Transcript
Intro
Hi, everyone. I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Teams podcast, where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate, and keep together highly effective sales teamsâŚteams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits.
Along the journey, we also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive you is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious Sales Leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, Stronger Sales Teams is right where you need to be.
Ben Wright:
Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop superpowered B2B sales teams. So a few weeks ago in Episode 32, we spoke about my coaching model and why I use it. The GROW model one from John Whitmore. A really easy episode to listen and take notes on so often, once you have those notes, tends to fall back into the not important or not urgent type of priority platform where we generally just don't quite get to it.
So for me, I wanted to try and expand on why really focusing on your team and improving them both as individuals and the collective is so critical to success in 2023/24, right and beyond.
So enter today's episode. Today is going to pair some of the chunky advice from episode 32 about coaching for success, right, with recognizing when and how you should be implementing this coaching into your team, right? So if you haven't listened to Episode 32, it's worth going back to it's a 25, 30-minute episode all based around the G.R.O.W. model, the coaching model that I use for my teams and also for those that I coach.
So to pair it with something very relevant today, one of the questions that always sits at the top of my list when I'm coaching any leader is one that I will ask at every single coaching engagement I have dnd that is âWhere is your team at?â
So your current team, where are they at right now? And then I'll pause and I won't say anything for as long as I can. So the answer here is all based around the characteristics that define the current workings and the thinkings and the behaviors of the team, right? Super easy question to ask, right? And even easier to pause and say ânothingâ for quite a few seconds, right? But most of the time, the answers I'll get back will be something like, âWe've got lots of good people, but we're not quite hitting results yetâ. Or âEveryone gets on, but we've got too many individuals doing their own thingâ or âWe agree on one thing in a meeting, we essentially get it right, but then people go and do their own thing, others will do something elseâ or âFor me, as a leader, I'm trying to get everyone to own their results and be accountable and make sure things happen. But it's becoming increasingly difficult for me to get people just to have ownershipâ, really, really common responses. And I'd be really surprised if most of the people listening to this podcast hadn't experienced some of those issues recently themselves.
So being that they're also super normal and me personally, I've experienced them repeatedly, right. I'm saying repeatedly, not just once over my career, but many times, we really need to focus, for me as leaders, on how can we bring some structure to improving these situations, right? We can bring a coaching model into it, but how do we know which parts of that model to apply or particularly which types of leadership hats to put on when we're trying to work for improvement?
So, for me, what do I do about it? I think the question of today and what do I see the best leaders that I work with do about it? Well, the long answer is there's lots of things, right? There's coaching, there's building sales processes, training, there's group strategic planning, lots and lots and lots of things.
But the area I want to focus on today, that I've seen done really, really well by the best leaders that I work with, is understanding where their team is at, what's the developmental stage of their team, so that you know what you need to focus on to get them improving and moving forward. So I love to work in simple framework. You've learned that absolutely by now. If you listen to any of my podcasts, I think they just help you give a bit of structure to what you're doing. But for me, they've got to obviously be practical and relatable.
So today I'm going to talk about a structure that I think many people on the call will have heard about, but certainly don't be surprised if you haven't, because it's not something that comes up every single day, but it's Tuckman's model around team engagement, right? So it's a great model, it's a nice, neat model. It's actually got five stages, but people generally focus on four, right? That's Forming, Storming Norming, Performing, and the last one's Adjudicating or Retiring, whichever way you want to look at it. But today we're going to look at the four stages of Tuckman's model and try and apply them to real life examples as to where teams, particularly sales and commercial sales teams, are often at in their journeys.
So let's start by jumping into it.. Forming. So Forming Storming Norming and Performing. Right? I like it. It rhymes. It works well, it's easy to remember. Forming is when teams are first coming together. It's the early stages, right? You don't know each other. It's like preseason for a newly established sporting team doesn't even have to be newly established. But it's preseason when you've got a whole lot of new talent in, you've drafted it in through the age or the underage draft, you've traded them in, right. You got people coming back from injury, whatever it may be, but they're a team that hasn't really got to know each other very well. It's really typical in this instance that people are still trying to understand their roles and how they go about them, right? So people are being polite, everyone's getting on. And for the sales world, this is when you've got lots of new people in the team, particularly a fast growth team, or even when you're new to leading that team, you might have stepped up to lead it or you might have been bought in from another department or another organization to lead it, right? Very, very common stage for teams is Forming.
