Welcome to the Virtual Antics podcast, where we help entrepreneurs streamline their business to six figures and beyond. These short, sweet and info packed episodes will inspire, educate and leave you feeling motivated to take one more step forward in your business. So put down your never-ending to-do list, because in this podcast, we are interviewing the best of the best in the entrepreneurial world as they spill their secrets to success. This podcast is sponsored by Nandora, the all-in-one software for entrepreneurs to grow their business, with unlimited landing pages, automations, emails and text campaigns, and so much more. I'm your host, natalie Guzman. Now let's get into it. Hey, hey, hey. Welcome back to Virtual Antics podcast. I'm your host, natalie Guzman, and I'm so excited. I have my good friend, daphne Velson on the call. She is a certified professional coach, professional speaker and corporate trainer focusing on career advancement and business growth. She's being featured on Forbescom and Voyage Magazine as a result of our work. Welcome, daphne, how are you doing today?
Speaker 2I'm doing well. I'm so glad to be here on your show today.
Speaker 1I'm so excited you're here because you have so much knowledge and experience to give us, and I just cannot wait to hear about it. So tell us about what you do.
Speaker 2Sure. So I own a boutique consulting services firm that helps to reduce manager turnover and it helps to reduce any team culture issues that are often causing bottlenecks and confusion. We have coaching, training, program development that we offer to be able to do that for individuals and organizations.
Speaker 1That's awesome because that's such a big, vital part of business, right as your team, especially if you don't want to be that entrepreneur that is doing everything by yourself and no one wants to do that right. I mean, most of us got an entrepreneurship for freedom and if you're doing everything yourself, well, you're not going to get that freedom right. So that is awesome that you hope with that, because I know a lot of times we focus on, like lead management and client retention. We don't necessarily focus on the retention of our employees and I think it's such a crucial thing.
Speaker 1I got into this business with never being a manager ever, and then, within like my first 30 days, I had to hire two people and I was like, what do I do right? And luckily, one of them is still with me today, which is super, super cool. So what do you see? What type of mistakes or situations do you see entrepreneurs getting when it comes to hiring and keeping their employees?
Speaker 2Sure.
Speaker 2So I've had the opportunity to work with over 400 individual clients over these past almost 10 years, as well as the organizational clients, and I've seen a few things come up over and over again to your point.
Speaker 2One of them is not knowing how to address conflict effectively, whether it's on the manager side or it's on the employee side.
Speaker 2So some employees are wonderful as long as things are great, and when things are not as great even if that's, you know whether it's confusion in details, or maybe the manager says something that was inappropriate to that employee people don't often know how to respond in a way that creates a more unified culture and a more connected culture versus those issues that come up. So that's one not knowing how to address conflict. And I think the second is not be for the manager not being clear on expectations and details enough so that the employee has a great chance of success in a project. And I think both of those things I too come from having times when I was, you know, an employee or a manager, where I made mistakes in both areas, where I was like, well, I don't wanna address the conflict because I don't want conflict, or I realized I haven't given them as many details as I could, and that's why they're not being effective at implementing this project.
Speaker 1Yeah, kind of boiled down communication right, and I feel like a lot of us, I feel like in every aspect of our lives, whether it's our relationships or parenting or our business, a lot of it drums down to communication. And because everyone has different communication styles and it's kind of almost like different languages right, Like I'm trying to learn Spanish right now. I've been trying to learn for years because my husband speaks Spanish, and it's a whole another language.
Speaker 1It's something I have to pay attention to, I have to give it my focus, I have to learn the different ways. You can say all these different words and it's kind of the same, even when we're just talking in English. It's kind of the same thing, right? We all have different personalities, we have different ways we say things. This certain words means certain things to us, and so really, it takes a lot of attention, takes a lot of focus, and sometimes you just want to focus on your job. You don't really want to focus on the relationship portion, right? So what are some ways that, as business owners, we can help with the communication process with our employees and our managers?
Sure, and I want to say too, for the solopreneurs that might be listening, this is even if you're hiring a virtual assistant. These things still show up. So even if you are the sole personnel on your team but you have a virtual assistant or you have someone working on your website so contractors that are doing little pieces of work this also applies to them. So some things that they could do. I think one of the things is learning about personality styles on different kinds of assessments. I love disc and I do disc workshops as well. But learning personality styles so that you understand at the beginning, when you know their personality style at the beginning, how they feel best communicated to, I think that's the first thing. That's really, really important. I think we do that even without knowing like assessment results. You're kind of like, maybe in an interview, like oh, this person's more laid back, this person's more excited, or I noticed this person really likes details, but sometimes we're not observing those things. So, from the onset of you working together, identify personality styles and if you know the specific personality styles based on an assessment, then figure out how to work well together before you start working together. I think that's one. Two, I think it's setting expectations with the person about how you want the work to go. So I've had a few clients who were developing apps and the person who was developing the app they didn't have the best experience with. So one of the things that they learned was, before we start working together, I need to ask them questions based on what my expectation is for communication, for responsiveness, for detail. So if you already know how you work well, effectively, with someone, talk about that up front, and I know some of you all you're already working with the person. An annual review, a quarterly review, your one-on-one check-ins are a good time to say, hey, I know we've been working together for a while, but I just want us to kind of recalibrate it's a new year and just talk about how we can work together most effectively. So let's go ahead and both make a list right now of what are. Just take five minutes, make a list of what what makes a work environment great for you, or what makes working with someone else really effective when it comes to how they're approaching you and then let's talk about all this that we have right. So that's an example of how you could do it.
