, but I did probably pick up in corporate—when I was in investment banking, I worked in big trading floors, and it was natural for us that when you’re in a trading floor for a large global bank, like an investment bank, like Merrill Lynch or UBS or any of these big banks, you have direct lines open.

You’ve got microphones on your desk, and you’ve got direct lines open to the desks in New York, London, Hong Kong, Sydney—you know, that we’re all connected. So for me, it was very natural to thrive in a virtual environment, even though I was in an office technically. And the communication—what I learned was that, you know, in a fast-moving environment where you’re trading stocks all day and things are moving very fast, the strength of your ability to communicate effectively and to communicate, like, to keep people updated and make no assumptions—like everything hinges on that. There’s someone in London who’s waiting to know what’s happening on your floor. So your communication has got to be, like, crystal clear, fast, and with no kind of confusion. So one of the things that I’ve brought into this company is that communication channels will make or break your virtual team and how you set up your rhythm and your communication channels.

And your communication channels. So for me, I’ve seen clients fail with this a lot, right? So anyone who tries to run a virtual team using email for task management, I would say, is destined for failure, even if it’s working for them right now. So you need to use things like task management tools. I’m a huge user of Asana. I was on the free version for four years before I ever had to upgrade it. Trello—you know, Teamwork PM—there’s loads of them out there, but you need to use the tools. And a lot of people are using Slack, which is great too as your communication channel. But again, you’ve got to be very clear on the difference between Slack and a project management tool. So people mix those up, and they start dropping task instructions into a channel like Slack and expect all their teams to just magically pick it up, which is kind of a disaster.

Barbara Turley: It’s just this whole thing of, like, I call it with my team “passing the baton.” I’m very strict on, you know, like a relay race. If you think about a relay race, the person who passes the baton has the responsibility to make sure the other person has it before they let go, right? And too many teams throw the baton in the air and expect someone to catch it. So there’s these sort of concepts around communication. And if you get this part right, it doesn’t matter where your team are.

Chip Lutz: That’s really interesting because I’ve seen that a lot, like you said, with email, where the person that’s in charge, you know, sends an email, does the whole read receipt to make sure somebody reads it, and then just thinks their job is done—that magically things are going to get done based on them sending the email and that, you know…

Barbara Turley: It can do, it can do—unless there’s a thread where someone needs to clarify something, and then you come back and go, no, it didn’t mean that, blah, blah, blah, and then someone’s trying to search through the thread to try and find the instruction right away.

Chip Lutz: Yeah, and that’s what I would think is that, you know, I mean, with that, what I’ve seen a lot is just a whole lot of miscommunication, you know, because with the written word, I mean, I’m thinking one thing when I’m typing it; when you’re reading it, you’re interpreting something different. So if I’m working for you, you write something, I read it completely different. I’m going off on a tangent working on this. It’s wasting time. It’s wasting money. I mean…

Barbara Turley: And do you know how many people—and this is a leadership point—do you know how many people I see that do that, and then they blame the VA and they fire them, and they start again, and they hire another VA, and then they fire them, and then they come to us and go, this just doesn’t work? I would love to get on a call with them and go, “Sorry, honey, you need to look in the mirror,” because who’s the common denominator here is the leader. So my advice on that is, before you shoot the messenger or shoot the people on your team—at some point you have to let people go—it’s always worth kind of not looking at the person and looking at the process first, looking at it and talking to them and going, “Okay, so how—what was it in what I said that made you do this?” And you’ll find the person will go, “Well, because we did this before, I thought that’s what you meant.” So that’s okay. Those little mistakes are a great way for you to refine and evolve your processes rather than just get frustrated and fire someone, which, you know, those are little things that if you just take a step back and focus on that, you will grow a successful company. If you keep firing people, you’ll get nowhere.

Chip Lutz: Well, I mean, that takes a little bit of reflection on a leader’s part to realize that it’s not everybody else—it’s them and the way they communicate.

Barbara Turley: You know what? If it isn’t you—even if it is your team—you’re the leader, so you need to find a way to bring your team onto your ship and them to row the way you want them to row. You know, you’ve got to teach them.