Next one, Storming. This is when it starts to get real and for me, this is by far the most critical to get right. But this is when teams are working together more deeply, when disagreements will start to happen because people feel a little bit stronger to get their opinions heard. It's not so much about building relationships, but conflict will start to rise here, right. Think power struggles, think people wanting to get their own way. In sporting terms, this is late preseason when you're refining your tactics so you've ideated, you got great ideas out there and it's now moving from ideation to implementation and what's actually going to work, right. Beyond just brainstorming. In the sales world, this is when decisions are starting to be made, right? What strategies are we going to roll out? How are we actually going to do things? So the reason that conflict is coming out is because people want to be heard and they have ways that they're experienced doing things that work or really strong opinions. And this is when we need to be building a team that works together to solve those solutions rather than against each other, right. We're asking for action and commitment from our team so people are going to be more engaged and stronger with those opinions. In this instance, it's as much about what you say and you don't say as a team member as what you do and don't do, right? So you can say a lot, you can say you're going to do a lot, but by not doing or not saying, that's also a form of disagreement or conflict escalation between teams, right? So as the most critical stage, this is one we're going to spend a bit of time on in a minute, talk about just what you can do, but certainly when we are starting to storm, so we've gone through the forming and the storming stage and this is when things start to get really real between teams.
Okay, so the next stage is Norming, right? This is when there starts to be more cohesion, more collaboration, alignment and trust is starting to build between teams, right? We're even building systems or symbols or norms, which I talk about quite regularly, but essentially teams are working together. This is the nice stage of team cycles or team engagement because it's when the sporting team, for example, is starting to get some serious time together and starting to win a few matches, right? We're not there yet, we're not performing well, but it's exciting because we're starting to get things right. In the sales world, this is when teams have gone through their training, have gone through their ideation, have gone through their strategy building and they're starting to be in front of customers, working with them and solving problems and getting those early wins, right? So there's a little bit of success, but not a huge amount of success yet. Great stage to be in, but also very important because we need to make sure we move from this comfortable stage into the performing stage where we're actually getting results and driving value for the business and the business's customers. So that's the performing stage which is stage number four.
So Forming Storming, Norming and Performing, this is when we're working together. Roles are well defined, it's harmonious, it's productive, right? In a sporting analogy, we're making finals, right? So in a sales team, that's when we're hitting numbers. Very, very easy stage to define and also comparatively an easy stage to manage at surface level. But we'll drop down another level as to why having coaching is just as important in the Performing stage as it is in the Forming Storming or Norming stages. And then the fifth stage Adjournment or Retiring. So we're not going to cover that stage today. But there's plenty of stuff we can talk about if you need to. And please get in touch with me if you'd like to.
Okay, so how do we leverage Tuckman's model or this framework, right? How do we use a really basic model to understand how our coaching styles and our application of our coaching model, which for me is the G.R.O.W. model. How do we use this framework to get better results out of our team? Right? This is the practical rubber hitting the road and actually applying theory with practical chunky real world examples. So here's some ideas to help you. I'm going to go through, in practice, some top level stuff and then we'll have a look at each of the individual team stages for today.
So number one is to understand where your team is at. What I do is and write these down and come back to me if you're multitasking. There's really only a couple of things you need to know for each stage. So if you're a new team, lots of polite conversation and ideation, you are in the Forming stage. If you're starting to see conflict, disagreement, not everyone doing the same type of thing, you're in the Storming stage. If things are settling down, trust is building, but you're not quite nailing it, you're in the Norming stage. If you're delivering, you're getting results, you're most of the way there, you are Performing. So they're your four key areas.
So each of those areas are just as important as the other to have leadership and coaching focuses, right? So what we'll do now is we'll actually go through what some of those focuses are and I hope that there's something in there that will work for you. Right. And I certainly say this is by no means an exhaustive list, but I hope that you can take a few things out of this that will actually help you become an even better leader and coach of your team.
