59: Tatiana O’Hara on Understanding Your Capacity and Workplace Transitions
Tatiana O’Hara is Team & Leadership Development Consultant that helps successful, yet overwhelmed online business owners create the structure needed for their team & daily operations, so they can focus on scaling sustainably.
As a corporate leader turned business coach, she’s helped dozens of leaders optimize and build their team, and learn essential leadership skills that have yielded hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales growth. Tatiana puts the focus on the things that matter most in our business- the people that run it!
Main quote:
If we have an efficient operation and a strong company culture, you're already opening yourself up to improve your capacity a lot without hiring more people. A lot of times we think we need more people to have more capacity, but sometimes more people can actually shrink your capacity because you're bringing more people into chaos.
Additional Quotes:
When you can build your own personal leadership and build that thought leadership within yourself, it allows you to show up as who you really are. And that's what we want to see. We want to see who you really are, not you fitting the mold of who you think you need to be.
Streamlined operations and strong company culture, those two things together is 100 percent the gateway to you being able to accomplish big things.
To connect with Tatiana:
To learn more about Grindaholics Rx
To learn more about Leaving Well, visit https://www.naomihattaway.com/
To support the production of this podcast, peruse my Leaving Well Bookshop or buy me a coffee.
This podcast is produced by Sarah Hartley.
Transcript:
Tatiana O'Hara, in this conversation, talks about tearing down the veil of secrecy. And it is really a thought that I have not thought about before when it comes to transparency. She also talks a lot about tough conversations, which is one of the things that I started following Tatiana for, was wanting to learn from her about her take on tough conversations.
She believes that tough combos are the highest form of servant leadership. She also believes firmly that everyone deserves The community you serve, your staff, your board of directors, the people coming behind you, and even the people that came before you, everyone is impacted by your refusal to have tough conversations.
Heavy hitting, right? The other thing that I'm excited for you to listen in for is Tatiana's definition of capacity, that it's not just about workload. She and I share some of the same definitions on capacity. And then I would also add when you hear what she says, I'd also add that there needs to be an interest and a values alignment.
When we talk about capacity, I won't talk about it any further. Dive in to this conversation in this interview with Tatiana. I hope that you will be as inspired as I was.
Tatiana O'Hara is a team and leadership development consultant that helps successful yet overwhelmed online business owners create the structure needed for their team and daily operations so they can focus on scaling sustainably. As a corporate leader turned business coach, she's helped dozens of leaders optimize and build their team and learn essential leadership skills that have yielded hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales growth.
Good Tatiana puts the focus on the things that matter most in our business, which are the people that run it. Tatiana, I'm really excited for this conversation and I would love to just jump in and ask you some questions about your team talk hotline, which I love. How did that come to be? And what are some of the biggest topics that you're seeing come up over and over again?
Yes. Well, first, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. And yeah, the team talk hotline is kind of my newest brainchild, and it is essentially a free hotline that business owners can call or write into to ask any questions that they have around team leadership operations. And I will answer it for them, um, generally through like an Instagram real and I'll post it to my feed.
I also email it out to my list later. And I would say like the motivation behind it or how it kind of came up was I found myself like after coming back from maternity leave, I found myself feeling like I was in a bit of a content rut and I wanted to create the content that people actually wanted to hear.
I felt a little like out of touch and I felt like my content wasn't really landing with my audience at the time. And so I was like, man, I wish people could just tell me what they want to know. Like, how can I just get them to tell me what. They want to hear from me and the hotline just like blinked into my mind and I was up all night.
I think I was in the shower when I got the idea around like 10 PM and I was up to like 2. 30 with my husband, like strategizing it, um, strategizing the design behind it and the creative direction. And so, yeah, now it's, it's just a really big part of my, my strategy as a business owner. It's completely free.
There's no, no strings attached, no upsells. Um, there is an option to do like a paid. private call. So if you don't want your question answered on my feed, then you can have it like emailed to you directly, but you can even remain anonymous the whole time. You're anonymous to my audience, but you can be anonymous to me as well.
And yeah, so it's, it's been great. Some of the topics that we've talked through, I've answered questions about. You know, Hey, I have six contractors. I feel like it might make more sense for me to just consolidate into one full timer. What do you think? Um, how do I plan for maternity leave as a business owner?
I'm having this team member who I feel like is, you know, kind of bringing the culture of the company down. What do I do? How do I talk to that person? So some, some really good, you know, thoughtful questions have come through so far. I loved watching it. And if you are not already following Tatiana on Instagram, it's underscore Tatiana O'Hara.
