Gaelene Adams Love
Team Fusion International Ltd – Part 1
People and Culture – Leadership Coaching
Join us as we delve into the intricate world of business relationships. with Gaelene Adams Love. Discover the secrets to building a high-performing team, whether it’s working with your partner or recruiting the right individuals who contribute to your company’s natural flow. With fascinating insights into boundary-setting, finding the perfect match, and identifying when it’s time for a change, this episode will leave you inspired and equipped to take your business to new heights. Tune in as we uncover the keys to unlocking exceptional business success.
Offer: Take the free What’s Your Genius? quiz
Business Type: People and Culture – Leadership Coaching | Personality Profiling Specialist | DIY Recruitment Support | High Performance Team Culture
SUMMARY
In this episode of Biz Bites, the guest, Gaelene, discusses her work with Team Fusion, who specialize in leadership development and creating high-performance team cultures using ‘Contribution Compass’, a profiling tool. They focus not only on getting the right people in businesses but also ensuring they work productively by being in the right roles, which drives overall productivity and profitability. Gaelene also shares insights on her personal experiences on navigating work-life dynamics, especially within family-run businesses and relationships. The episode also underscores the significant role of intuition and self-awareness in maintaining steady workflow environments.
00:00 Introduction to Biz Bites
00:47 Understanding Team Fusion and its Role in Leadership Development
02:42 The Dynamics of Couples in Business
04:34 The Importance of Boundaries in Business Relationships
06:00 The Impact of Business on Personal Relationships
06:14 The Challenges and Rewards of Family Involvement in Business
07:18 The Art of Recruiting the Right People
08:27 Understanding Employee Performance and Flow
13:39 The Role of Profiling in Recruitment and Team Building
21:57 The Dynamics of Opposites in Business Relationships
23:25 Conclusion and Preview of the Next Episode
TRANSCRIPT
Anthony Perl: Welcome to Biz Bites brought to you by CommTogether, helping businesses like yours build their brand through telling amazing stories to engage and grow audiences on multiple platforms. Well, hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites. And today we are going to talk all about people, such an important part of all of our businesses and really getting the right support, the right people, uh, working in the right way for you, uh, critical parts of any business.
So it’s the reason why we have Gaelene on the program today. So welcome, first of all, to Biz Bites.
Gaelene Adams Love: Thanks so much. I’m really happy to be here and talking with everyone today.
Anthony Perl: Well, firstly, why don’t you give us a little bit of an introduction as to what you and Team Fusion do? Sure.
Gaelene Adams Love: So Team Fusion are people experts and our underlying mantra is being better together.
So we work in the area of Leadership development, and we often work with a lot of couples in business, especially Australia and New Zealand have a lot of family based businesses. So we work with couples to help them be better together, both in the business and also in their relationship. Because obviously, you can’t really separate the two when you’re in a relationship and working together.
And then we also work with high performing teen culture and helping to raise that the standard within the business culture. We also work as personality profiling experts, and one of the ways that we help to create high performing team culture is by helping those smaller, smaller, medium sized businesses to recruit the right people in at the right time.
And so that’s, that is a really foundational piece and. It’s a premise that better to take your time and find the right person than to hire the wrong person and then regret having that person in your team because the wrong person will drag everybody backwards. Um, and then that’s no good for anyone, especially the person that you’ve just brought into the team.
So yeah, so leadership development, um, Personality profiling. We’ve got a service called DIY recruitment support for those businesses that don’t have the budget to recruit through an agency. Uh, and we just help them to put some structure in place and hold them true to who the right person is for them.
And then that helps to lift the overall team culture and of course the business productivity and profitability and helps everybody be on purpose in terms of the business and the goals.
Anthony Perl: Yeah, it’s such a critical area of the business to get the right people and I want to go to the two extremes that you’ve got here because, you know, you started originally talking about the idea of with couples in the business and I find that fascinating.
Um, you know, we’ve talked about it once before in a previous episode of Biz Bites because we had someone whose business. Um, uh, is in the dental industry and she had started off working alongside of her husband. Uh, they’ve now created sort of separate businesses and so that doesn’t happen as much anymore.
But I, I’m very aware of a number of couples, uh, that I know of that work in the business and the dynamic is really interesting. Uh, and, and one in particular, I know That, um, they actually hold a board meeting, which is just the two of them, um, going out, I think, I think it’s once a month, but they go into that as if they would prepare for a formal board meeting.
So they’re not husband and wife in that meeting, and they’re going in and preparing as they would do for having a full board, which I find really interesting. I can’t get my wife to work for my business, by the way. Tried for a number of years because I know she’d be great at helping out, but, uh, um, yes, resisting to the, to the last moment, I think, but it’s, it is a really interesting area and it’s a growing one, isn’t it?
