119 – Build Self-Managing Teams with Atiba de Souza

Episode Transcription

David Pisarek: Are you feeling stretched thin trying to manage your non-profit team? Atiba De Souza is back on the podcast to share proven strategies that boost team productivity, eliminate delegation bottlenecks, and help your staff work smarter, hopefully without burning out.

In this episode, I’m thrilled and excited to have Atiba De Souza back. He’s mastered the art of turning chaos into clarity. We’re going to be talking about all kinds of things around team performance and leadership. Atiba is your secret weapon when your team is underperforming. As a CEO, strategist, and team productivity expert, he transforms struggling organizations into productivity powerhouses through proven leadership frameworks that deliver immediate results.

Atiba, thank you so much for coming back on the show.

Atiba de Souza: Glad to be back and excited to have another great episode with you.

David Pisarek: Absolutely. Let’s jump in on this. For leaders of small non-profits, they’ve got limited time and budget. They’re probably wearing 37 hats. I love your Superman hats that you’re always rocking. What’s the first step that they take towards building, ideally, a self-managing, high-performing team?

Atiba de Souza: Well, honestly, breathe.

You’ve got to understand that if you’re not breathing, the organization is not breathing. So we have got to start there. Let’s slow down for a moment. After we’ve slowed down, David, then we need to look at this: in order for the organization to grow and have the impact it’s designed to have. We need to delegate better to people.

Now, what do I mean by that? Well, you’re probably delegating right now, and you’re probably thinking, “Well, but I do delegate.” But do they come back to you and ask you tons of questions? Do they need your input? Before it’s done, do you have to go out and check it and make sure? Do you have to go behind them and make sure that they actually did what you said in the time that you said? Are you thinking about it at night, wondering if we’re actually going to get it done? If any of those are true, you’re not delegating well.

Today, David and I are going to help you solve some of that.

David Pisarek: Love that concept.

You have to empower your team to be able to make decisions. If people are continually eating up your time and coming back to you, “Oh, what about this? Or what about that? What about this?” They don’t feel empowered.

There’s a reason that we hire people that we do in our team. We hire them as experts in X, Y, and Z, whatever it happens to be. Yes, maybe they don’t know 100% of the time, but ideally, they are willing to learn, solve problems, and figure things out. I truly believe that failure shouldn’t be viewed as a failure. It should be thought of as a lesson.

Okay, great. We’re doing things, we’re moving things forward, and I took a misstep. I posted something to our social account that shouldn’t have been there. Alright, well, what did you do to correct it? What can we do to prevent that from happening again down the road? How can we create systems and processes? Because that’s going to help make a lot of this easier.

Atiba de Souza: It is, but it doesn’t stop there.

A lot of us have heard those things before, and a lot of us even believe those things. Many of us have said, ‘But I’ve tried that.’ They made the mistake, and we put processes in place, and they still screwed it up. So that doesn’t really work. It’s a step in the right direction, but it’s also part of what I call the Delegation Trap — a series of lies that we’ve been told about Delegation.

Look, I used to buy into and believe the 80% rule. If they could do it 80% as well as you, let them do it. It’s okay. Come on now. You didn’t start your non-profit for it to be 80% of what you thought it should be. You also didn’t start your non-profit for people to just go make a bunch of mistakes and hope that they cleaned it up. Neither one of those is true. That’s where I was. I was there myself, several times, in several businesses.

About three and a half years ago, I found a solution, David. Since then, I’ve been teaching this solution to lots of organizations, and I have been amazed at how it didn’t just work for me, but it’s working for others, and it’s changing the way they lead their organizations, and it’s changing the outcomes their organizations are having, and it’s breaking them out of the Delegation Trap.

David Pisarek: You have piqued my curiosity. I’m sure that the listeners, the people watching this, are also interested. Tell us, what is the secret sauce that you’ve got?

Atiba de Souza: It’s called the CASE method. C-a-s-e. Case, the CASE method.

