How to Build Trust With a Remote Team: 6 Practical Steps

In today’s episode, you’re going to discover how you can learn to trust that your remote team is actually working and not taking advantage of the pay that you’re giving them. Welcome to the Eric Dingler Leadership Podcast. I have over 25 years of experience leading in-person teams, and in the last five years, I transitioned and have been leading a completely 100% remote team. My goal with this podcast is to help you become the leader that the dream remote team you want to lead wants to follow.

So today’s episode is part of a short series that I’m doing on the five most common questions that leaders ask when they’re asking questions about leading and managing remote teams. These are people that are used to leading in-person teams, or maybe they’re just brand new to leadership, and they’ve decided that they’re going to either build a remote team, or they’ve inherited the remote team that they’re trying to lead. Now don’t worry, each episode stands on its own. So if this is the first one you’re listening to, you’re still in the right place. You’re going to get something out of this.

But real quickly, the episodes in this series are going to be this episode, episode 45, which is how do I build trust with a remote team. And then in episode 46, we’re going to do how do I create a strong remote team culture, followed by how do I measure performance of a remote team? That’s tricky. You’re not there in the office with them. You’re not all gathering up. You’re not having your daily standups. How do you measure performance? How do you onboard new remote team members effectively, especially if you hire people on your team that are, you know, 12 or 24, or roughly that equivalency of a time difference for you? You don’t want to be up at 9 p.m. training someone at their 9 a.m., or asking someone to stay up at 9 p.m. to train immature 9 a.m. So how do you create an onboarding for remote teams, and how do you actually conduct a one on one? Specifically, this question came in, or some form of it, which is: what do I actually say and ask in a weekly remote team member’s one on one. So those are going to be episodes 45 to 49.

And so let’s get into episode 45 here, where specifically, how do I build trust with the remote team? Well, for today I’ve got three parts to the podcast. Just real quick, kind of give you a roadmap of where we’re headed. Part one is going to be the content. I’m going to answer that question. In fact, I have six things specifically that I want to share, and number six has three parts to it. So I guess that’s nine things that I want to share with you on how do you build trust in a team, in a remote team, so that they’re working, that things are getting done. What does that look like?

Then I’m going to transition and give you this week’s Leadership Axiom of the Week. I used to call this the weekly leadership tip, but that’s before I transitioned this to a leadership podcast. So the whole thing is about leadership now. It used to be about running a remote business. We were traveling full time, and we still are, but we were traveling full time, and I was helping people figure out how they put together a team, a business that lets them travel remote. And the thing that kept coming up over and over, questions about it, and really what I’m passionate about is leadership. And so several times in the first 40 some odd episodes, I would say like, oh, you know, I wanted to start a leadership podcast, but I thought, no, there’s already so many out there. And finally I got tired of saying it. And so I transitioned this just recently to a leadership podcast. So this used to be the Digital Nomad Entrepreneur. That’s me, digital nomad entrepreneur. But recently it became the Eric Dingler Leadership Podcast.

But I still want to, for a season anyways, still end every episode with a leadership axiom. That’s a little sane, a little nugget, a little memorable statement that, if you can take it and make it a part of your DNA, what’s memorable was portable. And so I’m going to share a leadership axiom with you. And then for those of you that discovered the podcast, I started listening because you liked the freedom of the digital nomad lifestyle of full time travel, and enjoy the travel updates. I’m going to wrap things up with a quick travel update.

So into the content. How do you build trust in a remote team? All right, how can you get to the point where you can trust that your team is taking action, is taking the right action, and that you aren’t stressed about the work that’s getting done? You’re not worried about it. So out of this, like I said, I’ve got six things.

