Mark Kosoglow - Study Break

All right. Hello everyone, and welcome to another sales assembly study break sponsored by Vidyard. I am here with Mark. Mark, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do. Yeah.

I'm Mark Costaglo, VP of sales at Outreach. I've been there since the beginning. I run the AE team and try to keep everybody, keep the machine cranking, you know.

Yeah, it's an important thing to do and a lot of people are using outreach right now, so it's an important tool to keep cranking. And something that is really top of mind today is mental health and what it looks like after the last four months and how people are dealing with it. And I think in an environment where people feel so separate, how do we talk about mental health and how do we dig in and how do we make sure that our people are well and taken care of?

So I panicked myself about a week and a half ago as I was falling asleep with my wife. She was getting ready for bed. I was doing some last minute emails on my phone, laying in bed, and I happened across a Washington Post article that said 33% of Americans are either clinically depressed or suffering from severe, moderate to severe anxiety right now. And I found that surprising for it to be that widespread. But what scared me was the fact that I had just had about a dozen skip levels two days before, and I talked to 12 reps. And those reps seemed up, they seemed energetic, they seemed involved, they seemed engaged. And I thought right then and there that, you know what, they either don't know or they're hiding it from me. And I wasn't getting it across. So of those 12 people, if I looked at the demographics, three to four of them probably should have told me that there's something was up. At least one or two should have said something. They didn't. And that's where I got really terrified for a second is I thought, boy, we're having a problem here. Nobody's willing to talk about it or admit it or know that they have it and we can't go help people. And that's the worst kind of problem is the, the one that you can't figure out.

Yeah. What's so hard about mental health is it's still so taboo and people are afraid to talk about it, not only with their loved ones, how they're feeling, but in a professional setting. I think the moment that somebody has that kind of vulnerability, they're worried about what the impact is going to be on their work and their life. And so there's this Element of fear that we as leaders have to disarm and disintegrate to make it a safe place for our teams and our peers and our friends to feel like they can talk about how they're feeling so we can genuinely help. And digging into that a little bit further, there's the extra hurdle that a lot of people haven't met the people on their team in person. If you just hired a team starting in March or April or May, you haven't shaken their hand, you haven't gone to say hi to them, you haven't built that relationship. So for those leaders who are thinking that they want to get to a level where they can take care of their people and address any issues they may be having, what do you think is the first step when that maybe professional friendship hasn't been established yet?

So it's funny, I have four children. Three of my children are the type of kids that I think every parent wants. Super smart, you know, appreciative of what I do for them. You know, all athletic kids, you know, whatever, you know, they were, they were great. My fourth child was a challenging child for me. And the reason was because he actually just didn't develop mentally as fast as my other children. And he is very, you know, they use the word strong willed. But really what it was for him when we had because we ended up having to get go through some counseling because we just couldn't figure out how to parent him correctly. And we could tell like we just weren't getting to him like we got to the other kids. So when we did this, we found out that the front part of his brain just wasn't maturing as fast as our normal children. And so it was causing him to be seem strong willed or obstinate. But really what was happening is that he was suffering from depression which manifests itself way differently in other children. And up to that point, when I would see a kid misbehaving at the store, my answer would be in my perspective of my three older children, which is if you discipline your right, if you had the right relationship, if they knew that you loved them, then they would listen to you and do what you said. When I had the fourth one and I had the relationship and he knows that I love me, but he was unable to control his actions sometimes and we had to use medication because he has a physical chemical problem in his brain that doesn't allow the neuro electronic stuff to work correctly so that he can't make the decision that he wants to make sometimes. And I Know, until you have somebody in your life like that, that's difficult concept to understand. But the way that the remote manager, the person that hasn't met the people, can manage is to understand that there are things going on in people's heads that they can't control. They can't gratitude themselves out of it. They can't meditate themselves out of it. They can't excite themselves out of it. They can't vacation themselves out of it. It's a physical thing in their brain that has to get corrected. And so I think once you go into with that kind of empathy or maybe sympathy, if you suffer from that, that, hey, listen, there's something going on that's a little bit different in their brain. We're going to give them space and encourage them to figure out how to deal with that in the best way that we can while we're still obviously getting a level of performance that they need to have. But I think that's the way to approach it is just have that empathetic view that it's not something that somebody can just decide to change. They need help either from you, from themselves, from outside, from medication or something to be able to get over this hurdle that's inside their head. That is literally a chemical makeup issue. Yeah.

I was talking to a member of my family recently who also suffers from depression, and what's going on in the world certainly hasn't helped. And this individual said that they were talking to their boss, and their boss said, you know, you just got to pick yourself up by your bootstraps. And I'm sure that they thought they were being really inspirational and really motivational. And with certain people, that may work. But this individual said to me, you know, I just felt like what I wanted to say back is, I'm not even wearing boots. Like, I don't even have the boots to pull up, you know? And so I think you make a really good point about meeting people where they are. And the tactic is different depending on the person and what they're going through. And support is going to look different depending on who you're talking to. And we. We as leaders have to shut down what we think is right and sometimes just listen and respond appropriately, and that's going to look different for everyone.

Yeah, there's this concept called cognitive load, which is how much or how the brain processes information. And unfortunately. Unfortunately or whatever. Realistically, what happens is everybody's brain has a certain hole that you can shove information into. Everybody's is a different size. And what happens Right now is almost everybody's brain. The hole to shove information into so they can process it isn't big enough. You have, man, there's Covid, man, my kids are at home. Are my kids gonna go back to school? Is my freshman in college next year gonna actually experience a real freshman year of college? Is, you know, there's social injustice going on? Do I protest? Do I send my kids to protest? Do I, I need to make sure I go with my kids to protest, to show them. Then there's the presidential election coming. Is Trump an a hole or is he not an a hole? You know, everybody has this so much stuff. There's so much cognitive load, there's so much information trying to be stuffed in the hole right now that your talk as a sales leader in your weekly meeting to pick up your bootstraps, I'm sorry, there's no room left in the brain to shove that message in for it to be effectual. And so I think as sales leaders we need to think about this is you can nickel a dime a hundred dollar issue and you're never going to get to a solution or you have to start thinking in terms of hundred dollar bills of what you're going to do. And that radical thinking of maybe we need to go to a four day work week. Maybe we need to have no meeting Wednesdays. Maybe we need to start saying, listen, nobody's allowed to have an internal call after 4pm These are the type of things that we need to start thinking about. They might not be the answer, but they open our minds up to start thinking about real solutions. Because right now opt in solutions of hey, if you guys need help, here's resources. People aren't opting into that kind of stuff because they don't know they need the help. And so I think we just need to remember that cognitive load is high. Everybody's brain deals with that in a different way. When you have that empathetic approach, I think you have a good chance to lead your team in the right way. That's going to be their needs.

Well, if that's not something to reflect on, I don't know what is. Mark, thank you so much once again, I'm Christina Brady, president of Sales Assembly. Thank you to Vidyard for sponsoring our content and we will see you next week for another study break. Bye everyone.