Stop Trying to Develop Your People
We were working with a company in Wales. It wasn’t a particularly well-managed company and people weren’t clear on what to do. There seemed to be no plans to develop the staff.
We spoke with the Chairman and asked him how he works with his staff to develop their abilities. He said, ‘I don’t spend any time developing them. I hire good people. We pay them a good wage, and we tell them the results that they’re supposed to produce. If they don’t produce, then we have a different conversation.’
Sacking people instead of developing them is a very expensive way to run a company. If you haven’t already done so, do a quick estimate on the amount of money it takes to get rid of someone and hire someone else. Don’t forget to include the value of time engaged in performance management, any legal negotiations, recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and training.
It's a lot cheaper to train your people than to replace them. And, nearly every manager we’ve ever met knows he has to do exactly this. It’s a rare manager who already has an all-star team. You’re probably not one of them. If you are, knock on wood, keep reading and commit yourself to doing all you can to make your all-star team even more productive.
If your team needs development, it's important to remember that you’re not here to rescue the fallen and lift up people who don’t have the ability or deep desire to make it. Neither are you here to babysit the heavy hitters and keep them sweet as long as they keep delivering. You’re here to develop a crack team that gets results.
Tending to your team’s development is arguably the most important thing you can do. A sales team that keeps learning its craft is a team that wins awards, quarter after quarter, year after year. It is a team that knows what it is doing, works together, and competes with purpose and without malice. New members end up fitting in well because the other team members stay close and not only watch what the new reps do but also show them how to work and how to succeed.
It's a job that's never done and dusted.
Your best sellers can lose their way, their edge, their passion and drive. Top salespeople are thoroughbreds, finely tuned, surprisingly vulnerable to slights from senior management, unfair compensation, record-keeping requirements from the pencil pushers, and the lack of a new challenge. Any of these things can prompt a search for greener pastures.
People in the lower tiers need help to step up or step out. You see the potential, you see the gaps in their skills and confidence, and you need to create conditions that will help them vault over the gaps and start playing big. You need to keep them challenged but not crushed by targets, to coach them to the next level of their ability, and to let go of those who just aren’t right for the job.
You know all this, but you’re busy. There are all those internal meetings that keep finding their way into your diary. Then there are the customer meetings and escalations that you’re handling because your reps just aren’t quite ready to shoulder the burden.
The result is that your good intentions for developing your team often fall by the wayside. You just don’t have the time to do the job right, so you compromise.
You don’t want to mess with success and slow down your top people, so you tend to let them do their thing, overlooking the team-inhibiting prima donna behavior and the occasional stretching of the boundaries.
You try pairing your average people with your more experienced people, but those reps aren’t being paid to train, and the time they spend doing so cuts into their sales performance.
You wind up spending most of your time with your worst performers. There’s pressure from the top to improve them or let them go, and you spend a lot of time little to show for it.
You wind up trying to develop your people instead of actually doing it.
One of our mentors once said, “You develop your people so your people can develop your business.“ Wise counsel, but how do you do it?
First, stop doing what isn’t working. If you’re compromising and being ineffective in developing your people, just quit what you’re doing. That will free a little time. Don’t use that time to come up with a grand plan. Try the following steps:
Get ready to act. Commit to a period of time each week that you will invest in developing your team.
Keep your eye on where you’re going. What will work in the long run is to give your people the following building blocks:
Method – a customer-centric way to sell that works for your business; a framework and a common language that everyone can follow.
Training – not one-off, but repeatable, professional, and embedded over time in their day-to-day work.
Coaching – creating a learning environment in which you know what your people are doing and you’re developing their ability to do it better and better.
Take the time you’ve got, and start simply, building as you go:
Meet one-on-one with each of your salespeople. Ask what they need to be more successful, move heaven and earth to help them get it.
Start with your people who are already good and ready to step up alongside your best performers.
Then meet with your best performers.
Then work with the lowest tier, perhaps in pairs or small groups.
At the end of every meeting, schedule the next one. Never cancel these meetings. They are your priority.
Trust your instincts and exercise your smarts. On this simple foundation, build something strong and lasting that you and they can be proud of.