Chip Lutz: Well, that’s what’s kind of cool about bringing in somebody like—I would look at your company coming in and doing the VA thing as an objective party, where you can look at things. You have no emotional tie to anything that happens, with the exception of you want your client to be happy in the end. So you can look at it objectively and say, “Well, you know, this is the case right here,” which might spur that reflection for the leader, where before it was just kind of like, “Oh, my VA is just so stupid,” right?

Chip Lutz: Yeah, I’ve seen that so many times. Like, you know, I always tell people all the time that if everybody else is the problem, chances are you’re the problem. I mean, exactly.

Barbara Turley: It’s happening over and over and over. It’s like, it’s so hard, but you have to go, “Okay, this is a pattern.” You know, it could be just your leadership style, and it’s a growth—I mean, entrepreneurship is a growth experience, and unless you see it that way… I mean, I make mistakes every day, but I always—I mean, maybe that’s one of the other reasons I’ve been successful—is I always look at myself first, systems, and then eventually I think, you know, well, let’s look at the team dynamics. Let’s look at, you know, who’s—I mean, and you do find people doing the wrong thing, of course. But once you do it this way, it leaves nowhere for your team member to hide if you have this kind of approach, because eventually you have a meeting with them and you go, “Okay, this isn’t working. Like, you’re either doing something else or you’re not suitable for this role.”

Chip Lutz: So with your team being in the Philippines and you’re in Australia and your clients are all over the place, I mean, do you have somebody that’s on-site that kind of does the day-to-day things, or do you, like, interact with all your VAs personally every day? I mean, how does the delegation chain work?

Barbara Turley: Yep, so again, I got a tip. What was the tip? Way back when I first started, I remember I was in a bit of a tizzy about hiring an HR manager and was like, I need people, I need people. And I had a business coach at the time—who actually is now my co-host on my podcast, which is called the Virtual Success Show—we do this together.

Chip Lutz: Say that again—yeah, hold on. Let’s give it another plug. Say that again. What’s your podcast?

Barbara Turley: It’s called The Virtual Success Show.

Chip Lutz: Everybody should listen to it.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, we do a lot of that. It’s very tactical. So we’ll have a show like, “When is the time to fire my VA?” You know, like, it’s quite specific. All the shows are like all the questions we ever get.

Chip Lutz: That’s a great title—“When do I fire this person?” Because those are the questions that people are looking for.

Barbara Turley: We get asked, so we’re like, let’s do shows on the specific questions we get asked. So yeah. And I was saying to him, I need this, I need that. And he said to me, “Okay, why don’t you take a step back for a second?” And at this stage I had about 20 people, and it was a bit of a mess way back in the beginning. And he said, “Why don’t you draw the org chart of what this company would look like at 100 people and then figure out who your next hire is?”

Barbara Turley: And when I did that, I realized, wow, I’m gonna need like six team leaders. I’m gonna need a master trainer. I’m gonna need a help desk and all these support systems. And what that helped me to do is—we’re now at 100 people—and I have built ahead of myself. So I’ve built the team that I need to run probably 400 or 500 people already, except for the team leaders. So we have…

Barbara Turley: There’s me, then I have my leadership team, which is my master trainers, my head of recruitment, my HR, and my operations director. They’re all sort of the leadership guys. And then I have a team leader for each team of 15 to 20 VAs on the ground with their teams, and they liaise with us every day on daily huddles. The communication channels are really clean the whole way up and down, and they know—I’ve told them what I need them to report on, to be watching out for, to tell us so that we can feed back down to them the mentorship programs and how we improve and all that sort of thing. It’s just a process, just a system.

Chip Lutz: Well, I’m glad that you brought that up because I was going to ask what your channel was with your leaders, your day-to-day leaders—were you meeting with them daily or weekly? I mean, how did that all work?

Barbara Turley: It’s a great question because, again, people—I think there’s three things that you have to get right, and I’ve learned this the hard way by not doing it. But there’s three things that you really need to do. You need to have your communication channel sorted out. So with mine, for example, it’s Asana. We actually don’t use Slack—we use it, well, we could, but I’ve resisted it for a few reasons. But with Asana, there’s a rule around it. So Asana is the motherboard. So if you want something done—even if you’ve spoken to the person—you tag them in Asana, and you give that instruction there, because everyone’s busy and they have a lot of things to think about, to remember. So when you do it that way, you don’t get the “I’m so sorry, I forgot you told me that.” You don’t get that problem.

