I start tomorrow and what happens when I work for you? Something happens right? In fact, what did you say to me before I even started? Did you set the stage? Was I sure what happens in the first 30, 60 and 90-days? These are all questions you must answer for two explicit reasons. One, do you want to keep people around, even if it is only for at the most two years? Two, no one leaves a company, they leave managers – remember that!
Employees need something to happen and something to believe in. Maybe that is an easy activity in this post for the manager. Or maybe it isn’t. What happens when I start working for you? An earlier post stated the importance of issues to provoke learning. Maybe this connection is answering the question, what provokes belief in an organization?
Think path. This is essentially what an employee cycle does for a sales rep. They, the employee must see what you stand for and they must also see a path within it. In a very holistic way, this is their beginning, middle and end. They know where they stand and where they can move and go. If I work for you, who do I work for and to what end?
So they start. Let’s say you get someone in the first day, what would you say to that someone to cement how they feel about you, the company and ultimately about themselves. In sales, the first impression sets the stage. If you had to say something on the first day, what would set the stage for the employee about what you do and who you are? What would you say in the first 5 minutes?
Philosophy and culture; who are you? This can be a tricky question to answer. It speaks to the vision of the organization. If you do not know what it is, this can be a challenge. Find out what it is, if you do not know it. Think how your company matters and how they factor in the industry, with your demographic (customer base) and within the competition? What is supposed to happen when I walk into the store, when I am there and when I leave?
Activity; what happens in the first couple of days? How are you engaging them? Sales reps need something, anything that engages them as soon as possible. People need to do “something”. This is not computer stuff, trust me. They need to feel part a process that helps them see their path within the organization; even if it is counting stock. The best organization has someone engaged in work each and every day; especially their first day. As the day turns into a week or month, I need to know my job and all things that may make it up. That means what it is, what it may be and what it can be. A sales position is the best paid job and worst paid job, the individual decides and you have a say in how they decide. Especially on the first day.
Ongoing; plain and simple…do not train me once and call it done. I need to be challenged by my job each and every day. I am never fully trained, only temporarily fully trained on XYZ on March 15, 2012. What can I do next? What will make me cool tomorrow? Stimulate me, force me to think, challenge me.
This perhaps is the most prolific question to date from a regional manager:
How can I do a better job of taking my team to the next level? Sometimes I think we focus on the “did you do this, did you do that” and don’t take it farther (tell me what happened here, why did you or didn’t you do “X”). How can I help them see the value in that and encourage different levels of employee engagement?
I appreciate this question. So I will go along a general path. The first response is clarity. Have you clarified what the job looks like for your team as well as to show them what good looks like? And does your team have a mindset of growing and developing their team every day? If either one of those is not in place, any tip or tactic will fall short. Second, is causality (cause-effect). If you are developing someone, it is because you are recognizing an outcome of some type (good or bad). What I found out later in my managerial life is the outcome is the result of a behavioral choice. The employee decided to do or not do something to create the outcome. So the shift in mindset is to educate the possible outcomes, acknowledge the outcome and always develop, stimulate and influence the decision making root cause. Here is the reality, many time managers are asked to coach a thing; e.g. coaching sales performance. Their default is to coach the number, not the “why it happened in the first place”. Was is skill or will? Was it lack of training or lack of buy-in or recognition?
Developing others is made easy in this process: Identify job and desired outcome, grow and coach behavior, provide a relevant and realistic action plan to reinforce or correct behavior and then follow-up to see what happens next. In a way this is the easiest employee cycle that is more day-to-day. Train and trust, right? It isn’t about taking someone to another place as an objective per se; it is about creating a foundation where everyone follows in a growth momentum. They choose what happens next within a process and they know if “x” happens, “y” comes next.
Cheers