0:00:43 Jemimah Ashleigh: Ben, how are you?
0:00:45 Ben Wright: Hello, Jemimah. Excellent as always.
0:00:47 Jemimah Ashleigh: Can I just say, this is getting a little ridiculous. We. You saw what I was wearing and you got changed. What’s going on?
0:00:54 Ben Wright: I wanted to be part of it.
0:00:55 Jemimah Ashleigh: Okay. Probably work on colour coordinating better. Actually. She’d be wearing blue jeans.
0:01:02 Ben Wright: The new Men in Black has come out. I think it’s come out. I think it might have gone by now. I remember seeing advertising. I think it’s done sometime over the last period.
0:01:12 Jemimah Ashleigh: Is Will Smith in that one?
0:01:14 Ben Wright: I think he’s still alive.
0:01:17 Jemimah Ashleigh: I think Will Smith’s still alive. I just don’t know whether he was in the movie.
0:01:19 Ben Wright: I haven’t seen him in a movie, in a decent movie for that long.
0:01:23 Jemimah Ashleigh: Could have gone either way.
0:01:24 Ben Wright: But I did love the Men in Black series and I am a fan of Will Smith, actually. Will Smith, he is someone close to my heart. Have you seen the movie Hitch?
0:01:32 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:01:32 Ben Wright: Yeah. So I remember he ate something and his face blew up.
0:01:35 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:01:36 Ben Wright: I get the same thing if I eat lobster and jellyfish. Don’t ask me where I ate jellyfish, but, yeah, face blows up.
0:01:44 Jemimah Ashleigh: Can I just say, I’ve immediately gone, like, what happened in your life that you’re like, yeah, it’s time to eat this spooky thing.
0:01:50 Ben Wright: Yeah. I’d probably be. Probably a couple of drinks.
0:01:53 Jemimah Ashleigh: So, yeah, lobster and jellyfish, allergic to.
0:01:55 Ben Wright: Yep. Everyone. I really get under my skin. That’s. That’s the way to do it.
0:01:59 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah. Great. Well, I’m definitely allergic to salmon, which is your least favorite thing about me, I think, because every time we come here, you almost try to kill me.
0:02:09 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:02:09 Jemimah Ashleigh: I can’t have it. Podcasting today. Very excited for today’s chat.
0:02:16 Ben Wright: Great.
0:02:16 Jemimah Ashleigh: Tell us about what we’re learning about.
0:02:17 Ben Wright: I am going to take the reins a little bit today and we’re going to talk about five traits that I see in successful teams.
0:02:25 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:02:25 Ben Wright: And traits aren’t always the right word. The structures find structures or behaviors.
0:02:30 Jemimah Ashleigh: So behaviors will also be a good one.
0:02:32 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:02:32 Jemimah Ashleigh: I find that one of the things that’s so interesting is that we inherently good leaders know some of this stuff quite intuitively. But I think defining it can be really hard too.
0:02:44 Ben Wright: Yeah, that is a very, very good point. If we can just bring some clarity and structure to our thought as leaders, that really helps us perform it. And look, I have to say, since I’ve been spending time, excuse me, as I pull some form of hair out.
0:03:01 Jemimah Ashleigh: I got attacked by like some fluff earlier. So unless you have a fluff tree in the back garden.
0:03:05 Ben Wright: There is a bit around. But back to my point is that I actually found that once I moved into my current life, which was very much about helping and supporting leaders and business and heads of business, is that I actually was able to put a lot more time into building those structures and bringing some process and system to the thoughts that I had had as a leader. We had almost 300 staff and subcontractors in the final business that I ran. That’s been really beneficial for me. So I love sharing it.
So. But today I’m going to talk about five things that I see. Behaviors, traits, systems, process, whatever you want to call it, that come out of successful teams. And it’s based off my experience leading businesses. And I did. I started at the bottom as a 20 year old. By the time being I finished running businesses, I was at the end of my 30s and now I’ve had a number of years doing this as well. So for me the first thing that I see in every single team is that they have a strategy that everyone is aware of.
0:04:03 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes. Oh goodness, yes.
