Episode 30: Why Entrepreneurial Thinking Will Be Critical To Team Success in 2024

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Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice on the complex world of B2B commercial selling. So today we are talking entrepreneurial thinking, or ethinking as I like to call it. Entrepreneurial thinking has been around for a long, long time. This is nothing new, right? How do we bring entrepreneurial thinking or ethnicing into businesses has been a topic that has been asked for decades for me. However, I think that now it has never been more important. And I can throw lots of personal reasons as to why I think entrepreneurial thinking is really important now, but I like to base opinions or personal opinions with facts. So today, before we get into why entrepreneurial thinking is really critical to team success, I just want to relate it back to some of the really key findings that came out of episode 26, one of our more recent podcasts that spoke around the challenges or the key challenges that sales leaders are experiencing in 2023 and 2024. So let's just have a recap on those because I think it's going to be really important to pare back as to why E thinking is really critically important at the moment. So there were five key areas that came out of that market research project. One was talent management. So sales leaders are finding talent management as by far the single greatest challenge for them in this year and likely into 2024. So that's all about employee hiring, recruiting, motivating performance and then retention of those employees. The second one was around building trust with customers. We then flowed into key account management and customer retention as the third. The fourth was social selling. So getting their teams to embrace social selling, which is a really difficult topic, particularly for people that haven't used social media or social selling as a go to for large parts of their career. And last but not least was around using Technology effectively. So they were the five key challenges that sales leaders are seeing as the biggest for 2023 and into 2024, where I think it's really important to be embracing ethynking is around two or three of those, but, but in particular talent management. And I'll go through that in a minute. It definitely seeps into building trust with customers. Right. So that's ownership around our customers. But for me, it's absolutely critical in making sure that we're avoiding AI couch potatoes, as I call them. Right. So the fifth one there around using technology effectively in a business, for me, we have to make sure we continue to embody a team's ability to think for themselves. So in doing my research, and I did some research for this episode, over and above what the market trends are saying to us, I found some really clear white papers. And one of them I'll share in the notes around this chat, but there were really clear white papers talking around AI in the education sector, which I think is really relevant for just about any sector you're in. Right. When you're learning, how is AI influencing that? And these papers, yes, they said AI was overall very beneficial to the learning process, which I like, and that's fantastic. But they did caution that the overuse of AI in particular is posing a very high risk, and they did say very high risk for reducing human decision making capabilities and making users lazy by getting AI to perform work for them. So use it or lose it. And lastly around security and privacy issues. So again, I'll put that link into the end of the podcast so you can have a look. So for me, that was really clear. And essentially the summary says if you are using AI too often or using too much tech, it is actually reducing your ability to make decisions by bringing forward a laziness, a laziness in your approach to how you do work. So this is where I think ethynking is really important and let me try and wrap that into the other couple of challenges that leaders are facing for 2023 and 2024. So for me, ethinking, which is all around the ability, and I'll define ethyncing a little bit in a minute, but it's all around the ability to think critically and bring ideas into a business. Right. For me, where we have technology that's reducing the amount of critical thinking, decision making, increasing laziness, or reducing the amount of new and real and unique work that's happening, we have a use it or lose it scenario where team members or employees or people in this world are actually challenging, challenging themselves to learn less. Right. So are you thinking the exact opposite of that? I think really, really important in making sure we're balancing out the use of tech. That, of course, then flows into our employer, our staff engagement. Right. So staff that are thinking for themselves, staff that are feeling like they're involved in decision making staff, staff that are feeling like they have a real impact in determining the future of the business generally are going to be more engaged in that business. They're going to perform better because they have a stronger sense of ownership. And out of that obviously comes an improvement in results. So by having something like ethinking live and present in a business, it's not only helping reduce tech laziness or tech couch potatoes, but it's having an equal and commensurate impact on the team's thinking and their engagement and essentially the