I’m not going to sit here and tell you I’m some radical genius who did decades of research to figure this out. This came about because I had hired a young lady to do a role in the company that I had done for over 20 years, and I was really good at it. Not a real good, I was one of the best in the world at it, and now I needed to train her to do it so I could be free and go do other things. That’s what we all do, right?

Well, over the first four or five weeks of her working for us, in our weekly meeting, I made her cry. Several times. That’s not good. That’s bad, right? And I was frustrated. I had tried all the delegation things and tactics in these weeks to get her to understand, but she just wasn’t understanding, and I was frustrated. Now, I knew she was smart, so I knew I didn’t hire the wrong person, but it just wasn’t working.

So I came into this meeting, David, one Tuesday morning, and I said to myself, “Atiba, we cannot make Christine cry again.” And myself answered, “But Atiba, I don’t know what to do. We’ve tried everything.” And I said, “Well, dude, we’ve got to do something different.” Not having any more direction to myself than that. Here’s what happened: we started a meeting, and I took a breath when she came on. It was over Zoom, and I asked her just impromptu. It wasn’t planned, and I said, “Christine, what challenges did you have this week in the path that you were doing?” And all of a sudden, she started listing things out and saying things, and I’m listening to her. Okay, I’m hearing all the challenges, and I’m writing down what she’s saying. And then I said, “Okay, so I understand your challenges. Can you do me a favour and articulate the steps? Go through. Now, walk me through every step that you took through the process.” And she started doing that. She’s walking me through every minute step that she’s taking.

Now, I’ve an understanding of the challenges she had in mind, and I’m hearing these steps. And as she’s hearing these steps, David, I’m seeing, and I’m hearing, and I’m feeling, saying, “That’s not the way I would have done it. That was the wrong choice right there. That’s why you had that challenge.” At this point, I’m not saying anything. I’m just listening to her go through all this, but I’m thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking all of this. And by the time she was done, I had a picture in my mind of: This is how she thought, and this is how she thought, and this is how I think. No wonder.

And then, the epiphany happened: My role is to help her go from thinking over here the way she is, cross the bridge of thinking the way I think about things, and then she’ll have better outcomes. I asked her to articulate, and that’s what’s going on. To really drive it home, I asked her the third question, and the third question was this: “Okay, so I’m going to choose four steps that you took. I want to study and dive deep into these four steps with you.” Now, she did way more than four steps, but I only chose four. That’s key. You can’t do them all. Four is the maximum. I selected some of the steps that she performed well, and I identified some of the steps that she didn’t perform well.

I made her go through and I said, “Okay, I want you to tell me, what were you thinking about before you started this step? And what did you think the outcome was going to be, and what happened in between, and did you get the results that you wanted?” And she’s explaining all of this to me, and in the process of explaining it to me, light bulbs are going off in her head. I haven’t even said anything yet. She’s not crying. She’s not learning. And then we wrap up the meeting, and the last question I ended up with, which didn’t come up in the first meeting and was raised several weeks later, was: the E in case.

That was, “Christine, what was Easier than expected for you with this process this week?” Those four questions, those four little questions, have changed everything. Because the thing that we miss is that we want to delegate tasks, and we say, “Do it this way.” The example that you gave earlier, even, “Okay, there was a mistake. Let’s put an SOP in place so we can solve that mistake.”

Well, now they’re just following a process, and the thing that they’ve not learned how to do, David, is think. When something different comes up, now they have to come back to you and say, but now what? But if we teach them how to think, it gets us freedom. I know it’s not rocket science. It’s super, super simple, but that’s the beauty of it.

David Pisarek: I think that’s super impactful, and I love the story behind it because it really clearly explains, here’s how we can help empower people.

Many of us have had a full life experience. You did that role for 20 years. I’ve been doing web for over 25 years. There’s a reason why I do the things that I do, and you do the things that you do in the order that you do, because you have the mistakes, the failures backing you, pushing you towards leaning and learning the right order of things.

If you go back to seventh grade, eighth grade math, when you were learning about bed mass, there’s the order of operations. If you do something wrong, you’re going to get the wrong outcome. So let’s reframe and work through things this way. But there’s something that inherently comes from figuring it out on your own. I think that’s part of your story there is empowering your employee, your peer, your colleague, to walk through things with you and try to rationalize and figure it out on their own and having you there to guide, mentor, coach along the way to go: Listen, you could do it this way, but what about this?

