Episode 41: Three Ways to Build a Performance Culture Based on Trust

Hi everyone, I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Team podcast. Listen. Where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate and keep together highly effective sales teams. Teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits along the journey. We also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive year is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious sales leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, stronger sales teams is right where you need to be. Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams. The place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you build super powered B2B sales teams. Beware the two edge Sword of Trust. With it you can do anything, but without it, very little. I love this quote and I may have paraphrased it there and made it my own, but certainly it's all about trust. A beautiful, traditional, pure weapon of the ages. Being a sword where if you can use it to your advantage, it is amazing. But without it a blunt sword, you certainly get nowhere today. That's right, we're going to talk all about trust. And for me, the there is so much in today's modern leadership world that revolves around trust. The world has changed and I'm not the only one who believes that because today's topic all around how we can build a high performance culture based on trust is a listener request. So thank you for those that provided the feedback. This one came through loud and clear. Really off the basis of episode 26, which was all about our research piece on leader challenges for this year and beyond, right? They were talent management, building, building trust with customers, key account or customer retention, social selling and how to use technology effectively. And loud and clear. What came through that was, hey, how do we build teams where trust is strong? And more importantly, how can we still hold a performance culture right, where we actually meet our targets, we hit our obligations, right? How do we know what we need to do but still have that really strong trusted team environment? We've all been there, right? Teams that they're performing okay, things are going fine, people get on well, right? We're in the middle bands for all of our engagement metrics. We work okay on spotfires, but we don't really get through to the true hard conversations, right? We've all been there, we've either been in teams or we've led teams. And for me personally, I see it very commonly. Middle of this year, I had a team where they were exactly that. There was about a dozen of them, they were working well together, but they just weren't having strong enough conversations. So for me, through that team, we actually sat down and we followed these three tips that I'm going to go through today around building high performance teams based on trust had an immediate impact. Right. And happy to share more about it for those people that would like to DM me and get in touch. But it was amazing the impact that it had. So why am I talking about it now rather than middle of the year? Well, we are coming into that time of year, that Christmas New Year period where people will often reflect on this year, gone turn their minds onto next year, Right. And invariably as leaders, we'll start to think about team performance and how we can move the dial. But as individuals, we'll also start to think about the new year, new challenge type of mindset as well. So getting this right, where we have a really engaged team that performs but has that strong sense of trust, super powerful to be focusing on now at this time of year. So in my experience, if we can get this right, if we can get that performance culture that's based on trust absolutely nailed, we'll get higher engagement from our teams. More learning will come from this because when people expect to be held accountable by not just themselves or their leaders, but their peers as well, they will generally try and be better and better at what they do. Right? Because you don't want to let people down that you have a great relationship with. And also what comes out of this is tenure tends to increase because people recognize they don't only have a great team they're working with, but they're also being challenged. So that new challenge that you look at often at the end of the year or early in the new year, that's actually quite well complimented by the team you're in because you're challenging each other to get better and better at what you do. So today, three ways we're going to look at as to how you can build that high performance culture based on trust. So let's get into it. And certainly by the end of this, you should have three really chunky things that you can roll out with your team. So first but foremost, teams that have high levels of trust, right. And that performance culture generally will build the boat themselves. So they will be actively involved in determining what their adventure looks like and how they're going to go about getting there. So this doesn't mean they're setting top line business strategies. They will generally come, in fact, they'll always come from senior management. But what it does mean is how they get there. So the boat, the vehicle that takes them to their destination, that is what they have a big saying. So that's things like how they're going to implement their strategies, the processes that they're going to build. I did a whole series of podcasts, one to six around building out sales processes, right? High performance teams with trusted cultures. They build their processes together, the metrics that they need to follow, right? Super important, how they're