entire approach that we're taking to talent management. So I think two really critical areas, right, Reduction of tech issues, tech laziness, but an increase of engagement by having people truly engaged in what they're doing. The third one for me is, and I think it's a secondary benefit here is that by having ethnicing in the business, we're getting feedback directly from the coal face, right? So when we are embracing an entrepreneurial culture where we want, want our team, bringing ideas, challenging the status quo, taking ownership when we're wanting them, bringing that back into the business, we're actually getting direct feedback from customers, which is in turn helping us build customer trust. Right? Which was one of the five issues that sales leaders are facing as challenges in 2023 and 2024. So for me, that's quite a quick look at why e thinking is important. But I just think personally, it is so critical to make sure that we are encouraging people to think, challenge and own the development of the business moving forward. So very simple in practice, right? We bring ethninking into a business and we encourage lots of challenging of the status quo. We encourage people to think for themselves. We encourage them to diversify our offerings and bring feedback in. But in practice, it's very difficult to actually apply, and particularly us as sales leaders who have so much on our plates, how can we find a way to actually add yet another tool into our bow or into our quiver to allow us to get out there and really motivate our sales teams. So for me, that's where I come in today, because I have done a fair bit of work around ethnicing or entrepreneurial thinking over the last 10 years. Those who don't know my background. I had involvement in two significant multi billion dollar companies globally, then scaled a business from startup through about 300 staff that had a really significant turnover, but was acquired, buy a business with a multi billion dollar balance sheet and then had to bring that business in. And also through my coaching and learning that I do, I certainly spend lots of time with sales leaders helping them bring this type of thinking into their business. So yes, it's a very difficult topic, but I wanted to bring a bit of a blueprint out for leaders or sales leaders in particular to try and apply to their teams. So let's get into it for today. First of all, and apologies for that long introduction, but I think ethynking is just so critical that it's worth that little bit extra explanation before we get into it. So let's have a bit of a broad brush view at what ethinking is. So for me, E thinking or entrepreneurial thinking is how we as individuals and how we as organizations as a collective bring in new ideas. So foster new ideas, new opportunities and then drive that into growth into our business. Right. So it's all about improving. It's all about bringing a culture of wanting to challenge the status quo. It's wanting to bring a culture of ensuring that we're growing and we're learning and in the end serving our customers or our stakeholders or our team members even better. With it also comes a really healthy dose of resilience and ownership. For me, super impactful that ethynking can bring in great bouts of resilience into teams, which means when things are not going well, they clearly have much greater capability of handling those. So if we nut that down into an even shorter kind of one sentence here, ethnicing for me is all about bringing in new ideas that help us grow and then maximizes our personal and organization performance. Okay, so let's have a look at how we can bring ethynking into a business, particularly more established businesses. But this is really relevant for new businesses as well because it's very easy, particularly with smaller businesses, to have a founder leading the charge and that founder dictates all of the strategies. So whilst I think ethnking has a very clear role in larger businesses who have been very systemised and process driven, I think we can't forget the smaller businesses that certainly can be at risk of having that founder syndrome of we do it our way and no one challenges it. Right. Or we do it the founder's way and no one challenges it. So let's have a Bit of a look at how ethnicing can evolve and how it can be available to every leader and every individual. Because I certainly think there's no prerequisite to this. There's no educational requirements, there's no significant amounts of experience that actually get drive you to be good at entrepreneurial thinking. It's actually something that you can live and own and drive yourself. So I look at entrepreneurial thinking as having two key levers, right, that you need to bring to your teams. And it's a model that we've heard before, will and skill, right? The will to think with the skill to act. So for me, the will to think around entrepreneurial thinking is very much structural within an organization. So it's how an organization is set up to be able to have a structure that promotes the engagement of ethnicing and promotes their team members and people within that business, including customers, to set up or step up and challenge the status quo. The skill is much more about the systems and processes that individuals can bring, right? Are they actually competent to think with an entrepreneurial mindset? So we have the will to think and, and the skill to act. The will to think being