Number two: I found I was doing that, and we still had holes. So then what I decided to do with my leadership team—and this is more specific for my business—we’ve got a series of pipelines that are running every day. If you can imagine, I mean, it’s really supply and demand. It’s the same as trading. You’ve got a supply of VAs coming through the recruitment channels, through training. You’ve got clients coming through the lead gen channels with the client briefs. And eventually you’ve got to match them all up in the middle. So we run a daily huddle meeting for that specifically, and then we have processes attached to every single part of that.

Those are the three things you have to have: the communication channel that is your task management, where you have rules around how people communicate; number two is your meetings—I run a daily meeting. I think daily huddles are fantastic. It doesn’t have to be anywhere from 10 minutes to 20 or 30 minutes. Make it fast, have an agenda, and make everyone stick to it; and then the third one is your processes. So everyone needs to know—you need to document the step-by-steps for each particular thing that you’re doing so that every team…

Barbara Turley: That you’re doing, so that every team… So you asked me, how do you control all this? Well, if you think about business this way, business is a series of systems. Systems run your business, people run your systems. If you’re the one who builds the systems and the business, then you can slot anyone in to run it, and you maintain a level of control—it makes me sound like a control freak—but it means that you can have your finger on everything without having to do anything.

Chip Lutz: No, that’s just smart. I mean, that’s just smart, because I was going to ask you—because that requires so much, I mean, like I said, with you being in Australia, most of your team being someplace else, that requires a lot of trust, a whole lot of trust between you and your first-line leaders, between your first-line leaders and their subordinates. So, you know, what is your process for making sure you got the right person? And do you get down in the weeds as far as, like, making sure that you QA every VA that comes on board?

Barbara Turley: No, I’ve got other people that do a little bit of that. I think one of the things that I feel very strongly about is that you have to come from a mindset position of trust in the beginning. Trust is something you build over time, of course. And I know Gary Vaynerchuk actually speaks about this as well—you’ve got to trust your people. Now, the problem with trust is people hire someone and go, “I trust that they know what they’re doing.” I don’t do it that way.

Barbara Turley: I go, “I trust you that you’re a good person and that you’re honest, and we’re going to start our relationship from this standpoint.” However, I’ve got a process, and I know exactly how that runs, and I know the results I expect from that process, and I know the reporting I want you to come back to me with. And I expect that you’re going to run that process for me. Now, because I build those myself—and a lot of entrepreneurs don’t want to do this job because it’s like an operations, it’s a COO-type job where you have to create your systems—I’m good at doing that, so I have a slight advantage there.

Barbara Turley: But because I know what the system is, what the process is, and what the results should be, or what I’m expecting, it’s very hard for anyone not—it’s hard to be slippery and to hide. Because I’ll be like, “Well, okay, so we’re not getting the result here, so let’s talk about that.” And rather than building trust over time and then having it broken quickly, I do it the other way around. I go, “Look, I’m going to start off from the position of trust.” If you erode that trust over time, and eventually it breaks the camel’s back, that’s the end of the relationship. So I give it all to you in the beginning, and I’m just like—I naturally like that, though.

Chip Lutz: It’s my personality type too.

Barbara Turley: I’ve learned that too, though—you’ve got to be careful people don’t take advantage.

Chip Lutz: Yeah, from the onset, I believe that people are inherently good. People want to do a good job. You know, if I communicate the expectations, they will generally rise to the expectation that’s set for them. I generally believe that, and I have been burned. I have been.

Barbara Turley: I have as well. Look, how I’ve gotten around this problem, actually—because I’ve been burned badly—and I’ve learned, so I’m very open about this, it’s not easy. But rather than becoming bitter and twisted and changing who I am…

Chip Lutz: I love the way you put that—I’m going to be bitter and twisted.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, because that’s what can happen. And then you don’t trust anyone, and then the entrepreneur journey goes into a vortex of kind of depression—that’s what happens. And I’ve done that. And then I thought, no, I’m not going to change who I am. It’s inherent for me to be loyal and trustworthy and all these things, and very open. So what I’ve done to get around it is I run a weekly huddle with my leadership team where we don’t talk about the day-to-day stuff. What we talk about there is the projects that are ongoing and what they’re planning to do. So it’s very clear—it’s like, what have you done, what are you planning to do, and where is the roadblock?

