Scaling your business: The secret to building high-performing teams
The Bean Ninjas Podcast
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Episode breakdown
So what’s the secret to building high-performing teams?
If you’re going to scale your business, you’ll need to be able to rely on your teams. What can leaders do to elevate their teams from pretty good to absolutely amazing?
In this podcast episode, Bean Ninjas CEO Meryl Johnston continues her discussions with Barbara Turley about scaling your business and building high-performing teams.
Hear Barbara Turley talk about her business experiences, insights into systemization and process writing, and how her time at ‘Grow with Hubspot’ led to some interesting revelations.
- Barbara talks about using Support Assistant roles in customer support
- Meryl talks about multi-tasking while rolling out a new Bean Ninjas training course
- Barbara talks about learnings from the Grow with Hubspot Conference on high-performing teams
- Daily huddle/pipeline meetings and matching demand with supply among the whole of the team
- Harnessing a feeling of an amazing team working together
- Having trust, removing politics, and utilizing each other’s strengths to cross-pollinate skills across teams, and building this into KPIs
- Listen deeply when others are speaking to discover how they attack problems and learn
- Lessons from the sprint: developing systems and delegating effectively to make sure people can take on new processes
- How to carve out time in role, where time is wasted in a role
- Good communication and trust is key to training your management team
- Getting your leaders to create their own high-performing teams
- The trouble with leaders who are not process-driven – who will do what & when? Leadership is about mapping out the plan
- Small businesses need implementers as employees, not visionaries
Are we a high-performing team—or do we just think we are?
In this episode
00:00 Delegating Customer Support to Support Assistants
Barbara discusses a pilot project she’s working on involving delegating customer support tasks to support assistants through platforms like Zendesk. She found that without solid processes and the right platforms, delegating customer support can fail. She’s working to create a framework to help clients delegate this function effectively.
05:22 Course Launch and Improvements
Meryl shares updates about re-launching her financial literacy course. She highlights the challenges of improving content while managing the actual launch process. Despite being on holiday, she remained engaged with a five-day challenge that supported the launch and helped reach a wider audience.
08:27 Grow with HubSpot Conference Insights
Barbara shares key takeaways from the Grow with HubSpot conference, especially from a session on high performing teams led by Atlassian. A major insight was the importance of fostering a culture where team members genuinely support each other and avoid siloed behavior. She compares this to her experience on trading floors where mutual trust and communication were essential.
14:12 Implementing Cultural Change in Teams
Barbara talks about practical ways she plans to introduce this supportive culture within her team, such as sharing her conference experience during daily huddles and leveraging previous success with sprint-based collaboration. Meryl also shares her own team-building plans through a sprint initiative focused on sales.
15:31 Challenges of Defining Roles in Growing Teams
Meryl and Barbara reflect on how sports team dynamics illustrate the power of clear role definition and mutual support. Meryl admits that defining roles in a growing business is difficult and is something they continue to refine to help foster high performance and clarity within their teams.
17:28 Cross-Pollination of Skills in High-Performing Teams
Barbara discusses the importance of team members learning from each other’s strengths. She highlights how each team member excels in different areas—such as system building or client interaction—and suggests creating opportunities for skill sharing. This might involve monthly knowledge-sharing sessions or “focus of the month” training to increase collaboration.
19:27 The Power of Deep Listening
Barbara emphasizes the value of actively listening during meetings, noting that important insights can be missed when participants multitask or tune out. She advocates for curiosity and attentiveness as a path to learning from others’ approaches and experiences.
20:22 Leadership Through Mirroring and Independent Implementation
Barbara shares a success story of a team member who independently adopted and replicated her leadership methods within the HR department. This example illustrates high performance through initiative and adaptive leadership without needing direct mentorship.
22:27 Encouraging Broader Perspective Beyond KPIs
The conversation shifts to encouraging leaders to look beyond their own targets and tasks. Barbara and Meryl stress the importance of stepping back from daily operations to learn from others and stay open to new ideas that can improve overall performance.
23:44 Balancing Innovation with Core Responsibilities
Barbara addresses a common challenge where team members pursue new ideas but let daily tasks slip. She explains the importance of learning to delegate, pause projects if necessary, and focus on efficiency and systems to free up time.
25:20 Finding Time to Innovate: Lessons from Coaching
They reference a coaching program that starts with helping business owners find 10 free hours per week before adding new projects. This ties into the idea that time constraints must be addressed before innovation can happen effectively.
27:21 Teaching Leaders to Delegate and Build Their Own High-Performing Teams
Barbara realizes the need to coach her leadership team on how to build their own effective teams. This involves teaching them trust, communication, and delegation so they aren’t bogged down by tasks that could be handled by others.
29:13 Distilling Entrepreneurial Training for Team Use
The hosts explore how business owners can translate complex training sessions into actionable, bite-sized processes for their teams. They discuss chunking concepts into implementable steps instead of overwhelming team members with broad visionary ideas.
30:52 Process-Oriented Leaders in Small Businesses
Barbara and Meryl debate whether leaders can be effective without being process-driven. They agree that in small businesses, execution skills are critical, and visionary-only leaders often create confusion without an integrator or implementer to support them.
33:48 Learning Through Real-World Challenges
The episode wraps with a reflection on how the most valuable lessons often come from facing real business challenges, not formal training. They acknowledge their evolving views and the benefit of processing these experiences through open conversations like this podcast.