0:04:05 Ben Wright: So that strategy normally has three to five key goals in it and most importantly has been built by the team. So often the leaders will set the broad spectrum. I.e. this year we need to move into a brand new geography or we are going to move into a new product segment or we need to make sure that for every dollar that we grow by, we limit expenses to a 25 cent growth, whatever it may be. A very broad top line structure is, but the strategy is then specifically created by the team.
So how we get to that new geography, how we roll out that new product line, whatever it may be, is.
0:04:47 Jemimah Ashleigh: The buying important from the team?
0:04:49 Ben Wright: Absolutely. If you build it.
0:04:51 Jemimah Ashleigh: That was such a loaded question that I was like, yeah
0:04:52 Ben Wright: And I rolled straight into it. So thank you. If you build it, you generally implement it.
0:04:58 Jemimah Ashleigh: Absolutely.
0:04:59 Ben Wright: So when we have teams that come in and get the opportunity to be part of that strategic formulation, they buy in so much more along the journey and they ride the Bumps. They ride the bumps not only with more agility, but more resilience. And resilience has been shown to be a really key factor in success.
0:05:19 Jemimah Ashleigh: I think grit is the most underrated thing. I think of all the things that we have, especially as entrepreneurs, as business owners and as leaders, the grit part, to hang on when other people are going, are you sure? Are you sure that we’re going off the rails? It’s like this is part of the process. You almost have to have the moment of.
0:05:38 Ben Wright: Yeah. Being comfortable with being uncomfortable. So that’s number one.
0:05:42 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, I love that. And I love that the team’s buying is so valuable because I think one of the things, when you bring new team members, everyone’s on board, the new people go, oh, we’re all on board this. Okay, let’s go.
0:05:53 Ben Wright: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Great. Number two, sales process.
0:05:59 Jemimah Ashleigh: Sales really?
0:06:00 Ben Wright: Sales process, really. For me, it expects never. The reason that this is so important is because as businesses grow, you generally lose control of your sales funnel at either a leader level. So if you’re a startup.
0:06:17 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:06:18 Ben Wright: You generally, generally found a lead. Sales is pretty common. You lose control of it as you grow. As you, if you’re a medium sized business that looks to go big, you’re putting on more and more salespeople. So you’re growing, you’re bringing new people in and you need to be able to train them.
0:06:32 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:06:33 Ben Wright: Right. And the third piece is that if you’re a really big business, you just have such scale of salespeople numbers, 50, 100, 200, 400, 1,000 people out in the field. But for all three of those, we need systems. If you have a sales process as a founder that’s leading your team, as you pass that sales process on to others, it’s easier for them to remember and you get to replicate it. If you’re a mid sized business that is also growing.
0:07:01 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:07:02 Ben Wright: And you’re bringing new people on. Right. When you have a sales process, it gives you something to train them around so they’re being trained the way you want them to sell straight away. And last, if you’re a large business and you have scores and scores of people, that generally means you have multiple sales leaders. And all your sales leaders are then training their people in the same way or varies, the same sales process.
0:07:21 Ben Wright: You’re not getting lots of deviation in your offer because as soon as you get deviation in your offer and what customers are accepting, it becomes harder to fulfill. As soon as it becomes harder to fulfill, it becomes more costly. You need more people it’s harder to satisfy your customers. So having a sales process that covers 80% of what you do is where I see teams succeeding. That still leaves 20%.
0:07:44 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:07:45 Ben Wright: For people to freeform. Freeform.
0:07:47 Jemimah Ashleigh: That’s a big gap.
0:07:48 Ben Wright: That leaves plenty of time for individual personalities. But you hit the Pareto principle and you cover the key stuff.
0:07:53 Jemimah Ashleigh: You really do allow people in those roles to have that flexibility and to have that personal development and that growth as well, which I think is really, really important.
0:08:01 Ben Wright: Yeah. Yeah.
0:08:02 Jemimah Ashleigh: Especially in businesses that are growing and scaling and people want to take ownership. One of the things that I. One of the best books I’ve ever read is Tribes, and it’s around how. And I love the psychology part of why humans human so well and how we work. But I really love this idea of we want to always belong. We will make strange bedfellows over no bedfellows every time. We will do anything to fit in. It’s how we end up doing weird jobs for as long as we do. She’s like, I like the team, they’re great.