Barbara Turley: Now, when you do that with a group of your people, it’s very easy to see who’s dragging the chain, and all the others can see it as well. So it kind of becomes very obvious that, you know, one of these kids is not like the other. Now, again, before you shoot them, you’ve probably got to go in…

Barbara Turley: Now, this is what I do. You’ve got to dig a little with that person because there could be something going on with them personally. They could be bullied. There could be anything. So you sort of have to—but again, you’ll find out pretty quickly, and then you can have a very frank and direct conversation and go, look, the others are firing at a much higher level than you are. What’s going on, right? You know, is it that you do feel overwhelmed, or maybe this role isn’t for you? So you can have a much clearer conversation and be very direct.

Chip Lutz: And we’ll be right back with that interview with Barbara. But now it’s time for the hot skinny. The hot skinny is where I share some leadership tips with you. And this week’s tip is: people don’t know what you know until you let them know. If you’ve gotten anything from our conversation with Barbara so far, you know that communication is key, setting the expectations is key, that you can’t do the whole mind-reading thing, that you need to set the expectation, you need to communicate it again, and you need to follow up. Now, if you’ve got a tip for the hot skinny, send it to me. I would love to share it on the show. You can email me direct at [email protected], and if I share it on the show, I will send you a free copy of my ebook, Leadership Secrets The Other Books Won’t Tell You.

Voice Over: Hey listeners, if you’re looking for a practical, no-crap speaker for your next business meeting or conference, Chip Lutz is your man. Learn more at his website, unconventionalleader.com.

Chip Lutz: Well, I think that would also provide a little peer-to-peer motivation—that if you see that, you think that… because I’ve worked in situations where I was performing at what I thought was a great level, right? And then somebody came in that was performing, obviously, at a much higher level. That became very noticeable to me that I wasn’t performing at my best, and that made me up my game a little bit.

Barbara Turley: That works, yes. It inspires the others to kind of go, hold on a second, you know. And then you don’t have the conversations when it comes up to salary reviews and performance reviews, because they won’t come saying, “I want this,” if they kind of feel like, well, I’m not really performing at the same level as the others.

Chip Lutz: Well, I mean, I have worked with people that have a completely different view of themselves than anybody else has.

Barbara Turley: Oh yeah, lots of those.

Chip Lutz: You go to do the performance evaluation, and you’re like, well, this is where you’re at, and they’re like, well, I really thought that it was much higher. And I remember one specifically—I was like, well, sometimes our view of ourselves isn’t really what the truth is. I said something like that. And it was because I didn’t know else how to put it, because I thought it was pretty obvious, you know, where this person was performing. And yeah, that was brutal.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, these are all the little things I’m sharing here—kind of all the refinements that I’ve had to make to my process to try to get to this. And you know what it is as well? I have an unbelievable commitment to making this work. So I’m like, I will get in there and refine a small part of a process. I’ll change something, because I’m like, I just know that if you want to build a company the way I want to, you have to get this right. You’ve got to keep hustling to get it right.

Chip Lutz: With most of your team being virtual, one thing that I always really liked about working with people day to day was just some of the other relationship aspects of my leadership job, some of that coaching and stuff. Do you find that when you’re dealing with your first-line leaders day to day, you still have that camaraderie, that feeling of connection that you would if you were working with them daily? Or is it something where you’re like, nah, we don’t—it’s just, you know, we’re just focused on getting this done?

Barbara Turley: Yes, a couple of things. Look, I do actually have an office in the Philippines. So I started the business with a work-from-home model, and so a lot of my leadership team are dispersed. So we are very virtual. But a lot of the VAs and the team leaders are actually in a physical office, and they have that camaraderie. I really do agree with you—that’s changed everything for us, where they have that sort of sense of camaraderie.

We have to manufacture it. So how we manufacture it is being visible to each other. So even in Asana, it’s that tagging each other back and forth so we feel like we’re chatting. And our daily huddle—although it’s quite a fast meeting—at the beginning we do shoot the breeze a bit, we have a laugh, talk about the weather, you know. So we sort of have that sense of that sort of thing.