And particularly, I think where that makes it even more interesting is, is working from home because. It’s a different dynamic when you go, when you go into a physical office and my parents work together. My dad owned a pharmacy, so they were going to a physical location and doing that. But when you, when you’re working from home, as many do these days, you don’t have, it’s very hard to get that differentiation between the relationship.
Gaelene Adams Love: Without doubt, and it all comes down to boundaries. So whether you are working with your spouse or your relationship partner or not, whether you’re a solo entrepreneur, and maybe with a team, but you are in a relationship, or whether you’re totally applying solo, no relationship, no team, all of these things come down to having the right boundaries in place and knowing when to bring which piece of your personality or which role that you’re fulfilling.
Into the equation at that time, but yeah, working from home, uh, I do it myself. My partner goes out to work and I’ve got a dedicated home office and it has an impact on our relationship. Often I need to work in the evening because of time zone differences. And that, you know, that’s effectively stealing time from our relationship time.
So there is definitely boundaries that have to be set in place. And I will say this too. I used to be married to another man. And we worked together in business and we worked really well together until we didn’t, we, we decided we would go, uh, into separate businesses and with his, um, his schedule and my schedule, we actually didn’t see each other anymore.
So we went from almost 24 seven together to hardly seeing each other and for us, the wheels fell off. So, you know, we did the best we could. So I bring that knowledge now into the work that I do. From a relationship dynamics perspective, whether you’re working with your partner or spouse or not, your business has an impact on your relationship and it has to be factored into the equation.
Anthony Perl: Absolutely. And, uh, here’s another loop, uh, into all of that, which I know is not uncommon. So my daughter is actually working in. In come together part time as well. And that’s a really interesting dynamic because we have a great relationship where we tease each other relentlessly when we’re not, um, when we’re not in a business relationship, but we both came to the understanding when she started working for me that in business hours, and when she’s doing work for me, because she isn’t full time that she understands that it’s.
Yeah. It’s a different relationship, but the minute she knows that I finished work for the day, well, that just goes out the window very quickly. It’s game on again. It’s game on again. Yes, yes. Fun little messages left on my whiteboard, which is part of the reason why everybody I know people are listening to this and not watching it.
But, uh, why I have a virtual background most of the time, because my whiteboard often, um, ends up with little notes that I haven’t realized, and you don’t want to have them in front of clients and people. So, but, uh, but anyway, let’s, uh, just get it, just getting back to it, back into it and, and, and try to understand a little bit more than on the other side of things in terms of recruiting, particularly, and recruiting the right people.
And, and I think that Extends into the fact that, um, and perhaps this is the starting point for this question. There’s a point where you might realize that people are no longer the right people to work for you, that the business has moved. And, um, and I’ve certainly experienced that in the past where I’ve had team members that have been with me for a while and the business has progressively moved.
You come to a realization that they have not. So what’s your question? Well, question is, is how do you manage that process? How do you, how do you come to the realization that, um, that it’s there? I mean, it just, there was one point where I just realized it, but how do you keep on top of that kind of, uh, dynamic within your own business?
Because you have to monitor the people on an ongoing basis.
Gaelene Adams Love: So human beings are in motion, in motion. And so we all have our own internal barometer of what feels good and what doesn’t. And so when we’re talking high performance teams, one of the things that we talk about is being in flow. And we use a profiling tool called Contribution Compass.
It’s about recognizing that we all have a natural flow and we have. Uh, what we call being out of flow. So every person on your team needs to be contributing to everyone else being more and more influx and when, you know, if you think about, uh, if you were standing in a river and you could, you can feel the flow, the current of the water, you know, there’s some resistance against your legs if you’re standing in.
The river. If you’re in a boat or a kayak on the river and you’re going with the current, there is speed and it takes very little effort. However, if you turn around and you’re trying to paddle your boat upstream, you feel the resistance. It’s extremely hard work and it’s exhausting. So if you’re finding yourself in that situation where there’s someone in your team that is frustrating you a lot, making you feel very angry, isn’t delivering what you’re expecting them to deliver.
Is just, uh, maybe making a lot of mistakes or is slowing other people down, then that person, you have to ask the question, is this person genuinely in flow? And usually the answer is no. So you’ve got to identify it. We all know what feels good and we all have our intuition. And we will often. hear the sound of the intuition and squish it down.
And then more and more things start to happen until eventually we just go, Oh, I can’t take this anymore. So that’s not how to do it. We want to listen to our intuition in the first place. And when we get those early warning signs, we need to start addressing them really quickly because as a leader, You control the culture in your business.