So let's look at Forming the first stage, right? A new team or a new leader such as yourself to the role. Here's the key things you really need to nail as a leader and a coach in this period. Number one, get the team spending time to know each other. A little bit harder in a hybrid working environment. But we've gone through certainly that before. Certainly there's a fair bit around learning that I've spoken about. I'll give you some references in a minute to those. But show you care as a leader by getting people together. âPeople don't care how much you know until they know how much you careâ. I love that one liner, I keep talking about it all the time, but get your team together. Define the roles, define the responsibilities, right? This is going to be via PDâs or task allocation or even appointing champions for the team, right? But make sure everyone in the team knows what they have to do. Define what you stand for as a team. So for me, my teams have always, always built rules of engagement. This is how we're going to work with each other, this is how we're going to work with our customers, this is how we're going to work with other people in our business and this is what we stand by. Rare that anyone can actually recite the rules of engagement, but they become strong themes into how you manage your teams on a day-to-day basis. It and also what you hold your teams accountable. Training, this is all about skill development in this session. So it's very much your base level training, but it's really all about your culture building in this phase, right? So lots of small regular celebrations when you get things right, praising specifically, definitely not criticizing specifically, you do that generally. But for me, and I've worked through this phase a lot, actually, earlier this year, I worked with a commercial sales team that were quite an experienced team. They'd been together for some time, or certainly most of them had, but they were just not getting things right. I actually pulled them all the way back to this stage, to the Forming stage. We reset rules of engagement. We re-did even sales processes, which is part of the next stage, and spent lots of time getting to know each other and sharing the wins, right? That team grew⌠almost doubled overnight in terms of sales, an incredible result. Better than I probably expected, but it was about an 80% growth in such a short period of time, all based on getting some of these basic Forming building blocks, right? So really well done. And the psychological safety in that team just improved rapidly out of a result of this. So that actually leads to me to say have some fun with this stage. When you're Forming, it is the fun stage, right? So get out there and make sure everyone's enjoying themselves.
As a coach, the hat you're putting on is to be a promoter and a facilitator of teams. But in terms of resources, to give you a hand on this one and the training resource I've done, which is Episode 16, there's a free resource around training. Have a listen to Episode 30, which I've mentioned before on coaching or even Episode 28 on Learning, how I go about learning, right? That might give you some great ideas about how you can bring your teams together to be learning. So, great stage and one where you can certainly apply some really nice chunky coaching principles and leadership examples to it.
All right, number two is Storming, and I've mentioned before, this is when it gets real. And this is absolutely, for me, the hardest stage of when you're coaching and leading your team. So this is to repeat it when things are starting to get real. It's not all smooth sailing, right? Teams still probably bringing great ideas to the table, but there's conflict, right, and negotiation happening. So how do we get through this stage and how do we move teams through to Norming? Because we want to get as quickly as possible to a situation or a position where our teams are starting to work well together.
So for me, the number one here is get lots of meetings together. Communication is an absolute it is at an absolute premium during this stage. So lots of meeting together. Use my three meetings from Episode 24 if you haven't listened to that. But for me, I've used this strategy heavily when I'm building teams, and particularly in a commercial team I worked with about five years ago. There was lots of conflict happening in this team as they were starting to come together and trying to get to that Norming stage, right. They were still Forming, but they were trying to get to a Norming stage. Lots of ideas, lots of conflict. We just consistently met until we worked through all of those ideas, decided which ones would work, which ones wouldn't, and then we funneled into a game plan that had worked. So by far the most important piece of advice I can give here.
The next one is to build out sales processes, build out strategic documents. We have a Team STEP model that we use. It's really, really important that you start to document how you're going to work together, build out processes, and then everyone knows what they're going to have to follow. Right. Start testing out the rules of engagement you built in the Forming stage, right. See if they hold. Because if your rules of engagement aren't holding now, then it's unlikely they're going to hold as you put more and more pressure right into the team. So for me is really focus on testing those rules of engagements and encouraging the teams to live by them. It's so important here that you're building team dynamics that are going to stick, right. So small behaviors, positive or negative, they can really get exacerbated as you grow as a team. So very, very important we can make sure that we're very strong with those behaviors now. This is actually a time when you might need to swap in or swap out people who don't meet with your cultural requirements, right. Don't be afraid to do it. It's far better to do it now than down the track and much easier to take a hard loss now because people's true colors really will start to shine at this point in time.