going to be measured, they have a say in this, things that are tangible and will impact their job. The teams build these or have a say in these together. So it's really important here. We must not confuse this with choosing everything they do to being heard. But for me and the teams that I've worked with over a 20 year period, those teams that have the high performance culture and the trust about them, they are at a minimum heard around these areas. So for you as a leader, right, when you can bring these teams together to be able to build out your strategies and if you're not sure what to do, go and have a look at episode nine and then 11 to 13. And we spend lots of time around the TeamSTEPPS playbook and how you can build really strong strategic plans and plans that teams engage in. Right? But for leaders, if you can give your teams the time and the scope to input into how you get there straight away, we will have higher engagement levels because they built it themselves. Think of it at your own end. Think of it with your children, if you have any. When you allow yourself or others around you to build things, you invariably have a much higher level of engagement and desire to fulfill what you've built because there's a level of accountability. Right? So how do you do this? So the what is you get involved in your planning? The how is generally we'll see this done over a full day or two half days with sales leaders. They'll often roll facilitators in to help them. And that's fine. There's plenty of good facilitators around there, right? I love doing it, but I love even more being part of the sales leader meetings where as a leader I get to help our teams build out their plan. Right? It's predictable that it happens every year. Teams like to know that they're going to get to do it every year and, and Generally this will be annually, so you'll do it once a year, but you'll review it quarterly just to see your progress, to measure how you're going, refine it and then tweak it and roll it out again. Terrific. Super powerful. The number one sales engagement tool I'd make sure every leader has in their toolkit or their playbook. So what are some leader tips here? For me, it's learn when to steer the conversations versus having a complete blank canvas. Right. So that's when you're setting the scene and providing a choice or adventures versus when people have a completely open say. So for me, I'll often phrase this around and the great leaders I say will often phrase this around, giving them a choose your own adventure type of scenario. Hey, we could do this, this or this. What do you think? Right. Or actually have a complete blank canvas and certainly choosing out of a number of options. That'll be really important when you have things like, so how are we going to meet with our customers? How often are we going to meet with customers? Right. They're really hard metrics that we only have a few ways that we can go about it. So we want to make sure that we really nail it. The complete open blank canvas is around things like, well, how are we going to present case studies to customers? How are we going to get involved in storytelling? How are we going to make sure that our customers are engaged and we're providing value? Right. This is some of the more creative stuff where you get to provide that blank canvas. But as a leader, knowing when you need to steer to a number of options versus when you can provide any options in a complete blank canvas or an ideation approach. Fantastic and very, very powerful. So that is, number one, get your team involved in the planning as to how they're going to execute things. Number two is it's really clear on how teams work together. This was the big piece I rolled out in the middle of this year with a team, and it's all around the ways they work or what I like to call rules of engagement. Right. Depends on your team as to how you want to label this, but you could certainly have some fun just naming it on its own. Right. But these are really defined protocols. They'll often be 10 to 12 things as to how you operate as a team. Right. These are things like how we communicate with customers, how we deal with conflict. Right. We play the ball rather than playing the man, how we turn up to meetings, our dress code, whether we do videos on or videos off when we're having remote meetings. How we keep our commitments, what our time frames to get back to customers are, how we learn as a group. Right. What are the modalities? The meetings that we hold as a team over a weekly or extended period of time, right. How we share ideas and how we give feedback. Right. Really important that we have the ways we operate. Go into this so that people know when they're held accountable. They're held accountable to a set of rules, right. That we actually developed as a team and everyone bought into. So how we do this, generally we do this during strategic planning or often on a Friday afternoon. We might have a lunchtime meeting on a Friday afternoon where we'll go and sit down and build out these rules of engagement because we can have a lot of fun with them. Right. You can throw a few silly ones in there, right? Like a customer. I work with Jack and he'll know who he is, right. It's flannelette Friday. That's the shirt you wear. You come in and you wear a flannel shirt, right. Bit of fun, right. But certainly you need to mix the really serious ones in there with perhaps ones that little bit more light hearted. Right. And then once you've done this needs to be rolled into your system, symbols and norms, right. So you have it plastered in offices, you have communications go out to teams. It's part of your one to ones. I talk about that a lot, about embedding