Reading a fascinating article in the NYTimes, Giving Kids Some Autonomy Has Surprising Results, got me thinking. What if we give our people more autonomy in how they manage their deals, days, what they do?
In the past 5-7 years, we’ve seen a movement to be completely prescriptive with our people and their activities. We script every conversation, yet the customers we are engaging don’t have the same script. Customer engagement plummets. We structure and architect each day, week, month. We assign number of dials, outreaches, meetings per day. Yet, our customers don’t want to talk to us. We assign pipeline metrics, identifying the number of opportunities each person must have for a “healthy” pipeline. Yet our pipelines are increasingly unhealthy. We have endless dashboards of metrics governing how we spend our days, “Dave you can pee at 10:15 and 3:45….”
As leaders, we had our own formulas for managing our organizations. We knew the ideal results each person should produced, firing the people who didn’t achieve them. To achieve our growth goals, we simply ran the math, looking at how many people, how many calls, how much activity were needed to achieve those goals.
When something happens outside these carefully structured days, we stop. We don’t know what to do. We look at our dashboards, metrics, scripts for insight on what we should do, how we should respond. At a loss, we tend to double down on all these things.
These highly structured/scripted approaches were designed to produce results. We ran the math on perfectly predictable revenue, and these were the answers. But………
It turns out they aren’t producing results. Fewer than 40% of sellers meet their goals. Fewer organizations are achieving their plans. People are more disengaged. Attrition is up. Customers don’t want to have anything do to with us. Virtually every indicator says “selling is broken!”
What if we started giving our people more autonomy to figure things out? Rather than scripting their conversations, what if we got them to think, “What do I want to accomplish in this conversation, what is the best way to do this?” Rather than dictating how they spend each hour, what if we gave them the autonomy to think, “This is what I have to accomplish this week, how should I manage my time to achieve this?”
What if, as managers, rather than following the formulas, we started thinking, “Is there a better way to achieve our goals?”
Some readers might be thinking, “This will be chaos if everyone is doing their own thing!”
But as the article points out, we have to create the underlying frameworks and guardrails to achieve success. We have to have the processes, we have to have the goals, we have to provide the direction and hold people accountable for that for which they are accountable.
Sometimes it’s as simple as shifting our conversations. For example, “You must follow the sales process!” to “Let’s look at how you can leverage the sales process to drive better deal strategies.” Or, “You have to make this many calls/outreaches!” to “What are the things most critical to achieving your goals this week? How are you going to accomplish them?”
What happens in these small shifts in focus and conversations. The act of their setting their goals, figuring out how they will achieve them, getting coaching to help them think things through, drives higher engagement and accountability. They take greater pride in what they accomplish and look to do more.
And isn’t this what we want for our people and our organizations? Don’t we want them to be driven to achieve? Don’t we want them to develop the abilities to figure out and execute what it takes to achieve their goals? Don’t we want to provide the coaching, processes, tools to help them do this? Wouldn’t we be spending their and our time better?
If educators are seeing great results with children, couldn’t we achieve the same with sellers?
Afterword: There is a bigger issue this article points out. Our education systems need to change and improve. If they are turning out students that don’t have the ability to do critical thinking, problem solving, or figuring things out. If they are turning out graduates that have resilience, who can’t establish goals. These are the people we bring into our workforce, we need them to develop the skills for success in their schools and universities.
Afterword: This is the AI generated discussion of this article. It’s longer, but has a couple of segments. The first 8 minutes is a general discussion about issues raised in the article. The remaining discussion talks about how we might put some of the practices I recommend in place. If pressed for time, listen to the first 8 minutes. If you want to learn more, listen to the full thing. In any case, enjoy!
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