Number one: The first thing you have to do is hire slow. You can’t rush into hiring. You have to hire the right people for the right reasons and have them doing the right things for you. Too many times I see people rush right into hiring the first person they talk to, somebody that reaches out to them through a cold email, promising to be able to help them with something. Hiring too fast is always a leader’s, a new leader’s especially, biggest Achilles heel when hiring. You see, we want to, as leaders, we’ve got this picture of something that we’re trying to create. We’re excited about the future, and we want everybody to be a part of it with us, because we think what we’re putting together is amazing. And so we have to be careful that when we hire, we realize we’re not just opening the doors wide and bringing anybody in that says they want to go along with us. We’ve got to bring the right people, very specifically as it relates to being on the team.

So we want to make sure that we hire slow, have a process. We do multiple interviews. More than one person does an interview. I’ve always done that, even when I was a solopreneur. Other people helped with the interviews. I never made a decision in an interview to offer a job. I always baked in time, a pressure relief valve. I would hire people to do a test project. And even when I used to run a summer camp, I used to even do this when I hired for the camp for certain roles. You know, when somebody would come in to interview for a cook’s position, we would have the ingredients and a recipe right there, and they had to follow the recipe and cook something. And it was always the exact same thing, the exact same recipe, the exact same ingredients, and I knew exactly what the outcome should be, and I wanted that exact outcome. And so I would test people. I do the same thing in the remote world. I hire slow.

Number two: You have to train, retrain, and then repeat train. I don’t know if repeat train is a thing, but we’re going with it. So you got to train, retrain, and repeat train your core values. You see, your company needs to have a very clear vision, mission, and core values. In fact, I dare you, I dare you to message me with an example of a successful company out there that doesn’t have a clear vision, mission, and core values. And here’s what I mean by successful: a business that has that is existing, healthy in a healthy way. They are existing after the founder has stepped away. It can’t be, well, they’ve been going for six months, nine months, 18 months, even two years. If the founder is at the reins, it doesn’t count. But if you can find me a company that is successfully healthy, they’ve got predictable revenue, predictable systems in place, like it is a real business and the founder is not at the head, I’m telling you right now, you cannot find a business like that that doesn’t have a clear vision, mission, and core values.

And so what you have to do as a leader is you have to develop this vision, mission, and core values for your team, and you have to repeat those core values, and you have to train them over and over and over, week in and week out. You’re constantly going to be training on your core values. Training can look lots of different ways: highlighting a team member that is exhibiting a core value, that’s training. Putting together a video, a quick five minute training video, that’s training. Putting together a blog post and sending it out and asking your team to read it and comment, have an internal blog just for your team. Even if you’ve only got two people on your team, have an internal blog that’s going to be content that’s going to build over time. And as your company grows and your team grows, you’re going to have this backlog of thought leadership and ideas, and now with AI, you’re going to be able to have AI go through that and pull together resources and repurpose it. So start putting training material out now to your team, in video or in blog.

You can’t overstate it enough. The moment you think you’ve said something too many times in leadership, all right, especially when it comes to vision, mission, core values, is the point in time where you’ve almost started saying it enough. You can’t repeat this stuff enough, because vision leaks. This stuff leaks away. People drift into what they value and to their habits. So you have to repeat your core values. You see, you need to have a vision statement that clearly states, this is where we’re going. A vision is going to tell your team, you’re either going to climb that mountain or cross that sea. This is where we’re going. And then your mission is the vehicle you’re going to take to get there. We’re going to go to the top of that mountain with a hot air balloon. We’re going to cross this sea with a submarine. So the mission is the vehicle.

And then your core values, the core values create what life is like inside the mission. What’s it feel like? How do you make decisions? How do people make decisions when you’re not there? They look at the core values. How do people behave if you’re not in the vehicle at that moment? They look at the core values. Well, those core values have to become their values. It has to become part of their DNA. They have to ooze your core values, and the only way you can do that is not by saying it once, not by training it once, but you got to say your core values over and over and over and over, and eventually you’re going to start to hear them repeated back to you by your team. You’re going to see them in practice. You’re going to be rewarding those, because your values have to become an integral part of how your team behaves and makes decisions.