So if there’s somebody that’s out of flow, first and foremost, you have to look at yourself and say, what have I done to create this? Have I not provided enough structure? Is their role not clear enough to them? Did they, do they not have the right skills and experience for this task? Have I moved them from a position where they really were in flow and now they’re out of flow?
And we can often do that when we take a high performer and elevate them into a manager type role. So I would say listen to your intuition and then look at yourself first. To see, have you done something here that is getting this result? And then look at the person, their skills, their, um, their experience and their training, and then start having some conversations around, tell me why this is happening.
I’d like to understand. So there’s a difference from going in there full, you know, full noise. With all your, all your emotions heightened or just going in and blaming, you’re not doing this, you’re not doing that. You’ve got to come in from an inquiry perspective first, and then with that new knowledge, then make some decisions about what do we do from here.
And I believe No, people know fundamentally when they’re not doing a good job. And we start to see it in, um, attendance statistics, the speed of delivery, their engagement levels. So, you know, it is, it, it, it’s not all about the person you’ve hired. You have to look a bit more holistically than that. And I will just add one other thing.
It’s very, very easy to turn a highly engaged person off. over a certain, like even over a couple of weeks, and I see this happen again and again, where people are scratching their heads going, I don’t know what happened. They were really engaged and now they’re not. And you have to rewind the tape and look at Did you shut them down in some way?
Did they bring a great idea and you fought them off? Because it’s the little things like that, that can turn someone from highly engaged into somebody who just doesn’t care. And it only takes a few exam, you know, few situations to get them from highly engaged to, I don’t give a toss here.
Anthony Perl: Listeners of Biz Bites will know that we recently featured an interview with Andrew Uglow and I’ve gone on to publish a podcast series with Andrew that will be coming out in 2024.
Stay tuned everyone for listening to that because he really talks about this idea of mechanics and how you need to pay attention to that and it’s not always about money and it’s about a whole lot of Different things. And I think it’s an important element here. What I wanted to talk to you about was the profiling part.
Um, and, and because on two levels, there’s, there’s a number of these tools that are out there. And so trying to understand what your tool. That you use does and, and why it might be different or better, but also then in understanding, is that something that you do once does the profile of someone change, you know, in this scenario that we were just talking about where the business may have moved and the person may have moved.
Is it a case of you should be refreshing some of these?
Gaelene Adams Love: You fundamentally are who you are. As a child, there will be certain things that you’re interested in, you’ll have certain character traits, and they usually stick with you for your entire life. So that little, little child that loves to, um, do little skits and plays at home, they’ll often then progress into wanting to be on stage in some way.
It could be presenting, it could be in theatrics. It could be that they are the star of the show in their own, um, chiropractic clinic. So it doesn’t always necessarily have to be a, you know, a full on stage. So Let’s come back to that thing around, are you in flow or out of flow? Because you’re, uh, we use contribution compass profiling.
Uh, there’s four natural energies and then eight individual profiles. And yes, you’re right. There are a lot of tools out there that are very similar. What I like about Contribution Compass is that it’s more aligned to where we’re headed in terms of what the younger generations actually want. So, what I’m talking about is Millennials are really motivated by purpose and they want to know that what they’re doing is making a difference to someone else.
So there’s a, that’s a very big driver for them. They want to know that they can contribute value to their employer and the team that they’re with. And Contribution Compass allows you to very clearly see what’s the value that this person brings, what’s the contribution that they’re making, and who do they need around them to maximize that contribution.
So it’s a powerful tool. Now I will say this, um, I have used. Other profiling tools. I fell in love with profiling in my very early twenties and it’s become a lifelong passion. And I I’ve been, I don’t even know how many profiling tools I’ve used, but I have this real excitement for profiling because it helps people through creating more self awareness and the more aware you are of yourself, then the better you can make a contribution to others.
So that’s why I use contribution compass. It’s aligned to purpose. And it’s also a very powerful team building, um, tool as well as a self awareness tool. And within the Contribution Compass suite, we have other tools that link in with that. So we were talking about recruitment before. We can actually profile the role.
That you’re looking to fill and if you’ve got existing team members, we can profile the role and then profile the person and see if they are a match. See if they’re a fit energy wise and what, um, what that role needs and for that person to be in flow. So we want to match. The person and their individual flow with the role flow, and sometimes it’s not a perfect match, but then you, there’s ways to adapt that so that that person can still deliver massive value to the company and feel valued and in flow while they’re doing it.
