Doing Business in a Chaotic World PART 1: Meet Your Coworkers and Clients Where They're At

Simon, for our first question to get us going. There's a lot happening around the world right now. You know, when you think of natural disasters from a business perspective, tariffs coming in, plus we're having a lot of growth in our industry right now and it's really challenging from some of our execution pieces. So in our world, there are lots of functions that have to work together to help a customer be successful, to successfully deliver to our customers. But what's unique about sales is for all that lack of control we have, we're still the person at the end of the day standing in front of our customer and who sometimes can be friends, people we see all the time. And we, and what I'm wondering is, do you have thoughts or ideas on how a salesperson can kind of retain trust with customers or be motivated during a time that's just really challenging? There's just lots of chaos out there, right?

Yeah. So a few thoughts. Number one, In chaotic times, you'll find confidence and will comes through connection. In other words, how good is the team? For example, I know people who have gone into combat, and this is crazy and dangerous, and people have weirdly positive experiences or weirdly positive feelings about combat, not because of the danger they face, but because of the intense camaraderie and family-like feeling that's created. And it's those relationships that they miss when they come back to, quote unquote, safety. Right. And so I think it's a time to double down on the relationships you have. If you think you can solve this problem or get through this alone, it's only going to get worse. The feelings are going to compound. So number one is the relationships you have with each other. It's really important that you're open with each other. You say, I'm scared. You say, I don't know what's gonna happen. You say, I'm screwed. You say, I'm freaking out. You say, I'm overloaded. You say, I'm lonely. You say all those things to each other just so that everybody knows what everybody else is going through, because odds are you're all going through the same thing. So that's a huge one. And the other one is it's an amazing opportunity to reinforce the relationships with the clients by including them in the conversation, right? 'Cause they have their own stresses with many of the same, chaos on their business side, right? And it's a wonderful thing to sit down with somebody and say, hey, you guys going through what we're going through? And how can we sit down together, not as supplier and customer, but as partners who are trying to make this thing called business work? How we're both trying to navigate our own jobs to get through the madness that is the world today. Like, how can we, how can we work together? And those are the most incredible relationships for building trust because you may not you may not be able to solve the problem, but when you feel that somebody cares, it's an amazing, amazing experience. Let me give you one, one example that, that really captures what I'm trying to, uh, get at, right? Let's take a silly example. Let's say you're on a business trip and, uh, you're done a day early, 2 days early, and all you wanna do is get home to your family, right? So you look online and you see that there's an earlier flight available and they've got empty seats. You call the customer service agent and you say, hey, I'm on a business trip, got done early, super exhausted. All I want to do is get home to my family. Can you please put me on the earlier flight? I can see that there's seats available. And the customer service agent says to you, um, I'm sorry, you have the wrong class of ticket. I can't do that. And you say, please, I just want to get home to my family. I don't want to hang out here for 2 days when I don't have to. And they say to you, I hear you, I hear you, but you have the wrong class of ticket. There's nothing I can do. The computer won't even let me.

Right?

You hang up angry, you hang up frustrated, and you sit around for 2 days, right? Now let's repeat that scenario with a customer service agent who has empathy. Same thing. I want to get home early. I see you have seats. Okay, let's get you home early. Here's the problem. You have the wrong class of ticket, and the computer won't even let me do it, but I want to get you home early. Let me see what I can do. Click, click, click, click, click, click, click. Okay, that didn't work. Let me try something else. Click, click, click, click, click, click. Hold on, let me talk to my supervisor. I want to get you home early. Hold on a second. They come back. I talked to my supervisor. We tried like 4 things. It's driving us crazy. There's nothing we can do. I'm so, so, so sorry. Right? You did not get what you wanted, but in one scenario you're grateful, in one scenario you're angry. And so it's that experience of empathy that, that If our clients know that we actually care what they're going through as well and where we can help them block and tackle, even if we can't do everything that they want, knowing that they're part— that we are partners to them in times of stress or difficulty go a long way to building trust.

So, I love that this is where you went with this because one of the big things I talk to my team about is the importance of leaning in and answering the phone. Even when you know people are going to be mad at you for what you're telling them or for not liking the message, that when we do that, we do feel they, they, they at least know we care. And we get a lot of credit for that in the market, by the way, with our, with our customers when we get a visit with them. So I love that. That's, that's the, that's a way to think about that. If we were to think about turning that internal, You know, sometimes when you have so much happening and there's so much growth that we're experiencing, a company having a sense of optimism in a company when we're really failing on commitments to each other internally sometimes, just because of all the growth and change and no one wants to do a bad job for each other, but we're kind of struggling to meet those commitments. How do you see, Is it different when you're dealing internally with people, or how do you build that sense of optimism in a company when you're doing all the right things, you're making all the right investments, you know you're going to get there, you're at a moment in time, you just got to get past this? How do you keep that optimism kind of going in a company from your perspective?

Okay, so two answers. One is me and one is the leader, right?

Okay.

So, so number one, and by the way, human beings are human beings. So whether it's building relationship with somebody I work with or being, building relationship with a customer or a client, like it's a relationship, building relationship with your loved ones, your spouses, your friends. It's how human beings talk to and communicate with each other, right? And so number one, it's better to be honest early because the truth is always revealed. Like if you're gonna let someone down, it's gonna come out.

Right?

