Mark states that, as a manager, you must make a fundamental decision. You must ask yourself if you truly care about the success, growth and well-being of others. If you don't and are more motivated by personal success, this is ok, but it may mean a career in management and leadership doesn't make sense for you.
He shares that the common reasoning behind why people are promoted to management for the first time is because they are outstanding as individual contributors. The assumption is then made that because they were a good salesperson, they will make a good sales manager (or similarly for any other function).
Unfortunately, this is flawed logic.
The best managers don't have to be the best individual contributors. They fundamentally require different skills and mindsets.
As a manager, success comes not through your success but the success of your people. This means you must be motivated to help others rather than solely pursue personal success. There will be times in the course of a management career where you are working hard, you are helping people succeed around you, and this doesn't fall back into your success - you must be ok with this and take satisfaction that you are supporting those around you.
Therefore, if you fundamentally don't care or can't look in the mirror and say that you genuinely love to support others to succeed, then a managerial position isn't the right one for you.
View the full Masterclass by Mark Crowley at https://10xmanagers.com/mii-view/Mark-Crowley
Mark wrote the book Lead From The Heart: Transformational Leadership For The 21st Century 11 years ago. Since, he has spent his time developing and supporting his ideas on why leading from the heart scientifically works.
Leading from the heart, as it sounds, is about a more human approach to leadership and management than the more traditional approach to business centred around logic and reason.
"Managers often try to lead with a 'business persona,' they think is right and is more acceptable in the workplace, rather than being their authentic selves. There is a regressive perception that emotions are a sign of weakness in the business world, which leads to a lack of "heart" in many management and leadership styles. The effect of this is often more transactional relationships.
Mark proposes that "Leading From the Heart" builds authentic relationships, which consistently outperform more transactional relationships because:
Ultimately, you need to approach leadership with an understanding that people are emotional beings and ignoring this part of their characters will always mean their potential goes untouched.
Whilst this may seem more obvious today, Mark shares that this wasn't always the case. There has been a gradual process of recognition in the business world that Leading From the Heart makes sense, and today's environment has accelerated this process through the COVID pandemic.
Interestingly, Mark shares that whilst it seems more obvious today, there is scientific evidence of why leading from the heart physically stimulates the people around us positively.
To watch the full masterclass go to https://10xmanagers.com/mii-view/Mark-Crowley
Michael states that to be a great salesman these days you have to be an ambivert.
The idea that a great salesman is the charismatic, gung-ho, loudest in the room extrovert is dated. Michael shares that you need to be extremely flexible these days and the key skill is to be able to tailor your behaviour and approach to that of your client in order to build trust.
Michael shares an example of how you can have the same conversation with two people and you gel with one and close the deal while the second one is unresponsive to your approach and you fail. This isn't because your material was bad, but that individual did not receive it in the same way as the first.
As the sales person, it is on you to read the room, understand what is needed and then adapt your delivery, phrasing, and persona to maximise their success. This means that being an extrovert isn't a benefit in sales, but rather be an ambivert - someone who can adapt and be flexible based on the person they are talking to.
Michael, who’s a student of DISC, shares that there are 4 behaviour types that all people can be categorised in to some extent:
D - Dominant
I - Influential
S- Steadfast
C - Compliant
Ultimately, use these personality types to understand what sort of character your client is and adapt your approach accordingly.
For example, if you’re talking to a dominant personality type, they’re usually quick and to the point before moving on if disinterested. So, you have to keep it sharp and state the benefits immediately. However, if it’s an “Influential” type of person, then they are more interested in building relationships and you must spend time on this accordingly etc.
Of course, this doesn’t mean you should not be your authentic self, it simply means tweaking your delivery to suit their client's personality types as a means to build trust and keep them engaged.
Head over to https://10xmanagers.com/mii-view/michael-leigh to see the full Manager Masterclass.
Therefore, accepting that we are all salespeople, it’s critical we understand sales and how we can master it.Michael believes it’s extremely important to redefine sales as the art of selling has transitioned significantly in the recent past.Historically, sales and selling have always had a terrible reputation due to your stereotypical used car salesman. This has, unfortunately, resulted in people being wary of selling or even accused of selling as it’s now been equated with something unpleasant.
However, Michael shares that the simple truth is that we are selling every day regardless of our role. Although it may not be as obvious as selling a product, we’re constantly negotiating, influencing and persuading with our family, children, friends, colleagues etc.
You could be a marketing manager trying to secure a budget for an upcoming initiative, an engineering leader influencing your engineers to build in a certain way or style, or just about anything else. If you can't sell, you won't be effective in a business setting.
In fact, Michael shares that in a study of 9,057 non-sales employees; the results found that these people spent 24 minutes of every working hour on sales-based activities in the form of negotiation, persuasion or influence.
Michael shares that salespeople have transitioned from being the holders of knowledge who could push all the relevant information to clients in a bid to convince them to buy, to now being in a position where they must build a genuine relationship and create mutual wins for them and their counterparts.
Nowadays, people who try to portray themselves as the person with all the answers will often get caught out.
