The imperative of investing in your people
Meet Keith Willis, who loves to help people leverage their talents. They've already put in the hard work and done all the right things. They just want somebody to give them a little bit of guidance, a little bit of a push and help them get to the next level – that’s a process he helps them achieve.
Wherever you are in any organization, a lot of times people think that the development of people just happens. In fact, it is a process. There are steps that must be taken to make sure that you get people where they want to be. Keith and I discussed this recently in an episode of Nuggets with Sauce.
Times are (still) changing
We agreed it's interesting that when you look at Gallup data, it always talks about how low engagement is, and over the years that hasn't changed. Well, it changed a little bit during COVID, probably because people were happy to have a job and companies let them work from home. That's in the rear-view mirror now. Things have not gone so well lately. Read the news anytime and a CEO is saying, “Hey, I want my people back in the office. Yeah, I want my people this, I want my people that.” And they’re likely also moaning about “nobody wants to work”, which isn’t true.
Focus on what they can do
Keith shared a story from his time in pharmaceuticals as a district sales manager, and a representative who was really struggling. One day, she looked at him and said, “I think I'm going to go home and cry.” That hit him in a particular way and left him thinking, that’s never good. At that time, he was reading Break All the Rules (by Marcus Buckingham), and one of the focuses in that book is on what people do extremely well. She was an extremely good sales representative. She struggled with her product knowledge. When asked what it was that she did better than anybody, she said she helped paint pictures and helped doctors understand who they should write for. That was they decided to focus on to help her improve.
Now, that doesn't mean that they couldn't focus on her product knowledge, because in the pharmaceutical industry, being able to provide the right knowledge is very important. The reality was she was never going to be somebody that was going to be 100% or an “A plus” with product knowledge. But if she got to a “C”, then she was going to be okay. And they were able to get her focused on what she did extremely well, and she ended that year over 100%. That was the first lesson around focusing on what people do well can give you the types of results that you're looking for and great performance.
What we are vs. what we aren't
We tend to focus a lot on what people aren't, often more than what they are. “Oh, here's the 52 things you did wrong and here's all the ‘what not to do’”. We see this all the time in business. If anybody's bothering to do performance reviews, performance coaching, performance anything, there's so much focus on the mentality of the “You're not this, you're not that, it's not enough.”
Instead, we should flip that on its head, break those rules and say, “What are we doing in this space? What are you getting right? Where are you wonderful and shiny?” How do we bring more of that to the forefront as opposed to pounding on people about all the things they're never going to be?
Better alignment = better outcomes
One of the reasons why the story of that sales representative is so vivid is because that's one of the things that most people learn in management because managers are always trained to say, “Okay, well, how do you fix it? What's wrong? What do you do?” One of the best things to look at is what people do well and try to help them do more of that. Because if you do that, then they're going to be happier and they're going to be more productive. And they're going to enjoy what they do.
And there's a lot of value in that for driving better business results.