things into your one to ones, but it's absolutely about making sure that it sticks and you can even share that around your teams and around other leaders. Right. But for me, there's a couple of really important tips here to get this right. The first one is in the rules of engagement meetings is to make sure that everyone gets engaged, not just those who are most vocal. And I've learned this the hard way. Certainly over the years, I've rolled out rules of engagement that were done in a nice and neat half an hour meeting. They were actually developed by the top 20 or 30% of people who wanted to have a say. And those who wanted to think about it, reflect on it, or perhaps give me their feedback afterwards, didn't get an involvement in those. And invariably they were actually less engaged in rolling out the rules of engagement and sometimes even challenged me. So the real key point of advice here is to make sure that you give everyone a chance to have their feedback. So. So it might be an afternoon meeting, an hour or so where you set these up, but then perhaps you get to revisit them a week later to lock them in in stone. So draft rules of engagement or draft how we work to be finalized, or you get around at one to ones after that meeting to confirm everyone's on board, but just give yourself the chance to be able to get everyone engaged in that. And secondly, around this from a leader tip. So, first is make sure everyone engages. The second piece is to make sure that you really take that approach of praise, specifically criticise, generally. Certainly when we set up ways we work together, people that can be a bit overexcited might actually hold people accountable publicly in meetings. You as a leader need to understand where you can and can't have that happening. Right. And it might even be a part of your ways. We work together to say, hey, when things go wrong, we approach individuals behind the scenes. Right. When we want to provide feedback, we use the right forum. It's an even better way to word it, because what it's saying to people is you don't necessarily pick on things in front of everyone. Right. But you pick your time to make sure it's done right. Can be hard to get right, but certainly very powerful when we have a team who all know how you need to work and are happy to hold each other accountable and celebrate when it happens. So that brings me into the third area as to how we can really develop a performance culture that's based on trust. So, for me, once we've defined how we're going to go about our strategy and what we're going to do and then the ways we're going to work with each other, and it's all about making sure that the team then actually operates according to what they've said they're going to do. So what does that mean? That means we measure what we say we're going to do and we implement what we say we're going to do. Right. Normally, in reverse order, we'll implement it first and then we'll get out and measure that. So how do we do that as a leader? Because that can be really difficult. We have so much going on. How do we actually make sure that when we say we're going to do certain things a certain way that we hold everyone accountable? Well, for me, there's two or three things that are really straightforward to do here. Number one is training program. Design your training program back to what your key goals are and around the how we'll work or rules of engagement in mind. All right, so if our strategy talks about creating value for customers at every opportunity we can get, then we should be making sure that within our training program, we have sessions around how we create customer value, how we communicate customer value, how and how we workshop customer value with our customers. Right. We have lots of different ways that we can approach value, but by having it rolled out into our training program, we know that it becomes omnipresent and it's something that our teams can actually engage with. Right. Second part here is when we've got some key ways we'll work or some key strategic imperatives that we're gonna roll out. Right? Rolling it up the line to leaders is really impactful, particularly when our leaders will agree to work with us with our teams around certain focus areas. So when they're seeing members of our team in corridor conversations, out with customers or any other types of engagement, they can actually be focusing on the areas that you as a leader are trying to achieve. Now, of course, we need to make sure that that aligns with the broader company engagement piece. However, very impactful when we can get leaders involved in it. And lastly, here is coaching. We've spoken a lot about the grow model. That's episode 23, if you want to go back to it. Coaching takes time, but if you can have a really clear focus around what you want to achieve with each of your sessions, right. Then it makes your coaching very impactful. So when you can relate it back to your strategic planning or your ways that you're going to work together, right. Then it allows the coaching and everything you do around it to be really defined and focused. Right. So some really nice, smart ways that we can actually roll out a high performance culture but still have that trust built around it. And lastly, here is around personal learning. So have a look back at episode 28 if you need to, but where we're making sure that our team members are actually learning according to what our ways of working are and what our strategic imperatives are, then once again, we are supporting that initiative around performing to what we want to achieve. Right. That high performance culture. But trust is building because we know everything we're doing around what we say