What Anyone Can Do Deb Calvert 1010

Welcome to our new show, What Anyone Can Do Podcast with Leo Battaglia and me, Randy Cantrell. Our new show picks up where the last show, Year of the Peer, left off, highlighting the simple truth that who you surround yourself with matters, and that if we enlist the support of others, give back to those who give to us, and pay it forward for the next generation, we can do anything. Author and keynote speaker Leo Battaglia and I will interview a diverse group of thought leaders who will share stories and insights that will help you succeed in business, and in life. How? By doing the things anyone can do, but most of us never will. Today's guest is Deb Calvert. Deb is the founder of People First Productivity Solutions and co-author with Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner of Stop Selling and Start Leading: How to Make Extraordinary Sales Happen. Deb is also the author of Discover Questions and founder of The Sales Expert Channel, a UC Berkeley instructor, and a certified sales and executive coach. Deb Calvert is a certified master of the Leadership Challenge, working with our clients to build leaders at every level. She has been named one of the 65 most influential women in business and a top 30 global sales guru. We have a bonus gift for you listeners and viewers. Deb Calvert has generously supplied our readers, listeners, and viewers with a free sample, Chapter 1 of Stop Selling and Start Leading. There'll be a link over in the show notes to today's episode. We encourage you to go to leobattari.com/deb. That's leobattari.com/deb, and you can download your free copy of Chapter 1. There's no opt-in required. We welcome Deb to the show.

Deb Calvert, welcome to What Anyone Can Do Podcast. We're so very, very happy to have you here today.

Thank you, Leo. I am thrilled to be here with you and Randy. This is going to be a lot of fun.

We sure will. Hey, one of the things, of course, that we were really excited to talk with you about is I think you're really one of the people who, um, you know, few people I think really goes vertical on leadership, sales, and teams, and, and using this word, um, connect and, and focusing on the importance of relationships in all three of those areas. And of course, this show is about who you surround yourself with matters. So if you want to give some, uh, opening thoughts on that, we'd, we'd love to hear, and we'll just take the conversation from there.

You know, early in my career, I was in sales. I was surrounded by wonderful team members who I learned a lot from. I was fortunate to have very good managers. But I didn't appreciate any of it until I saw the contrast. I was promoted to a corporate role at a Fortune 500 company. And that was great at the beginning, that, that same kind of culture, a very people-oriented culture, held up. Until the company put itself up for sale. And suddenly it was all about profits and processes and products as if people didn't matter at all. And that contrast was a bit of a wake-up call. So when I left that and went into business for myself, I named my business People First Productivity Solutions. And I realized that you don't get any of that. Profit, product, process, whatever you're after, unless it's through your people. So that's been my, my mission ever since then.

You know, one of my favorite books, I had my own company for a little while and I actually modeled it after reading this book and it was Hal Rosenbluth and Diane McFerran Peters wrote The Customer Comes Second. And what I loved about it was, you know, the concept is pretty simple to understand, right? I mean, if you expect like superior, service to your clients, then you have to put your people first because they're the ones delivering that service. The book, however, was so wonderful because it showed to the extent they delivered on that in every single aspect of what they did and every detail on it. And, um, so it's kind of one thing to say people first, but in terms of practices that you've seen where you find great examples of what putting people first looks like. Maybe give us some thoughts on that.

I will, but if it's okay with you, I'll, I'll give the business case first because otherwise it just sounds like sort of kumbaya. That, that's nice. It seems like a luxury. But, uh, you know, that book you mentioned, it was one of the earliest ones to really focus on employee engagement. And there's been a lot more in the past, uh, oh, 5 or 6 years coming out about employee engagement. But engagement, that term, what it really means is that people have an emotional commitment, emotional commitment to the work they do. And when they have that kind of commitment, they apply additional discretionary effort to their work. So employee engagement has now been directly linked to improved retention of team members, to productivity accelerating by any measure, customer satisfaction, as well as top-line revenue increases and improved profitability. So there's a lot to be said for engaging your employees by having an emotional commitment, by putting people first. That's, that's the business case. Your question was about some examples of what that looks like, and it ranges from just dignifying people with a hello, how was your weekend— surprisingly, there are managers out there who forget even those basics— to understanding what personally motivates each individual, what What's going on with each individual? What are the learning opportunities and what are the challenges for every person? Because if you're not talking to people as individuals, you're really not putting people first. There's got to be more than the rah-rah once-a-quarter team-building session that you might do. You have to create a sense of belonging in the workplace and help people to see how their work is meaningful, how it's tied to something bigger.

