Marnie Jones of Educate X On 3 Things You Need To Know To Successfully Manage a Team
First, you have to create successful REFERENCE POINTS for staff to go to for data, answers and how-tos that aren’t you. A reference point could be a policy, procedure, video, template, etc. but it must be based on a SUCCESSFUL ACTION — meaning it has been proven to be workable and isn’t just someone’s random idea.
As a part of our series about the five things you need to successfully manage a large team, I had the pleasure of interviewing Marnie Jones.
Marnie Jones began her career at just 19 years old, quickly establishing herself as a dynamic force in the business consulting world. With over a decade of experience, Marnie has assisted businesses with turnovers ranging from $200k to $130m in unlocking their full potential. By age 23, she had already ascended to the position of Head Consultant at a boutique firm in Sydney, where she led a team of consultants.
Her career has spanned more than 56 industries, including fashion, design, mining, construction, and childcare, and she has delivered workshops and seminars to thousands of professionals. Marnie’s expertise has led her to identify three key pillars of business success: hiring high-performing employees, leveraging staff through effective management, and creating organized, efficient teams.
In response to these business needs, Marnie launched three successful brands. TALENT X has achieved a remarkable 75% hiring and 12-month retention success rate using a proven hiring model. EDUCATE X focuses on transforming managers and staff through accountability training and practical management frameworks. BUSINESS POWER X helps companies scale safely and effectively by optimizing their founders, managers, and teams.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! What is your backstory?
Well, I started my career when I was 19 and was lucky enough to land a traineeship in a boutique consulting firm where I got to teach a specific curriculum and get my business clients to apply it. That meant I didn’t need personal experience in that business — only the skill of teaching properly the concepts and ensuring they apply it. I was essentially a teacher. After 6 years of consulting in that firm and running our consulting team, I went out on my own. I worked as a sole trader for a couple of years before creating Educate X in 2020.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?
When I was 23 I lived in Cameroon, Central West Africa, for 7 months working with a natural gas mining client on the London Stock Exchange. Our job was to transform the mentality and working methods of the management team and roll out these changes across their 120 staff. They were losing money at the time and by the 4-month mark they broke even. By the 7-month mark, the market cap of the company increased by 46 million pounds. That time was high emotions, crying, yelling, people quitting and being fired, mass confusion and resistance at times. It was a turning point in my career and set me up experientially and results-wise.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
When I was in my early 20s I had it in my head that I knew everything, haha. But funnily enough, I was the only consultant who got warning letters — and I got 3. I was often late, combative, rude to other managers, etc. Honestly, I was truly awful. I don’t know why they kept me haha. I was blessed to have incredible bosses who saw my potential and had great patience with me. They pushed through my insolence and I truly wouldn’t be who I am today without their guidance and mentorship.
The biggest lesson I learned was in everything you do, treat the action as if it is its own business — this helps you to create the best result possible with true professionalism. When you write an email, format a document, communicate to someone — whatever — do it as if you are in the business of writing emails and ask yourself — would someone have paid you for that action? Would they refer you to others? This simple view drastically upgraded how I did EVERYTHING in my life and is the basis for my high standards today.
Ok, let’s jump to the core of our interview. Most times when people quit their jobs they actually “quit their managers”. What are your thoughts on the best way to retain great talent today?
That’s true, staff really do leave managers, not companies. I have worked with and taught thousands of staff and I know the gripes they have with managers and owners. I think the first thing to realise, as a manager, is yes there are a lot of terrible staff out there — but don’t forget there are also a lot of terrible managers and owners out there, too. They overpromise, change their mind, blame them for their own mishaps, don’t teach or guide the team enough, make small things a big deal, don’t celebrate wins, come down too hard on someone, micromanage, etc. etc.
So really, the first thing you must know as a manager is being good at a job is really different from getting someone else to be good at a job.