Speaker 2So figuring out personnel, not only the styles at the outset and then also figuring out expectations for how you want to work together at the outset or within your one-on-one check-ins, quarterly review, annual review, making sure you confirm that. And then I would say feedback that's the last thing that I'll share. Making sure that you both are able to provide feedback on a regular basis, and I have clients that say, well, where do I put the feedback? Like there's not the right place to put it. Well, you can actually incorporate it into your one-on-one check-in towards the end. Maybe.
Speaker 2What is one plus about my experiences in my role so far? Maybe from the employee's perspective, and one thing that I wish could be different? Or for the manager, what is one plus that I see with your work? And maybe one delta in area where I think, if you shift it, it could make a big difference. If you want to make it lighter plus in a shift, or a pro in a shift or something, you could change the words, but basically having the opportunity to share something, maybe really positive, and then something that could be a shift, and sharing that with the right tone, with the professional tone as well.
Speaker 1That's awesome and I 100% agree. And one of the things you mentioned earlier was a disc. Can you explain, for those that don't really know what that is, what it is?
Speaker 2Sure, it's an assessment that I really love. Apparently, I was doing a lot of movement just now. So, disc, it's four personality types there. We all are a mix of all four, but we tend to predominantly be in one or two areas. So some people would be a D-style, some people might be an I-D-style or an S-I-style. The D is for dominance, so that style is more. They might show up as more aggressive, not always. They like to drive toward action.
Speaker 2So you may see that that person at work is about the results. Sometimes there's so much about the results that they might not be worried as much about feelings on the team. So maybe they're not the person that might be doing a lot of talk about your weekend or your week and all that great stuff. But this person may be very interested in making sure that things are moving forward. The I is influence, so that style is usually the person who's talking, maybe quite a bit. They like relationship. They want everyone to be unified. They tend to be pretty social on a team. So if you think about, if you think about a team that you've worked on, you may even be able to identify who was what style. The S-style is steadiness, so this person likes for things to remain steady and consistent. They don't like conflict. They are more of the people who are there to support you.
Speaker 2I feel like a lot of my, the people who have worked with me on my team. A lot of my team members have been S-style S or S-I, so they're like whatever it is that I can do to help you, but not necessarily driving towards results. In fact, they don't like a whole bunch of change, they like for things to be stable. And then the C is conscientiousness. So these people I like to think like clarity, so they like to ask questions. You might feel like they push back on a team, but it's because they have a lot of questions about things. They want things to be very precise and done well.
Speaker 2So where a D person might who's dominant, may be pushing action forward hey, as soon as we can get it done, the C person may be like well, I don't understand why we're doing it this way and maybe we should do it this way instead. So conscientiousness, d, dominance. I influence S, steadiness, c, conscientiousness. Again, you could be a mixture of styles. I've been an I on an assessment that I took and I've been a S-I Another time, years later when I took the assessment. So there are a lot of assessments that you can take online as well, but you can have access to and then if you ever want to get like a more thorough assessment done with a debrief so about an hour and a half or an hour someone sharing with you how you can use the assessment individually as a team. You can hire someone who does disc workshops as well, like me or another provider.
Speaker 1So cool and I love these types of tests. I've done a couple of different assessments with our team and then I even have a refer another like entrepreneur that I love to collaborate with and they, whenever they get someone that they really liked but they can't hire them, they afford me the resume and they attach the disc assessment and I love that. That is so cool because I can see right away. I think that's like the coolest networking tool is when you're referring people and you give them the assessment. You're like here you go. I was super impressed.
Speaker 1So that was yeah, just so helpful because then I can see you know, are they going to fit in with my team? My team is very we work together where our personalities are not similar at all but we work like especially like for the type of stuff we do. You know, usually our eyes we do more towards like customer service or even discovery calls, or you know, the ones where they're really talking to my clients and then my D's are actually more towards like automations and website design things that they kind of do more on their own but they're trying to get like the best results ever where some of my like systems and processes people are more on the D side, which is really really interesting.
Speaker 1But yeah so there's some really, really cool aspects of it. I absolutely love it. I love how they kind of fit into these roles. So that's one things I think about. But I also have to think about, like, are they going to meld with my, meld, merge, merge with my team? Because that it's just having a really safe environment for my employees is really, really important to me especially.
Speaker 1We hire a lot of like stay at home moms and so, or you know, or women are taking care of you know that either have disabilities or taking care of someone with disabilities.
Speaker 1That's a lot of times where we end up hiring and so we really want to keep it a safe spot and not also, you know, some of the more dominant personalities that I realized, like they try to strive so much more for results, but sometimes it gets really overwhelming for, like, the S's right, the ones that want to keep it steady and so, like, try to keep that environment safe is such a juggle.
