Are you carrying the weight of poor performance on your team? As the year winds down, it’s time to get honest: are your employees aligned with the skills, attitudes, and behaviors your business needs to thrive? The end of the year is the perfect time to take stock, reassess, and make changes that set you up for success in the year ahead. In this episode of Leadership is Feminine, Kris Plachy dives into the power of a year-end team audit, breaking down how to evaluate where your team stands and what needs to shift.

Kris challenges leaders to stop tolerating misalignment and start addressing the tough questions. Are the people you’ve hired still the right fit? Are they delivering results, or are you carrying the burden of their shortcomings? She shares practical strategies to assess team dynamics, identify gaps, and figure out whether further investment in your team’s skills will pay off.

This episode also highlights the role of feedback in building a thriving team culture. “People need to know if they’re winning or losing,” Kris insists. By fostering open communication and clear expectations, you can create a culture where everyone understands their role, their impact, and their path to success. Join Kris as she provides the tools and insights you need to realign your team, elevate performance, and start the new year with confidence.

Key Takeaways From This Episode

1. Why Regular Team Audits are Necessary

2. Consequences of Not Addressing Team Member’s Performance: Ways to handle employees who perform exceptionally well and those who do not meet expectations.

3. Communication Issues in Teams: Highlighting the leader's responsibility in establishing effective communication practices.

4. Conducting a Team Audit: The process and benefits of the assessment.

5. Importance of Setting Clear Goals for Team Members and Providing Feedback

Contact Information and Recommended Resources

Get Access to the One Hour Leader book and Masterclass

What if your team knew exactly what to do without you having to tell them? This book will show the EXACT steps to design your high-performing, self-directed team. CLICK HERE to read the One Hour Leader and start your journey.

Already have the book? Dive deeper with the exclusive Masterclass Kris mentioned - just $97? Learn more and purchase.

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Have questions? Want more details about the ways we support women Visionary Founders? Visit www.thevisionary.ceo.

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Transcript

Kris Plachy:
Hey. Hey. Welcome to the podcast. We are halfway through December. Holy smokes. Here we go. Couple things. So, first of all, I saw Defying Gravity, or, I say that I saw Wicked a couple of weeks ago, and I just wanted to share this because I love this movie and I loved the musical and I love the reception that it's getting. Not just for the current actors and actresses that are participating, who are all divine, but really for Stephen Schwartz, who wrote the music and the lyrics.

Kris Plachy:
Because the lyrics, I'm always in awe. Like, I, you know, I just like- Lin Manuel Miranda, who wrote Hamilton. Like, how do people create this work, this body of work? It's marvelous. Wicked. I saw Wicked for the first time in 2012, the summer that I was laid off from my last job job. That's when I started my company. And we had already planned a trip to New York with our family. So we took our kids.

Kris Plachy:
My son at the time was 12, and our twins were what, 7ish, 8. And we took them to see Wicked and that music. I had already fallen in love with the music years before that. I remember listening to that music in the early 2000s. So it must have been shortly after it came out, and I just drank it. I know every line of every song from the original Wicked cast that. I love them all. But Defying Gravity was always sort of this anthem.

Kris Plachy:
And when I got laid off, Defying Gravity was just this song that I played over and over and over again on my walks, you know, in my house. I wrote the lyrics out once and actually posted it, like, as a blog post. When I left the company that I was with, I wrote to all of my colleagues that I had adored working with, the song, the lyrics from the song For Good. It's just been the whole soundtrack, and the words of the soundtrack have been an anthem for me and Defying Gravity especially.And I actually find it very powerful and fascinating that that song is now gaining so much traction. And it's happening right now. It's such a new season, I think, for so many of us. And so if you haven't listened to Defying Gravity and really listen to the words, it's such a powerful song for all of us who are recognizing that maybe we've been, we have limited our potential for whatever reason, and it's really powerful. So I invite you to go for a walk and plug it in, see what you think.

Kris Plachy:
As I mentioned last week, I told you I was going to talk to you about your team this week, and that's what I want to do. I want to give you some thoughts as you're wrapping down the year, or what to think about and what to do to debrief your mind on your team. I think every year you should do a team audit. You should do team design. And that is something that's available when you access the One Hour Leader product that we have. I believe you can get that by just going to our website or going to the One Hour Leader. I think it's just thevisionary.CEO/OneHourLeader I think.