T A T I A N A O H A R A. And you'll be able to see the reels that she's posted so far. What I think has been so beautiful about it also is that it's bite size. You know, a lot of times there's Podcasts. Ours is short, but a lot of times there's podcasts that are beautiful, but they're really long and we don't always have time to listen to that much content and you go straight to the point straight in.
And I think you're under like 2 or 3 minutes when you give the answer, right? Yeah, so that's my goal is to keep all of them pretty short. Sometimes it's hard to rewrite my response like 10 times to get, you know, more refined, um, answer, but yeah, it's quick. It's easy to digest. And I think it also indirectly kind of creates community too, because Often in the comments more often in my DMS though.
People are telling me I've been wondering the same thing I've been struggling with the same thing So I think it's also just kind of like Tearing down this like veil of secrecy that a lot of business owners have around some of these really hard like Leadership operations topics, because maybe we feel embarrassed or we feel like we should know these things already.
I think it's just given business owners a little bit of comfort too, and knowing like they're not alone in their struggles. Yeah. Well, and there's so much power in normalizing and naming things. And so by doing, um, the team talk hotline, it's giving, even if, like you said, people are in your DMs about it, it's still normalizing for them that this is normal for people, um, and for businesses and for.
Uh, organizations. So one of the things that you navigate a lot with your clients with the teams that you work with are hard conversations. I love hard conversations. I, I really value them, but I know that is not the case for everyone. What do you wish that people knew about hard conversations and why they really should lean into them instead of pulling away?
That's a good question. I think if more people knew that having tough conversations is one of the most servant things that you can do as a leader, then more people would want to do them. I think when we think about having a challenging conversation with someone, let's say based around performance, we don't want to hurt their feelings.
We don't want to rock the boat. We're afraid of conflict. And so we avoid it. Those conversations. But what happens is the problem just gets bigger and bigger behind the scenes. It almost like I hate to make a dental reference, but it almost kind of reminds me of like, you know, when you have a little bit of tooth pain, right?
It's like, you could probably go to the dentist and get it cleaned up really quick and be okay. But the longer you let it sit, it's a cavity. Now it needs a filling. Now it needs a root canal. Now you have to get the tooth pulled, right? But it also is affecting all the teeth around it too. And so when we avoid having this conversation with this employee who maybe isn't performing up to standard, now, all the other team members are having to pull extra weight because this team member is not doing their job properly and the team member who we're avoiding having that conversation with, they're not able to reach their fullest potential because we're not challenging them in the way that we should.
And so when we have these conversations, the right way and at the right time, it can not only like resolve issues, but it can like make your company culture skyrocket because people are going to know that, yes, they're held accountable for the things that they do, but also that you're there to support them, that you're bought into them.
The employee likely will feel more bought in once they have that first conversation and they see like, Hey, my leader wants to actually support me through like my development and my improvement. Yeah. I mean, I, I could go on and on about this all day, but I think like once you have that first conversation that goes well and you start to see the positive effects, it's like, You'll never stray away from it again because you realize what happens when you do well and to go on with your dental reference.
I think like when I have mouth pain, mouth pain affects my whole body. And so I think about, you know, not only the teeth around the impacted tooth, but like, if we don't resolve that, not only is that our team culture, but the communities we serve or the folks that we serve. And I also. I think a lot about what we do inside of our teams will never know the full ripple team members can then have hard conversations with each other without management in the room or without management having to start those conversations and whenever they go into the next company, that's could be really great embedded culture that they can take on with them to whatever jobs they have next is the power of hard conversations and navigating those.
It's a very simple tool that helps you. It works both ways. Like it helps to develop that employee and help them grow in their, you know, leadership, but it also helps to develop you and your leadership as well. And everyone is made better at the end of it. Um, I always say like no one is served when we sugar coat, right?
Like when we beat around the bush, when we hide from the hard things, like. Everyone is punished as a result. You included. Yeah, that's powerful. Yeah, I would also love to talk to you a little bit about your either definition or opinions around capacity and team productivity when it comes to performance of a team and maybe share a couple of examples of either teams that you've worked with or the way that you've run your business in the past around capacity and knowing when to say no, when to say yes, how to grow capacity, those kind of things.
Yeah, so I think capacity is comprised, comprised of a couple different like aspects. Um, so when you think capacity, I think the first thing you think of is like workload, right? Like how much can we take on? How many clients can we work with? How many people can we serve? But I think it starts with the skill set of the team, right?
Do we have the skills in order to perform the way we need to? Um, but do we also have like really clear communication? Do we have efficient processes? That's probably a big one too, like A lot of teams capacity would easily increase by improving efficiency. If we have an efficient operation in a strong company culture, you're already opening yourself up to improve your capacity a lot without hiring more people.