And if you like where you are, you would stay. Especially if you feel belonging, if you belong to that. Because at a fundamental level, us being voted out of the tribe, if you will, was near certain death back in the day. I feel banished in the camp. We want to be part of that. And I think in both of these, number one and number two, figure you’re allowing people to come into it. Yeah. And then buying into this trap that you’re making.
0:08:48 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:08:49 Jemimah Ashleigh: Cultivating this environment for them.
0:08:51 Ben Wright: Yeah. And that leads into part of number three, which I will get to as the second part of number three. But the first part of number three is metrics. When we have a business that has goals but doesn’t measure progress to them, a couple of things happen. First of all is we can lose sight of that goal. And when we need to be heading due north, if we start to head just a degree at a time off to the west, we can all of a sudden be.
0:09:12 Jemimah Ashleigh: Take off in London, like take off in London L.A. or depending on one degree. Right.
0:09:17 Ben Wright: Yeah. We want to go north, which is the best place for us to be. But we end up the Wild west very, very quickly. So, one, we lose track of our goals, but number two is our team members lose motivation to hit there. Because often when we’ve got something that’s a long way ahead, but we’re not measuring progress along the journey, people don’t realise where they’re at and they start to focus on other things.
Metrics get a bad name because often, particularly in the sales landscape, they’re seen as a form of micromanagement. But when you take the lens that says they’re actually there to help you recognize when you’re making progress and when you’re not making progress and bring you back into line to keep you on course, I think that’s a terrific way to approach them. But what is also really important, also really important about metrics is that we keep them nice and simple.
We will do a podcast on metrics, but I work off three metrics. The temptation is so heavy now to go into a dozen metrics on a CRM dashboard or any form of working operating.
0:10:17 Jemimah Ashleigh: I start looking at my CRM dashboard because it just overwhelms me with numbers. I was like, I just need to know if we’re getting people in and if people are leaving. I need to know if this is greater than this. That’s all I need to know.
0:10:28 Ben Wright: And that is the reason that I actually suggest we keep it simple because we want engagement. But the second part around wanting to belong to a tribe, the second part of the third reason why teams, businesses succeed is that they celebrate progress around these metrics. So we’ve had actually episode, what are we? Episode 16 was all about celebrations and rituals. I recommend you go back and listen to that. But for me is when we have metrics that are built around a process that is towards achieving our goals, right? If we’re celebrating how we’re going, teams buy in. 78% of staff say that they will stay to business longer if they feel recognized and rewarded appropriately. So when we celebrate
0:11:09 Jemimah Ashleigh: It’s not hard. To do that stuff. It’s so interesting.
0:11:11 Ben Wright: It’s not hard to celebrate, but it is hard to build a system around it. So the businesses that do this really well, they measure performance and they celebrate wins. They acknowledge progress and they celebrate wins.
0:11:21 Jemimah Ashleigh: I love that.
0:11:22 Ben Wright: Cool. Ready for number four?
0:11:23 Jemimah Ashleigh: Bring it.
0:11:24 Ben Wright: Right. So number one was goals. They have clear goals that people build together and they buy into. Number two is they have a process around sales in particular. Right. That’s often the lifeblood of a business, not always. Third one is metrics and celebrations. Fourth is they have a training program. Everyone has different motivations when they go to work. Some want to belong, some want to make money, Some want to learn. There’s lots of others. Some simply have to go to work because they just need to be there. But for those very much in the majority is if we can be learning at work, we are more satisfied if.
0:11:59 Jemimah Ashleigh: We’re growing and we’re getting the paycheck and we’re feeling valued. You’ve got a staff member for life.
0:12:06 Ben Wright: Yeah. And look, we certainly change careers more than we used to. Staff members for life exist. They less frequently or lives. There are more lives in every career.
0:12:15 Jemimah Ashleigh: So says us who has had multiple.