Well, I think too, um, you know, it's pretty clear too. Just look at the name of your company. It's not called Employees First. It's called People because we should be looking at people as whole people, not just people who are employees of the organization, right?

Yes, absolutely. Uh, sure. The technical term is employees. I sort of bristle when I hear people say things like my employees or my direct reports or even my subordinates. That one really bugs me. There's no ownership here. We're people. Let's work together.

Exactly. So Randy, as an entrepreneur who have certainly, um, you know, had a lot of people that you've worked with over the years, tell us some of your thoughts on your experiences and how they gel with what Deb's talking about.

Well, I'm captivated, Deb, by, you know, by the language, the words that we use and, You're, it seems to me that you're, you're a very verb-intensive kind of person, which I have great respect and appreciation for. And I know that the book Stop Selling and Start Leading, that a big premise behind it is for us to stop pushing, that verb, and to start guiding or leading. And then there's obviously the verb that is all over your website of connect. I don't know, talk to me a little bit about those verbs.

You know, I've never been called verb intensive before, but I think I'm going to just take it and run with it. I like that. That suggests action and do it.

Yes, exactly.

Connecting. Think about anything you've ever done in life, business or otherwise. If it involved anyone else, it was probably more successful because of the connection that you formed. Even in the first few seconds that you meet someone, you have an opportunity to connect with them or to just be in the same space with them. The bridge, the connection that brings people together, to me, that's where the magic happens. And the book, "Stop Selling and Start Leading," is about getting a connection that's a superior connection between sellers and buyers. We did research with buyers and also gathered stories from sellers, and the connection was evident. The connection of sellers stepping in as leaders was a powerful one.

Why is there— why is that so difficult? And, and I've, I've spent my life in sales, so I get it. But why do we seem in so many cases so predisposed to just, you know, to want to push? Is it, is it selfishness? Is it our thinking only about ourselves and not the other person?

You know, this is going to be a different answer for different people. For some, Yes, it's about, let me get to my commission dollars as quickly as I can, and customers, you're just in my way. Say yes and I'm moving on. Sure, that happens, but it's that stereotype that really is what's in the way. It's that stigma about what sales, true sales, looks like. I come across a lot of salespeople as a field coach who think that that's what they are supposed to do. They don't like it. They don't want to be interacting with, with customers in that way, but that's the example they've seen either from a sales manager or their peers or maybe even just in some movie. And then you add to that that buyers expect it. So buyers are all teed up to meet with a salesperson and they've got their defenses up and they are with those barriers creating a scenario where actually it feels like you have to push to break down the walls. You can't have a bridge if you have a wall. So that fuels all the wrong behaviors too. And sellers just don't know the alternatives about how to, to position themselves differently.

I know you use assessments in, in your work, and I'm curious the, the impact, the influence that that has in your work and in our ability to better understand ourselves and hopefully better connect with whomever we want to connect with?

Yeah, I do use assessments as a coach with working with teams. I use several that my go-to, the ones I use most often, are one called the Echo Listening Assessment. That's actually quite new, but it helps people to understand their own listening habits, their preferences, or their styles when they're listening. And it turns out there are just 4 dominant listening habits. So if you can understand the others that are not your preferences, then you have a better chance of being able to speak in ways that others can hear and receive your information. So that's a really powerful connecting tool. I also, with teams, will use the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. I'm familiar with DiSC and others, but Myers-Briggs, in my opinion, gives you a chance to go really deep in terms of understanding And then connecting with, collaborating, communicating with other people. And for leaders, and when I say leaders, I mean leaders at any level. I'm not talking about senior management. But leadership is just like you said, Randy, it's about guiding. Anyone can guide. So the work of Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, who are my co-authors on Stop Selling and Start Leading, they have a beautiful instrument backed by over 30 years of research. It's called the Leadership Practices Inventory, LPI for short, and it's a 360. So it gives you insight into how others are viewing the frequency of these very specific behaviors. They're leadership behaviors that cause others to willingly choose to follow you. The main thing these tools have in common, and others that I, that I use less frequently, is that they're all about two things. Getting people connected and getting some awareness, some self-awareness so that you know what you're doing and how it impacts others.