So number one, hire slow. Two, train, retrain, and repeat train your core values.

Number three: Reward what you want repeated. The moment you see, especially in new hires, but everybody, really be intentional with this. With new hires, for the first couple of months, the moment you see the slightest thing that they’ve done specific to a core value, don’t just willy nilly be like, oh, Joe, you did a really good job this week, you showed up every day and did the bare minimum. Don’t waste this. You’re not looking for somebody to do a good job to say, hey, good job. You’re looking for somebody to display a value, and then you say, hey, I saw you do that, I appreciate that. You know, one of our core values for our company: our vision, if you will, is we see a future where successful businesses are giving to the nonprofits and organizations that they care about, to eliminate human suffering in their community. That’s the vision, that’s what we’re trying to create. Successful businesses in communities that have additional resources that they can give of those resources to eliminate human suffering.

The mission we do that with is we help businesses with their marketing. We provide digital marketing services and accessible content, because we want to create content that’s accessible to people with disabilities for our clients. We want to teach our clients to create because we want them reaching more clients, reaching all the potential clients and customers they can, giving them equal access to what they’re putting out there. So that’s the mission right now, is helping businesses with their marketing. We could provide coaching, that would be a different vehicle, that’s not what we do. We provide marketing services, marketing strategies, and systems with accessible content, to help local businesses attract more customers and increase their customer activity. That’s what we do. Why do we do it? So that they have resources to give away to their community.

And our core values. How do we do that? Well, the first thing we do is we want to focus on our clients’ ultimate success. So how do we focus on our clients’ ultimate success? We provide first class experiences. So now I can have these conversations with my team. What’s a first class experience look like? Have you ever traveled first class? Imagine what it would look like to be in first class. Hey, what would it look like if this was a first class experience? And I can have those conversations, I can ask those questions. And the first time I see somebody do something that’s first class, I’m like, hey, that was first class, you created a first class experience right there, that was it right there. I’m rewarding what I want repeated. I don’t want to reward a good job, I’m not looking for people to do a good job, I’m looking for people to execute with excellence on our core values: first class experience, obsessing about our clients’ goals, communicating on a cadence, our clients understanding their point of view, and systematizing for success. Man, when somebody creates an SOP, ooh boy, that excites me. When somebody uses an SOP, ooh boy, that’s good stuff, because they’re systematizing for success. And so reward what you want repeated, specifically your core values.

Number four: Delegate the win, always, even if you’re delegating a task. Let’s say you have somebody, you bring them on your team, and they’re going to help you with answering your emails. All right, so you bring in a VA, you’ve decided you’re going to have a VA come in and help you with your emails. Well, if you start out by saying, okay, Mr. or Mrs. VA, here’s what we want to do, you’re going to answer my emails, you’re going to log in three times a day, you’re going to classify emails this way, here are folders you’re going to put things in, here’s the system, here’s some templates for replies, here’s what you’re going to do and here’s how you’re going to do it. If you do that, you are going to struggle trusting your team. You’re going to feel the need to step in, because you’re going to look in to see, are they doing exactly what I said? And the moment they try something different because they have an idea, you’re going to clamp down on it, because you say, well, that’s not the system, that’s not the system. And they are going to want to give up on you and leave, because you’re going to show them you don’t trust them.

How do you know? The key to building a team that you trust is you trust them. That’s the key. Well, how do you trust them? You hire the right people, you hire based on character first. So you got to hire slow, hire the right people, hire for character, train, retrain, repeat train your core values, reward what you want to get repeated, and then delegate the win. So when you’re onboarding this VA, you say, hey listen, Mr. and Mrs. VA, here’s what I’m going to give you. I’m going to give you the heartbeat of our client communications, this is what keeps us alive. It’s making sure that emails are handled in a timely fashion. Here’s what I’m delegating you: the every day, every email, answered. That’s what it looks like. I’m delegating inbox zero. Every email, in a first class way, is responded to. It’s either been delegated in a way that you’re going to make sure gets executed on, it’s been just deleted because it was spam, it’s been deferred to a meeting, but you’ve told the client, hey, Mr. or Mrs. Client, we got your email, we’re going to talk about this Thursday at a meeting, we’ll follow up, or you’re just going to answer. So this is what a win looks like.

