If you’re like most of us, you probably think life would be a whole lot easier if you just had a few more hands. Or if you’re like me, you think it’d be easier if you could just replicate yourself a few times and get to work.
What would your life look like if you could just have three carbon copies of yourself? You wouldn’t have to train anyone to sound like you or increase their sales skills to match your own., You could just send them out and trust that with three more ‘yous,’ you’d effectively get three times the work done. Life would be golden.
Trust me. I’ve thought about this concept a lot, and if there was a way to do it effectively, the younger version of myself would have done it by now. While it seems like this futuristic dream of mine would be the perfect setup, I’m here to tell you it isn’t. After training more than 1,000 employees to work under me, there’s something to be said about building a team full of individualized workers who each have unique skills of their own to bring to the table.
At 16 years old, I joined the United States Military as an army medic, and at 17, I shipped out to basic training. For the next 13 years while in the army, I learned that military service is 100% based on team building and 0% based on individual skills and talents. When you’re serving in the military, there’s no type of networking involved, and no type of social interaction is encouraged. In fact, the military strongly discouraged social involvement to the point that we weren’t allowed to have social media accounts of any kind while we were serving the country.
When I shipped out to basic training at 17, I immediately became a part of a team that cared far more about the other 5-10 members in our group than they did about themselves. While I served as a medic, some team members were responsible for shooting people and some were responsible for radio communications back to basecamp. I realized I was not inherently good at or meant to do either of these things.
While we participated in cross-training and I could certainly hold my own when it came to some of these tasks, I realized very quickly that each one of us had a specific role on the team. If not attended to, the team didn’t function as well as it should, thus causing major problems in the long run. Eventually, I got injured in Iraq, medically retired from the military, and came home to try something new. As time went on, the realizations I had on that team never left me.
After retiring from the military, I began my career in solar. It became evident that the industry revolved around what I like to call “duplicate yourself culture.” If you were going to be successful, it seemed as if you needed to train the people on your team to be just like you in every way possible. They needed to recruit like you, perform like you, pitch like you, act like you, wear the same clothes as you, go to the same bar as you, go on the same vacations as you, go on the same fad diet as you, and so on. In the solar industry, It was all about creating a culture of everything being the same, and that’s what it meant to be on a team. It was just the way everyone did it even though it lead to 300% turnover rates each year.
After looking into what was causing these extreme turnover rates, I learned two things: By training people to be just like me, I was 1) shoving people into boxes they didn’t fit or belong in and 2) teaching my employees and team members exactly how to leave my company and start their own.
My team members were never going to be me, and when I reflected on my time in the military and what I learned there, I realized that I didn’t want them to be. You see, you have to accentuate the differences between each individual member if you want to have a successful team. Some people absolutely have a certain skill they’re good at. By encouraging them to do something different, you’re eliminating their ability to add to the team’s overall success.
Today, when I think about creating the perfect team, I know it’s most effective to strategically build and optimize teams based on each individual member’s skillset rather than aiming to build a team of carbon copies of myself. When team members bring their true skills to the table and recognize their role on the team, turnover rates plummet, and productivity skyrockets. Doing things this way effectively produces positive results and positive experiences for everyone involved.