113. Effective Team Building and Self-Management for Founders – Emily Hawkins Interview

Interview Summary

In this episode of Feel the Boot, I sit down with leadership expert Emily Hawkins to unpack the essential yet often-overlooked “soft skills” that founders need to lead their teams effectively. Emily, who built a successful corporate career before transitioning to work with small businesses, shared valuable insights from her experience as a fractional COO and creator of the “Leadershift” framework.

A key theme Emily highlighted is the critical transition from “doer” to “leader.” Many founders are fantastic at executing their vision but often struggle to delegate or communicate expectations effectively. She explained how the habit of making assumptions—believing others think or work as they do—can quickly lead to micromanagement and team disengagement. For example, Emily recounted her own “revolving door” of employees in her early leadership days, which only improved when she realized the importance of clear communication and setting realistic expectations.

We also discussed common founder personalities, including the “autonomous achiever”—a trait she and many founders share. While autonomy is great for bootstrapping, it often prevents founders from delegating effectively, leading to burnout. Emily’s advice? Train team members thoroughly so they can eventually perform tasks better than you might have alone. This approach fosters a culture of trust, freeing up founders to focus on scaling the business.

Another valuable point Emily brought up is balancing process with flexibility. Too little structure leads to chaos, while too much stifles creativity. She suggests focusing on essential processes, especially those impacting safety and quality, while avoiding over-automation. Her “SOP” method—“Some Other Person”—helps founders build systems that allow team members to take ownership without constant oversight.

Finally, we covered self-management and founder well-being. Emily stressed the need for breaks and play, which often stimulate creative problem-solving. She encouraged founders to embrace activities unrelated to work, like hobbies or social time, to recharge. This approach is crucial to preventing burnout and fostering a sustainable business culture.

For more insights, Emily offers a free business-owner assessment on her website, designed to help leaders understand their management style and identify areas for growth.

Link to the assessment tool: https://learn.emilyhawkins4u.com/type/

Bio

Emily Hawkins is a seasoned business leader and the creator of LeaderSHIFT where Emily guides small business owners to implement strategies that not only keep more money in their businesses but also foster lasting success and growth. With over 15 years of experience in the corporate world—where she led teams, streamlined processes, and saved millions for large organizations—Emily made the pivotal decision in 2017 to leave the corporate sector and dedicate herself to helping small businesses thrive through her innovative approach. Equipped with a Supply Chain degree from the University of Tennessee, an MBA in Global Business from Georgia Tech, and a Robbins-Madanes life coaching certification, Emily has successfully coached over 2,500 individuals and business owners, guiding them to unlock their potential. Emily’s expertise and impact have earned her recognition, including being featured in Forbes in 2020 for her groundbreaking work. Emily believes meaningful changes in a business don’t require a fancy degree or technical know-how—just a healthy sense of curiosity and a willingness to adapt.

https://www.emilyhawkins4u.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilyhawkins4u/

Transcript

Lance: Founders are experts on many aspects of their business, but often working with people is not one of those strengths. Yet, those soft skills are often some of the most important in a successful founder. Today, I talk with leadership expert, Emily Hawkins, to explore managing teams and yourself during the startup process.

She had a highly successful corporate career before transitioning to working with small businesses, where she has helped thousands of people as fractional COO and the creator of Leadershift. Check out her full bio down in the description.

And if you have successfully overcome challenges with the human side of business, let us know how you did down in the comments.

[Intro Music]

Emily, welcome to feel the boot.

Emily: I am so excited to be here. Thank you for having me, Lance.

Lance: So I'm, I'm thrilled about this one because I think we talk about on this channel, a lot of very technical issues and a lot of founders are experts on what they're experts in, right? They really know the thing that caused them to start their business.

But very often that isn't building and managing teams and working with the people who are actually going to execute on their vision. And so that's why I wanted to have you on to talk to us today.

Emily: Well, I'm excited to be here and it's so true. I am a former doer as well. That's what I call those people.

And I think going from doer to leader is something that, I mean, anybody who's listening to this and thinks they need an MBA, you don't learn it there either. You don't learn it in business school and undergrad. I have so many clients that say to me, Well, I didn't get a business degree. And I'm like, well, good, then you just saved a lot of money.

