"Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win Championships." Michael Jordan
In enterprise selling we’re aiming to win games and championships, so let’s look at how we can do that by great teamwork and a little bit of intelligence.
In this, the first of two articles, I cover the most important element of any successful business and sales organisation, the team. In the second article, I share how understanding needs and wants is pretty much all the intelligence you need to win deals.
It’s all about the people. Because it doesn’t matter how fantastic your product or service is, how well you’re managing your sales pipeline and process, or even how much you know about your customer’s needs and wants. Without a great team, your business will not perform to its potential (and you won’t have much fun along the way).
In summary, a sh#t team will deliver sh#t results. A demotivated team will be demotivated (duh). An average team will deliver average results. A disconnected team will disconnect. But a great team will almost always deliver great results.
How to create a great team that delivers great results?
Get to know your team members.
Start with culture and shared values.
Create a psychologically safe environment.
Build the strategy together.
Measure the right stuff.
Maintain your rhythm.
Role model the right behaviours.
1. Get to know your team members.
“That which is not good for the swarm, neither is it good for the bee.” Marcus Aurelius
I get it, it’s obvious, but in the busyness of business sometimes the obvious gets forgotten. So, first get to know your team members. Who are they rather than simply what job they do.
What do they do for fun? What do they like and dislike about work? What are their intrinsic and extrinsic motivators? Personal and professional goals?
TIP: Listen with a curious and open mindset, it’s not an inquisition. Personally, I love sharing, listening, and learning, however, not everyone does. So, whilst it’s important to get to know your team members, make sure you allow them to share in their own time and way.
2. Start with culture and shared values.
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Peter Drucker
First, understand your organisation’s culture and values, then align your team’s ways of working to them. Potentially creating new team values along the way. Alignment is critical from the top down and bottom up. Align your team’s values to the organisation’s and ensure that you have alignment between team and personal value systems.
As living legend Patty McCord, the original Chief Talent Officer at Netflix, will tell you, cultural fit isn’t about having a bunch of mini-me's 🤯 in your team who enjoy doing everything you do. Diversity is super-important; we want different thoughts and opinions. However, alongside diversity of thought, the greatest teams are made up of individuals with similar personal value systems and everyone buys into the organisation’s mission and vision.
TIP: When hiring, above all else prioritise cultural-fit.
3. Create a psychologically safe environment
“Psychological safety is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes, and that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.” Amy Edmondson
A few years ago, Charles Duhigg the author of The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better, spent time with Google’s Aristotle Project, to help them understand how great team's work. They discovered that high-performing teams operated within an environment of psychological safety. In fact, psychological safety was more important than strategy, team structure, team goals, roles, and individual’s talents and skill levels.
So, how do we create a psychologically safe environment? To borrow from Amy Edmondson, the leading global expert on psychological safety and author of The Fearless Organisation and Teaming, we create and nurture an environment where team members feel safe taking interpersonal risks. Where we are all OK to share our thoughts, concerns, and ideas. Where we feel safe making mistakes. Simple, yet not always easy 💚.
Another way of viewing psychological safety is it’s creating an environment where you feel safe being ‘you’. An environment where team members bring more of themselves to work. That sounds so simple, however, why is it that in many teams and organisations people have to ‘put their game face on’, or even worse ‘armour up’ before they get into the office to deal with all the office bulls#t, politics, and egos prancing around the room.
Here’s a 2.20 min clip from Charles Duhigg on his work with Google: https://youtu.be/v2PaZ8Nl2T4
TIP: If you often feel that you need to ‘armour up’ each morning before you walk into the office. I strongly recommend you start looking for another job. Or at the very least, analyse why you’re armouring up, then find ways to remove some of that armour (ask for help doing this). Importantly, remember that armour is having a negative effect on your mental health. And less importantly, it’s not giving you the best chance of success in the workplace.
4. Build the strategy together
“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” Sun Tzu
Pretty much everyone will get this; when creating your strategy, make sure you involve the people who will execute it in the planning stages. This is where organisations with fixed mindsets get tripped up. They talk about buy-in and bottom-up strategies, however, when it comes down to it, they fall back on their ‘smartest guys in the room’ mentality (which is mental).
In addition to getting early buy-in and alignment on how best to achieve team and organisational goals, building the strategy together leverages diversity of thought, brings more brains to the table to solve challenges, and helps develop a culture of collaboration.
TIP: Don’t forget your horizontal relationships within the organisation. Almost always we’re relying in-part on other departments/business units for our strategies to succeed. So, make sure that as well as looking after your vertical relationships (bosses and team), you get other departments input on your strategy early in the planning process. This will also help you to uncover potential blind spots in your vision. Get in front of them early, because it’s far better to pivot during the planning phase, than after you’ve already executed the strategy!
