Moving The Rock

James opens the episode by recounting a conversation with a tech CEO about the most productive way to think about raising her sales team’s potential and performance. It starts by making sure the ‘why’ that drives each member of your team is aligned with the ‘why’ that drives your business. Too often these ‘whys’ are diametrically opposed. Then, you must bring it all home by adjusting your sales team’s process, methodology and skills to give life to this new way of thinking and improved results to their pipelines and paychecks.

Chris kicks us off with reference to the life and death of Achilles, the heroic warrior from the Iliad. In this episode we explore the process of moving yourself, your team and your company forward, from being stuck in the ‘Hero's Trap’ to being empowered by the creation of a ‘New Growth Engine’. Making the transition means you have to leave something familiar and comfortable behind, but it also means you have the ability to take your game, wins, rewards and recognition to the next level.

What does a culture that demands heroic efforts from leaders and people say about the potential of an organization? When heroic efforts are the norm and normal efforts are the exception, people and teams underperform. Short-term goals may still be hit, but long-term value will always suffer. The performance costs can be measured in higher turnover, loss of key employees, longer periods of time between growth milestones, lower operating margins and lower valuations. Healthy leaders build scalable teams and healthy cultures. The value of change is undeniable and its within every growth company’s reach.

More than ever, valued leaders and team members want more from their experiences at work. Their definition of what is meaningful to them has changed significantly as we exit the pandemic, and organizations are failing to keep up. In this episode we continue our conversation around meaningful success with a deep dive into four transactional behaviors that hijack the investments companies make in their most valued employees, and in many cases, cause more harm to the company than if they had done nothing at all.

If your goal is to build a team that has the potential to be world class, where should your focus be? Can you sustain world class outcomes by simply focusing on heroic individual achievements, or must you cultivate a deeper understanding of what the larger ‘team’ requires to succeed? In this episode we continue to explore the lie of heroic efforts and the value of seeing your ‘band of individual contributors’ as an organization of aligned and disciplined team members.  

Is it about false hustle and hype? Is it about proving yourself worthy and doing whatever it takes to win? Or, is it about creating something of value, the journey you walk, and who you choose to walk with along the way. Join us as we explore the hard side of this “soft” topic, including a powerful formula healthy leaders can deploy to build scalable teams and growth cultures. 

Everyone does it and almost everyone thinks they can be improved. As with any discipline, there are right and wrong ways to run a sales team meeting, especially if your goal is to advance your team’s overall effectiveness. The key objective is establishing a discipline, the key requirement is your commitment, and the key deliverable is accountability.

If your goal is to hire and retain top performers, who can sustain a high level of output, then you must be prepared to meet them where they are. You must be ready, willing and able to build a learning organization capable of helping top performers maintain their personal and professional growth trajectory. If you don’t, your organization will become mediocre and top performers will see you as a source of far more risk than return. Listen to learn how to position coaching as a pillar of your learning organization and a more predictable path to success.

The decisions we make plus the actions we take equal the outcomes we create. Execution, the combination of our decisions and actions, has as much to do with what happens between our ears as the experience, skills and talent we bring to a task. Join us as we discuss the importance of cultivating the proper awareness of a situation, i.e. collecting the right data and/or evidence, and the importance of exploring the assumptions, biases and judgements that can limit our effectiveness and potential.

As we learned in the last episode, goals can hold you back if they don’t allow you to reach beyond what you think is possible for yourself and your role. In this episode we continue the conversation by exploring the three stages of development of one’s Role Identity. Essential for leaders who want to model a way of thinking and behaving that has the power to truly help valued team members reach and redefine higher levels of performance.