Cause you don't learn these skills there at all. And I learned the hard way and that was being a terrible leader. And the reason was is because I was a great doer and as a great doer, we are blind to the fact that not everybody else is great at doing, especially at the specific things that we're great at doing.

And I would say the main thing that business owners, especially these founders struggle with is one word. It will cripple your business. It will put you out of business the fastest, and it is assumption. Assumption is the most dangerous word. Assuming that when you hire someone, they have all this experience.

They must know as much as you do. They've worked in this industry before, so they know how we do X, Y, and Z. Assuming that they think like you, that they would go down that same rabbit hole that you've gone down. All of these assumptions will get you into trouble very, very quickly. And they were hard fought lessons when I was actually in the corporate world leading a team.

I wasn't leading a team. I was micromanaging and doing all the horrible things and really creating what I call the revolving door in my office. And it was when one day I locked myself in my office and said, I'm going to write a document about my dream employee. So I sat down and I wrote: they will not be late,

they will not do this. And then I thought, well, I said, it's a dream employee. It's not about what they're not doing. It's about what they're doing. So I deleted everything out. And then I sat down and wrote and questions they would answer. And things they would say about, gosh, there's time hours in the day, because they loved what they were doing.

And I was so excited. I wrote two whole pages and I was excited for about 2.5 seconds. 'cause I realized in that time that if that person showed up, I wasn't the right person to lead them. And that was very scary to me. Again, I'm amazing at doing at that point in my life, I was amazing at doing. But what about communicating?

Why I operated the way I did and how it affected the business. That was really what changed the game for me. And it was letting go of those assumptions. That was really simple.

Lance: And what do you think it was about your, your communication style or lack thereof that was the, the real crux of the problem?

Emily: Oh, that's so interesting.

So I have found that there are four different types of owners, and what I will tell you is there isn't a bad one, right? There's not a certain owner. If you are this person, then your business is destined to fail. What I have found is that there are pitfalls and there are beautiful things. Some business owners are big picture visionaries, so they can see with their own eyes everything around them.

But they're probably not 100 percent great at the day to day. And communicating what needs to happen. They're great at talking 10 years down the road, but getting the action together in the day to day is hard. So communicating that and knowing what that is. I am not a big picture visionary, by the way. I am an autonomous achiever, and an autonomous achiever is somebody, you know, this is, you know, feel the boot.

I have felt the boot, my friend. I have bootstrapped everything in my life, and that is dangerous. And I will tell you the reason it's dangerous is because sometimes when you're autonomous, autonomously achieving, you shut out help from everyone else. Because you're like, I'll do it myself, I'm sufficient, I'm efficient, and you tend to just take things back.

So if somebody asks you a question, I'll just do it myself. I'll just do it. It'll be faster if I do it myself. I call this death by a thousand paper cuts, but really it's a death by a thousand "I'll just do it myselves." Because nothing takes five minutes and in that five minutes rather than doing it if you spent 30 training on why and how Then all of a sudden that task doesn't boomerang back at you.

So being an autonomous achiever is amazing because you're not afraid of wearing a hat. You're not afraid of diving into a problem, staying up late, figuring out what it is, you know, doing the research, but you're not great at handing off. And at some point autonomous achievers will hit this where they have made the thing, they have created the product, but they're going to hit a ceiling because they can't do it themselves anymore.

They have to start handing off. And so that was my biggest flaw was that I was an autonomous achiever. My biggest strength.

Lance: You know, that's funny. That's something I've talked about a lot. And, and in, even in terms of hats, that the experience of being a founder, right? When you're a solo founder, you wear all the hats of necessity, and then the entire experience of the journey is taking them off and giving them to other people as fast as you can, because you just can't scale.

If you're trying to do it, you know, there's, there is no level of efficiency, which will grow a big business when you're doing all those things. And yeah, my experience of that was very painful in my journey that, especially that moment when it isn't as easy as you hoped. They don't get it. They're not doing as well as you would have done it and you have to delegate anyway.

Um, yeah, I, I, I struggled with that experience as well. So how do you work with founders to help them get over that? What sort of process do you recommend?

Emily: Well, one of the things that I do is first I let them know that everything that's happening to them is completely normal. It's not that anything is bad that's happening currently, because typically businesses I'm working with, I'm not helping them get sales.