Speaker 1Sometimes what we, sometimes what we did. Actually, at first we had everyone meeting on the same day, on the same week you know, our same day of the week, at the same time and everyone meet and get together, and then I ended up breaking it into kind of departments, because I noticed that there was like so much kind of entanglement going on Like the personality some people were getting seen somewhere, some were giving opinions but other people didn't want those opinions, and so we divided it actually into sections of teams and I didn't realize my teams were like these teams of the same personality type, which is kind of cool. So that actually really really worked for us. What are some things that you tips or tricks that you recommend to your clients for making sure that team is working in like a well machine?
Wow, I love the story that you shared and how you discovered that having the team members meet within their departments Actually helped them to really have a great experience together. That's so great and I should also share with you, with the listeners and I think you already know this, but I know you already know this but in certain styles they don't always fit into whatever their main style is. So a D, even though they can be motivated by power and authority. If you look at the disk definition right Of what the D should be like, I've had some friendly, super friendly, awesome D's and people who have that person, have that person. I saw one of them. He told me he knows that he can come off more as more aggressive so he takes extra, extra care to be very friendly. So he is one of the most friendliest people that I know, but it's because he's very intentional around it. So to your point of making the environment safe, even if we know we lean towards one area like I might lean towards, I am being more social or being more enthusiastic. I know that sometimes I might need to bring my energy down to be able to relate and make someone feel safe who may not be at that high energy level and that's completely fine, it's no problem. It's just being flexible and adapting to different folks. So that would be going into how to have people who are managers be able to work well within these different styles.
Speaker 2I think one thing is being adaptable. So, being adaptable as a manager if you know you're someone who likes to ask a lot of questions and push back on things, but maybe your employee is an S and they are like we just change this cloud software, why are we changing right now, after I've already completely transitioned to this new software, then you might need to provide more explanation or you may need to provide a timeline for how you're going to transition. I think empathy is also important. So, putting yourself in someone else's shoes let's say it's an I person who's personality style I and you're engaging with someone who's personality style D. Maybe the personality style D would like shorter explanations for how the project is going and what you need and, as an I, you really want to share about. Also, how you feel about how the project is going and some additional thoughts that you have about the project and maybe some new ideas that you're sharing for down the road. But you know the D doesn't want to hear.
Speaker 2You can use your empathy skills to say you know what I want to make sure I'm communicating in a way that this person will receive it. So I need to prepare to share the top bullet points about the project in a way where my manager is going to be able to receive what I'm sharing and in a way that's going to help our relationship to connect more. As I'm talking, I just want to say this also applies to marriage and dating and friendships. So you communicating in a way that the other person is going to receive it, so adapting based on what you know about their style, but also empathy, just thinking about how is this other person feeling, about how I'm coming across and how can I make sure that I'm forging more connection instead of division, knowing how this person wants to be approached and how I feel I would like to approach them.
Speaker 1Yeah, one of the best questions I ever got when I was still in the workforce was it was an interview, a job interview, and they asked me what's the difference between sympathy and empathy? And I was like, oh my gosh, I never realized that there's such a. That allows me to confuse them, right. So sympathy you can, you know, feel bad for someone, but empathy is actually putting yourself in their shoes and I think sometimes we're so rushed in the day to day things where we just stay on the sympathy level we don't take that extra step further to reach empathy. So, I think, taking everything you said and just remind, reminding yourself to really feel what they're feeling, think about how they react actually, episode before yours whole different.
Speaker 1Another topic was about marketing and about consumer behavior, and we were we can look at data and data can stay. You know, something is so long and so you might want to make it shorter. But maybe we were talking like about podcast episode, right, I noticed that my podcast episodes that were 45 minutes we're going down to 20 minutes and or my listeners were fall off after 20 minutes, he said. I said, oh, so I made them 20 minutes long. Well, he said, well, think about their behavior, Think about what they're going through. Well, maybe they lost interest at that 20 minutes and that's why they're not listening. We really have to take it further and really dive deep into why people are reacting certain ways to really understand and I think that's something that big corporate companies I love that they can hire you or even the sole entrepreneur, because a lot of companies have not worked like that in the past. They have not had empathy, where they're, the people that are literally taking care of their business and their baby and their money.
Speaker 1And so I think it's really important that we provide, focus our energy onto our employees and really create that safe haven, because they're the ones that are really making our business run on a day-to-day basis. So I'd love to hear where we can find you and learn more about your services, because I definitely know we all need someone like you in our corner.
Speaker 2Joy, thank you so much and I love what you said about sympathy and empathy and the importance of empathy. It's so beautiful. So you can find me on Instagram at Daphne Valsen. It's my handle. You can go to my website. It's DaphneValsencom as well. Those are probably some of the two best places, or LinkedIn. You can find me there as well under my name, daphne Valsen.
Speaker 1Awesome. I'll make sure I put that in the show notes as well. Thank you so much for coming on, daphne. It was a pleasure having you and we'll talk to you guys next time on the Virtual Antics Podcast.