And to help empower them to expand their thinking. I think it’s really important. Absolutely. I have mentors and coaches for me. I do mentoring and coaching as well, not just with my team, but with other agency owners. It’s important to provide and help, not put constraints around thinking, but quite the opposite, and allow the freedom of thought.

Atiba de Souza: Exactly. Here’s a very fundamental thing that so many of us miss: people will support things that they co-create. But so often as leaders in business, we feel like it’s our job to create their job to do. But if we bring them into that creation cycle, they hold on to it, support it, and own it more. Yes, that is one of the underlying principles of the case method. It’s one of the things that’s built on is that principle.

David Pisarek: Something that you alluded to there that I’m just going to put out there is: enabling your team to go and do the things that they think they need to do. Or as a team, you’ve been like, “All right, we need to do this thing.” Or, one of the things that I like to empower my team with is that everybody has their little pet project to work on. It doesn’t have to do with their job or role in the business, but it does have to be related to the company.

There’s a new era, a new version of culture that comes into the business with that. They do feel ownership over these things, regardless of how big or minute they are. They have the buy-in, they have the care, they enjoy the environment. There are a lot of people who work their whole lives, and it’s just a job. I don’t want my team to feel that way.

Atiba de Souza: That is one of the shifts in leadership. Let’s face it, when we were younger, leadership was all about this dogmatic in charge, tell people what to do, so on and so forth. The world has changed. The world has changed drastically. As leaders now, our job is to empower them. But the way you empower people is not by telling them what to do, but by asking them questions that lead to the answers they were looking for.

I will give you another story, which just happened this morning. We were talking before we started on how I’ve been on calls all morning, and this is one of the things that happened in a call this morning. I’m talking with someone else on the team. Last week, when we were chatting, we were brainstorming through an innovative way to solve a challenge that we’ve been having. This is a process that we’ve always done. We’ve always done it this way, but it takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of time, like an entire week, to do one process. It’s like, “Okay, how can we speed this up and how can we use AI in different ways to speed this up for us?” We brainstormed ideas last week and came up with some suggestions.

This week, she comes back and we’re having a conversation about what she did and so on and so forth and what it produced. I CASE methoded it, of course, we went through; I asked what the challenge was. She didn’t really have any challenges; it worked pretty well the way we had laid it out. Okay, but she said I wasn’t totally happy with the output it gave; however, in terms of the process, the process worked. Because this was literally just a prompt in ChatGPT that she was working with, it was just one or two prompts in there.

There wasn’t a whole lot in terms of studying, going through the articulation of the steps. But we went through the prompt, we did look at it, and then I said, “So your challenge is you don’t like the output that it gave you in this way.” Now, when I read the prompt, I saw the problem right away. I knew exactly what she was missing. I just asked her, I said, “So you went through, you said you’re happy with what it produced quality, but it just didn’t produce the quality the way you wanted it. So, how do you make that crosswalk?”

It was in the process of just asking her that. All of a sudden, she thought, and then you could just see the light bulb go off, and she said, “Oh, my gosh, it’s in the prompt. I didn’t ask it this way. I just need to change it and ask it this way.” There it is.

We, as leaders, have to understand that our role is asking questions. We’re going to set vision, and then we’re ask great questions to help people execute and get to that vision. That’s where we have to be. I’m glad you’re there. I know you’re there, but that’s where we have to be. That’s the message that we want to get out. It’s how do you ask questions? The case method involves four questions, but there are numerous other questions that you should also ask.

You’ll cover that in a book a little bit. Smack the Hub in the middle of the book is a whole chapter on understanding how to ask questions, and your mentality of the questions that you’re asking may be getting you the wrong answer. It’s not just asking questions, but it’s asking the right question.

David Pisarek: You touched on something there that we haven’t had in the episode yet, which is: you have a book coming up.

Atiba de Souza: Yes.