we're going to do is actually supporting that. Right? So it's fantastic when you can support that through personal learning. Go and have a listen to that episode because there's some really great ways that teams can individually learn out of it. So how do we go about doing that? Well, for me, it's all about the meetings that you set. Right. There's three meetings I love teams to run. Weekly sales review, training and then deal review meetings. So that was episode 24. Jump back and Having a look at that. Lots of episodes to reference out of today's podcast, by the way, but where we're actually making sure that in all of our meetings we're reinforcing everything that we're setting, right? And also that we're celebrating when we get wins. This is the big kicker here, and the big leader tip is to make sure that we are celebrating when we're achieving what we said we're going to do. Right? Because when we do that, the team will trust that if they actually focus and achieve what we said we were going to achieve, that they will be recognized and if not, rewarded from that. All right, so that's a clear leader tip to make sure we're nailing this one, but also being really consistent and revisiting and refining this all the time to make sure that we're actually doing as we say we're going to do. Okay, so we've gone through three ways today where we can build high performance cultures that are really based on trust, right? So number one is all about having our teams build out the boat, right? So build what they want to achieve because then we're going to see a much greater level of engagement to it. Number two is have very defined ways of working, right. And it's not just about little things like how we deal with customers, but it's also about how we'll deal with each other, how we'll make sure we're learning and how we'll continue to improve. And number three is an executed plan around it, right? So that's learning, that's cadences, that system symbols and norms, getting our leaders involved, right? Our coaching modalities. This is all about making sure that we've built what we want to achieve. We've said, how are we going to do it as a team? The third thing is making sure that we're actually out there doing it and we've got the processes to back it up. Right? So very structured in how you can approach high performance teams, but some very clear individual things you can actually implement to make that work for you. Okay, So a final word on this is there's lots of things we can do to be building out high performing teams, Right. I certainly won't say that this is an exclusive list, nor will I say that it'll work for everyone. But what I will say is that we need to focus on some key areas to be building trust because that will much more likely roll out to high performance cultures. And right now, this time of year is a great time to be focusing on it not only because we want to be driving performance next year, but also because the new year, new challenge type of mindset does tend to creep into people naturally, Right. So we want to be making sure that we're driving our teams for the next 12 months and beyond. So. So that's it for today. If you weren't able to capture everything, jump onto strongersalesteams.com, you can download transcripts, of course. Get in touch with me if you'd like to know any more or you need some help, right? I get across every connection into the business, so you'll hear back from me. But before we leave, today's health and wellbeing tip. So this one is a great tip from someone I've worked with extensively, Justin Beauregard. And I love this saying that she has and she says, how do you know that you're not doing enough right? And for me, when we're down, it's really easy to say, I'm not doing enough right? But how do you actually quantify that to bring yourself up out of that place of hardness, right out of that doom loop, as we've heard it called before. And for me, it actually comes down to two pretty simple questions to ask yourself. Why am I not doing enough? So you quantify what it is that's missing. And two, what would have to change for it to be enough? And if we relate this to fitness, the question why am I not working hard enough on my fitness? Might be answered with, I don't have enough time or I'm not prioritizing it, or I don't get to bed early enough to get up. Right? It's very easy. The answers will generally be very easy. And then what am I going to do about it? Can very quickly work around that, right? Well, I need to put in my calendar that I'm going to do exercise starting three times a week or starting two times a week and then building up, or X number of nights I go to bed by certain period of time, right? A certain time at night. So for this type of approach, right, where you actually say, hey, why am I not doing enough? Quantify and then actually acknowledge what needs to happen, you set yourself on the path of action, right? And action is one of the surefire ways to get things done. That's it for today. Until next time. Keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve. Want to be kept up to date with any of our free materials to help you build the best sales teams possible? Well, the easiest way you can do so is to follow us on your favourite social media channel. We're stronger sales teams on most of them and if you DM us stronger, we'll send you right back some great resources to help you build your super powered sales team. If you'd like a little more help, please get in touch directly and book a free discovery call with me. I run a limited number of these sessions and they're free for my podcast listeners. I'd love to help you out. Until then, see you next week for another podcast of stronger sales team.