An effective salesperson doesn’t push their product to their counterpart but instead asks penetrating questions to further understand and help develop the thinking of their client/stakeholder in a bid to identify whether their product/service/idea would be of benefit to them, and make the sale of it a win-win.
If through this investigation the salesperson identifies it is not a good fit, they will shake hands and walk away.
Head over to https://10xmanagers.com/mii-view/michael-leigh for the full Manager Masterclass
Tom shares that as a manager, if you work in a company with resources to help you hire, you have to take advantage of it but make sure they are working with you to source your ideal candidates. If you are receiving the wrong types of candidates, work with them to refine their processes.
As a manager in a smaller organisation, you may have the mandate to source candidates.
Alongside his "student mentality" trait, Tom shared what other characteristics he looks for when hiring salespeople:
1) Optimism: Since sales is a challenging role with a lot of rejection, you must find a candidate who's optimistic, positive and can look at a situation with a glass half full approach.
2) Work Ethic: You need to be self-motivated to work in sales, similar to managing your own business. You need to put in the work to be successful.
3) Resilience: Resilience is key to success in a sales role. You must be able to pick yourself back up not only when you have a bad day but even if you've missed a month's targets or missed out on a promotion.
4) Team Player: A lone wolf that delivers results will not fit well within the team culture Tom likes to build regardless of their individual talent.
To identify whether an individual has a trait, Tom recommends asking them interview questions that prompt them to tell a story whereby they have demonstrated the trait in the past. You can then examine this story and understand if it was a good reflection of the trait you are looking for.
To assess candidates, you can make a grid of your required skills and behaviours and assign each one a score based on their answers to your questions. Ultimately, you will have an overall skill score and behaviour for each candidate that you can use to compare with the perception of other interviewers.
Check out the full Masterclass at - https://10xmanagers.com/mii-view/tom-love
When it comes to building culture, Tom shares that you will make mistakes along the way. However, he shared the frameworks he used to help frame his strategy and planning towards building culture:
Patrick Lencioni's Model of team building starts with the first requirement of needing to build trust. Without trust in your team, there is no safety to engage in healthy conflict and debate.
Once trust is established, and your team are debating, you can move towards holding one another accountable, setting real team values and then delivering results.
Recognising you can’t jump straight to results is critical, and you must start by focussing on trust-building and moving through the stages systematically.
Similarly, the cycle of Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing model recognises the process you must go through when team building.
Tom shares that the forming stage is when you start to establish something new within a team. This could be an entirely new team of people, new processes, or new technology. The goal of forming is to introduce the latest components and enable everyone to explore them effectively. In this period, you will often see people curious about "the new". To be effective in this stage, you must do simple things like allowing your team to get to know one another and get excited about the change.
You will eventually hit the storming phase where the conflict begins to arise - this could be a conflict between people or conflict towards new ideas as people question whether the change was good. During these times, engaging with your people and helping them with healthy and constructive communication and debate is critical. Even with the challenges they face, help them connect with the end goal of why this change has been made and why it will benefit them.
This will eventually lead to Norming, where things become more natural, and finally, Performing where you start to see the benefits of the change.
Check out the full Masterclass at https://10xmanagers.com/mii-view/tom-love
According to Tom Love, culture plays a vital role in creating high-performance teams.
After all, your team can be the absolute best in terms of skill. However, if there’s no environment conducive to the people that have mastered that skill or if the environment can’t contribute to your employees bringing their skills together, it will not lead to high performance.
Psychological safety and zero judgement are examples of essential components of an effective team culture as they allow your people to come to work as their authentic selves and perform to their best abilities. The environment and culture your team are exposed to are among the most significant factors when promoting high-performance.
Now, culture is a broad term, but Tom shares some of the aspects you must pay attention to:
Tom shares his experience of working at a previous organisation, XpertHR. He tells the story of when he was asked to go to California and build an XpertHR US branch from the ground up.
When establishing the team, he initially had a reference in the form of the culture from the UK head office. However, he quickly realised he’d have to build a brand new culture that suited the new team he was building to ensure they connected and resonated with it.
The process of allowing a culture to develop and shape was tough, and it took six months of challenges before the members found their place in the business. Once the culture was embedded and people felt comfortable, it didn’t take long for the results to follow.
Check out Tom's full Masterclass at https://10xmanagers.com/mii-view/tom-love
Kyle believes that trust and honesty are the most important components of any culture. These values are the fundamental pillars that will help you create an environment that is conducive to getting the most out of your employees.
However, when it comes to implementing these two core values, Kyle recommends you be mindful of the following:
It's essential to understand that trust is relative. It is highly dependent on the level of the employee in the organisation. For example, in Kyle's world of finance, if you're hiring an early-career analyst, you should be able to trust that they are financially literate and can analyse financial statements. However, this level of trust is very different from hiring a more senior employee where you may need to trust them with client relationships etc. You must match the trust you give to the person you work with. Too much or too little trust that should be expected of a person can both cause issues.
Honesty is another significant value that must be implemented in a team or organisational culture if you want people to operate effectively together.