You know, I actually, it would be great, I think, for our audience too, to talk about those 5 exemplary leadership practices. I'm going to test my memory a little bit on them. But, um, so it's modeling the way, right? Inspiring a shared vision, enabling others to act. Challenging the process and encouraging the heart, right?

You got it. Those are the 5 exemplary practices of leadership.

There we go. So I would love to have you talk about not only how they play on the leadership front and how they, um, you know, certainly part of the, of an LPI, which I've done too, which is great. Um, but also in terms of how they play out in sales and in teams, because you can really see the commonality, especially when you talk about a sales situation where, you know, if you think about it, you, you want that person who you are trying to sell, if you will, to to know that you care about them and their interests? And how do you get on the same side of the table? How do you get on the same team? How, as a leader, do you convince people that are working with you that you are there to make them successful, not the other way around? You know, so that there's that part of it. So I'd love for you to talk about those 5 exemplary practices and how they play really in all 3 areas.

Okay. So I'll introduce each one and talk about how it, um, how it plays in those 3 areas. We'll just take them one at a time because there's a lot here. So the first one is to model the way. And by the way, these 5 exemplary practices of leadership, they also come from Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner. So, and we use them in Stop Selling and Start Leading. To model the way really means to become a good example. And you can't become a good example until you know your own values and you understand how your actions are reflecting those values, and you're consistent. You become credible because of the way you live your values. That's really important if you're in a formal management role because people, well, they look to what you're doing a lot more than what you're saying. It's the old actions speak louder than words. And your credibility, if you are in a position of senior management, your credibility is what is going to make or break the success of your team and organization. You can't be credible if you're not consistent and predictable. So that's what model the way means for leaders in organizations. For teams, it's about building trust. The handoffs that we have with each other, the, uh, need to be able to not do duplicate work because I trust you and you trust me. That comes from our credibility and our consistency. Then in sales, this is a big one. The comments that we received in our research study with buyers, over a third of the comments had to do with one specific aspect of Model the Way, and that is that buyers want sellers to DWYSIWYD. That's an acronym. To DWYSIWYD, it stands for do what you say you will do, and buyers feel that sellers don't do that at the beginning when the relationship is really fragile and the trust hasn't fully formed yet. That's what they're gauging. That's all they have to work with. So we got comments that said things like, hey, if the salesperson said they were going to call me at 8 and they didn't call me till 8:15, I'm done. Because that's all, that's all they have to work with.

Yep. Yeah. So, so there's model the way.

Yes. The second one is to inspire a shared vision. A couple of keywords in there. The first word is to inspire. That means to breathe life into. And if you think about breathing, it's something that you do continually, almost constantly. And the same is true with the vision. You have to be breathing life into it over and over and over again, not just putting it out there once. A vision is a future state. The ideal state in the future. So it can be inspiring, but only if you're breathing life into it and only if it's shared. It's not my vision. It's our vision. We've talked with each other. We've come together. I understand what you're looking to do. And our vision means we're working together to get there. I'm guiding you as, as a leader to help realize your vision and to help you see how your own self-interests are met by our vision. Probably obvious how that's represented in organizations from senior management. In teams, it's what unifies us. We might be sometimes working at cross purposes, competing for resources, or making sure our own functional area needs are getting covered before we take care of team needs. But if we're unified by a shared vision and it's being inspired over and over again, that's going to get our work done in a much different way. And then sellers, well, buyers want to be inspired. They want to be going towards something, and sellers already know this. That's why they ask those questions, business owners too, about, you know, what do you want to accomplish? But that's not quite the vision. That's really more like a goal. Vision is big. If you think about, think about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his I Have a Dream speech, right? He said, I have a dream. And it was a big dream and it ignited people. He didn't say, I have a list of measurable objectives, right? It wouldn't have been inspiring. So in sales, we have to understand our buyers' dreams and where they want to go and then find ways to show them how we're going to help them get there over and over and over again.