0:12:19 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:12:20 Jemimah Ashleigh: Tired thinking about it. So tell me more about that. Tell me more about the training aspect. So what does that have to look like? Does it have to be an extensive one or is it just that we have training like available internal, external facilitators.
0:12:33 Ben Wright: Yeah. So I have this beautiful program set up with training that actually allows a leader of the business to. To set the format of a training program for 12 months in one hour. That’s all it takes. It’s brilliant template. The key elements of that training program are they have a set format that’s repeatable.
0:12:48 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:12:49 Ben Wright: So they know how long it’s going to go for, they know how often they’re going to have it and they have a broad structure around the topics they’re going to cover. Now, it doesn’t have to be weekly. I recommend weekly but it certainly doesn’t work if it’s once a quarter.
0:13:03 Jemimah Ashleigh: And there’s an argument to be made for weekly and fortnightly as well. It was often there. Immediately I was like I would be putting it fortnightly into my office and be like everyone comes here that day. This is what we’re doing. We’re having staff training this day. It’s followed by cake and celebration of what we’re all up to. Perfect.
0:13:18 Ben Wright: Right. And I love cake. So I’ll be there every time. So it’s very much a pedal. It has some rules of engagement.
0:13:23 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:13:24 Ben Wright: So everyone knows how they need to behave within the training. Third piece around trainings is very clear. Action items come out of it. And the fourth, but really importantly is that we know how we’re going to lock that training in, which I’m going to come to in a moment. But they are the really key part. So we have a very clear formula. Right. We know what we’re going to talk about. We’re very clear on what we action items that we need to get out of it with rules of engagement in there. And at the end we make sure we lock that training away so we cement it in. Because the average training only lasts the impact’s only a few months, 40 odd days. Different stats will give you different numbers but certainly at a thematic level we forget what we’ve learned a couple of months. So we need to make sure we’re cementing that. Right.
So that’s a really, really important part of that training program. But there’s a little unintended consequence of training programs that very few leaders I certainly didn’t recognize until I had time to really decompress, post my time leading larger business. And that is often leaders, whether you be an entrepreneur, whether you be a functional leader or business leader, often what comes back that you learn in return is significant.
0:14:35 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:14:36 Ben Wright: Generally studies say that teaching is the best way to learn. In this instance, I’m actually not talking about that. That’s a great benefit. I think that’s pretty, pretty well known.
0:14:44 Jemimah Ashleigh: Unintended benefits are always beneficial, of course.
0:14:48 Ben Wright: Right. The one I’m talking about here though is that we get to hear feedback from our teams about what’s working and what’s not working. Because it’s not a structured team meeting where they’re very formal. It’s not a one to one where you’re talking about personal development. It’s a meeting where everyone’s in there and you’re working out how you can be better. And with that then comes that feedback. I can say that some of the best from field learnings I’ve ever taken have come from training programs.
So great little side benefit. And it’s one of the reasons I really encourage leaders to run a training program. That’s four, we’re four down, one to go. Coaching. Say what? People sometimes go, what are you talking about? Training is coaching. And I’ve got a beautiful one liner here. Training is knowledge transfer.
0:15:36 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:15:38 Ben Wright: Coaching is knowledge enhancement.
0:15:41 Jemimah Ashleigh: Love it.
0:15:42 Ben Wright: So whilst we might train on how to deliver a podcast on how to set up a podcast on how to get it all ready to roll, the coaching piece comes in when we’re actually running through our podcast and we have light coming in from the side that we need to fix. We have technical glitches with microphones. We have guests not turn up or run or have a poor experience with a guest. We have editing issues. Right. We have all these types of problems that occur when you’re running a podcast and you don’t always learn at the start. That’s when we get to enhance that knowledge. And the same goes whether we’re coaching marketing teams or operations teams or customer service teams or sales teams.
In fact, I want to share an example here. One of the best coaching proteges I had in the business was a young guy. He came in very knowledgeable in the industry we’re in. I’m not going to mention the business here. This is a general example. He came in very, very knowledgeable. I went to his first presentation with him. All he’d done was switch customer base from residential to commercial. It was the worst presentation I have seen a commercial salesperson give.
0:16:51 Jemimah Ashleigh: Excellent.