All right, so for you, Coaching Hat, Mediator and Negotiator, they'd be the ones I'd be talking about here, right? You're trying to get the team to move forward in a situation that's going to not only work for everyone, that's going to work for the business, right. It's not about people getting their own way, but it's about the team collectively moving forward with strategies and processes and ideas and customer results that are best for the business and best for the customer. In terms of resources lots here, we've gone through lots of stuff I've got to help share because I know how difficult this is as a leader to get your teams through this stage. Right. So if you're looking around sales process, that's episode one to six. There's six episodes on building a sales process and there's a free resource, all available on strongersalesteam.com/resources. Episode 9 and Episode 11 to 13 are all about building your strategic playbook, which is the Team STEP Model. Again, some great free resources on that one you can download. Episode 24 on running effective meetings, the three meetings I'd hold each week. And there's lots of free resources around this, right? And of course, if you really struggle, give me a buzz. I'm certainly happy to help you.
Okay, so we've gone through the Forming and the Storming stages, right? So next we're into Norming, and this is a nice stage because we're starting to make some forward progress, right. For me, the most important here is, check in to make sure that everything we set up in the Forming stage, so everything we set up right at the start of our team development cycle still stands, right. What needs to be tweaked, what doesn't, what's working really well because we want to be making sure that it's holding true as we start to build out into the real world. Right. I've got a great example here. Team I worked with, this is about twelve to 14 years ago, and this is a team who they were very much into the Norming stage. They'd been together a while, but what they'd forgotten to do, I came in as a new leader, is they'd actually forgotten to check in if what they were doing was still relevant from when they were Forming. And what we found out was that the team was stuck in this Norming stage and they weren't yet Performing because they were still going to the decision makers of contracts when what had actually happened is the contracts had been awarded. Right. So they didn't need to go to decision makers anymore. They actually needed to be spending their time on end users, the people that use the product to make sure that the contract was implemented. So there was a really quick pivot here to say, âhey, we're targeting the wrong peopleâ. And what happened out of that was the team actually performed really well and moved very quickly into that Performing stage. And I think this was a really key part of why they were able to get there.
So for me, measurement is the absolute key here, right. Because this is how this came out. We measured who they were meeting with. Use metrics that you have in your business. I only use three. Certainly there's lots of information around that. I'll reference that in a minute. But use the metrics that you have agreed to with your team. Make sure your one to ones are happening and they're adding value. Make sure your training is starting to be led by your team. This is not your base level training. This is more your medium, your moderate to your advanced level training. Right. And all about making sure that these behaviors are getting implemented and improving across the business and customers. Really open communication still remains really important here. Clearly it's critical in the first two stages, but we need to make sure teams continue to learn so that they move from the Norming to the Performing stage, right. And they actually nail it. Your learning here is important to keep up, right. So that you avoid complacency settling in because you're not quite there yet, right? But it's easy to think you're very close, you can just chill out from there. So your coaching hat for this stage, all about being the enabler, right. Making things happen and getting results.
In terms of resources, I'd have a look at Episode 15 of the podcast and the 3-Box Model resource. It's a free resource again, all in the same place, strongestalestems.com/resources. And then go and have a look at Episode 28 if you haven't already around the four habits I have for learning.
Okay, so forming Storming, Norming and last stage is Performing. This is when things are happening. The business is going well, but we have to keep the team moving forward so that we don't fall off the perch. By far, this is the best stage we can have our teams in. But it's also the riskiest because once we are performing, if we fall off from those performance levels, things can go south really quickly. So for me, the most important thing to do here is to keep your learning up, right. Very different type of learning to the earlier stages. It's very much advanced and making sure that we're focusing on our go-to-market models, what our customers want, what our competitors are doing. Right. And we're staying ahead of the curve.