I think the vision piece that you mentioned regarding teams is really important because You know, when, when you have teams and when you are either competing for resources or there may be different opinions about how to get somewhere, right, or how to get something done. I worked with a team, uh, at Mullen at the time. Today it's called MullenLowe. And it was, it wasn't, um, that team did not have an absence of conflict. I mean, there was a lot of conflict, but the conflict wasn't team members fighting against each other. They were team members who were fighting for the best idea. Everybody there was committed to work, to being part of a team that they believed could produce the very best advertising in the world. And so you had passion around that. And the conflict around that was actually quite healthy. It was never personal. It was never at people. It was about how do we get to that vision? And it unified the team in a very, very powerful way. Um, and again, it didn't create kumbaya. In fact, maybe just the opposite, but it created a great level of satisfaction when the work became, you know, the real prize, you know, the real— and that vision is realized that we are here to do special things. We are here to do great things together. And it's kind of nice when, when you can celebrate that.

Absolutely. That unity, that is the stuff that employee engagement is made up of. It's what gives people that sense of belonging. And that healthy conflict, that leads right into the next practice of exemplary leadership, which is to challenge the process. Because leaders are, they're restless. They're always asking, what's new? What's next? They're not complacent and settled in the status quo. And they will stir things up. That means there might be some healthy conflict. How can we always be improving? What are some of the incremental steps we can be taking toward our vision? And It means we might even have to take some risks. We can't be afraid to fail, but we have to be committed to failing forward and to learning and to growing together. For teams, it's just exactly what you described, Leo. And for sales and buyer relationships, well, buyers want it. They don't want to be challenged before relationships are established and before trust is built. They actually sort of rail against that, and that's a misunderstanding out of other work that's been out there. But they do want a seller to bring them fresh ideas and to ask thought-provoking questions and to be constantly on the lookout for innovations and other ways that things could get done.

Nice. So we've got two more. We've got enabling others to act and encouraging the heart.

Yes, and these are the two that tend to surprise sellers the most when it comes to, I'm supposed to do that with my buyers? It doesn't seem like it's in the realm of buying/selling, so I'll explain there. To enable others to act means to build up a spirit of collaboration, and it means to respect the decisions and the ideas and the thoughts that others bring to the table and to listen to them so that they are fully enabled to do their part. It means that you're not doing things for others, and it means that you're not hoarding the work because you're afraid to delegate or afraid to give up some kind of control. It truly is shared and collaborative. What buyers want— in fact, this practice ranked higher than all of the others, although they want all 5, this one was at the top. What buyers want is to be heard, and they want to have an opportunity to put their own imprint on the solution. They want to participate in creating what they want. Huge misunderstanding, because we think that as salespeople we should do all of that work for them. And yet when we do, we're distancing them from the product. And that means that they don't have buy-in before we're asking them to buy. So to enable others to act, we need to engage them and make it more collaborative.

So, and of course, encouraging the heart is interesting. As you know, Kusitz and Posner actually wrote a book just on this one practice. And I know for— I first became acquainted with this work when I was in graduate school. And we all took LPI. And interestingly enough, we all scored pretty low in the scheme of things when it came to encouraging the heart, not because we didn't appreciate people or whatever. I think we didn't know how to do it. Um, I think it was, um, a lack of really, um, understanding about how creative you could be, how important it could be, not only to privately, but publicly acknowledge people and what that looked like. So yeah, I'd love for you to talk about encouraging the heart, cause I think it's something that, people, it is inspiring and it is something that fills people up and helps accomplish, I think, a lot of those other— it feeds those other practices, I think, in a big way.

Absolutely it does. When people hear this practice, they tend to think about praise and recognition. And there's a lot more to it than that. So in, oh, in the workplace or in buying, selling, we know at the end Everybody's done a good job. We got to the final product. The goal's been met. We know we're supposed to say thank you, and we generally do. But it turns out that's not enough. To encourage, that word, to give you a visual, it means to pour courage into. And where am I going to pour that courage? I'm going to pour it into your hearts. So here's that emotional connection. It is emotional. We are human. And when do you need courage? You don't need it at the end when you've already had the victory. You need courage along the way when the going gets tough and it's hard. In buying/selling, buyers need courage when they're trying to sell this idea to everybody else in their organization and they're saying no to others so that they can make a choice to work with you. And they're putting their, their necks on the chopping block because they're proposing a change. And what if that change doesn't work out the way They think it will. They need courage, praise, recognition, celebration, dignifying them that their ideas are good and that they are capable, ennobling them. Enoble means to make people feel worthy or important. And so all of these things, all the way through, when people are making great effort, that's worthy of being recognized. So to encourage the heart means that you are constantly on the lookout for what people are doing well and what they're doing to advance toward the shared goals that you have, the vision, and how they might be bringing the values, the shared values that you discovered in Modeling the Way to.