0:16:52 Ben Wright: I walked out of that meeting wondering if this guy was going to make it.
0:16:55 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:16:56 Ben Wright: So he didn’t actually need any training on what to do. He knew what to do.
0:17:01 Jemimah Ashleigh: He was able to do the presentation. He knew how to set the room up. He knew how to be there and do the quick you thing.
0:17:06 Ben Wright: And he just didn’t know how to engage the customer. Two and a half years later, number one salesperson in a business. And this was a business that was growing really quickly.
0:17:17 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:17:17 Ben Wright: And the sales. That there were 22 in this sales team. Yeah.
0:17:23 Jemimah Ashleigh: Right.
0:17:23 Ben Wright: So he wasn’t one of three. He was one of 22, and he was the number one in the team.
0:17:27 Jemimah Ashleigh: Incredible.
0:17:27 Ben Wright: In his last year with the business, before he had. He moved his family overseas. But I still respect his willingness to take on the coaching. He spent a lot of time with him and he spent some time with others. But most importantly, I’m grateful that he did the learning because he just. It has launched his career and he’s doing really well in what he’s doing overseas.
0:17:46 Jemimah Ashleigh: And coaching is so interesting to me because it’s. It’s a wheelhouse. I’ve certainly played now doing a lot of visibility coaching and helping people with that, because, I mean, none of the things. And I think we can broadly say this for most people listening to this at the moment is that most people will know everything that we do is somewhere online. How we deliver it, how we provide it to people, particularly what I do. People know how to go and do visibility stuff. It’s all there.
0:18:12 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:18:12 Jemimah Ashleigh: How I do it is a little bit different. How that enhancement piece is everything.
0:18:17 Ben Wright: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Excellent. So five things.
0:18:21 Jemimah Ashleigh: Five things, please.
0:18:22 Ben Wright: Strategy.
0:18:23 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:18:23 Ben Wright: Sales process, metrics and celebrations. Training program and a coaching structure. Yeah.
0:18:30 Jemimah Ashleigh: My silver bullet for this is easy. It’s the metrics part. The track what needs to be tracked and understand that that’s what can be changed.
0:18:37 Ben Wright: Yeah. Okay.
0:18:38 Jemimah Ashleigh: I love that and I love this idea that these tiny little tweaks really do change everything.
0:18:44 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:18:45 Jemimah Ashleigh: It’s that 1%, the 1 millimeter at a time effect.
0:18:48 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:18:48 Jemimah Ashleigh: And I. I’m really looking forward to our podcast on metrics because I actually really like those 1% changes. I think they are the difference between the road less traveled and living in a mainstream life. Every Single day.
0:19:02 Ben Wright: That’s right.
0:19:02 Jemimah Ashleigh: What’s yours?
0:19:03 Ben Wright: I traveled the road less traveled and it made all the difference. So for me, mine is as leaders, we generally know this in here, there should be some little silver pellets. There’s not going to be a silver bullet in there, but lots of little silver pellets. It’s about making sure we take the time to actually quantify, put it down on paper
0:19:18 Jemimah Ashleigh: It’s the process stuff right.
0:19:20 Ben Wright: Right? Yeah. Just take these five things and work through it with your team and they will be grateful for it.
0:19:25 Jemimah Ashleigh: I work with. We have a fairly. I have a small, smaller team, but I have other teams that I work with throughout the year. And one of the things that I see people doing is inherently quite well. What I don’t see is this formalized process. And I think that’s, you know, that maybe the bullet is that formalized process. Formalize it.
0:19:42 Ben Wright: Perfect. Excellent. I love it. Well, thank you for Jemimah.
0:19:46 Jemimah Ashleigh: Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you for Ben, always. We have a lot of fun doing this podcast, don’t we?
0:19:53 Ben Wright: Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes, you know, I spend so much time talking in front of people that even, even I trip over my words, so. But I’m lucky that people are genuinely pretty friendly. They tend to tolerate a mistake or two. And if all else fails, you’ve got your friends in Business who are us. We’ve had a great, a great podcast. Thank you again, everyone. We’ll see you next week.
0:20:13 Jemimah Ashleigh: See you guys.