I am helping them scale to get more sales because you are going to hit a ceiling if you don't have the right processes and systems and people in place where it's a law of diminishing returns, right? So back to autonomous achiever, Emily, there is a point, there's only so much of me, right? And if I want to scale my business, I'm probably going to piss some people off customer wise, because eventually there's just not enough time and then I'm letting people down.

I don't want people to get to that point. And so typically people are on the tipping point of that. They're about to be there. They're still getting great customer reviews and all of that. But they're at a point where they're like, there's no more room in the inn. And something has to change. And what I love about that is that typically they understand that they are the ones that need to change.

As an owner, you have all the control. It's so beautiful. And what I mean by that is the control of how the company operates. How trusting everyone is with each other, how open that environment is. So what I typically do is I sit down and the first session with my clients and ask them a series of questions about what's happening in the business, how excited they are about the business.

And then I work through what we should work on first, because. Sometimes it's their team and it's people related because they really need to hire and they need to do it as fast as possible. There are several things that need to be in place for that to happen effectively. So we might start there. Other people it might be that they've never documented processes.

So I am currently working with a very successful roofing company that the partnership has just split. And the person who was over operations. And all of the operations was in this man's head is gone. And so we are now building those processes out because the business is growing incredibly fast and they need to hire more crews and more people.

How do you do that? So for them really building out those processes, and then layering on those people. And then for other people, it's really strategizing how they're working the systems that they're working in. So this could be tech systems. This could also be the systems and those processes between the tech and people what do you need?

How does that work? And honestly, you don't need as much as you think. And so typically we're stripping away and we're simplifying so that the business can run as smooth as possible. It can get complicated quickly if we let it. And so it's really important to step back and saying, why are certain, why are certain things and things.

When we there, two of those things save you money, save you time, and actually increase ability for the organization. And that's really,

Lance: so how do you help people think about what the right amount of process to put in place? I mean, I certainly see a lot of startups. Uh, they work well because they're super lean.

Everyone's in one room. They, they effectively have no process because you just lean over and talk to your co founder. And then that sort of starts to get out of control. They're, they're getting too big. So they hire in some MBAs or someone like that, who then puts in a huge amount of process and sort of ossifies the entire company.

What's your thinking about the sweet spot and how to manage that transition?

Emily: So I love what you're saying because. I don't like over automation. I don't like over processing. Like, for instance, uh, there should not be a five point plan of how to send an email. Like, that just feels really intense. Um, and then maybe for certain organizations, that's important.

But what I like to think about is safety first. So, is, are there safety issues within your business? So, um, I'll give you a great example, and this seems so random, but at one point I worked with Walmart, not in the business I am now, I actually worked for Carter's Baby Clothes at one point in my career, and safety became an issue because we had a giant recall of footed pajamas.

There was a, a tiny string that the process for cutting that was not properly defined, Uh, there were a couple babies that actually their toes got wrapped around the string. And we're talking about most, mostly nonverbal children because they're about six months old. And so this became a safety hazard.

And so we had to recall all of this. And so if we had had the right fold codes and processes in place with the factories, then this would not have been an issue. And by the way, after that, of course, it was fixed. Um, making sure that everything was turned inside out and all of the loose strings were cut.

Um, But that's a really great example of a safety process that actually very much matters. So safety matters again. I was telling you about this roofing company. So. A lot of the processes there are safety related. Now, other processes that matter are quality related. So again, I was making the joke about the email, but if you want to make sure that let's say you're sending, you know, bulk emails or something like that, there is a quality factor there.

So you want to identify processes that affect your safety, Of your people and your customers and then anything that affects quality. So anything that affects the name of your business, how you do business, the voice of your business, because those two your quality and your safety will make or break you as a business.

Lance: I like that. I remember when, when I was, uh, running Anonymizer, my privacy company, we actually had some sort of commandments, we call them, some very high level guidance that were in the almost thou shalt not kind of space because they provided the framework to help people self navigate that, okay, these are the guide stars that we need to be paying attention to.

And within those frameworks, you have more freedom, but these are the non negotiables that always have to be, uh, followed.