David Pisarek: Tell us a little bit about the book, the tent behind it, and I guess the hero story behind it.

Atiba de Souza: A little while ago, I was in a mastermind, and we had a moment to share, and we were sharing some of the things that were working for us in our business. I stood up, and what I shared was that I don’t answer questions that my employees ask. The room went into an uproar over that. Over the next couple of days, people kept coming up to me and were like, “Oh, my gosh. What you said resonated so because I’m so overwhelmed by people always asking me questions, and my day is just full of answering their questions. What do you mean? How do you do that?” That was the moment in time when I realized we needed to write a book about this.

I have taught the case method to several businesses. I have spoken on stages and keynoted on the case method, but I’d never written about it, not even a blog post. But when that room erupted, and this is a room of very, very successful high-level entrepreneurs. When that room erupted, it said something to me. It said people needed this. I said, I have to write a book, something I thought I would never do, and it’s called The Delegation Trap, because we are trapped by Delegation.

There are lies that we’ve been told, and we’ve been told these lies by well-meaning management consultants who have come in and said, “This is how you delegate. Start with small things. Don’t build trust and all that crap,” and it doesn’t work. Because if it did, you and I wouldn’t be having this conversation right now.

You, listening to us, wouldn’t be listening because we all would have figured out how to delegate and have the perfect teams, but the stuff that’s out there is incomplete. The case method, which I explore in The Delegation Trap, can help you completely revolutionize the way your organization operates.

David Pisarek: Love it. Something that I’d like us to talk about for a moment or two is that small organizations need to scale up. We need to delegate, they need to delegate. Even if it’s a virtual assistant automating tasks, perhaps it’s creating a ChatGPT agent to help delegate, speed up, or improve the process.

Definitely COVID, I feel like I should stop mentioning COVID, actually, because we’re a couple of years out, right? But COVID really pushed people into remote work. I remember my first long-term job, I was there for about 11 years, and my director was like, “Nonono, you can’t work remotely.” Everything I was doing was web. I had an office set up at home. I could do it all. “No, you had to come into the office. You had to come into the office.” I think there’s a little bit of a micromanagement issue there. I think there’s a little bit of personal reflection, pushing, whatever. It doesn’t really matter. However, remote and hybrid work situations are extremely common now. Are there any systems or tools that you have found effective for remote and hybrid teams on how they can help stay productive?

Atiba de Souza: It’s a great question.

Let me tell you, my team has been remote since 2010, so this works. Now, not only remote, but we’re remote and also distributed around the world, and that’s the beauty of it. Now, the beauty of it is also, because it’s based in principle, it isn’t just based on some nouveau reach tactic. These are based on principles of how humans think, feel, and behave, and get this, this is going to sound a little bit counterintuitive right now, but it also works when you’re looking at building AI employees. Why? Because we built AI employees to mimic humans.

Indeed, you won’t have a conversation back and forth with your AI employee, as you would with a human. But guess what? When you need to teach an AI employee to do something new or build an AI employee, you have to consider how they’re going to do it. When they do it, you’ve got to consider whether they have any challenges in doing it. That’s called looking at the logs, right? When you’re studying and you’re diving into these, you’re looking at the logs. It’s all the same. It is all the same.

This is leadership. It doesn’t matter if it’s a human, it doesn’t matter if they’re sitting with you or remote, it doesn’t matter if they’re a virtual assistant or if it’s an AI employee. These principles work. I’m telling you that because we have an entire gang of AI employees that we’ve built, and this is how we’ve built them. We’ve been remote since 2010.

This is what works. It doesn’t matter.

David Pisarek: What, I guess, do you have any part of management tools or software that you lean towards, having done this for 15 years, 14, 15 years, that you’re like: All right, here’s the way that Atiba handles bringing the team together, remote, globally distributed, etcetera.

Atiba de Souza: From a tool perspective, we use Slack and then ClickUp for the management of everything. ClickUp, you don’t get paid for doing it. It’s really that simple. But that keeps us organized. Now, ClickUp feeds the way my brain works, which is why we chose ClickUp. We’ve tried others in the past and hated them. I know other people who use them and love them, and that’s okay. That’s the beauty of the different tools when you get there. And the tools matter less if the input into the tools isn’t great.