A lot of times we think we need more people to have more capacity, but sometimes more people can actually shrink your capacity because you're bringing more people into chaos. You're bringing more people into, you know, extremely inefficient operations. So yeah, I think shoring up a lot of those things can put you in the right position to think of a couple of like examples.
So I work with a lot of business owners that run agencies of some sort. So capacity is, is a really big thing there. And so one of my clients, when we first started working together, she had a team of, I believe two, maybe three people, and they had a certain capacity and she felt like they were kind of like packed at a certain amount of revenue.
because they couldn't serve more people. Um, and so some of the things that we did, first we started with like looking at her service offering and the process that she would take her clients through to refine that, making sure that we have really clear communication with our clients, having set dates and meeting dates and whatnot to coordinate with our clients along the way.
They were waiting on clients a lot, waiting on feedback, waiting on revisions, and that was slowing them down, thus shrinking their capacity. 'cause they can't take on more clients because they're held up in all these places. So that was one. Um, then making sure all of the team members were in the right seat, like where their best serving the business, like they're in the best possible role for them.
And then finally, I think just like really refining the way that the entire team communicates. If Team A doesn't talk to team B. And then team C is over here, like waiting to receive something, but the other two teams aren't communicating. Then it just leaves more opportunity for like balls to drop, if that makes sense.
And so, yeah, by the time we were done, she did end up bringing on one more person, but they were able to, over the course of like, I want to say about six months, essentially double their revenue, not because they were marketing better or, you know, selling to more clients, but because they were able to actually take on the wait list of people that they had that were waiting to work with them.
Yeah, I love that. And I would love if you would go a little bit deeper when you talk about making sure people are in the right seats. Something that I do often with my clients is ask them to do a job description review and if they're willing to, a resume review with their teams. Because I think a lot of times when you hire, you skip over so much of the goodness that someone's bringing you.
And not until you get into a project or into the culture does someone realize what skill sets they might be able to bring. And so my encouragement is always, you Where can someone help you get a project to the finish line that you might not have thought of? And so it kind of correlates a little bit with what you're talking about with people in the right seats.
Would you share a little bit more about maybe one or two things that someone could be looking out for if someone's in the wrong seat or maybe on a more positive side moving people into the right seats? Yeah, for sure. So I think the first thing, like if you have an org chart of some sort, some sort of visual that shows your company's structure, then a practice that you should get into, I would say at least once a quarter is to sit down and review those, right.
And to look at each role within the chart and ask yourself a couple questions, like what are their strengths? What are their weaknesses? Um, what areas of growth do I see for this person? Like if I were to promote them tomorrow. What type of role could I see them moving into? And then looking at like their availability and their personal goals as well.
Like, do they desire to grow with the company? Are they building their own business? Are they comfortable where they are and kind of taking all those things into consideration. And a lot of times, like when I do this with my clients, it's the first time they've ever looked at their team at this granular of a level, like, Oftentimes when we're reviewing strengths and weaknesses or something of the sort, it's because they're doing something wrong, right?
And we're like trying to figure out, like, are they a good fit anymore? But like more proactively, um, when we're looking at their strengths, sometimes we find that their strengths don't align with the role that they're in, right? They're really good at, you know, leading people, having conversations, managing big picture tasks, but maybe we have them in a role where they're not doing any of those things.
Or vice versa, which I think is what we see more commonly is when you have someone in like a leadership role, but they're more of a behind the scenes person, right? Like, they don't love giving direction. They're not the best with keeping up with multiple due dates and keeping multiple balls in the air.
Um, and sometimes that happens, you know, you have someone doing really well in their job, so you want to promote them. not realizing that it's a completely different skill set that you're promoting them into. So yeah, I think like taking the time to dig into some of those things can often help reveal, you know, are they in the right seat?
And maybe, maybe they are, maybe they just need a little bit more training, right? Maybe they need more development in the seat that they're in. But yeah, I've seen people go from being a leader and moving into a non leadership role. I've seen people go from not being a leader, doing a lateral move where Before they were managing people and now they're managing processes, you know, so on and so forth, or maybe we just discover that someone has potentially outgrown the company or this role has outgrown them and we, you know, look into what it would look like to replace that person.
You, you talked a little bit just now about Being in that right seat. And I'm wondering if you could speak to the person who might be listening, who is a first time executive or is just getting to the point of being in that executive leadership position might be an internal promotion, or it could be from an external hire.
I'm curious what you would tell that person from an advice or feedbacks standpoint. Obviously, this is hypothetical and you don't know a lot of the details, but what advice would you offer? Yeah, so is this more so to the person who might be in the wrong seat or just generally speaking? I think just generally speaking.