5. Measure the right stuff
“Plan your work for today and every day, then work your plan.” Margaret Thatcher
Once you’ve created your vision, mission, goals, objectives, and activities. Make sure you’re measuring the right stuff. What is the right stuff? The activities my friend, the activities 🎯.
Yes, we love goals and objectives, however, your team members cannot directly control them. So, if that is all you’re measuring you will demotivate your team (no one likes being measured on a metric they cannot directly control).
I’m not saying you shouldn’t measure and track performance against business goals and objectives (usually lagging indicators). Yes, we need to measure these, however, you also need to measure the activities. The activities that your team members are completing to achieve the team’s objectives and goals. The activities are leading indicators, and critically they are activities your team members have direct control over.
When it comes to measuring the right metrics 📈, I first came across this methodology in 2016 care of Jason Jordan and the team at Vantagepoint. Through their research Jason and Michelle (co-author) learned that out of the 300+ sales metrics, most organisations measure to monitor the success of their salesforce. Only 19% were activities that their sales team’s had direct control over. 19%! The rest were sales objectives and business results that sales organisations only have influence or indirect control over. If you’re interested in learning more about Jason and Michelle’s findings and a way to do it better. I recommend you check out their book Cracking the Sales Management Code here.
If you know me, you know promoting positive mental health unpins almost everything I do ⛅. And ‘measuring the right stuff’, is a great bit of advice for our personal as well as professional lives. In fact, measuring what you can control has been a principal tenant of Stoicism for over two thousand years. More recently many Therapists introduce their clients to the Circles of Control* when helping them better manage stress.
TIP: If you’re interested in completing the Circles of Control exercise for yourself, here’s a simple and free PDF excerpt from Mindhabit’s Find Your Why Guidebook, that shows you how to complete the exercise.
*The Circles of Control exercise has been adapted from content in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey.
6. Maintain your rhythm
“Effective teamwork begins and ends with communication.” Mike Krzyzewski
You must create a communication cadence or management rhythm, with clear channels of communication and meetings set up.
Whenever someone asks me about the great bosses I’ve had, the first thing that comes to mind is that I knew I could reach them when I needed to. So, make yourself available to your team. Your team is your priority, and seldom should they feel that they are disturbing you. Bearing in mind that does mean your team is escalating every single little problem. Empowerment and distributed decision making is for sure the way to go. However, your team should know that they are a priority for you, and that you are there for them when they need you.
Secondly, it’s critical to create planned meetings, artifacts, and events. From a meeting standpoint, below is a non-exhaustive list of recommended options:
Frequent standup meetings to update the team on project statuses, share critical information, raise problems (but not fix them)
Team meetings to build and nurture culture (not to be mistaken with the dreaded ‘status meeting’)
1-to-1 catch ups to provide opportunities for feedback, problem solving, mentoring, and coaching
Performance development meetings
Retrospectives
Celebrations (let’s not forget to celebrate! Work is supposed to be fun after all)
TIP: Interested in learning more about standups? Then check out Atlassian’s guide to daily scrum meetings, and specifically daily standups for agile teams
7. Role model the right behaviours
“Behaviour drives people - people drive business.” Unknown
People do not always listen to what we say, however, they see and often follow our behaviours. If you’re not walking the talk, chances are your team won’t be either. And that’s a surefire way to screw things up. It is not always easy to match our deeds to our thoughts and intent. It’s super-easy to tell people what to do (this article is a case-in-point), however, it’s not always as easy to do it yourself. If we’re asking our team’s to take action and change their behaviour, sometimes as leaders we also need to have a good hard look in the mirror. And take responsibility for role modelling the new behaviours ourselves.
One example I see in the workplace are managers who talk about the importance of a positive work life balance for their teams. But as individuals they appear and act as if they have limited work-life-balance themselves. They do not take the time out to exercise their minds and bodies, and drop hints in conversation about how much work they have on / the 100’s of emails they get each day (as if the number of emails you get each day is some measure of your importance?).
TIP: Once you’ve agreed on your ways of working and ideal behaviours, create some visual cues to remind yourself and your team members to walk the talk.
And that’s a wrap! 7 important elements to create, design, and foster a great team:
Get to know your team members.
Start with culture and shared values.
Create a psychologically safe environment.
Build the strategy together.
Measure the right stuff.
Maintain your rhythm.
Role model the right behaviours.
Hopefully you enjoyed that article, the ‘7’ aren’t the only things you need to do, however, if you start there, you’ll be ahead of the curve when it comes to developing a high-performing team.
Feel free to share your own ideas or input on how best to work with and lead great teams. And, if you’re interested in having a chat about great teams, strategies, and cultures you know where to reach me 💻📱.
Cheers, Gareth
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