As a Leader, Do You Focus on the Road or the Wall?
Managing others is part art, part science, and lots of patience. Every person who manages others has been faced with the challenge of inspiring their team to achieve objectives while supporting their ongoing growth. How do you motivate people to get stuff done and help them develop professionally when they’re frustrated with the status quo?
It all starts with you. Whether you are a team lead, manager, executive, or the CEO, it starts with your psychology. Ben Horowitz in his book The Hard Thing About Hard Things said that the most difficult skill he learned as a CEO was the ability to manage his own psychology.
“Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared with keeping my mind in check.”
The problem is everybody learns to be a team lead, manager, etc. by being a team lead, manager and so on. No training prepares you sufficiently for the role until you’ve actually performed the functions and made the decisions. This is what is referred to as being promoted to your level of incompetence. In other words, the only way to get experience is to get experience.
Leading Your Team through the Status Quo
When I was a fairly new manager, I found myself being stretched to motivate my sales team to perform through a status quo season. When a sales team isn’t making sales, their attitudes slide down in direct proportion to the sales numbers. The team starts getting grumpy and desperate.
Grumpy, desperate sales people with bad attitudes repel customers. It’s a downward spiral.
At the next sales training meeting, I got my team in a great mental state by having them laugh and have fun. It’s the concept of focusing on the road, not the wall. When a race car driver is learning how to take a turn at 200 mph, he’s taught to look where he wants to go — the road ahead, not at the wall. If he focuses on the wall, that’s exactly where he’ll end up.
I knew I had selected the right people for the team — that wasn’t the issue. I had to cultivate an environment of psychological safety where they could re-connect with each other as people. If you’ve ever worked in sales, you know that the higher the stakes are, the more competitive the environment; thus the less friendly and cooperative team members can be with each other.
When I started the meeting, I took a different approach. I didn’t go in with the attitude that heads would roll if sales didn’t increase. I knew that focusing on the wall — our poor sales performance — would only lead them straight into the wall. Instead I took full responsibility for my own attitude about our sales performance. I didn’t make any excuses, and held myself accountable to the team for not leading and supporting them to achieve their sales targets with a genuine positive attitude.
Taking ownership of my attitude sent a powerful ripple through the team. I had shown vulnerability instead of pointing fingers. Then, one by one, without prompting, each team member volunteered their own admissions of negative thinking, jockeying for position, or otherwise not being a team player.
It was as if we all breathed a collective sigh of acceptance by confessing our non-team-like behaviors to each other. Every person then pledged to work together instead of a room full of individuals with their own self-interest.
I also had each sales person write down one thing they liked or admired about each of the other team members. We went around the group and read what each person wrote. It was an excellent way for everyone to hear how their peers respected them.
After that meeting, the energy level, enthusiasm, and commitment to success had returned to the team 1,000 fold. Everyone felt more connected to each other, and more connected to the big picture of hitting sales targets. Each person took personal responsibility for their own thinking, and the resulting actions that thinking had inspired. The team banded together to encourage and help each other sell more. Our sales increased and everyone was achieving their targets. Increased sales = happy employees.
Keeping The Stray Team Member Focused on the Road
But one Kum-Ba-Yah sales meeting does not solve every challenge among competitive team members. Each month I focused on each individual’s performance privately during a one-to-one review. This allowed for laser-focus on the specific issue[s] each person was experiencing.
Carol was the one team member who vocalized her negativity the most. She routinely came to work with an aggressive, demanding attitude, whining about how she wasn’t making her sales goals. She expressed disappointment that the store wasn’t making the collective sales goals, and she regretted transferring into our store a few months earlier.
One of our more seasoned sales persons, Gail, noticed Carol’s demeanor and smartly advised her, “Act as if you don’t need the sale.” With frustration Carol asked “What does that mean? How do I sell without acting like I need the sale when I so desperately do?”
Carol had transferred into our store a few months earlier. During one of her performance reviews, she dropped a bombshell on me that explained a lot: her previous manager did a majority of closing sales for her and she was credited with the sale, when in reality she wasn’t doing the selling. Her sales performance looked good on paper, but closing her own sales was a whole new experience for her, and her sales figures reflected it.
Sheesh — no wonder she was frustrated and desperate! Carol had been thrown into the proverbial deep end of the pool but still hadn’t learned how to coordinate her limbs to actually swim. Ugh.
Carol had only worked for the company for a year prior to arriving in our store, and was barely old enough to legally drink, so she was still quite new at, well, almost everything having to do with being an adult! I put my two best women on the project. Gail, Sharon, and I worked closely with Carol over the next few months to teach her both sales skills as well as relationship skills.
Once Carol’s attitude shifted, she stopped whining about not making sales, and her demeanor with customers softened. She came to work open-minded and willing to gain the experiences that would lend themselves to more confidence. As she gained experience by working with Gail and Sharon, she noticed her confidence level grew incrementally, every day, until she felt more secure. Her sales started to increase, and her sense of desperation began to melt away.
Gail and Sharon provided me with excellent counsel as a fairly new manager as well. The guidance they provided Carol was the same guidance I needed, albeit in a different context. They both observed to me that how *I* was showing up at work directly impacted the entire team too. We all needed to take responsibility for our attitudes at work, me included. [This is the “getting experience by getting experience” part of being a new manager.]
Managing others requires a close understanding of how each person is showing up at work, and also how you as their leader are showing up too. Your team will closely observe your level of self-awareness, willingness to be vulnerable, and personal ownership of your behaviors, attitudes, and actions. One way to think about your team and how to lead them is a saying I heard from a friend many years ago: “What parents do in moderation, children do in excess.”
You are a parent to your team of children. They look to you for guidance, support, and encouragement. If you show up at work with a hint of negativity or a bad attitude, your team will emulate and amplify that vibe. If you show up with enthusiasm and encourage them authentically, their attitude will swell in proportion.
When faced with the challenge of inspiring your team to achieve objectives while supporting their growth, remember: you as the leader must not simply maintain the status quo. You must stay focused on where you want to go, and be the shining light that guides your team around that turn at 200mph.
If you liked this post, please subscribe to my blog here.
***
Wendy Nolin is the President of Wendy Nolin Worldwide, a business and executive career coaching firm that liberates professionals from the status quo. Wendy has nearly 2 decades of business and career development experience coaching executives to advance in their career, and business owners to double their revenue in half the time. Her latest book, Own Your Greatnessis now available on Amazon.