And then a lot of my team are in Manila. Okay, they’re dispersed around Manila, but I send them out for dinners. Now, I’m not obviously there, but I do try and go—look, I would go more often to get that camaraderie feel, but I also have a two-year-old daughter, so it’s a bit hard for me to travel. So I send them out together, though, and often I send them on trips to Cebu, which is down south in the Philippines, where all the office space is. And I send a few of them together for like a week to do a training program or to do some mentorship at the team there. Because they stay together for a week, they kind of develop that bond, and they’re all quite close. So yeah.

Chip Lutz: Awesome.

Barbara Turley: You just have to make it work. You’ve got to find a way to make it work.

Well, and I think it’s cool that—I mean, you’re obviously a process person, you know me—but what I like is that it’s tempered with the personal side, that you’re starting out each meeting with something a little more personal. And to me, that’s really…

Barbara Turley: And look, I could do with getting better at it, I think, because I think, look, I’m very process-driven, but you can’t just run a company that way. Culture is very important. So, you know, we’ve got some very strong cultural values that we literally live and breathe every day. And the culture for me, particularly in the office environment, is something I’m very focused on with the people there. So engagement, recognition, all these sorts of things that we’re trying to get better at. But yeah, you have to have a serious focus on your people.

Chip Lutz: That’s cool. That’s a good thing you brought up on recognition. So what are some of the things that you do to recognize some of your people out there? Because I imagine that if you’re a VA, you’re out in the middle, you’re working with a third-party customer, and sometimes, if you do a really great job, you’re wondering, is anybody going to notice this?

Barbara Turley: Yeah, we do. I’m actually working very hard at the moment with one of my developers to build an internal, almost like a Facebook platform, where we can give thumbs up and gold stars to each other. Awesome. So we might say, look, Jimmy today helped me figure out this thing with my client, so I want to give him a gold star for showing the cultural value of collaboration or support or these values that we have.

Now, we’re not there yet with that. At the moment, what we do is we seek a lot of feedback from the clients. So we have automated feedback programs where, at the end of every day, the client gets an end-of-day report that we sort of have in our template. And at the bottom of it, we have a little happiness meter where they can just click a button—gold star happiness—and they can leave a comment. And they actually use that quite a lot, and they send in comments.

And then what we do is our team leaders—we have that through Zapier and stuff—we make all that stuff drop into Asana so we can all see it. And the team leader for that person picks it up, creates a little Canva image, and we have a Facebook group for all our VAs—just an internal one—and we give cheers. And they create these beautiful pictures with the words the client said. So we share it with each other, and we do little, you know, ding-a-ling kind of… we’ve got great feedback.

And the other thing we’re starting to do, which I haven’t done yet but I really want to do, is creating milestones. So, for example, getting to 100 staff is a huge milestone for our company. So I want to do a program where every time we reach a company milestone, we might have, like—it could be a little bonus for every single person. It might be a little gift. It might be a cupcake for everyone. It might, you know, just be something in the office to help them participate in the company-wide goals, the big company goals.

Chip Lutz: That’s awesome. And I think it’s cool you have a little happiness meter. You know, everybody should have a happiness meter. I mean, that’s awesome. It’s like, yeah, today, this is where I’m at.

Barbara Turley: Well, actually, one of the things I do—now that you mention that—one of the things I’m working on that I really want to do for the VAs as well is to do a little happiness meter for them, which can be anonymous. How happy are you today? Because they might not want to put their name to it, because they don’t want to feel like they’re complaining about their client. But I want to gauge a happiness meter across—it can be anonymous. I just want to get a gauge of how happy people are, in general, emotionally within our company. So that’s something I am launching as well.

Chip Lutz: That’s cool. That makes the difference right there. Not only knowing where they’re at for you, but then knowing that you actually care.

Barbara Turley: Yeah, I care very deeply about them. You know, we had a case recently where there was a little bit of—somebody felt bullied by somebody else. That other person thought it was just funny, you know. And I actually flew over there—that was so serious to me—I flew over there to be on the ground for those particular people that were feeling hurt. So yeah, I care very deeply. And I did a whole workshop for all of them around…

So rather than going over from an HR perspective, just beating everyone up, I was like, okay, there’s HR and then there’s culture. I flew over there, I spoke with each person individually, I listened, I heard them, and then I did a workshop for all of them around the words that we use, understanding that what’s fun for one person may not be fun for somebody else. And we have a cultural value of fun, so I actually recognized that the person involved thought they were exhibiting that value, but they misinterpreted it. That piece of fun was not fun for the person on the other end. So it was a training thing that I had to do on that.