structural and the skill to act being more systemic and process driven. We'll take a look at both of these in a bit of detail. And then at the end here, let's try and step out a few action items that you might be able to take to really encourage ethnicing into your team or your organization. So first of all, and I will say before I jump into this, this thinking that I'm bringing today, this is off background of some really strategic discussions that I've had with really senior leaders in business, businesses particularly. Over the last three or four months, I've had three or four leaders individually come to me and talk about ethnicing and how we can maximize it. So this model here has been street tested actually, and road tested a little bit here. So it's one I definitely encourage you to get out and use a bit. So let's look at will first. So for me, there's four categories that we can structurally bring will to a business that's going to allow us to engage more impactfully around ethynking. And I call these desires, I've labeled them all as four desires that we bring to a business that will allow us to structurally think about ethyncing. So number one is an environment of continuous improvement. This is by far the most impactful that we can bring to encourage ethnicing. And I call this a desire to be curious. So this is where we are encouraging our teams and our teams that we work closely with to be curious when things go wrong, to be curious about how we can improve, to be curious about how things can be done differently. Because when we bring a mindset of curiosity, so it's a structural mindset driven from the top of a business, we actually embrace more than what's in front of us. We embrace that the answer may not be something that we've already known or already a path well trodden in the business. So by bringing that desire to be curious into an age old problem, we can then think of ways to solve that problem or solve that opportunity with a new amount of thinking. For me, sales teams, very important, particularly when we're not winning deals, that we can look out there and look at what our competitors are doing, pair it with some of the strengths or the competencies in our business and see how we can drive that forward ourselves. Okay, so that's called a desire to be curious. So the second one is where we can replace an environment that has a fear of failure to be characterized as an environment that has a desire to do so. When we work in a business where we are encouraged to try new things and when we try new things, that the consequences for failure aren't significant. Certainly I'll asterisk that that that is when the trying of new things are done within the parameters that we have of a business. But where we can have a desire to do which is trying new things as the way we work, we actually get more done. By getting out there and doing something, you will fail more, but you also give yourself the chance to succeed more. So the second structural area here is leaders is creating a desire to do. The third one is by promoting an environment that values creative thinking. So it's not just a desire to do, it's not just a desire to be curious, but it's a desire to create. Right? Where we give our teams the time to ideate. So we have specific meetings, we have systems within a business. So for example, we might have rooms that are set up as creative rooms. We have lots of boards and we have color in an office, we have ideation spaces, we have people within our business that are ideation champions. Right? We have lunches where we just sit and talk about things. But where we can have that desire to create new things driven at a leadership level, we really are creating that environment where there is a will to ethync. And last but not least, right where we have an environment where fast decision making, particularly on decisions that don't have a significant structural impact to a business or a net tangible, non reversible impact to a business, we can create a desire to empower. So let me unpack that a little bit more. Where we can have a business where we are empowering our staff to make decisions, particularly decisions that we can reverse if we don't get. Right? Right. So decisions such as we are going to put in a new offering into our proposals that provides an option for customers to extend their warranty by paying for it over a 12 month period. Right. Very easy decision to reverse out. But for some customers, actually having that extended warranty that they can pay for out of their expense line rather than their capital expenditure line can be really beneficial. Right. So by having that desire to empower and giving our staff that opportunity to make decisions, we're structurally creating that environment where ethyncing can certainly be alive, if not thrive. So let me recap on those four things in terms of the four desires or the environment where we can create create the will to succeed. So structurally, to promote a thinking, we as leaders need to be promoting an environment where there's a desire to be curious, which is continuous improvement. An environment where there is a desire to do rather than a fear of failure. An environment where there is a desire to create, to ideate and bring new ideas to a business. And number four, to create an environment where there is a desire to empower, which is essentially an ability or a desire to make decisions.

So as leaders, if you can nail.