Okay, so I think my advice would be to, from this point forward, to work on developing your personal leadership, whether you desire to be in a role that leads people or not. Everyone needs leadership. Everyone needs to be a leader, right? Or have those types of qualities. That's only going to help you grow and develop in your career.
Um, and so I think it first starts inward, right? It's asking yourself like, what are my core values? What's important to me? How do I want to show up at work? How do I want to show up as a person? And using those things that are different about you and unique about you to help you form your own unique leadership style, right?
And maybe that shows up in the way that you communicate with your team, the way that you communicate with your leader, the way that you communicate with your client or insert blank, whatever it is that you do within your role. Um, maybe it shows up in the quality of work that you deliver. Maybe it's like a personal signature thing that you do when you interact with people.
But if you can begin to develop that, it's obviously going to give you like You know, more of a leg up as you grow in your career. I think it's also going to help you find the confidence to show up as full as possible in your day to day at work. Because a lot of us at work are suffering from imposter syndrome of some sort, or feeling like we're not the smartest person in the room, or feeling like we weren't necessarily, like, supposed to be there.
But when you can build your own personal leadership and build that thought leadership within yourself, it allows you to show up as who you really are. And that's what we want to see. We want to see who you really are, not you fitting the mold of who you think you need to be. That would be, that would be my advice.
And that, that's coming from me, Um, you know, consulting and working with people, but it's also me speaking to myself when I was in a corporate role, you know, I, I came into a job feeling like, wow, everyone leads in this way and this is not me at all. And I came in trying to be who I thought they needed me to be or who they wanted me to be.
And everyone hated it, like the people I was leading hated it, and it wasn't until I was like, okay, who am I like how do I show up as myself that like, not only did my teams, because I was leading a grocery store so I led five different store locations I was a district manager. So not only did my Store managers start to love me and my store team start to love me.
But that's when we started seeing results. That's when we became one of the top performing districts in the division. That's when I started getting multiple, you know, new things to do new responsibilities because I was myself. And when I showed up as myself, like that's when it really started to, that was the turning point for me in my career.
I love that. And it, it leads me to the next question that I didn't send you in advance, but I recently saw you share, um, that you're going to be speaking at SHRM next year, I believe. And I would be curious from that space, because there's going to be a lot of people in the room or who might hear about what you said afterwards.
What are, what are you hoping to share from that stage that people might be shocked or surprised or have the biggest learning from, Speaking from that space of where only you can stand in Tatiana, because of all of your expertise and your experience and the unique person that you are. I wonder if you already have thoughts about what big message you might be sharing.
Absolutely. So I love speaking in predominantly like corporate spaces because, because I've been so Disconnected from the corporate world for so long because I've been like running my own business. Corporate jargon, like goes over my head. I'm just like, why did we complicate that? It just took us 80 words to say something that could have been said in two seconds.
A compliment that I often get when I speak in those types of spaces is This was such a fresh perspective. This was so simple. So direct. Um, this was fun. It wasn't like stuffy. And so that's always my goal is to teach on whatever topic, generally something to the tune of, you know, empowering your employees to become the CEO of their role, right.
And finding that independence within themselves, but to teach it in a way that you haven't heard before. I don't want to stand up there and give you the same, you know, five to six Basic leadership points that you could have gotten it on Google, but like, I want to really humanize the workplace because we are all human.
Right. And we often don't treat it that way. And also to just leave everyone with extremely tangible, tangible takeaways that they can take back to their team and implement the smallest things that they can implement that could make really big change over time. Yeah, thank you. I'm excited to hear more about that.
As the time comes, you recently did a team talk hotline talking about KPIs and metrics. And I would love as we kind of wind down our podcast conversation, for having us. To hear from you about operations. So operations, KPIs, metrics, all of those things in the nonprofit space, they often shy away, leaders often shy away from them, but yet that's a big part of operations in the corporate world.
And so I'd be curious, uh, when someone's tasked with impact driven or community focused work, what would you say about operations and productivity and metrics and success measures? All of those things that someone could take away as something they could implement. soon and not, you know, be complicated and have it be something that's simple.
Yeah. So I think that with nonprofits, right, the vision, the mission is so big and it's so important, but a lot of times because it's so big and so important, we like tend to forget or shy away from the operations things. Right. But the thing that I want to leave you with is that Streamlined operations and strong company culture.
Those two things together, they don't live separate. Those two things together is 100 percent the gateway to you being able to accomplish these big things. If you want to create this impact and you want it to be lasting impact, then you have to have strong operations. Your, your business has to be able to run on its own.