Chip Lutz: Kudos for you for going all the way over there. I mean, that is awesome. That says a lot to your team as well, as far as your level of support for them. So that’s pretty cool. Pretty cool. Well, I tell you what—I have really so enjoyed talking to you today.

Barbara Turley: I’ve had fun talking about this. You’ve actually triggered some ideas I had in the back of my head I haven’t implemented yet. I was like, yeah, I want to do this one, that one.

Chip Lutz: Well, giddy up—that’s awesome. Now, I always like to ask my guests, like, if I just get promoted to my first leadership job and I come to you, I’m like, Barbara, I just got promoted to this job. I’ve never supervised people before. What’s your best advice for me for being the best I can be for my team?

Barbara Turley: Yes, okay. When you step up to running a team, first of all, go easy on yourself because there are some things you have to master that you’re not going to master on day one. And the big tip is you’ve got to strike a balance. We all want to be liked, and this is something I suffer from as well as a leader. We all want to be liked, and we’re either the type of leader that wants to play good cop or bad cop. We typically don’t like to do both.

But trying to strike the balance between your team respecting you and liking you, but also knowing where the boundary is and that you’ve got to be firm—and the way to do that is to, in the beginning, set clear expectations, then have a little fun together, and then revisit the expectations and make sure that everybody understands what the expectation is for you, for your team. And then it’s one team, one dream.

Barbara Turley: It’s like, hey guys, these are the expectations. Let’s work together so that we deliver on these expectations, and be more “we” rather than “you deliver to me my expectations.”

Chip Lutz: That’s all good stuff right there. I like that, because I always maintain as well that it is a fine line we walk as a leader between—we all want to be liked, but we still have a job to do. And sometimes not everything that we do as leaders is liked, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be likable. I know that we can build that relationship, and we can show our true selves. If there’s something that comes down the pike where, like, hey, I’ve got to make this hard decision—it impacts you—but since we’ve built that relationship, you know that I’m coming from a place of authenticity. So that’s…

Barbara Turley: That’s exactly—I was just going to say—you’ve got to be as open and transparent with your team as possible. Just be you. But at the same time, there are different leadership styles, you know, as well. So you’ve got to find your leadership style and be as authentic to that as you can, and try to work within your team. Be open with them about what your style is as well, and then ask them how they feel about that, you know, and how you can… so feedback loops and things like that are good. But tricky to get it right, though—it’s hard.

Chip Lutz: Awesome stuff, awesome stuff. Now, after today, people want to connect with you. Where do you want them to go? Because I think that you’d be an awesome person for anybody to be connected with.

Barbara Turley: Sure. So I like to connect with people on LinkedIn personally, so I produce a lot of content over there. So you can just find me by typing Barbara Turley into LinkedIn. But if you want to connect with the company, we’ve got some awesome free resources for you guys, which you can get at thevirtualhub.com/lhh for Leadership Happy Hour. And over there, you can download a free guide, which talks about the mistakes people make with virtual teams and how to fix them. It’s like a five-step thing, so it’s really good. Just covers everything I’ve talked about in a simple format. There’s also a seven-part scalable business success formula e-course, which has been written by me. So again, a lot of the stuff I’ve talked about here. And then also, you can book a call if you want—a free strategy call with one of our outsourcing strategy consultants. I’ve one in Ireland and one in Australia, so we cover all time zones there, and they’ll help you to figure out: are you ready for a VA? Are you a good fit? All that sort of thing. I’ll give you some tips for getting ready.

Chip Lutz: That’s awesome. I might wait to schedule a call with the person in Ireland just so I can listen to them talk, because I really like your accent.

Barbara Turley: Actually, you know what? He’s also my brother. He’s also my brother.

Chip Lutz: He’d call you afterwards. He’d call you outside—who the hell was this guy that just called me? I can’t believe you gave my number out.

Chip Lutz: That’s awesome. Well, I really appreciate you sharing—I mean, you having some extra resources for my listeners, I mean, that is just fantastic. Thank you so much for, you know, putting that extra effort into providing value. Thank you. Now, if we were actually at a bar drinking at some pub in Ireland and, you know, I would give you some kind of drunk dare, I’d be like, hey, Barbara, you should go do this—you’d be like, I’m not doing that. But…

Barbara Turley: Very welcome. Thanks for having me on the show.