Structurally those four areas of entrepreneurial thinking or bringing a will to your business, then you are well and truly on the right track to bringing ethnicing into your business. So next is all about skill. So that's a skill to bring entrepreneurial thinking to the business rather than a structural requirement. And I'll flick through this pretty quickly because I think the will's definitely the most important part. But where we look at ethinking being structural from a will point of view, skill is about enabling systems and processes and customers capability development. Right? So for me, if we want to be bringing skill or checking skill in a business around ethnicing, we can run a really simple process that will allow us to do that. So the first one for me is as a leader and we may want to bring other leaders into this, right? To be able to brainstorm, but we want to try and identify the areas of the business where we can bring more ethynking into and develop a target map. Right? So we want to pick our territory where we're going to work on ethynking, then we want to build out an eprocess that will bring structure to decision making and leveraging our business strengths and essentially providing a broad framework as to how a group of people or individuals can approach ethynking. So we've created a map where they can work. We then want to build out a really rough kind of territory for them to be able to play within. The third one is to then bring in E behaviours. Right. So these are behaviours that will encourage us to challenge the status quo and embrace changing direction. Right. It's all about actually having questions for our teams so that as a business, we can lead them to be increasing their or improving their skill set around critical thinking. So these are questions like, what would happen if we did it differently? What would happen if we went down to the left instead of to the right? How could we possibly improve this offer? What could our competitors be doing? What do you think you'd do if this was your business? If you had time to think about this, do you think you could come up with another idea? Right. They're just lots and lots of questions off the cuff. But if we can be building those E behaviors that will challenge the status quo through question asking, then we're on the right track to really embracing skill sets, which I refer back to me saying that skill sets, you don't necessarily need to have a degree in this. Right. You just have to be able to challenge yourself to think differently. Okay. So we're identifying a target map for rethinking. We're building out a broad process, an eprocess that allows our teams to know where they can operate entrepreneurially. We're building E behaviors. So questions that are challenging the status quo and encouraging us to do things differently. And then the last one in terms of the skill section of E thinking, is that we're actually picking some E projects that we can hit up with some E thinking. Right. So it's. We're actually selecting areas of the business to get us started. So you can see this is quite a very systemized approach here. Right. We give our teams an area they can work, we give them really broad structure, we help them on their way by asking questions, and we select a couple of very specific projects for them to start working on. What we're then doing is actually setting the scene to build momentum around a thinking that we compare back with our desires to do, our desire to create, our desire to be curious and our desire to empower. Right. Okay, so we've spoken about that. Will to structurally bring a thinking to a business. And also now we've jumped in around skills, right? How do we bring skills to bring ethyncing to life? But when you pair those two, how can we actually put them together and say, righto, this is how I'm going to do it. This is how I'm going to have a business that encourages E thinking. So for me, a little action item you can take out of this. And I think it works really well in any size business. But if you're unsure about it, please get in touch with me. This is not an easy topic. I say it again, this is not one where you'd expect to leave the podcast and nail it, but I'm really hopeful that this can give you some ideas around bringing it into your business. Okay, so some action items how we can do this. Number one is bring the leaders and key team members together, right? Get them into a room and start talking about the will and skill for ethynking and how you can build out that approach, right? Get their input. Because when we have people that are involved in determining or designing a system, they're much more likely to implement it. The second one is appoint an E Champion internally. Right? Pick someone who will drive this, who will be responsible. You might want to pick two or three, a committee, but absolutely, let's get someone accountable and responsible for driving this. Number three is select the target E projects to begin working on. Right? It's very much in the skill piece that I spoke about a minute ago. But if we can bring everyone together, select an E Champion or champions and then give them some projects to work on, we're starting to build that momentum. Number four is you as a leader should work with that E Champion or the E Champions and their nominated teams to drive that project. Right? You need to be in front of them, you need to be helping them, and you need to be leading by example. Yes. In this one, there's a little bit of pace setting that will help ethyncing go a long way. And last but not least, with this, you'll hear me say this all the time, is we need to review it, right? Review, adjust and re roll out once we've started to get some momentum around the project. There is nothing like deadlines and timeframes that will help us be better at actually executing on a project that we want to bring to life. So let me recap those. We bring leaders together to get them involved in starting the ethnicing process. We appoint an E Champion or champions internally. We select targeted e Projects right. For them to start working on. So we're building that momentum. We work with them hand in hand to get the projects up and running and we set targets and deadlines to make sure that