Kris Plachy:
But you can access that and if you get the masterclass, you get some videos that will walk you through how to do team design, how to do a team audit, these things. And I think it's a really powerful exercise. So I'm just going to give you kind of the high level of it right now. But really, when you think about all these people that work for you, whether you have five people or five, 500 people or 50 or whatever, we all change all the time. So everybody that comes to us after they've now worked with us, things are happening to them. Their lives are changing. The people in their lives are changing. The things that they want are changing, their skill sets are changing, Even their experience changes because they work with you.

Kris Plachy:
And so just like you, we are all, everyone is evolving. And so to expect that people remain static after you've hired them is unreasonable. And it's vital for you as a leader in your business, and if you have leaders who report to you, to do an assessment of the team. So there's what their competencies are, versus the competencies required of the role right now. And then what are the competencies that are going to be required of the role in the future? And is the person you have right now prepared for that? And/or, are they overprepared for that? And/or should we invest in them to be prepared for that? Do we have people on the team who are blowing it out of the water and we're not- we have yet to really place them in a role where we can harness that skill and that capability and that initiative they have. Are we underutilizing people and their competence? We talk a lot about people who aren't doing their job, but what about the people who are exceptional? And are we creating a culture of exceptional by keeping people who are exceptional and the people who don't meet their goals consistently? Are we helping them understand that this is not the best environment? If you run a small business, you guys, you cannot continue to absorb poor performance.

Kris Plachy:
I know you understand that logically but to expect that your company can absorb poor results from a person, or two people, or four people regularly is unreasonable. And that's the kind of work I do with my clients. So if you're struggling with that, then we should probably be working together, because that is a solvable problem. But at this point in the year, right now, this is when you have to be honest with yourself. Are the people that work for you aligned with the skills they need? Do they have the behaviors and the attitude that is necessary to be successful in your business? Are they meeting the goals of the role? Are the goals for the role even clear? Have you established what they should be for next year? Have you had a conversation with them about where they're going and what they can create and what you see in them? Are they getting feedback from you? A little communication goes a really long way. And what I have found, I've worked with so many different leaders and their businesses, and that's not just in this recent time in my life, but over the course of my life. And I can promise you that the one problem that is consistent with every team that isn't doing well, meaning even if they're hitting their goals, everybody doesn't like each other, or there's threats that people are going to be quitting all the time, no matter what. It's a communication issue.

Kris Plachy:
And it usually starts with the leader, whoever's on top, because they're not hearing what they need to hear, when they need to hear it. And whether or not it needs to be you isn't really what's important. It's that there needs to be a culture that establishes that people get feedback. People understand why what is happening. They understand how what is happening impacts them. They understand how what is happening they contribute to. They need to know if they're winning or losing.

Kris Plachy:
We're so afraid to tell people that they lose. And yet, you know, if you're a football game, that's very obvious. If you're losing, and yet at work it's not, which is so interesting, right? Like, I've talked about this on previous podcasts, that if you play on a football team and you keep not playing well, you get benched, right? And it's so normalized in sports, and yet it's so unnormalized in work environments, and yet that's exactly the same thing. We hire talent, we hire resources in forms of humans to deliver on the promise of a role, to achieve results, but then when they don't achieve results, they stay.So every year you've got to do a little audit here. And what's the gap? So if we have people who are just knocking it out of the park and doing an exceptional job, and we haven't acknowledged that, harnessed that, built upon that, invited them to talk to us about what else might be exciting for them, we have to ask ourselves, why? Why haven't we done that? And then the opposite is true. If we have people who are not knocking it out of the park, do they have clear goals? Do they know how to succeed? And if the answer is yes, what's the gap? Why are they still here? It's usually a skill gap on the part of the leader. They don't want to hurt someone's feelings. They don't have- insert here.

Kris Plachy:
Right. So take this week and look at your team. And if you really want this resource, I strongly recommend you do it. We'll put it in the show notes. Go get the masterclass. It's like $100, I think. It's really inexpensive and it will walk you through how to do team audit and team design. And it's an incredibly powerful end of year exercise that's strongly, strongly recommend.

Kris Plachy:
Right. Those of you listening who are clients or have been clients, you probably have this in your vault somewhere, right? Or you can go get it again for $97 or whatever we're selling it for, but it's readily available. All right. And it will take you a very short period of time. You can do it on your own, you can do it with your management team, you can do it on your management team, and you can have your managers do it for their team. But regardless, it's such a great- Team design, team audit are such powerful tools to recalibrate where you are now. Not where people were a year ago, not where you were a year ago, and certainly not where the business was a year ago. Sound good? You should do that.

Kris Plachy:
All right, thanks for tuning in. Talk to you next time.