Emily: Well, and I love what you just said because Uh, we as human beings make about 39, 000 decisions a day. It's, it's roughly that and people are always like, how is that possible? But if you think about it, when your alarm went off, you debated whether you were going to get up or not.

Then you debated if you're going to reset your alarm for the next day. Then you debated what clothes you're going to wear and so on and so forth. Uh, we make around 250 food based decisions a day alone. So our creative burden, which is really what that is, It's hot. And when we think about our team, we can relieve as much creative burden as possible so that they can really use their zone of genius, which by the way is not figuring out, you know, what should be in, you know, this specific process, then you're actually relieving your team of things that you as a company have already decided.

Um, and I actually coined the phrase, uh, so SOPs, uh, many people may know this term, it's standard operating procedures. Uh, while I said that, you probably fell asleep. It sounds so boring. Either we work in some sort of audio body shop, or maybe we're in surgery. I call it some other person, and the reason I call it some other person is because if you put your processes together right, you can hand this over to some other person, and they do it better, potentially, than you do.

As well, if not better. Again, in that safety and quality perspective.

Lance: Right. I mean, that is the thing about that delegation, is the first time they do it, it probably isn't as good, but because they're specializing that one thing, the thousandth time they do it, they're probably way better than you ever were.

Right. Um, it's just that intermediate time that you need to, you need to push through. And of course, that's a personal issue. When we talked, uh, before we did this interview, we talked about sort of managing outside, but we also talked about sort of managing yourself. And I think a lot of founders. Uh, get into this hustle culture and they're just driving themselves so hard.

I always say when you work for yourself, your boss is a real asshole, but I wanted to get your thoughts on how founders can be managing that and taking care of themselves, their energy and their use of time.

Emily: It's so true. We are our worst enemy. Uh, I know that my boss didn't pay me for the first year. And, uh, because there was no money, but that's typical, right?

Exactly. Right. Um, and I love that you mentioned this because here's the thing about being a founder. We're trying so hard. To get our foot in the door, to get in front of as many people as possible. And we think that the more we work, the better we're going to be. But here's the thing. There are a few things that your brain actually does better if you have done things that are not work related.

So, for instance, our stomach is connected to our brain. When we are in the womb and we are formed as people, like we're starting to form, a lot of people are not aware that the brain And the stomach are right next to each other. And at some point, I guess they were connected. So, again, they're connected now.

I mention this because what you eat affects how you think. And so if you're skipping meals, if you're eating garbage, it might not affect you today, but all of a sudden, over time, you're going to have brain fog, you're going to be tired, and that working extra hours Is it really going to help you like you thought it would?

You're actually it's a lobbed back to the diminishing returns, right? Um, but there's two, there are two other things that also affect this that are equally as important as what you're eating and it's your sleep. How much we sleep affects our mood. It affects our creativity. It affects our ability to rebound and, you know, just all these different things.

And then one thing that we don't talk about enough. And I think that on your. specific audience, I'm going to say a word that these people have not heard in maybe 10 years if they've been in business. And that word is play. That's right. I am going, you want to go out and play. Go play a game of pickleball.

Go work a puzzle. Something that has no game. I know, that's terrifying. Uh, but here's why this is important. You might think But I've got that big presentation with that company, that, that, you know, angel investor, the thing, and I've got to work. I got to pull an all nighter. Well, by doing that, you're not letting your brain, other areas of your brain work.

So when you move into play, what happens is that main thing, that presentation is actually getting figured out. In another area of your brain, and this happens all the time, I'm sure it's happened to you too, Lance, where you've been playing a game with somebody, and all of a sudden this thought comes to you, and you're like, that's it, that's the thing I've been trying to think of, it might even happen, like, in the shower, right when you wake up, you might dream about it, this doesn't, I

Lance: bought a scuba slate to put in my shower, so I could take notes, because this happens so often.

Emily: I love this idea. Where do you buy something like that?

Lance: Um, Amazon, of course.

Emily: Well, I know what I'm doing after this show. Uh, because you're right. And here's the thing. It's because you've allowed yourself to relax and you've just chilled out for a minute. And you're like, I'm just going to enjoy this shower and enjoy this.

And then. Your brain is like, thank you, I was able to access a different area that I didn't before. So, I recommend play, and this is one of the things that I tell my clients all the time, and they bristle with the most, is I say every single day, I want one hour of play. If that's going to play golf, if that's going, like I said, to work at Puzzle, go out to dinner with friends.