we're actually moving it forward. I will say on the targets and deadlines, we need to be a little bit careful that they're not too rigid because ethynking involves some creativity. So sometimes that takes time, but certainly by having them as general goal points, posts that we need to be ticking off along the journey, that will actually help us bring real structure into that E thinking. Okay, so we've gone through a bit today. I might just recap here and have a bit of a final word around entrepreneurial thinking. For me, it's something that's available to every leader and every individual. Right. Within an organization. We don't need to have a degree to do this, but it is so critical in the modern world to help us avoid becoming tech couch potatoes. Right. So that our decision making and our ability to make decisions doesn't fall fall away and we don't actually produce less original work. Really important for that. Really important for employee engagement and building trust with customers. In ethynking, to get any program working, we need to have the will and skill, so the will to implement and the skill to be able to do it. Will being structural and skill being systems and processes. We need to create that environment for our teams to be able to work on their ethynking projects, if you like. The third thing is that by creating that environment, we're actually building the momentum and it's up to us as leaders to make sure we do that right. So as part of this final word, we need to be making sure that we're developing the processes, the behaviors, picking projects and giving our teams the opportunity to practice. Right on. Developing their skills to think. And then for me, just to repeat what I said at the start is this is within our power for all of us to be able to do it. And I think it's really important in anything around ethnicing that I continually encourage is that anyone can do this. We just have to be able to bring that cultural process to, to make it happen. Okay, so once we've done that, of course we want to be reviewing and adjusting. I've spoken about that. But for you now, as a leader, if you're looking for something to do after this podcast, if you're looking for one thing that you can take out of it, to actually roll into your team and give entrepreneurial thinking a go and Kudos to you for doing it because it is really, really hard for me. I would take notes to do something like the following. Get out there and try and create the will that is the most important way, right? So get the desire to be curious, the desire to do, the desire to create and the desire to empower. Get that out there, right? Pick some team members, sit down and brainstorm around processes and behaviors and projects, right? Which is your skill. Go through those notes that I've gone through today. Hopefully you've recorded plenty, but of course the notes are always available afterwards. And pick a project that you can work on to give it a go. Pick one project and it's often around customer offer. Pick one thing around customer offer that you want to bring some entrepreneurial thinking to and then really start to embed that in through weekly meetings, lots of communication with you, leading by example, right? Very simple. Get that those desires in start to build the skills. Give it a go at an example, meet weekly and lead by example and see where you end up with it. And so then that real final word on ethnicing today is that again, this is a really difficult topic to master. The largest organizations in the world are still trying to get it right, and the smallest organizations don't necessarily nail it either. I'm happy to meet with anyone that's part of my network for half an hour. I don't charge anyone to do that. So if this is something that you are passionate about and you'd like to see rolled out in your business, just book a half an hour, call with me. We can use this as the topic that we talk through and I hope that it will give you some benefit. Right? But last but not least is really, I hope that as sales leaders, this has given you something to think about that you might be able to apply differently within your business. Right? So again, if you need any help, I've got 20 years experience in this. Get in touch, you know how to find me. And same goes with the show notes. If you weren't able to capture everything, make sure you jump onto the show notes. They're on the website, they're on social media. You can access them through DMing. Me or anyone on our team. We'd love to help you. I get across every connection that comes into the business, so likely you'll even hear from me directly. But before we leave today, today's health and wellbeing tip. I've focused a reasonable amount on mental health at the moment and I think I'll do it once more time today before we move on to something else. But I came out of some trouble last week where I was experiencing and I was really thinking weeks and months ahead, oh, what happens if this happens? That'll lead to this. That'll lead to that. And I was really embellishing on what could happen and dramatizing what could happen down the track. So for me, I just needed to take a step back and it reminded me of a quote and I had to look up who said it. His name's Lucius Seneca, and I hope I've said that right. He was an ancient Roman philosopher. But the quote that stuck with me for a long time is that we suffer more in imagination than reality. We suffer more in imagination than reality. So the point is we need to keep it real and factual and I needed to do this last week. I did eventually get there. Work with what we know before we buy the rumor. We've all heard that saying, just don't buy into the rumor. There's so much we can say on it. But for me it all comes down to keeping yourself focused on the present, focused on the now, and controlling what you know to avoid us spiraling out of control. Be it a little bit beat a lot. But avoid that spiral or that doom loop happening when we don't actually know what the result will be. I hope that one helps. It really actually worked for me last week and got me out of a sticky situation. But until next time, keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve.

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