Here’s the key thing: if you learn to delegate this way, you can bring somebody on and say, hey, here’s what the win looks like, here’s a clear picture, this is what it’s going to look like, here’s how these people are going to feel, here’s how you’re going to feel, here’s how I’m going to feel. This is the definition of a win. How can we get there? When you get to the point where you can clearly define the win in a way that makes it a vivid picture in somebody’s head, and it elicits feelings and emotions, now you can step back and go, what do you think we should do? How can we do this? And you can build a system that is exciting, that’s innovative, and better yet, you can have them do it.

This is one of the things I teach in my 90-Day Team Engine Accelerator, where I help people in 90 days learn how to recruit, hire, onboard, and train a remote team. And in the accelerator, we spend time talking about delegation, because a lot of people get this wrong, and it takes a little bit of practice to delegate a win. I’ve got a formula that I teach within that, and I just shared it without breaking down the formula, I just shared what it is with you, how to delegate the win. I’m not keeping any secrets from you.

So let’s recap the four. Number one, hire slow. Number two, train, retrain, repeat train your core values. Number three, reward what you want repeated, specifically core values. And four, delegate the win, always, even if it’s a task.

Now I’m going to get into number five and number six here. But before I do, real quick, I have created a new 11 day email series, and it’s the 11 Day Remote Team Leadership Reset. This is for you if you’ve been leading an in-person team and you want to pivot to leading remote, or if you’ve never led a remote team and never been led within a remote team. A lot of people don’t know how to lead a remote team because they’ve never been on a remote team, they’ve only been led at an in-person brick and mortar place, so they try to take those lessons and implement them in remote, and that is disastrous. And so I have these 11 journal prompts that you can work through to help you unpack some mindsets that aren’t going to serve you well in leading a remote team. It’s 11 days, 11 emails, 11 journal prompts, to help you set and center yourself around healthy remote team leadership mindsets and habits.

So to get it, just go to Eric Dingler dot com, and it’s a link tree page. And if you scroll down you’ll see the 11 Day Reset listed there. Don’t get distracted by everything else on the page, scroll down to 11 Day Remote Team Leadership Reset and click on that, fill in the form, and you’ll get email one. Now if you’re sitting there going, I can’t go 11 days, that’s ridiculous, well, just for you, friend, at the end of each email is a fast forward button. As soon as you’re done reading it, you can click a link to get the next email. So you get all 11 of them right now, or you can use it as it’s intended to be used, and let it take you on a journey of self discovery and exploration to reset your leadership to be effective in remote teams. So again, Eric Dingler dot com.

Number five: Always have a deadline and a process to extend it when needed. If you only delegate what and you only delegate how, and even if you delegate why, but you fail to delegate when, you’re going to have trouble trusting your team, because you’re going to tell someone, hey, I need you to do this, and they’re going to think they’ve got two weeks, and you’re expecting it done in three days.

Now the other thing is, when you lead remote teams, you have to be specific to this. You can’t say I need this at the end of Monday. Well, the end of who’s Monday? I’ve got team members that are eight hours difference than I am, going either direction. So I can’t even say I need it done by Friday, because my Friday could be their Thursday or Saturday. So when you’re working with a remote team, you need to have an official company time. You can do Greenwich Mean Time, you set the company to, hey, we’re on Greenwich Mean Time, or for us, because the vast majority of our clients are on the East Coast of the United States, we run on East Coast USA time. That’s the official time. So as a team, when we communicate, everybody knows if something is due by Friday, it’s Friday, 5 p.m. East Coast time.