Kyle shares that his organisation had a big push on "Radical Candour" in the past. However, he believes this implementation wasn't as effective as it could have been and resulted in people being overly direct and blunt. He shares that with radical candour, while you are supposed to be honest, that doesn't excuse you from being devoid of all emotional intelligence or situational awareness - this can very quickly lead to undermining trust in your relationships.
Unfortunately, similar to how one extreme end of Radical Candour is being obnoxiously aggressive, the other end is ruinous empathy where you're over-empathising with people. It's essential as a manager and as a leader to find a middle point between the two.
View the full Manager Masterclass at https://10xmanagers.com/mii-view/kyle-pearse
The foundation of trust and honesty all stems from understanding your employee as a person. What do they value, what do they enjoy, and what is important to them?
Once you understand your employee as a person, you are equipped to create a culture that enables them to perform better and allow for them to be happier.
Kyle believes you should strive to “empower” your people to run their business as they wish. This enables them to shape their days in a way that supports what they most value - however, this requires trust from you as their manager.
Kyle believes that when you empower an employee to operate in a way that best fits their lives and values, it encourages them to go the extra mile, which will benefit the business, you and themselves.
He shares his tips on how to empower your employees:
To effectively empower people, you need to provide them with a way to improve their job. Now, this doesn't mean you give them loads of work and ask them to get it done. It's about stretching their capabilities. Give them something that makes them slightly uncomfortable, and allow them to tackle it.
This supports their development and growth as a professional and keeps them engaged by not becoming bored with the "basics" of the job.
When it comes to stretching them, Kyle provides an example:
At his workplace, a junior employee's basics are analysing financial statements, writing credit papers for committees, or writing pitch decks. However, empowering/stretching his employees would be getting them to be involved in those pitches and to be involved in them structuring conversations with the clients.
In business, there will be an overlap of teams where people are needing to collaborate to get work done. Therefore, all the involved teams and individuals need to be aligned with an overarching core set of values and "rules".
This will help empower all the employees and understand what's expected when people work together. This enables people to work together and collaborate effectively with a "ruleset" that allows the independence of hierarchy. If there is a misalignment or misunderstanding, people can use the expected rules and values to operate and overcome the challenges they face together.
When someone in your team has a great idea, and it's implemented, you must publicly celebrate their success and recognise their contribution as their manager. If it's an organisation that caters to clients, not only must you let your leaders know but also the clients. It would be best if you never took credit for their work because they're "junior".
After all, they are working hard to deliver for you and should be recognised for these efforts. Empower them to stretch themselves but then ensure that they are rewarded and recognised, so they will likely give the same effort in the future.
Avoid the tendency to justify your contributions to a project and find satisfaction in the progress and success of your people.
To watch the full interview, and all our other Manager Masterclasses head over to - https://10xmanagers.com/mii-view/kyle-pearse
This week's leader is Jamie Dixon, Consultant of ShapingPaths.
In this Masterclass, he shares actionable insights around:
To get full access and exclusive content to this interview check it out at: https://10xmanagers.com/mii-view/jamie-dixon
This week's leader is Dodge Woodall, CEO and Founder of Bournemouth 7s Festival.
In this interview, he shares actionable insights around:
To get full access and exclusive content to this interview check it out at: https://10xmanagers.com/mii-view/dodge-woodall
This week's leader is Diego Valenzuela, UK Country Manager at Floward.
In this interview, he shares actionable insights around:
To get full access and exclusive content to this interview check it out at: https://10xmanagers.com/mii-view/diego-valenzuela
This week's leader is John Jeffcock, CEO at Winmark.
In this interview, he shares actionable insights around:
To get full access and exclusive content to this interview check it out at: https://10xmanagers.com/mii-view/john-jeffcock
This week's leader is Lee Houghton, Director at GetKnowledge.
In this interview, he shares actionable insights around:
To get full access and exclusive content to this interview check it out at: https://10xmanagers.com/mii-view/lee-houghton
This week's leader is Doug Forbes, the Consulting Director at ONQU.
In this interview, he shares actionable insights around:
To get full access and exclusive content to this interview check it out at: https://10xmanagers.com/mii-view/doug-forbes
This week's leader is Simon Prior, the Head of Technology - QA at EasyJet.
In this interview, he shares actionable insights around:
To get full access and exclusive content to this interview check it out at: https://10xmanagers.com/mii-view/simon-prior
This week's leader is Clara Ross-Benham, the Head of People at Olsam.
In this interview, she shares actionable insights around:
To get full access and exclusive content to this interview check it out at: https://10xmanagers.com/mii-view/clara-ross-benham
This week's leader is Suzanne Homewood, the Enterprise Sales Director at MoneyHub.
In this interview, she shares actionable insights around:
To get full access and exclusive content to this interview check it out at: https://10xmanagers.com/mii-view/suzanne-homewood
This week's leader is Ed Foxell who the Operations Director at Kinly.
In this interview, he shares actionable insights around:
To get full access and exclusive content to this interview check it out at: https://10xmanagers.com/mii-view/edward-foxwell
This week's leader is Reneilwe O'Kane who the Head of SDR at MetaCompliance.
In this interview, she shares actionable insights around:
To get full access and exclusive content to this interview check it out at: https://10xmanagers.com/mii-view/reneilwe-okane