Yeah, it seems that at least on the leadership front, a lot of the negative behaviors, the, this command and control, I think is probably the key one where when someone tries to control, it tends to lead to practices that are the opposite of encouraging the heart and enabling others to act and inspiring much of anything, right?

Yes, I contrast command and control to heart and soul. And as a leader, you can't be afraid to put yourself in the mix. Being a little transparent, even vulnerable, helps people to feel connected to you and to see you as a leader that they would willingly choose to follow. When it comes to who do you choose to surround yourself with, any of us would choose someone who inspires us, who dignifies us, who reveals a little bit more of themselves to us, and who respects us as a person enough to want that kind of connection with us.

Yeah, I think, you know, someone else who I believe you will know, Robert H. Thompson, who wrote a book called The Offsite, which, as you may know, you know, is based on the 5 exemplary practices of leadership. But there's a character in this kind of, um, you know, business fable, if you will. And his name is Sam Arthur. And Sam Arthur is kind of the, the one who is the, um, kind of the real metaphor for, for leadership, but he's the groundskeeper. He's the guy who takes care of all the beautiful plants around this incredible resort. And it's nice because if you think about it, they could have given him any, you know, Robert Thompson in terms of writing the book could have given him any job. But he gave him that job, I think, in particular, because in order for those plants to be as beautiful as they are, Sam Arthur wasn't running around screaming at them, telling them to grow faster. He was, he was watering them, making sure they had sunlight, doing all of the things that created the conditions in the environment so that they could flourish. And I really thought about that in terms of people. How do we make people around us flourish? Whether we're in sales leadership, whether we're a team member, whatever that looks like, how do we do that? And I think much of what you talked about today kind of helps us do just that.

Yeah, there's a quote from Eleanor Roosevelt that I really like, and it goes something like this. She said, a good leader causes others to have confidence in the leader. A great leader causes others to have confidence in themselves. And I think that's ultimately what it's all about, nurturing people helping them to flourish and grow means that you don't try to do it all yourself. Leadership is not a solo act, but that you make space for others to also be leaders and to stretch and find the outer bounds of their own capacity.

No, I think that's great. I love that we've kind of, you know, used these 5 practices to kind of take a deep dive into this, both for teams, um, you know, leadership and sales, because I think people will really start to see that connection, you know, in a very big way. So this is, this has really been great. You know, um, I'd love to get a sense too of, um, you know, when we get into our conversation, we were talking about the fact that this idea of who you surround yourself with matters. It's certainly what, um, you know, The Power of Peers was dedicated to. And the same thing with the next book I've got coming out, What Anyone Can Do. But in terms of just, you know, just getting the right people, you know, becomes really key, doesn't it? I mean, that's, that's the, that's the start. And I know you mentioned you use assessments and things like that, but what advice do you have for leaders who are just trying to get the right people hired on their team? Because how many of us have received a great resume and they go through the interview process and everybody's great, and then 3 months later they're wondering, why is this not working?

So— There's one thing you've got to look for. Above and beyond the experience, you want to look for someone who's teachable, coachable, someone who wants to learn and grow. Because the world's changing, and even if they have all the experience exactly buttoned up the way you want it for the job today, that doesn't give you any guarantee about what's happening a year from now. People who want to learn and grow, they're receptive to your coaching and to doing things perhaps a different way. And they also are willing and able to stretch themselves so that they might even innovate and help you do better than you're already doing.

That's great.

Deb, you start your company in 2006, you step out of the corporate world. And so in keeping with kind of our tagline of who you surround yourself with matters, share with us people that led a person like you to start a company like this and to name it People First. I mean, you clearly have a framework and a philosophy in your head that, that we certainly appreciate and is congruent with what we're all about. I'm interested to hear the stories.