And so let’s talk about that for a moment, so we’ve talked about the fact that as a leader, you have to ask great questions. The other thing that you have to do as a leader is set Vision. You’re listening to me, and you’ve probably heard vision. “Okay, yeah. We have a vision statement. We read that. We wrote it down and we read it at a meeting two years ago. Yeah, that was our vision statement. Cool. I know our vision. I know it. Cool.” That’s where a lot of people are, and that’s not what I’m talking about. That’s not at all what I’m talking about.

What I’m saying to you here is, let’s say you’re talking with Employee A. I’m just going to use A as a name. You’re telling Employee A that this item needs to be moved from this position to that position. In order to communicate that to Employee A, you must have vision. There’s a vision that you impart to Employee A. You see, if you clearly impart the vision to Employee A, Employee A will not come back to you with questions. Employee A then knows exactly what to put inside ClickUp or any project management tool.

Now, what does that vision need to have? Who, what, when, where, why, how? You cover those, and you cover them clearly. You never need to answer another question, and they know exactly what to do, and the project management system has everything it needs, and everything runs.

David Pisarek: Love it. We use the same tools over here: ClickUp, Slack. We have integrations between them. There are some amazing things for anybody listening to this. ClickUp offers, I think, a free tier. You can get started with that today. There are templates inside of them. There’s AI built in. You have to pay extra for AI, but you can leverage that platform so well to help organize, strategize, simplify, and delegate.

Atiba de Souza: Yes, absolutely.

David Pisarek: Awesome.

Atiba, these have been some amazing insights. I love the conversation. Our last episode with you was fantastic as well. I hope people listening to this are able to walk away with something, at least one gold nugget. I know I’ve got five or six. I’ve made some notes as we were talking today that I’m going to take back to my team.

If you were to issue a challenge to anybody listening, something that you want them to do today or tomorrow, what would that challenge be?

Atiba de Souza: It’s a great question. If you’re listening to this right now, maybe you’re sitting in that place where you’re thinking, “Maybe I’m a good manager. Maybe I’m a good leader, maybe I’m not. Maybe I don’t even know if this matters. Or maybe you flat out realize I’m having a problem.” We started by saying, First, breathe. Slow down. Breathe. Take a moment. Breathe. Next, forgive yourself for what has happened in the past. And set an intention to be better and different in the future.

Then, go to thedelegationtrap.com/chapter1 and go read chapter one of the book. It’s free, completely free. Go read chapter one in the book. After you read Chapter One, if you see yourself in anything in Chapter One, read the whole book and watch things change in your organization.

David Pisarek: Change doesn’t happen overnight. Change also needs to be intentional. Take what we’re talking about today, head over, check out the book, and check out Chapter One. It’s free. I am very much looking forward to the book launch. I know I’ll be picking up a copy as soon as it’s available. You mentioned before we started, it’s going to be on Amazon. Head over to Amazon, everybody. Go pick up the book. Level yourselves up.

Even if you don’t implement anything from the book, you’re going to end up with this knowledge, with this insight that you can take forward into maybe other parts of your life. Maybe it’s not your professional life. Maybe you do some volunteering. Maybe it’s something in your family. You need to help strategize and organize there. At some point, you’ll be able to take this and subconsciously, you’ll be implementing it across everything.

Atiba, if anybody wants to get in touch with you, what do they need to do?

Atiba de Souza: Best thing to do is find me on LinkedIn. You can go to meetatiba.com. You can find me there. Love to chat with you. Love to hear your story on Delegation as well.

David Pisarek: Love it. Atiba, thank you again so much for joining in. It’s been great having you here on the Non-profit Digital Success Podcast. To everybody listening or watching this, if you want any of the links or resources, the link to the book, anything like that, just head over to our podcast show notes page by going to nonprofitdigitalsuccess.com. Click on this episode for all the details.

So until next time, keep on being successful!