Anthony Perl: I love this and it’s certainly something that’s, um, uh, appropriate in timing and whilst, uh, when this podcast is being published and, and aired, hopefully I will have finished a recruitment process for someone, but as we speak right now, I’m in the middle of it and it’s a very interesting situation because the candidates that have been put forward, Without having done the profile, I am very aware of my profile through it, through a different tool.
And, uh, I don’t think you’d be surprised to anyone to, to, to know that I’m in that creative category. Um, and that. I’m very, I’m very aware that what I don’t want is someone that’s the same as me, that you need someone to, that in a particular role, that’s going to work alongside of you actually needs to have almost the opposite, uh, in, in the way they flow.
And so it’s very interesting in going through the candidates, uh, that have been put forward to me. And whilst I’m not doing an official profiling, I’m very aware of that. And I’m looking at them and going. Yeah, I don’t think this is the right kind of person, regardless of how good they might be at their job, I don’t think they’re right.
And I think it’s a hard thing to be conscious of, um, and doing that.
Gaelene Adams Love: Because it’s a natural thing that we, you know, birds of a feather flock together. So we want someone who’s like us because they’re easier to get on with. But that doesn’t mean that’s actually who you need. And when we profile with Contribution Compass.
We actually can say to you, all right, well, if you’re at this profile, then the two people you need to cover all the bases in your business, the minimum two, uh, this profile and this profile, because they come to balance where you are weak and they will push you further into flow because they’re taking away the things that would pull you out of flow.
So yeah, absolutely. And you know, we’ve got this amazing tool. Um, it’s very easy to use and it. It just makes it so, so simple to say, now I understand exactly who I’m looking for and why I’m looking for that person because it creates alignment and we also have a tool that allows us to see whether adding that person will take your entire team.
Further into flow or pull your team out of flow. So we’ve got a flowometer that we can measure the flow level of a team, which is very fun to do. And then to share those results with the team. So yeah, happy to do that, that process with you while you’re in the middle of this recruitment process. Mostly we would do it at the beginning, but there’s no reason why we can’t.
Um, into either. And we’ve done that on multiple occasions with other clients. We’ve just said, okay, let’s do this. Let’s see what the result is. And then it gives you that much more information and not just about who’s the right person, but how to manage them, how to reward them, how to motivate them. What, what do they need in terms of your onboarding process so that you, are, you, you, because you know you are a, you are a, um, creative energy.
So visual and, um, you know, don’t give me all the bullet point details. Just kind of give me the high level and I can take it from there. But if you are training your person that you really need in that way, they will feel bereft. of knowledge, because they’re not getting what they need to fully understand how to do the job and serve you really well.
And
Anthony Perl: whilst, uh, well, so this wasn’t, uh, this isn’t a podcast about me, but what’s really interesting, I, what I’m very conscious of that. And, uh, fortunately. My, uh, the last person in that role continued something that had started with the very first person that had, that, uh, had filled that role. And there is a very extensive set of documents that details everything that they have to do, uh, that’s been written by them.
So the first. Three or four days on the job is, uh, a little bit of an introduction from me for about half an hour and then say, right, go and work through all of the documents and then let’s talk once you’ve been through all of that, because there’s a heck of a lot of detail to go through and, and it is, but it is something I see, you know, and I’m sure you see it all the time in business in terms of hiring the wrong person.
And I, I love that dynamic between the, he’s talking about being the opposite of you, because when you look at relationships, I always find this fast. It’s fascinating as well that when you look at relationships of, you know, husband, wife or partners, um, these days, probably more correctly saying is that, um, you see these two types of couples, right?
They, there are either, they are very similar or they’re completely the opposite of one another and you work and you say, how does that work? But it does, doesn’t it? I think my wife and I are probably a lot more similar, but I’ve seen the, I know plenty of couples where it is completely the other end.
Gaelene Adams Love: And, you know, we say opposites attract, but also birds of a feather.
And look, at the end of the day, no one knows what really happens inside any relationship, except the two people who are in the relationship. And even then there’s a dynamic around who I think you are, and who you think you are, and then who you really are, and then vice versa on the other side. And I find that fascinating, that we’ve all got filters.
And there’s a saying that Women, women marry men and expect them to change and they don’t and men marry women and expect them not to change and they do.
Anthony Perl: Yes, I think that’s, that’s roughly true. Although I’ve also heard a variation of that where men marry women and have. Don’t think about anything at all.
So that just, um, and that’s part of the process as well. I hope you’ve been enjoying the conversation so far. We look forward to bringing you part two in the next episode of Biz Bites. Biz Bites is brought to you by CommTogether. For all your marketing needs so you can build your brand, engage audiences on multiple platforms, go to commtogether.com.au, follow the links to book an appointment for a free consultation.