We love promoting staff into management roles without teaching them how to manage. The best way to retain talent is to find, look for, and learn the top successful actions of management. I know this seems too simple, but successful actions often go uncodified, get lost if the manager leaves, etc. Already now I am sure you could come up with the top 5 successful points in managing most staff. Formulating this is important so it can be shared across all management.
How do you synchronize large teams to effectively work together?
The simplicity of this is splitting the teams into fractions run by competent managers and investing in the manager.
When you have strong managers — the need to focus on the teams themselves becomes sooo much less.
This is because any fault you find with staff is actually an expression of the managers’ weakness.
Too much focus, time and money is put into trying to “fix” staff to make them more productive.
If staff aren’t accountable it simply means the managers aren’t good at or don’t know how to create accountability.
If the staff don’t follow policy it is simply the managers aren’t good or don’t know how to get them to use policy. Etc. etc.
The second you lose sight of this is the second you waste money addressing the symptom (staff) and not the cause (managers).
So to answer your question, the best way to synchronize a large team to work together is to split the team into manageable groups, run by competent managers who coordinate, teach, mentor, push, organise, measure, etc.
Here is the main question of our discussion. Based on your personal experience, what are the “3 Things You Need To Know To Successfully Manage a Team”. (Please share a story or example for each, Ideally an example from your experience)
These top 3 things can branch off into unlimited concepts. But if you can fully grasp these, you can find different ways to bolster them.
First, you have to create successful REFERENCE POINTS for staff to go to for data, answers and how-tos that aren’t you. A reference point could be a policy, procedure, video, template, etc. but it must be based on a SUCCESSFUL ACTION — meaning it has been proven to be workable and isn’t just someone’s random idea.
The upside of doing the work to build this is so that the staff gets CONSISTENT answers every time. When the same person is providing the same data point over and over — what are the chances they will give that data with the same detail, focus on importance, etc?
This also means the manager doesn’t need to be around for the staff to get that information.
Managers who don’t do this experience overload, mistakes, double work, work becoming bottlenecked, confusion, miscommunication, etc.
The amount of times a manager has to repeat themselves or provide the same info to multiple staff will tell you how badly they need to do this.
Example: I worked for weeks with an Electrician client of mine to codify each step of the estimating process. We defined which role does what, where things are filed, how they’re labeled, templates for email comms, etc., and rolled it out across his team. We trained it out to his estimators and now the whole thing runs without his involvement. It can be hard work to determine which step is done in what sequence, etc., and can take some figuring out and testing, but when done correctly, your drive for rolling it out to the team is immense because you can see that if everyone simply followed this, it would provide you with so much more free time.
This seems all too simple, but all of my clients have all needed help creating key Reference Points their staff can go to instead of them.
Second, you have to be good at REFERRING to these Reference Points without frustrating the staff or making them feel disengaged.
The key to this is proper training on what those points are, why they’re vital, where they came from, what problem they solve, and ideally tied to any issue the team member is having so they have buy-in
Then the manager must adopt this firm rule: NEVER EVER EVER EVER ANSWER A QUESTION ALREADY COVERED BY AN EXISTING REFERENCE POINT.
The expending of breath to answer a question already answered by a Reference Point is double work and, if entertained, will deteriorate the weight of the Reference Point.
STAFF GO TO THE SOURCE FROM WHICH THEY GET THEIR ANSWERS. So you must supplant you as a source to something else — or they will forever go to you.
The upside to this is if the Reference Point is written correctly and cleverly, it actually creates more freedom for the staff member in their role so long as they work within the boundaries of the Reference Point.
Example: I mentored the management team of a manufacturing company. It took time, but with proper mentoring, we were able to direct staff to go to these reference points instead of to the managers, without being upset about it. We did a full training rollout, heard their objections to it and angled the whole thing to the problems they were facing, etc. And the staff were the ones who got the most out of it! They felt confident in what they were doing, understood why, and didn’t feel anxiety around making mistakes or doing their best to find out the manager didn’t like it. One of the managers was able to go on holiday stress-free for the first time since working there.
