Stop Motivating Your People
Welcome back to the Stop > Start series. This week, we introduce you to the diagnostic tool we have used with great success both internally and with hundreds of our clients across the globe.
It was one of those conversations that spontaneously occurs when you’re receptive to unexpected opportunities. I was on a train, heading into London on a Monday morning, anticipating a day of training with a small, technology services firm that specializes in configuring Oracle and Microsoft applications for their clients.
I struck up a conversation with Robert, an engaging man in his mid-thirties, who a month earlier had been promoted to sales manager in his company. His was a typical story. He’d been successful, very successful actually, as a salesperson for his employer. He’d made a lot of money, had a wonderful time, and then he’d been promoted to management.
It had not been an easy ride for him. He now had direct line management responsibility for the six people who had consistently ranked below him in the company league table. He knew them, of course. He’d shared numerous pints of beer after work, and joined in the moaning and complaining.
That was fun, but now he was finding that these complaints had roots deeper than he’d realized. His team was demoralized and had been for quite a while. He didn’t really understand why people – especially those who had a job that depended so much on maintaining a positive mindset – would let themselves wallow in such petty things. That was preventing them from making money!
“And now,” he said to me, “it’s my job to get them motivated. What do I do?”
Sales is a challenging job – really challenging.
There are customers to deal with – customers who often don’t really know what they need, who ask for things that won’t solve their problems, and who often believe that you’re trying to con them. They block your team’s access to stakeholders, and they often follow procurement processes that prevent both buyer and seller from arriving at the best decision for their company.
There are also internal customers to deal with: teammates who are trying to move you in a different direction, delivery staff who may or may not fulfill the promises made to the customer in the sales process, and service team members who may or may not take care of problems that arise.
Then there’s all that noise and distraction from well-intended but sales-ignorant people from products, marketing, HR, supply chain - and, lest we forget, the finance people who keep setting unrealistic targets. - who think they know exactly how you and your team should be doing their jobs.
It’s easy to see why your salespeople’s motivation slips from time to time. And, when they are ‘down’ instead of ‘up,’ their ability to sell suffers. When salespeople are demotivated, complaining, and lacking confidence, you know their motivation needs to change, and fast.
The problem is - and, nobody ever tells you this when you become a sales manager - that you cannot motivate your people!
Let that sink in for a moment. It’s a bit depressing, but, if you think about it, you’ll know it’s true. You cannot motivate someone else. Only one person in the world can do this - and that’s the person himself.
If you can accept this initially frustrating truth, you are on the road to a remarkable transformation in your management style. You will start drawing some interesting conclusions:
You can’t change someone else’s attitude - only they can.
If they don’t know how, they can learn.
If they won’t learn, or they learn but won’t do it, it’s not your fault, but theirs.
This logic leads directly to a decision that will change your management approach forever: you can’t make someone have an effective attitude, but you can require them to maintain one for themselves!
You can require your team to spend their working time more ‘up’ than ‘down.’
You can require them to recover quickly from disappointment - in minutes rather than hours, days, or months.
It is critical to require this of your people. Your team’s sales success will absolutely depend on its ability to maintain a genuinely positive attitude, one in which they keep seeing possibilities, no matter what challenging things happen.
As team members improve their ability to manage their attitude, they think more clearly and act more boldly. We call this an “above-the-line” attitude, and it’s the most powerful force for performance in every job, but especially in sales.
What is your part in their learning to manage their attitude? You’ve got to get very skilled at creating the conditions in which they can do two things:
Notice when their attitude has fallen “below-the-line.”
Take the steps required to elevate it again so they can confidently move forward.
We think that is the most important skill a sales manager can learn. It’s how he can help his team want to do what the business needs them to do.
Try this, for starters. Make a list - mentally or on paper - of the ways, directly and indirectly, that you try to motivate your people, inspire them, lift their spirits, make them feel better - all that stuff.
Now, make a vow to yourself to stop doing these things - all of them – now.
Then, at your next team meeting:
Share your list. Tell them that you’ve been taking responsibility for motivating them and you’re going to stop trying to do what’s impossible.
Establish a new standard for your team: each person, including yourself, is required to (a) recognize when their attitude is ‘down’ and, second, (b) get it ‘up’ quickly.
Tell them that you will have an individual conversation with each of them to agree on how this requirement will be part of their specific development plan. Reward them as they succeed with this requirement.