As a management consultant at PriceWaterhouse in the early 90's, I was asked by the board of the retail arm of a well-regarded Brokerage firm based in Boston to recommend improvements to help their sales. They had done a tremendous job recruiting top talent, yet sales were still slow.
I remember traveling from region to region on my chosen quest, getting polite but vague answers in response to my probing questions. I finally arrived at a mid-western office--actually, it was Oak Brook Illinois, serving a large population of affluent clients and prospects—typically a fertile ground for sales. Yet they were losing sales in this “fertile ground,” and many existing customers were feeling less than enchanted with my client’s people.
At the time, the home office was doing endless roadshows to its regional sales folks to drink the Kool-aid of a policy called “Needs-based selling,” which theoretically meant that the sales people should assess their customer’s financial needs objectively, set out a clear menu of product options, and let the client choose what they needed. The idea was not to push specific products at clients, not to pressure them to buy a stock, a bond, a mutual fund, or an annuity, but just to be a helpful consultant to them.
Sounds good in theory, right?
So what was the problem?
That same home office was paying commissions to the sales people up and down the ladder based solely on quotas for each type of product. The sales people would lose out on bonus and commission if they failed to sell enough of one thing or another every week. So I asked the wonderfully honest Oak Brook branch manager: “What does ‘Needs-based’ selling mean to your people?”
And she chuckled, shrugged, and gave me the first honest answer I’d received in a while: “It means, ‘I NEEDS to push more annuities this week’…”
Put simply, the company chose capable, motivated people to do the work, and that's great. Yet they fell flat on their collective butt by ignoring those good people, and their customers, instead creating policies that hindered, rather than helped, sales.
To be sure, people are a leader’s most valuable asset. Without people, no amount of structure or good intentions would ever be worth a damn. But today’s organizations require much greater self-understanding and awareness of their leaders. We must master so much more than we ever have before: process, systems, tools, and training. Evaluation of consequences, emotional intelligence, experience, and intuition. And most of all, good old-fashioned common sense.
I’ve hired excellent people – perhaps I should listen to their ideas?
I’ve espoused a policy that sounds good on paper, yet I am paying many, many people to avoid following it.
Hmm…
Research, evaluation, training and experience can only take a leader so far; intuition and common sense play vital roles in the day-to-day decisions that come so quickly, so ceaselessly that leaders find themselves relying more and more often on more and more people to get the job done right. Ignore the obvious, set aside that initial instinct or intuitive leap that happens in a blink, and your leadership can lead the train slowly, then quickly and inexorably off the tracks
Much has been written about teamwork, cooperation, collaboration, solidarity, and unity, et al, but true leadership – the kind that works as well in theory as it does in practice – is about more than mere buzz words, posters and pie charts. It’s about arranging the framework of the house, to create, display, value and foster common sense and simplicity.