Stop Listening to Your People
For our first contract with a global telecommunications company, we were mentoring a senior executive who was on the fast track even though he had no sales experience.
We asked to observe him holding one of his regular meetings. He held a conference call every Thursday for one hour at 4 p.m. with his staff. Each of the sales reps spoke, one at a time, reporting on their work. Our client listened and then told each person what to do. The call went on and on.
Afterward, we asked him how he thought it went. He said, ‘It went well. Everyone had a chance to speak, they got to learn from each other, and I gave some good advice. What did you think?’
‘Well, I said, ‘I’m pretty sure that nearly everyone was tuned out except when they were talking to you – and I don’t think you have much to show for the hour spent.’
After I had given him the data behind these conclusions, he agreed.
You are meeting again with one or more of your salespeople. It could be a team meeting, a one-on-one catch-up, a deal review, a trouble-shooting conversation, or a monthly update to discuss activity reports.
About fifteen minutes into the meeting, you suddenly realize that you are completely and utterly bored.
You’ve heard it all before – just last week, in fact! The same stories, the same explanations, the same reasons why deals have slipped.
You feel yourself getting impatient, but you hold back from letting it show. You are doing management by listening, just like you were taught. So you ask more questions – open-ended of course – but all you hear is more of the same why sales aren’t progressing.
Now you’re getting irritated. You insert more incisive inquiries to drill down into what’s really happening, but you just keep getting the same story told from a different angle. Finally, with time getting tight, you ask for pledges of what’s going to happen by the next meeting. Your skepticism rises as you listen to a familiar litany of promises, and you doubt that anything much will come of it.
We actually are big fans of listening, especially when it’s done right. Skilled listening can lead to true learning, and that gives you something new to work on – both with customers and with your sales force.
However, we’re not fans of story-telling, hypothesizing, or fiction of any kind. It is this ‘moving the air around’ that most management-as-listening enables. It takes an enormous amount of time – usually in conference calls or long face-to-face meetings – and it just doesn’t produce the insight and activity that will really change things.
A lot of management conversation fails to produce results because:
First, it fails to deal with facts and face reality – grounded in hard data, recognizing the unknown, free from assumptions and speculation.
Second, it usually ends up either assigning or avoiding blame – roasting someone on the spit or protecting one's own butt from the heat.
Third, people fail to notice and admit to their own part in a given mess, and therefore they cannot wisely identify and commit to actions that will create the results they seek.
So what can you do instead? Try this exercise – best done with a team – to help them face reality and commit to activity that will bring different outcomes.
Draw two columns on a piece of paper and have your team members list all their targets down the left hand side (outputs and inputs).
In the right hand column, have them list anything that could realistically get in the way of them achieving their targets.
Tell them that – at the end of the target period – they will either have achieved their results or their reasons why they didn’t. But they won’t have both.
Help them admit that the odds are high that some of those right-column things are going to happen.
Ask if they will commit themselves to their targets even if those things happen. Don’t go to step 5 until they really make the commitment. Stop the meeting and reconvene later if needed.
Tell them that now they are ready to develop a plan to succeed. Ensure that they do.
That will get the conversation moving in a different direction.