Now because of that, we’ve trained our staff to never just give a middle of the week time, or end of Wednesday. We are always very specific in our communication. Hey, I need this done by Thursday, 3 p.m. eastern. Boom, we’re very, very clear. If we’re in a meeting and I’m like, when do you think you can have that done, they’re not going to say, well, probably middle of next week, they’re going to go, I think I can have it done next Wednesday by 9 a.m., or next Wednesday at one, or next Wednesday at five. There’s a big difference between next Wednesday and 9 a.m. or 5 p.m. I may be thinking, I’m going to wake up Wednesday morning and boom, I’m going to have the item in my inbox, and they’re thinking they’re going to wake up Wednesday morning and finish it and send it to me. So you’ve got to be really, really clear on this, way more specific than if you were all in an office. So you have to give a very specific deadline, and a process for when it’s extended.

And I’m telling you right now, the process, if you tell somebody, hey, I need that done Friday by 5 p.m., the process to extend it doesn’t start Friday at 3 p.m. That’s not when it starts. We have a 24 hour policy: if you need to extend it, the extension request needs to come in one full business day, or 24 hours, prior to the deadline. Outside of that, I expect it to be done, outside of an emergency, I expect it to be done. Grace ends 24 hours before the deadline. I know that sounds harsh, but that’s just the way it is. Now, you know, somebody’s family member gets sick or injured, I mean, we’re not jerks about things, but I don’t give a 24 hour grace period after a deadline. No, no, no, no. Grace ends 24 hours before the deadline. If I don’t hear from you at that point that, hey, I’m going to need an extension, then it better get done, because I’m telling you right now, if it’s not, we’ve got a trust issue, we’ve got a character issue. You gave your word and you failed to deliver on your word. That’s unacceptable. If you want to be on this team, you can’t do that. And here’s the thing, leader, you can’t do that to your team either. You have to hold yourself to these same standards. Now don’t hold yourself to a higher standard, that’s stupid. Hold yourself to the same standard, and just have it equal like that.

Now there are some exceptions. Here’s one: in our company, every single project has one person identified as owns the ball. It’s a tag in our project management system, so it may be Eric owns the ball, Peter owns the ball, Marissa owns the ball, somebody owns the ball. That person has to give a daily update on that project every day, Monday through Friday, without exception, unless you’re me. I don’t give daily updates on Friday, my last daily update is on Thursday, because Friday is my CEO day, I only work on the business on Friday. Now I do things throughout the week, all week, where I’m bouncing back and forth between working on the business and working in the business, but Friday is a special day, I only work on the business, and I do metrics and accounting and it is a tough, long, detail oriented, boring day, but I got to get it done, and I purposely do it on Friday, I leave it there, it’s there, I get it done. But that’s Friday. So everybody has to leave a daily update every single day on every project they own the ball on, unless you’re the owner of the business. And here’s the thing, if people really don’t like it, they can go out and own their own business, I’m really not that worried about it. But nobody on my team gets upset or bent out of shape, nobody’s like, well, that’s not fair, because trust is built in the absence of secrets. I just told my team, hey, here’s the expectations, everybody’s going to do this, but I won’t, because on Friday, I’m making sure everything’s in place for the business to thrive and survive, and make sure payroll is going to be there next week and in three months. So I have a different job description, and that’s how I explain it to my team, we all have different job descriptions. My job description says the CEO will give a daily update on projects he owns the ball on Monday through Thursday. Boom, that’s it, and I can’t miss those dates, I hold myself to that standard.

Number six: Let’s recap. Number one, hire slow. Number two, train, retrain, and repeat train your core values. Three, reward what you want repeated, especially those core values. Number four, delegate the win, always, always delegate the win, not just the task. Number five, always have a deadline and a process to extend when needed. Number six, communicate on a cadence. That’s right, you have to build in a range of communication and an expected, predictable rhythm of communication. And I don’t care if this is a remote team or an in-person team, this applies both. Maybe you use different tools, you may do more asynchronous things, but you have to have a rhythm of communication. Here’s what it looks like in my company, and some thoughts on it.