Something that has no purpose. It's not going to make you money. Um, because they're in that money making place. They bristle, they bristle, they do it, and they're like, Oh my gosh, this is amazing. I connected with myself. I have these better ideas. I realized that I was doing this, and da da da da da. And all of a sudden, it really opens up.

More creativity, and that's really where innovation comes in. So, playing is really your gateway to innovation, and nobody talks about that.

Lance: Yeah, it's, it's rarely when you're staring at the spreadsheet that the big ideas come. It's, you're, you're taking a walk in, in nature. In fact, I, it is frustrating to me the number of memos I leave myself when I take a walk because it just, there's continuously things perking up and ideas and oh, I should think about this and oh, here's a great phrase I should use or here's a topic for another video or.

They're just popping off all the time, and it's because I'm not here in the office in front of my computer, you know. I'm always interested by how much context matters. I mean, just like even moving from one room to another, or changing media from a computer to a whiteboard to a piece of paper. The mind is It conceptualizes things differently and different kinds of ideas come.

Emily: I believe our bodies are designed for variety. Our brain, our guts, all of it is designed for variety. Um, a great example of this is some of the most powerful videos online are the videos where somebody is in their car talking and there's like movement behind them or they're walking down the street or they're like walking out of a room.

It's because our brain sees novelty and variety. And so we naturally latch onto that. So I love what you're saying. And I actually do that a lot too. I will sometimes use Canva. They have a big whiteboard in Canva that's amazing, it's pretty much limitless. Sometimes I'll design in there, other times I have a magnetic whiteboard with magnetic little sticky things on it, and I'll work from there.

And sometimes I'll start in one medium and move to another, and it does, it spurs that idea, it's variety. Our brains dramatically need variety. And I want to kind of tie this back to the team. This is another reason why having people on your team is so important and building trust and autonomy with those people is so important because you need variety of thought.

You need somebody that's not like, Oh, that's a great idea. We should just always do what you say. I joke that as a founder, I'm the dumbest person in my company because I'm just like a big dumb elephant. That's like, maybe elephants aren't dumb. I just think big, you know, like, Kind of bull in a China shop with like, Hey, I had this idea and we're going to go do it.

And if you have surrounded yourself with the right people and you've created that trusting environment, then they're like, well, have we thought about this? And if we thought about this nine times out of 10, I'm like, Nope, sure. Didn't. I didn't think about it like that. It's so helpful to have that variety of thought.

So yes, 100 percent changing rooms, going for a 15 minute walk, and then also sharing an idea with somebody on your team with the understanding that you want them to poke holes in it. Like, tell me how terrible this is. Like, all I want to hear is how bad this idea is.

Lance: I remember when I'd come up with one of those harebrained things in my company and I'd walk into some meeting and I'd throw it out there and it always made me deeply nervous when everyone agreed with me because I knew how little I had thought about this, right?

This is a half assed, partially formed idea. You all shouldn't be agreeing with me at this point. There should be holes poked. How do you approach building that culture of safety? To express disagreement, because one of the challenges I found as a founder is, especially as the company grows, there's a mythic characteristic to that, and people are very inappropriately differential to it.

How do you get people into a space where they feel more comfortable in pushing back, giving negative feedback, expressing doubts about things that are critically important to have?

Emily: I want to start with the opposite of that. So many of us, including myself, have come from environments that I call mean environments, and this is an acronym, uh, mean, meaning, micromanaged, egotistical assumptions.

So micromanager who is egotistical, all the rules apply to everyone, but them. Uh, they're ruling on assumptions. I assume that everybody's like me. I assume everything's working this way, and then they're super nitpicking. You are not going to get anybody pushing back on anything. Because if they push back, well, it starts the micromanagement machine, and the nitpicking, and all of that.

So, how you build this is what I call, and I call this a stable team. And again, this is another acronym. You create an environment where people are seen. That's the S. And scene is really, you know, do they feel safe? So I know that sounds kind of ridiculous, but I feel safe in an environment where I can voice what I'm saying and my boss does something about it.

