Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been setting up and defining what I think is the single most important challenge facing sales organization. I started with a discussion around our obsession and abuse of metrics in, If It Can’t Be Measured, It Can’t Be Managed, I went on to discuss The Death Of Sales Management!
At its core is understanding business beyond the dashboards and being able to exercise judgment beyond the data.
In understanding the business, I’ve stolen Peters/Waterman’s MBWA, using the concept of Leadership by Walking Around. The shorthand is the “walkabout.” (Thanks to my Aussie friends.)
I learned the power of these walkabouts early in my leadership career. It’s not just what I learned, but the example started changing the way people thought and acted—hopefully more openly.
I learned a new definition of the speed of light. As the new CRO, I started wandering around within the organization. Word spread at what seemed to be the speed of light within the organization, “Dave’s doing something different, something is happening!” People were watching, they started thinking and acting differently, even though they weren’t involved in the conversations.
I recognize it’s hard to get out of the control room, particularly when things are going at 200 mph. But things aren’t working so well sitting behind a dashboard. Think about doing something different.
In fact, some of you may be thinking, “Dave, why are you so anti-dashboard?!?” The walkabout doesn’t replace the dashboard. It changes your ability to interpret it. It helps to establish the “why” a certain indicator persists.
Stated differently, the dashboard helps you think about where to look. The walkabout helps you understand what you are looking at. Judgment connects the two and enables you to take action.
It means getting out to where the work is actually done. It’s sitting down with your people, your customers, and partners. It’s understanding what’s happening, how things get done, what needs to change. It’s rolling up your sleeves and working with them.
But how do you do this? Where do you start? What are the dangers?
Here’s a laundry list, roughly prioritized.
Getting started:
- First, choose a particular area that you want to focus on. The walkabout I describe is not aimless wandering, even if that is a learning journey. Choose an area that is important to you. It may not be the biggest problem, but there’s something happening that you want to better understand.
- While this may be counterintuitive, I’d suggest you choose the one that you have the greatest confidence you understand. Choosing a known broken area is obvious, it’s what people will suspect you focus on, but it teaches you less. Your behavior becomes one of diagnosis and fixing. Not deep learning and understanding. Choosing one you think you understand may produce the greatest surprise. Perhaps stated more sharply: A good metric hides more than a bad one because nobody is looking.
- Get specific, get into the weeds. Too often, as leaders we aggregate information. We see win rates are down. The data on our dashboards represent a collection of hundreds of situations but provides no deep understanding. Sit down, look at a deal, or an account, or a specific call. “Walk me through this loss,” is far more valuable than knowing we have a win rate of 20%. You don’t have to look at all of them, but get into the weeds of what happened, what people did, what resulted from it, why they chose to take certain actions, why they chose to omit certain things. The devil is in the details.
- Resist the urge to have a hypothesis or agenda. Let me be clear about the difference between having a hypothesis and not. The hypothesis is about what you think you will find and testing whether you find it or not. Seeking to understand is about learning something new. Having an agenda makes your conversations an inspection and people will seek to validate that hypothesis. Going with a question, which you do not have the answer for, opens people up to collaborative learning discussions.
- Resist the urge to fix! The objective is learning and understanding. You are trying to see what’s really happening in the organization, not fix every problem you come across. Some coaching, some ideas, but don’t dive in and fix it. It’s the job of the people you are talking to. Above all, resist the urge to find fault, that will shut everything down.
How do you do them:
- Recognize the first visits or meetings you conduct will be viewed as theater. Since it’s something people haven’t experienced, they will tend to answer things the way they think you want them to answer. They will view your visit as going through the motions. They’ve seen it too many times before. It’s on the fourth, fifth, tenth conversations that people recognize you aren’t going through the motions. Let me be clear, I’m not suggesting you have to have four, five, or ten conversations with the same person, your skills at having the conversations and improving as you have more. You will get much more out of the fourth or the tenth than you got from the first. But you had to do the first few to get there.
- Recognize that people are watching and judging. They may not be directly involved but word will get out. As they see you having more conversations with more people, they will become more open and honest. The behaviors you model, your curiosity, interest, caring will be seen by people. But the example you are setting will have an impact on more than the people you are talking to.
- Mix it up. Some of the conversations should be one on one. Some may be small groups. Be careful about mixing too many levels into a group conversation. The lower-level people are likely to shut down. Where possible, make these F2F. It’s amazing what you observe when you are F2F. Some related to the conversation, some unrelated but give you impressions about what’s happening. After each meeting, send a short thank you. Perhaps highlight a point the person made. Let them know you value their time. Don’t copy or blind copy anyone, just make it between you and the person.
- If you are a senior leader in a large organization, recognize managers reporting to you may “curate” who you speak with. They will influence what you are learning. They will worry that the wrong person may make them look bad. As a senior executive, I spent a lot of time in the field. Ad-hoc coffee conversations, grabbing someone for lunch, help reduce this. Seeing a deal that may have been won or lost and talking to the person, or some action that may have caught your attention.
What you do with what you’ve learned:
- Resist the urge to present the results as a PowerPoint. The moment, people see the slide, “I did 15 interviews and discovered these 3 issues….,” everything will die. People will recognize you actually had an agenda, you’ve gotten the data to support it, and you have a fix. This is about learning, discovery, understanding. It doesn’t need a slide, it needs collaborative conversations with your team to better understand, and, possibly, to explore changes and shifts.
- Resist the urge to move fast. Yeah, I know the mantra is “Move fast and break things…” You don’t have to do it; they may already be broken. Sit with what you have learned. Think about it. Ask more questions. Give yourself the chance to imagine something new, rather than reacting with the quick fix.
- Did you change your mind about anything? What we see in the control room, and what we see where the work is being done could not be more different. If as a result of doing your walkabout, you haven’t learned something new, discovered a possible change, you haven’t been asking the right questions.
- Every leader on your team must be conducting their own walkabouts. Not mimicking yours, if you are the top leader. Each has something different they want to understand more deeply. Resist the temptation to measure them on doing this, it’s not how many people they have talked to, how many walkabouts they have done. What’s important is what they have learned, and what you, in turn, can learn from them. It’s what you and your team then decide what you might do based on these.
At this point, you may be throwing your arms up in frustration thinking, “Dave, I get it. We have to go out and work with our people, we have to talk to them! But what’s this mean, other than adding more mileage to by airline points, what’s the point?!?”
Some quick thoughts and the bridge to the following article.
Our dashboards tell us what has happened. They don’t give us insight into why it’s happening. The only way we get to that is by actually seeing and being part of the work that produces those metrics.
“Why do I have to talk to so many people?” No single conversation can tell you what you need to know. They can only tell you part of it. The discovery, “This is happening in a lot of places,” or “I wouldn’t have been able to connect the dots, without these conversations,” is what you are really looking for.
My recommendation to not leap to action may be bothering you. Rightfully, you might be thinking, “What’s the point? I get this information and I shouldn’t do anything about it?” What the walkabout produces is understanding. But the moment you decide what matters and what to do about it, you are exercising judgment.
The core issue we are exploring is developing our abilities to exercise judgment. Our dashboards help us understand what’s happening. The walkabout helps us understand why. Judgment is the ability to connect the dots and take meaningful action.
We’ll dive more deeply into in the next post.
Afterword: Again, this AI based conversation is so creative in the way this article is interpreted. They provide an analogy of driving a car that’s brilliant. They also get deep into the experience of doing the walkabout. Enjoy!