Number one, we require everybody to fill in a weekly report. We learned this from Dave Ramsey, the Ramsey organization, through EntreLeadership. I’ve been using the daily, or the weekly report, for many, many years, and I absolutely love it. It’s a fantastic tool, a very simple tool. We used to use theirs, and now we’ve built our own. Everybody has to submit it on their Friday, I read these on Monday. So I tell everybody, on your Friday, which some of our team may choose their Friday, their last day of the week, to be Saturday, and I’m fine with that, but these have to be in by Monday, 7 a.m. eastern, because I’m going to read these Monday morning. The weekly report just asks people, how was your morale this week? What was your workload like? Any highs or lows? Any distractions? There’s just a couple simple questions they can answer by clicking a smiley face, or a frowny face, or a neutral face, and then some fill in the blanks. It takes a minute or two, if that, but I get a snapshot every single week of how everybody on my team is feeling, what their morale is like, their job satisfaction. I’ve got a really good pulse of how the team is doing, not just performing. It’s easy to measure performance based upon client satisfaction, or if deliverables are being done. But as a leader, I want to go deeper than that, I want to know how my team is doing, I want to know how they’re feeling. I need to know the condition of their heart with the work, because that lets me know about motivation, it lets me predict longevity. There are so many benefits from this weekly report. Maybe one day I’ll do an entire episode just on the weekly report and its benefits.

Number two, everybody has a weekly one on one, with their direct supervisor. I’m not the direct supervisor of everybody on my team anymore, so they have one on ones with their direct reports, but everybody has to have a weekly one on one. It can be a 25 minute Zoom, we’re going to sit down, we’re going to chat. And you got to be creative with this, there are some times these happen at weird hours for people, but here’s the thing, you communicate that in the very beginning, during the interview process. Hey, you’re going to have to have a weekly one on one with your supervisor, and right now this is your supervisor’s time zone, so if you’re hired, you’re going to have to be available during this time. We give a window, we look at their time zone, and we may say, hey, once a week at 6 p.m. your time, you’re going to have to be available for a meeting, and that may go to seven depending on time zone or daylight savings. You got to figure that stuff out. But we always bring it up, it’s always part of the interview, so nobody’s surprised. Nobody’s like, well, I don’t like having this meeting every week at seven, well, you signed up for it, Jack, you can’t be surprised by it. So let everybody know: everybody gets a weekly one on one.

And then the last one, for you to trust your team, here’s the thing, this was a game changer. This is the thing that literally made it so I slept better at night, when it comes to trusting that we were on track, and that’s the daily updates. We tried all kinds of variations of this. We tried email updates, we tried asynchronous video updates via Marco Polo, and they all worked for a bit. But our daily updates, where in our project management system, every single active project has a daily update card, and one person on that card is tagged with owns the ball, I described this a little bit ago, and you have to make a daily update. And guess what, I read those every single day. Now, the ones that I have to leave daily updates on, I leave daily updates, obviously not on Friday, so you caught me, but I read these every single Monday through Thursday, and it takes me about 25 minutes. But at the end of that 25 minutes, I know exactly where every project is. I know what’s going to happen next, because every daily update says: here’s what’s happened since my last update, here’s what should happen next and by whom, and if it doesn’t happen, here’s the plan. That last part, if it doesn’t happen, here’s the plan, only relates to if you’re waiting for an external person. So if you say, I sent the client the request for approval, I let them know I need to hear from them by Tuesday, if I don’t hear from them by Monday, I’ll send a reminder that we’re expecting it on Tuesday, that’s the update.