So A, the best thing you can do is let somebody know, like, hey, I'm not going to honor my commitment. Right? And I need you to know early. And I want to work with you to find a workaround. Number 2, if you didn't do it early, that it happened on time, is like, I let you down. I let you down. I am so sorry. Accountability. Right? And if you don't do it at all, like you get scared to do either of the— if you don't do it early, you don't take accountability, and they come to you and they're like, WTF? You know, you'd be like, that's not the kind of person I want to be. That's— I'm sorry. And you got to go back to that accountability, right? It's normal human relationship stuff, right? That's number one. Now, if you're the leader, you talked about how you maintain optimism. Let's be crystal clear what optimism is and what it is not. Optimism is not blind positivity. And a lot of leaders make this mistake. They think in difficult times to keep their teams motivated, they have to be positive about everything. Everything's good. Look at the bright side. We got this. Look at the good stuff that's happening. And the reality is, like, the ship's taken on water and you're talking about the sunny day. It's not helping. In fact, that kind of positivity actually backfires because a lot of people who are struggling are looking at their leader going, my God, they're so positive and I'm struggling. Maybe it's me. And so they blame themselves now. Right. So that's, that is what toxic positivity can look like. Optimism is different. Optimism is not naive. Optimism is the undying belief that the future is bright, but it allows for darkness in the present. It is very self-aware. So we can say, look, this is one of the most difficult challenges we've ever been through as a company. This is easily the most difficult challenge that I've ever faced in my career. We have uncertainty. We have, we have, we have, we don't, we don't even know what we're doing. I don't know how long this is even going to last, right? This is the, this is awful. But I know one thing for sure, that if we take care of each other, if we have each other's backs, we will get through this and we will come out of this stronger than we went in. That's what optimism sounds like, which is way more inspiring than simply bouncing off the walls about how good things are?

You know, it's funny because we've been in— this is our national sales meeting and we've been in conversations for the last day and a half. And one of the things we're trying really hard is to own those pieces where we've made, you know, we've not implemented well or we've made some mistakes through our implementation and that's caused more pain sometimes as we're going through the process. But then you also do have to balance that because you're like, but we're spending the money in the right places and we're, we're making the right things happen. We're just not quite there yet. We got to, got to get through those things. So I love, I love the not being so positive you're ignoring what's happening, but you're being honest about it's a moment. My big thing with the team yesterday was actually I always try to remind myself this is a moment in time and because of all these other things, we're going to get where we're going.

Yeah.

Gotta get through today with what's there, right?

That's kind of where honesty gets in trouble is when we confuse our value with the work that we have contributed to the product or the service. Let me, let me, let me be more specific, right? So real life examples, I've had it, you had it. You gotta, you've got a bad product. You made a product. It's not a good product. It's not a good service. Doesn't really work that well, right? And so when somebody says, to be honest, we've got a bad product here, what happens is people get really defensive because they worked really hard on making it. And they think that when you say this is a bad product, that the way they receive that information is you're bad, or you, you made it bad, or you failed. Which is just not true, which is just not true. The product is bad. We worked hard. We had good intentions. We all tried to do the right thing. But for whatever reason, probably usually at some point leadership has to take some accountability. But for whatever reason, it didn't turn out how we wanted it to turn out. And let's just call a spade a spade. Right. And so I think it's very important to remember that some people get very defensive when you point out that the product is bad because they'll take it as a personal attack. And we have to get to the point. Where we can be honest that sometimes we miss and that's okay. Now the question is, what can we learn so we don't miss again? Like we've, we've had some royal screw-ups, you know, we've invested time and money and it came out badly. Great. Just don't make that happen again. Let's have, let's have an honest conversation about what communication broke down, what systems broke down, where, where, where, you You know, leadership should have been involved when they weren't, et cetera, et cetera. And let's make sure that that never happens again. And okay, what are we going to do now? Right. And so it's just— it's— and also for leaders to just be a little bit empathetic for people who do take it personally and work them through— work them through that narrative as well. But that's a huge thing. We have to be able to be honest and say this isn't— this isn't— this isn't us. We can do better. OK, let's do better. It's let's do 1% better, 2% better. Let's move forwards.

So, so that kind of leads in because, and I think this all ties together as you're pulling it, as you're pulling, as you're talking, because it seems like some common themes. Because I mean, we have, we have amazing people in Eaton who are doing a lot of great work, but we have new people who have joined us. We have people who are moving roles and we have all this growth happening and we're having some execution challenges and they're trying to build trust in their new roles. They're trying to demonstrate that they can get their feet underneath them. You know, what ideas— I mean, so many of the ideas you're talking about feel like it's the same thing that you got to be doing in your new job or your new role. But do you have ideas or strategies that we should think about for integrating faster or being more successful more quickly with all the change going on around us as we move around?

So I guess one question that comes to mind is Uh, does it have to be quick? Like sometimes you want to get your feet under you quicker for all the right, for all the right reasons, but like some things right, sometimes right doesn't mean fast, right?

Totally.

And, and sometimes our goals get in the way of quality. You know, I've always believed go, you know, goals should be a dial, not a switch that you, you adjust them to make sure that you're maintaining high quality at all times because sometimes you're going too fast, it's the speed that's breaking things, right?

Right.

So that's, we have to be honest about that, and that's a leadership challenge. But I'm gonna sound like a broken record to all of these questions, because basically what we're talking about is how human beings work with human beings. That's what all of this stuff is, right? And the single best thing human beings can do to build trust above them in the chain of command, or below them in the chain of command, or to the left of them, or to the right of them, is to be honest about what the situation is and what their capabilities are. It's, again, it's a called accountability, right? And for somebody to raise their hand and say, "I don't understand," or, "I need help," or, "I made a mistake," you know? And the best way to ensure a culture like that is if the leader operates by example. If the leader says, "I don't understand, can somebody explain this to me? I screwed up, this is on me, I'm sorry," right? Like if the leader creates that space, And if somebody else takes the risk to raise their hand and be like, I screwed up, not to bite their head off, but to rather say, great, can we all— let's all help Molly get it right. And Molly is not shamed for making a mistake, but rather what she discovers is that by being honest, that there's an expectation that the team will rally to support.