Third, you have to objectively MEASURE the teams’ performance, which is a different conversation to “KPIs.”
I find KPIs to be a very confusing topic. They’re used to refer to a metric, a quota, a target, etc. but all of these things mean different things.
The key to management is keeping things FACTUAL and OBJECTIVE. And to do that you need an objective view of the performance of the individual and team.
If you have that, you’re able to have simple, emotionless conversations. You’re able to build Reference Points based on what really WORKS — as proven by data, not someone’s opinion.
Having them in a line-trend format allows you to predict the decline of an area before it hits you in surprise and you have to jump in and firefight to solve it. It also allows you to see the overall improvement or decline of someone’s importance instead of looking at only today’s data, you’re seeing it in comparison to the previous weeks.
This allows you to take the correct action. For example — let’s say you are measuring the salesperson on their sales value and it is sitting at $20k for the week but you want it at $30k. When looking at it individually like this you might be motivated to go hard on the staff member, be frustrated with them, and put all your time and energy into “fixing” it. But if you see it in trend format with a line graph like above, you might see the staff member is in an impressive steep incline — in which case you don’t change anything but instead keep them focused on whatever they’re doing to make it go up so they can maintain that uptrend!
This dashboard, which can take a bit to work out, becomes the KEY reference point for any conversation around performance, bonuses, targets, ideas, privileges, reprimand, etc. and when rolled out correctly and where a culture is created around factual-ness, you end up bias to one thing and one thing only: the performance of an area.
I have proven clients wrong with their bias, sometimes even racist, ageist or sexist views, by getting them to focus purely on the graphs of the area. Who cares how old, young, experienced, etc., someone is? The main driver in what matters is performance.
The problem is that so many companies are not organised to get this data or spend too much time measuring things that don’t really matter.
What advice would you give to other CEOs or founders to help their employees to thrive?
Use Reference Points to define the guardrails, then let them get on with it.
A lot of management issues actually come from poor hiring. A great hire can compensate for poor management skills but great managing can only compensate for so much with a poor hire.
So focus on hiring great staff (of which there is a specific, workable, consistent method), define your reference points, refer back to them, and let them get on with it!
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
Haha, yes! I would like to introduce a bias in the workplace — a full-blown prejudice — which is centered around PERFORMANCE.
Out of the hundreds of companies I have worked with, only one or two actually measured individual performance. Now — this is different to KPIS. I find KPIs a very confusing topic. Stating that a delivery manager should “achieve client satisfaction” is NOT a measurement. Measurement is the “Average Rolling Client Feedback % Score” which shows how well this is being achieved.
This is by far the biggest weakness across the board. It can be complicated and tricky to work out, so I totally get it. But isn’t that a super scary thought? The amount of strategy days I have facilitated where the management team is discussing if they should let someone go with ALMOST NO reference to their performance; it is shocking to me.
If you do not have an objective way to view the performance of EVERY individual and team, then by fact EVERY decision you make is a subjective one. And subjective decisions made on gut feeling are not scalable. I would love to see a movement/obsession with performance measuring.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“Go as far as you can see; when you get there, you’ll be able to see further.” — Thomas Carlyle
So many of my life mistakes have been making decisions too far down the line without it eventuating around me first. 100% of the time I have coached someone, there is always a DIRECTION they wanted to go without ever knowing if it was right, or if they wanted to go elsewhere.
I think you should go down that path first. When you’re there, you’ll have a different view and be able to see further from there. This has helped me traverse romantic questions, business questions, etc. Should I do this service? Well let’s do a test session then see — ah-ha I love it! Yes, let’s do it! Or nope I just realised this will take too much time, not be profitable enough, etc.
To wrap that up I would add- once you know the right way — codify it so it can be referred to by your team/others!
How can our readers further follow your work online?
They can check out my website www.educatex.com.au or my LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/marnie-talentx/.
Thank you for these great insights, and for the time you spent on this. We wish you continued success.