So now I know exactly where that project is. If the client reaches out to me, I know where their content is, I know what’s going on. Sometimes clients ask me a question, hey, I was thinking about the content, and I haven’t been involved with their project, I don’t know what they’re talking about, but oh wait, I do now, because I read the daily update. I love these daily updates, I can’t emphasize enough how big of a difference these made. And you know who came up with this? My team. This is something that Katie and Peter and Paola and I wrestled with over a couple of weeks, and fine tuned it, and tested it, and tried it, and gave feedback, and adjusted, and now we’ve got a system that just works and flows, and we couldn’t be happier with it.

So there you go, how do you build a remote team that you can trust? You got to hire the right people, and you know what you can do that with, hire slow. So hire slow, train, retrain, repeat train your core values, reward what you want repeated, delegate the win, always, always delegate the win, always have a specific deadline to the hour, and a process to amend it when needed, and communicate on a cadence to your team. So those are them right there.

Don’t forget to head over to Eric Dingler dot com to sign up for the 11 Day Reset. Now, before I share this week’s Leadership Axiom of the Week, I just want to say thank you for listening up to this point of the podcast. I got a great leadership axiom here for you, but I have a favor to ask. Would you do me a favor? Would you review the show wherever you listen? Just wherever you’re listening right now, just review, subscribe. And if you’re listening on a platform where you can comment, if you’re on Spotify, comment, leave a comment. This helps me so much. I know you listen to other podcasts, I know you hear people ask this, but honestly, it really does make a huge difference in how other people discover the podcast. This is a strong signal to the podcast platforms that people are listening, not just downloading and letting it play. People could download and let it play and walk away, but they’re listening, they’re engaging, they actually got something out of it. So if you’re listening to this point, please leave a review, subscribe, and if you can, comment.

All right, so what is this week’s Leadership Axiom? Hire for character first. I tell my team this every time we go to hire, one of the things we always talk about: what does great character look like? We want to hire for character first. In fact, like I told you earlier in the podcast, we do multiple interviews, and one of the interviews we do is the character interview. We conduct one interview where we’re just looking to assess the person’s character, how they respond in the past, how they respond now. This used to be a whole lot easier with in-person interviews, I could set up tests to see how people dealt with things, you know, if they walked past garbage on the ground, or if they picked it up, if they opened the door for someone, however they behaved. I would ask them how important cleanliness was to them, or being organized, and then I would walk them to their car at the end of the interview, because I wanted to see what your car looked like, because, were you lying to me?

Now I do this in videos, there are times we have people submit a video and I’ll watch it on mute, in silence, just watching, wanting to see, what can I tell from this person just by their body language, their facial expressions, their eyes, do their eyes match when they smile, what’s going on in the background, what can I see in the background? Now some people use fake backgrounds and blur them, but not everybody. So there are several things that we now do to evaluate someone’s character, checking their social media profiles, there’s so many things that we do, because you can’t train character, and you can’t fix broken character. I can train someone to do the tasks we need done, there is not a job in our company that we can’t train somebody to do, people can learn to do it, but I can’t train character. I also can’t train people to get along with our team. So one of the interviews we do is we interview for character. The second one we interview for is chemistry, how are they going to get along with the team, how are they going to get along with their direct supervisor. And then we interview for competency, can they learn, do they have the ability to learn, are they self-motivated to learn, are they a self-starter. But it all starts with character first.

The moment you compromise here, you’re like, ah, I just get this weird feeling about them, I don’t know what it is, but man, they just seem so smart, boy, they’re really going to be able to help us out, they’re really going to be the best salesperson we’ve ever had, the best developer, the best whatever it is. But there’s something about their character that’s just not quite right. I guarantee you’re going to regret the hire every single time. So always hire for character first.

Well, my friend, you have made it to the end of the podcast episode. I thank you for listening for this first episode in our series. Make sure you tune in to the next episode of the series, number 46, how do I create a strong remote team culture? Until next time, make sure you chase your big dreams, lead with courage, and safe travels.

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