Know Your Group Members, Vistage Fundamental #12

Get to know your fellow members intimately, both their business and their personal lives.

Devote 5 minutes during each group meeting to get to know something personal about another member.

When being the host, share intimate details about your business and personal life.

Transcript

This is Steve Van Valin with Culturology, and I’d like to share this month’s fundamental for the Vistage Brandywine Valley Groups, led by our master chair Jim Lucas. And we have the Vistage Way, which is composed of 14 fundamentals. Each month, we take a focused look at one of them. And this month, it’s number 12, to know your group members.

Right up front, here’s what it says about this fundamental. It says, Get to know your fellow members intimately, both their business and their personal lives.” And that’s a challenge, isn’t it? We don’t have enough time often in meetings to do that.

I wanted to share with you an incredible idea on how we can be intentional about getting to know fellow team members and employees at work. And this was inspired by a story that I shared in my book called The Search for Meaning at Work. And I talked about this amazing general manager that we had in our QVC call center out in San Antonio. And she led hundreds of people and had almost 50 or 60 supervisors that worked for her. And what she did was she set out to get to know them personally so that she could have great conversations with them and build trust.

I want to share with you the idea from Michelle Alexander that’s all about creating a baseball card approach to identify the key things about an individual that you’d want to know. So Michael Jack Schmidt, probably the greatest third baseman of all time, there’s one of his early baseball cards. But if you look at the back of a baseball card, there’s always interesting information about the player, some statistics, some things about their home, et cetera.

What Michelle did was borrowed this idea and created baseball cards in a sense for her supervisors. And so here’s some of the things that she would’ve captured on it, and I added to this as well. But put the team member’s name on the top, of course. Where did they grow up? What’s their hometown? What community do they live in now? And obviously, you want to know their birthday so you can remember that special day when it comes around once a year.

Other things that you can remember that might be important, especially if you’re getting to know people emotionally, is what are team members’ parents’ names, and are they still with us? And what’s their partner name, if you know that? And if they’re married, what’s an anniversary? Kids’ age, school district, and even the pets. What is that family’s favorite vacations? What do they like to do? What are their activities and hobbies? And what are some of their holiday traditions?

Now, if you can remember these things in the right moment in a conversation to be able to ask about these, imagine the reaction from the other person to realize that you can empathize and you care enough and respect enough about them to remember some of these details and be curious about them.

Here are some additional things that you could optionally record. How does the team member’s family give back? Do they have a way that they do that? And what are the family goals? Now, if this is somebody that works for you, this can completely be a game changer in the conversations about motivation, to know why they’re actually making money in your organization so that they can help with their family goal. Do they have any special needs? And is there a fun fact about the family?

All of those are opportunities to get to know our fellow members intimately or team members that we work with. And when you’re the host, when you share intimate details that might be on the back of your baseball card, then people will know how to respond to you, and you’re going to be an all-star leader in your organization.

This is Steve Van Valin with Culturology.