Next one is about growth. Growth for individuals is really important, right. One to ones, career growth plans, empowerment models, entrepreneurial thinking. What are we doing to make sure that our team members keep learning? Because boredom can real easily set in when you're actually achieving what you need to. So as a leader, you need to move towards helping make sure your teams have future plans and future growth. Right. Other one that can be important here is managing Burnout. So it's really critical. We're celebrating. We got team off-sites. People have got balance, right. This is when you're saying as a leader, when you see Burnout coming, go and have a break, take a long weekend, take a week off, right? What can I do to help you actually be better at your job and happy in your job? And I've had this example, I've seen this happen so many times and probably one that stuck with me is I had a team member probably five years ago who was performing. They were doing really well, but they lost sight around what was important. And as a leader, I didn't actually recognize this early enough. They started to focus on their own way of doing things rather than the team way of doing things. So what happened is they lost that true understanding as what needs to happen as a team to perform. They started to focus internally and it became about them. Right. I didn't get onto this quick enough. And looking back, I really should have buddied them up with someone with a really strong, non kind of managerial mentor to help them. But I didn't. I left it too long and in the end that person ended up leaving. And I look back as a leader, that really should have been something I could have done better. Right? So for me, coaching in this area is all about being supportive. Supportive and making sure that people continue to grow and learn.
So resources here. I'd look at the podcast, Episode 30 that was actually about entrepreneurial thinking or Ethinking. Little bit left to center, but it's all about making sure people come in with a challenging mindset to want to grow and improve the business, so that's certainly helpful. And then training, I come back to this all the time. We've got lots of free resources and Episode 16 is all about training.
So bringing this all together, whilst how we coach and the model we use for coaching is really important, understanding where our team is at and what we need to do to move them through to the next stage or to perform is just as important. So for me, some action items that I'd love to hear more about coming out from today is for you to sit down and confirm that coaching model you're going to use. Right. I spoke about the G.R.O.W. model, but there's others out there. Then try and pick where your team's at, Forming Storming Norming or Performing. See if you can nail the stage that they're at. Put together a game plan that gets them from one stage to another with some flexibility to allow it to happen over time and put it into action. Right. I'd love to hear how you go and I guess a final word on this is certainly from a leadership point of view, is we're really working hard to put out lots of ways you can add structure to your team out there. And this is certainly one of those. It's not a one size fits all approach, there's lots of different ways you can do it, but if you're taking the wins from these podcasts and getting little gold themes that come out of it from here and there, then I could not be happier. Right. Because that's exactly what happens as a leader, is you grow over time with small wins until you get somewhere in the vicinity of where you want to be performing and then you go and do it all again, right? And learn and grow and more. So if you need any ideas or any more help, DM me. If you need to go, you think more than a layer or two deep in this, DM me. Because certainly change management can be hard unless you focus really heavily on it. That said, really easily if you can do that.
Okay, so next week we're going to move back towards selling and storytelling. Got a special guest coming in. I love storytelling. It's so important in the sales process. So, looking forward to that one. But for today, if you weren't able to get everything written down, show notes are on the website. If you want some extra help, call me. You can get across our social media channels. We're putting lots and lots of content out on LinkedIn in particular. So jump on and follow me. My LinkedIn's Ben Wright. Nice. You can get out there and see lots of different stuff that we're putting out there to try and help. And I'm certainly across every connection that comes into the business. If you'd like me to help.
Okay. But before we leave today's health and wellbeing tip. Last week before I had my race, I actually did a swimming session with one of the current Nutri-Grain Iron women. So it's a surf, life saving series, really big in Australia. Super talented athletes, right? Really big engines and really good across multiple sports. They have to paddle or surfboard. They have to kayak, they have to run, they have to swim, right? Lots of things they're doing. But her tip to me around training that she spoke about was how important personalizing the last 10% of your program is, right? So if you're out there and you're fit and healthy and you're doing what you do and you're following a program that someone else has given you, don't be afraid to tweak it to what works for you. You don't need to follow those programs directly to be successful.
So for me, for example, discipline and routine are critical in my training. If I get to that, even if I don't do the session perfectly, but I'm getting the sessions in, I know that I get the most out of it. So I will focus on hitting my repetition and my routine discipline that I've set, more so than perfectly nailing the session. For others, they can miss sessions, right, as long as they're nailing the ones that they do. So for me, I pride myself on getting there in that routine, and that works really well for me. That around me that I get involved with in sport. They know that, right? So have a think about that. Take your program, but just make sure you're personalizing it to get the best out of what you need. And if you don't know what that is, try and work it out, right? Or find some others to help. Again, something I'm always happy to help with. Not business related, but I certainly like it. Okay, so that's it for today.
Until next time, keep living in a world of possibility, and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve.