Chip Lutz: Since we’re not, I’m just gonna ask you a few random questions for my Overstuffed Would You Rather book. Are you game, Barbara?

Barbara Turley: Sure, go ahead. I do love a drink, though. If it wasn’t morning, I’d nearly crack.

Barbara Turley: Well, I say I’ve got my—I got a vodka tonic, which is almost all gone now—but yeah, it’s afternoon for me. So I’m just gonna… you know. And they are random—where I open up to is what I open up to, so I apologize in advance if anything is, like, too… what? Too terrible.

All right, first question, Barbara: would you rather chew a piece of toenail off a dirty man or thoroughly lick an unshowered armpit?

Barbara Turley: You do what it’s asked of you. What was the second one?

Chip Lutz: Thoroughly lick an unshowered armpit.

Barbara Turley: Oh my God, oh my God—neither. I think if I had to, though—I mean, this is so gross—I’d go with the armpit.

Chip Lutz: I would, too. I would, too, because I am not a feet person. Like, if I were king of the world, the first law I would implement is that everybody would have to get approval from me in order to wear open-toe shoes, because not everybody should wear them. Not everybody should.

Barbara Turley: Can I imagine your team-building events based on these questions? Wow.

Chip Lutz: All right, second question: would you rather not eat for three days or not sleep for three days? Okay, yeah, yeah—it’s a hard one for me because I really like food and I’m pretty scheduled on my sleep regimen. So that’s… for the sleep.

Barbara Turley: Not eat. I literally wouldn’t be able—I would literally fall down and fall—I would just be… I would fall asleep by accident. I wouldn’t be able to commit to it at all. Eating, I could probably—I love my food—but I think it’d be easier.

Chip Lutz: Yeah. All right, third question and last question—this is terrible. All right, would you rather, Barbara, have to eat the contents of a full vacuum cleaner black bag or a pound of toe jam?

Barbara Turley: What’s toe jam?

Chip Lutz: Toe jam is that stuff that coagulates between your toes after a long day.

Barbara Turley: Oh my God, oh my God! I’m not being friends with you anymore. This is horrific. Oh my God, I’m so grossed out.

Chip Lutz: It’s the beginning of the day there, so these are visuals that you’ll have all day.

Barbara Turley: I mean, this is just—I have to, like, bow out completely. I would just rather die.

Chip Lutz: Well, I’ll tell you what—you could go back to your first answer from our first question to say, “Can I hit next?”

Barbara Turley: Yeah, that’s funny.

Chip Lutz: You don’t have to answer that one. Well, I really appreciate you spending some time with me today. I mean, you are super smart, and you’ve given me—personally—a lot of things to think about for me strategically, what I do on the marketing side of where I’m spending my time, but also for my listeners on what they can do to increase communication with their virtual teams, you know, what they need to do just to be in the moments and handle things as they need to be handled.

Barbara Turley: Sure, yeah—very good tips and stuff. I’ve got war wounds from learning that stuff myself, so yeah, free advice—there you go.

Chip Lutz: Thank you so much.

Barbara Turley: Thank you.

Chip Lutz: Well, there you go—Barbara Turley. Was she freaky awesome or what? So smart, such great information. She really challenged me to think about how I spend my time as an entrepreneur and how I would manage virtual teams—something we all struggle with. Further, it really made me think about the whole communication chain. I love the way she said, you can’t just throw the baton up in the air and hope somebody’s gonna catch it—you really have to pass it off.

I’m gonna encourage you to check her out. She offered some freebies. I’m gonna put those in the show notes. All you have to do is click—really great resources that you definitely need to check out. I also encourage you to go to my website, unconventionalleader.com, sign up for a monthly newsletter, and get some free stuff. But if you’ve got something you want to hear on the show, something you liked, or a tip for the hot skinny, email me direct at [email protected]. So until next time, this is Chip Lutz saying cheers.

Voice Over: Thanks for joining us for Leadership Happy Hour. Please leave a review on iTunes and let everyone know how cool this podcast is. And remember, leadership theory is nice, but application is what works. Keep taking names, kicking ass, and making a difference. Do you have questions or something you’d like to hear on the show? Email the host, Chip Lutz, direct at [email protected].