So, um, you know, I'm going to make this up for a second, but every morning I come to work and it's dark in the space, you know, that we've rented as a, as a startup. And I'm kind of scared to get out of my car every day. Well, if somebody on your team told you that, how could you help the situation? And if you're like, oh, I'm so sorry, you know, I'm going to get right down to that.

I'm going to go, I'm going to go fix that. And then you don't? You did not really see that person. But if you go and you say, you know what, I've talked to this security guard and he knows that at 7. 30 that you're going to be parking your car and he promises to meet you there so he can walk you into the building area, or whatever.

Um, all of a sudden that person feels seen and they're more willing to give feedback. Not just about, I mean that was a true safety issue, but anything. It's amazing, like the coffee in the break room sucks. Go get some new coffee. You will be shocked at how much. That helps people feel seen in your organization.

Um, the next one is trust. And it's you trusting your employees that they are the right people. And this is where the opposite of this is the micromanaging, right? That is not trusting your employees. And so when you trust them, this is actually a little bit of a two way street because you're trusting them to do exceptional work.

But by trusting them, you're supporting them with those. Some other person is SOP, letting them fail and learn and grow and know that the whole building is not going to, you know, catch on fire or something like that. And that links to the next one, which is ability. And that is letting them truly be the expert.

Stop running those meetings. Let them drive. Let them be the expert. And I love providing some gossip. Gossip can be scary and terrible, but the gossip I'm talking about is productive gossip. That can go a long way in strengthening the ability with your people. So productive gossip goes like something like this.

You're talking to Fred, and you say to Fred, Man, that Carol, she was on fire this week. She answered these questions. Without being prompted and she, you know, made sure that everything was done for this meeting ahead of time. I just love how proactive she is. That was really specific. You didn't just say Carol's good at her job.

You gave specific reasons and Fred's going to go back to Carol and be like, Hey, you know, this was said about you and Carol will be even more excited and more confident about her ability. Which again will make her want to share ideas. So it goes back to that. Um, the final one, there's also boundaries, love, and enjoyment.

Loving what you do in the right, or sorry, loving your people in the right love language. Uh, most of our people are about, um, money. We think that. And I would say that the majority of your people, yes, of course they want money. They're not gonna work for free, but sometimes it's acts of service. So taking over work for them when they leave on vacation and doing a great job with that.

Uh, sometimes it's words of affirmation, whether you write him a little handwritten note and you leave it on their desk, mailing them something, sending a little gift card. All of that goes a long way, but making sure it's in the language that makes the most sense to them. Uh, one of the people on my team is very much about gifts.

Um, you know, there's really handcrafted things that means a lot to this specific person. And I've got somebody else that's very much words of affirmation. And then enjoyment is making it a great place to work. But I saved B for last, so I realized stable B's, you know, I kind of went around this. All right.

I wanted to talk love and enjoyment because they're just, like, a little bit simpler to understand. Boundaries are something that we, as owners, suck. Uh, suck is a word that I learned when I got my MBA. It's a really important professional word. Um, and the reason we suck at it is because we don't have boundaries, typically.

Um, back to that rest, play, uh, and nutrition piece that we really do need to lean on. Most of us aren't great at that. We're married to this idea. And in doing so, we sometimes force our genes down that path as well. And that's very dangerous. And so it's really important to honor other people's work times and understand if you do need them to work late.

Giving them as much notice as possible and honoring the commitments that they already have to their family, to friends, that type of thing. Um, and making sure also that you're promoting the right people. And what I mean by that is, um, uh, one of the books that I love is Radical Candor. And in that book they talk about rock stars and superstars.

So a rock star is somebody who actually loves what they do, and they want to stay where they are for a period of time for plenty of different reasons. And then there's superstars, and those are the people that are looking to move up. Well, as founders, we think everybody's looking to move up. And sometimes, without having a conversation with somebody, we encroach on those boundaries, and that person that might actually be a rock star, we're Saying, Oh, we've got this opportunity to promote you.

And we could actually burn that person out without having that conversation. So creating that stable environment again, it's seen trust, seen and you've seen your employees trusted, you know, creating trust with your employees, honoring their abilities, creating those boundaries, honoring those boundaries.

Loving people in your organization in the way that means the most to them, and then, uh, creating an environment that's actually enjoyable that people really want to be a part of.