Your team members, they need to know what's expected of them. They need to know. what good looks like, what done looks like, they need to know how to do their jobs. They need to have the tools and the resources to do their jobs. But in addition to that, they need to have the type of company culture that is empowering and exciting, the type of culture where they want to show up to work.
They want to help, you know, drive this mission and the vision forward. And so without those two things, like, The, the big mission, it either never happens or it only happens for a short amount of time. It'll, it'll fizzle out in, in a short amount of time. Yeah. So, yeah. And I think like a couple like quick starters, one is does everyone on your team know exactly what they're supposed to be doing?
Does everyone on your team have a job description? You know, even if you've hired them two, three years ago, everyone needs to have a job description. You need to have some sort of metrics, KPIs in place to measure how well we're doing. Like, if I am working as a campaign manager or a partnerships manager for you, and I don't know what it looks like to be doing well in my job, then I may never do that.
I may never achieve that. What, what it is that you're looking for. And then on the culture side of things, I would say just communication. Communication can solve so many culture issues, whether it's having, you know, a set framework for how you have meetings, when you have meetings, and having meetings that are more conversational versus you just talking at them.
Culture, contrary to popular belief, culture is not bringing in donuts and pizza. Culture is not team meetups at the bowling alley. All of those things are the cheery on top, but the real work happens at In the workplace in the inner workings of how we work together day to day. I will keep going. So I'm going to stop.
Well, I mean, I'm sitting here. I've got all these notes just from that little section you said so we probably should move on. But I do want to highlight the fact that you asked. These two questions, because these are really important. What is good look like? And what does done look like? Because done is something that nonprofits don't do very well.
If we were all successful at achieving our mission, every single nonprofit mission is something like eradicating poverty or Ending something, but we never actually get there. And so that's a good question to really ask ourselves is what does done look like? Because sometimes things can and should be sunsetted programs, projects, et cetera.
So I love that you said those two questions. Okay. Our last two questions for you. Um, what three words would you use to describe your own relationship with change and or transition? I would say one is definitely gratitude. I'm always grateful when change comes about because I know it's getting me closer to where I want to be.
Evolution. I think in the past, I would see change as like, You know, looking down on where I was before, like feeling like I wasn't doing well enough and like, Oh, I'm finally moving up, but every step along the journey is just that a step along the journey and nothing is right or wrong. And then I think the third word, it would be like a hyphen word, but it would be full send, like, because when it's time for a change.
I find my confidence in that very quickly, and I'm all in a hundred percent in, and it's the only way I, I can truly function. Right. If not, then I'm one foot in one foot out. I'm full of doubt. I'm like questioning things. So I just have to allow myself to go all in on what this changes and, and know that, you know, like I said, I'm, I'm moving in the direction I'm supposed to.
Yeah, I love that. So as you're listening to that, I would love for you to just reflect on what Tatiana said about. Okay. And we'll send and think about ways and moments in your own life where you can operate from a full send kind of confidence. Before I ask you the last question about what leaving well means to you.
Is there anything that we haven't touched on or that you wanted to go deeper on? No, I feel like you, you have some really good questions, like in all the different areas. Like it was a very well rounded conversation. I think. Good. Okay. Well, we could, we could have another whole conversation and probably talk for an hour, but I would love to just know, what does leaving well mean to you?
This is such a good question, but such a hard question. Because to me, I think leaving well looks like reflecting backward, but always looking forward. So it's being grateful for the things, the moments, the situations that have brought me to this place, and using my past experiences To help me make better decisions in the future, but not letting my past experiences overshadow my future.
And then it's looking forward to the future, you know, like keeping my eyes on, on the road in front of me and not looking at everyone else and what they're doing and, and just knowing and trusting that I'm on, on the right journey and on the right path. I love that. Thank you so much for, for joining me for this conversation.
Thank you for all of the work that you do with other organizations, companies, corporations, leaders, et cetera. And thanks for also just being yourself. I really encourage folks that are listening to go follow you on Instagram. It's a joy to follow you there and we'll have all the other things and ways that people can connect with you in the show notes.
Thank you. Thank you. If you've not yet taken the Workplace Transition Archetype quiz to discover your natural relationship to change and transition, you can do that at naomihattaway.com/quiz. To learn more about leading well and how you can implement and embed the framework and culture in your own life and workplace, visit NaomiHathaway.com. It's time for each of us to look ourselves in the mirror and finally admit we are playing a powerful role in the system. We can either exist outside of our power or choose to decide to shift culture and to create transformation. Until next time, I'm your host, Naomi Hattaway, and you've been listening to Leaving Well, a navigation guide for workplace transitions.