Okay. Well, coming out of that corporate experience, I knew one thing when I went into business for myself. I knew that I wanted to work with organizations that had a people-first belief or that wanted one. And I, at the beginning of business, I tended to steer toward the places where I thought I could have complete rehabilitation. So I worked with a couple of organizations who are on the top 10 list of places that are the worst places in the world to work. And those were large companies that I wasn't going to turn around with me and my small team. We made some inroads, and what ended up happening, frankly, is that because of this philosophy, we ended up working with a few leaders who decided they had to go elsewhere, that they also couldn't change the organizations. So I took a step back and said maybe, maybe rehabilitation is not quite what I'm after here. So now I do look for organizations. I work primarily with organizations that are already committed to this, and they're looking for the tools and the techniques to make sure that their culture is solid. And that what they say, what they profess, I'm putting their people first, is evident in their practices. And when it comes to people that I select for my team, they have to be able to put people first. I'm pretty rigorous in my selection. So for example, with trainers, there are a lot of trainers out there who are excellent presenters. They're really, really good as a sage on the stage, but they're not as good at facilitating, at being able to turn the spotlight over to others in the group that they're teaching, to ask the questions that draw something out of people so that there's some self-discovery that's happening in that moment. And if I'm not able to help someone see the value of doing that kind of facilitation, then they, they don't make it onto our trainer team.

Is there some particular personal story that you would, that you would be willing to share as far as somebody who impacted your life? To kind of put you on this track?

So many people. I have been really, really blessed with a lot of great mentors. I'll go back, so back a lot of years because it's, I think, what changed my way of thinking. This would have been in about— what year would this be? Late '90s. And there was a new vice president of advertising at the newspaper where I worked as a salesperson. And we had a large meeting with the 80 or so people that were part of that team. On a day when he was being introduced as the new person who would be in charge, and I was equipped right after that meeting to go turn in my letter of resignation because I had a new job offer. But he said something that made me never, ever turn that letter in. What he said in that meeting was that he really believed that people should go and work in the places where they were given opportunities to learn and grow. And he said the reason that he chose this job out of all the jobs he had recently been offered, he chose to come work at the Kansas City Star because we had a reputation for being open and giving people opportunities to learn and grow. And he was right. And I had to think about that. I had to think about all the other mentors I'd already had at that newspaper. But Mike became a mentor to me because he gave me so many opportunities over the next 10 years to grow and to learn and to constantly challenge myself. He asked me to do ridiculous things that I never dreamed I could or would do.

That's great.

And he believed in me. So, um, I did those things and exceeded my own expectations.

And here we are now, the author of Stop Selling and Start Leading, co-authors with Jim Kouzes and Posner. And we're, we've been, we've been happy to have you. Interesting conversation. Any, any last words of advice, Deb, for folks that are trying to be more purposeful, more intentional about who they surround themselves with for their own success, customer acquisition? I mean, in any and all areas of life, parting shots.

Yeah. One last, just as a, as a counterbalance here, we want emotional connections, but that doesn't mean just gravitate to the people who you automatically connect with. Form connections, in fact, with people who think differently than you do, who challenge you, who will be the ones you have the healthy conflict with, because your ideas will be enriched and your decisions will be better when you've had that sort of thought partner.

Great, great words of advice. And also, just as a final thing too, let us, or let our audience know, where they can learn more about you and your work?

Well, the website is People First PS— stands for Productivity Solutions— People First is spelled out, peoplefirstps.com. The book Stop Selling and Start Leading is available at all major booksellers, and I'm all over social media, so look for my handle People First PS or my name Deb Calvert. And, and let's do connect. I would love to surround myself with the listeners of this program because I know already that, that we're thinking alike.

Great.

Thanks, Deb.

Thank you.

To learn more about our show and what we do, to submit questions to us, and to subscribe to What Anyone Can Do Podcast, Please visit our website, whatanyonecandodo.com. What Anyone Can Do Podcast is hosted by Leo Battari and me, Randy Cantrell. Music provided by Kevin MacLeod is Vibe Ace, licensed under Creative Commons by Attribution 3.0 license. Thanks for watching or listening. We hope you'll share the podcast.