Lance: That's great. You know, it's funny talking about the, the rock stars and superstars. I, it goes back, you know, so far to basically the Peter Principle, where you're promoting people into their own, uh, incompetence, you know, a lot of people, Our individual contributors, that's where they want to be and trying to suddenly force them into a management role, which is a radically different set of skills is is such a mismatch between the person and what you're asking them to do.

And you think you're rewarding them by doing it, and you're basically just setting up for disaster. It's an interesting problem that I see over and over in businesses.

Emily: I actually, unfortunately, when I was in the corporate world, did this. There was a lady on my team, her name was Rachel, and it's one of those regrets in life that I have where I saw how amazing she was at her job.

She was a doer to the nth degree. And I assumed, which is never good, that she wanted to move up because I, that's how I was. And she, I saw so much of myself in her that rather than having a conversation about, here's where I see you, is this direction you want to go? I just assumed. And I started putting more work on her and grooming her without telling her that's what I was doing.

She came into my office one day, tears in her eyes. through her notice on my desk and she's like, I quit. I can't take it anymore. You put way too much on me. This is not what I want. Come to find out, I didn't know it at the time, but she and her wife were trying to get pregnant. And they were ready to start a family.

I never asked. I never asked that. And now, you know, hindsight being 20, 20. First thing I should have done is, uh, because I could have kept that rock star on my team and she would have been a valuable asset to the organization for many years. Um, so that was an regret, a regret. I always have when I put my stable, uh, framework together, I, I definitely had her in mind.

Um, hoping that one Rachel, uh, was going to help many, many others. So

Lance: that's excellent. Is there anything that you're doing that you want to promote things that people should be looking at to learn more about kind of this approach to working with employees and working with yourself?

Emily: Definitely.

Definitely. Thank you for asking. I was talking earlier about these four types of business owners. And again, all of them are good and all of them have pitfalls. And I believe that we are only as strong as how we know about ourselves and how much we're working on ourselves. And so I've actually created a absolutely free assessment, six questions, very simple for you as a business owner or anybody can Um, and understand more about how you communicate where this could go wrong, how it can take your business down the wrong path, but also how it could be a huge asset in your business.

And I give you three simple shifts you could make in your specific style that will amplify this and actually make you more price grade. Um, so if you go to my website, it's Emily Hawkins, the number for the letter U dot com slash type, you will find this. Um, and you can take it and you can give it to people on your team if you want.

It's a great conversation starter. Uh, what I have noticed that a lot of business owners do with this, they take it and then they bring it to a team meeting and they talk openly with their team about the pitfall. So you can talk about how great you are, that's fine. Uh, but I think if you really focus on the pitfalls, if you read them the pitfalls, and say how can you help me make myself better, wow, you are going to build so much trust in the organization.

And when they see that you're willing to learn and grow, it's going to go a long way. Um, but in there you also get tips on exactly how to do that.

Lance: Fantastic. Yeah. Showing vulnerability is such a powerful move. Uh, and I guess it is one of the ways of, of encouraging people to, to share. Feedback, right? It shows that you're open to that kind of thing.

Uh, and I'll put a link to that tool in the description for this video. So if people didn't take notes, uh, quickly while you were talking, they'll be able to just scroll down there and click on that. Well, Emily, thank you so much for coming on. It's been fantastic to have you on Feel the Boot. And I really appreciate the insights you've shared.

Emily: Well, thank you so much, Lance. I absolutely love everything that you offer. I was saying this before we even started that the sound bites that you offer are so valuable to owners. And I was looking at some of the videos and thinking, gosh, where were you 10 years ago? I needed you. I could have saved a lot of money.

Lance: Oh man. So much of this just comes out of. I wish I'd done it differently when I was doing it the first time too. Well, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.

Emily: Thank you.

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Lance: Thanks for watching this interview. I hope you found it useful and interesting, and if you did, please do the usual, like, subscribe, and share. Ring that bell. If you're looking for fundraising for your startup and wondering if you're ready, I've created a short quiz that you can take to let you know whether you're ready to go and what you might need to do to get ready.

If you need help with your startup in general, I'd love to talk with you. Let's get on a meeting. And I've got a couple of options for getting on my calendar up there and down in the description. And until next time, ciao.