[E78] Management Week: Part 3 with Donald Meador

This is Part 3 of Donald and my conversation around management.

In Part 3, we talk about:

• Your number one job as a leader
• Being the BEST is hard

Make sure to subscribe and catch all the episodes this week to hear the full conversation.

Donald’s Info:

Website:

https://thecorporatemiddle.com/

Book:

Surrounded ByInsanity: How To Execute Bad Decisions

Bio:

Donald has survived mergers, promotions, re-organizations, and downsizing. Throughout his career he has led multiple teams of varying sizes consisting of both on and offshore resources. He has successfully led multi-million-dollar projects and was selected to complete a two-year program to become a lean six sigma certified black belt. Donald has a degree in Computer Engineering and an MBA. In-addition to his corporate experience he has co-founded multiple companies. Donald is an award-winning speaker and the host of the podcast “The Corporate Middle” where he answers the most common middle management questions. He is the author of the book “Surrounded by Insanity: How to Execute Bad Decisions”.

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Episode 78 – Transcript

Hi and welcome to another episode of the sales experience podcast. Welcome back. Thank you for listening.

If you’re new to the show, you’re catching this right in the middle of a new week where I’ve been talking to Donald Metter who is a management consultant. Lots of middle management experience, wrote a book that I find just hilarious and very accurate and appropriate.

This conversation started on Monday, the first episode of this week and what I did was I took that and put it into five episodes. You’re listening to part three of five in that conversation. Make sure to subscribe, rate rank.

If you want to check out the show notes, the full transcript as well as all as Donald’s links, make sure to go to the cutter consulting group.com website where you can go and see this podcast and all the other ones that I’ve been putting out and until then sit back, relax or enjoy your drive or enjoy your workout.

Listen to Donald and I have fun. Now, the thing to keep in mind is whether you’re a sales person, sales manager, owner of a company, all of this that we cover is applicable because it either helps you with your direct role or helps you understand the other roles in the chain.

So enjoy this episode part three with Donald, you don’t have to be a manager or a leader to be responsible for that culture within your team organization. You can have influence on it at any level and so make sure that you’re focused on that.

Creating that culture within your team, within your peers that focuses on what they can control and focuses on where they actually can have impact because that’s what’s going to matter.

That’s how you’re going to keep people focused and that’s how you’re going to keep people successful. I know that there’s so many times where I have a team and let’s say it, the sales team shares the building shares the office floor with other departments either really close by or just on the same floor and they can interact with each other off.

So on where I’ve wanted to build a wall, have a separate entrance, have them come in from a different way and not interact even in the parking lot because I wanted to isolate and insulate them from other cultures or other groups that, were spinning out of control or you know, weren’t in line or you know, didn’t have the same focus.

Because especially when you have salespeople, they’re driven by that selling result in whether it’s a fear of missing the quota and losing their job, or it’s the goal of gain from making a bonus or commission. You know, it can go both ways.

Everyone thinks that people are in sales and they work really hard just for money. I’ve seen a lot of people work really hard in sales just because they don’t want to get fired. They really ever make money. They always generally make the quota and then they have a job and that’s good enough for them.

But you know, they’re driven in a different way than say customer service or processing, you know, all of those other departments within an organization, and I’ve seen it where I just want to keep everybody separate for the sake of my team and keeping them healthy mentally. It’s a difficult job.

You know, nothing that we’re talking about is easy, but it is necessary if you want to make sure that you’re getting the best out of the folks that are on your team and, and make no mistake, your job as a leader in any capacity is to get the best out of the people around you, right? And you have to understand them. You do have to understand, as you already touched on what are their motivations, right? Why are they here?

You know, if you’ve got 19 people on your team, you potentially could have 19 different ways of motivate and helping to understand that and understand why they’re at work that day. What are they there for? Are they there to collect a check? They have a sick kid at home, they need to make sure they have health insurance.

There’s all these intrinsic motivations that as a leader you have to understand, and it sounds daunting and it is initially in the beginning, but once you get that flow going, once you start to understand your team and understand what’s going on in their heads and understand that base motivation that they only care about themselves, then you can start to really get the best out of them.

So if they’re going to be successful, you’re going to be successful too. And so that’s really your focus as a leader in any capacity. And again, you don’t have to just be a manager to be a leader.

I think a lot of times we look at that just from a title perspective. If a manager director, but I’ve seen so many instances where people within the team, your lowest level is actually the leaders on that team.

They’re actually the ones driving the culture. So that could be you. You don’t have to have the title manager to do the things we’re talking about, but the focus is on making sure you’re getting the best out of each individual.

So you can only do that with understanding the motivations of why they’re there, what’s going on with their lives, things like that. And a lot of people like to try to distance that and say, you know what? No, you don’t need to know anything about this. You just focus on, you know, pushing them hard and the quotas and things like that.

If you do that, you can be successful. I won’t say you can’t be, but you won’t be as successful had you not actually invested the time in getting the best out of each individual person, yeah and what you’ll end up with, because I’ve seen managers, sales managers who are amazing at this, they literally could have 40 people underneath them, Right?

So let’s say they are a branch manager and then they have other managers underneath them, but literally 40 people underneath them.

So they know pretty much everything about each person, what they’re personally going with, whose girlfriend broke up with them last night and that’s why they’re pissed today. Or you know, whose kid is sick or who got a flat tire and a stressed about money.

They know all of those personal bits. They also know how to motivate and push different people cause we were talking about salespeople and so you know who likes to be pushed by being razzed or called out on the floor, right and that motivates and drives them cause they love that competition and that kind of back and forth jabbing at each other.

So then which people if they did that would literally turn into an HR complaint because they’re, they’re crying underneath their desk as they picked on and everybody’s different, right? Like I don’t enjoy being rest.

I don’t enjoy that. Right. At a high level, at a medium level, I’m okay with it. But you know, I didn’t grow up that way. So it’s not normal. But for other people that’s normal. That’s what they enjoy. If you don’t do that, they are not motivated and excited.

Like if you just ignore them or just treat them like everyone else, they like that interaction. And so I’ve had some managers who literally know that about each person. They treat each person different as they’re walking up and down the rows of desks. And it’s from that standpoint because they literally are in tune with that.

So then I have other managers where they could have 20 or 30 agent’s reps underneath them. And if they don’t know any of that really, like they know a little bit from what they hear, but they don’t know what motivates them.

So that’s always the biggest thing I see that’s missing for sales managers to be effective is exactly what you’re saying work. You’ve got to understand each person, what motivates them, what drives them and you know, and it’s obviously, it’s the personal stuff they have going on so you can address it.

Why is John not closing any deals today? Well John and his girlfriend broke up with a Morris, of course grandma’s sick, right? Or you know, Carol isn’t closing deals and is falling asleep at her desk because her mom is in the hospital and she’s spending nights at the hospital and then coming into work each day you’ve got to know those things.

There was one person where every time her and her boyfriend would fight, she would come in angry the next day and that was exactly what made her effective and she would close really well. She would close a lot of deals that day and the manager knew it.

He almost wanted them to be fighting all the time because on fire he’s like, okay, what I can do to chat with her boyfriend to make him break up with her, got to hit quota. But you know, knowing those things.

So then also on the flip side, which is I think huge and this is the question I asked every manager, I’m like, what would every single one of your reps put on the Vision Board for them at their desk for why they’re doing this? Why do they want this? Is it a car? Is it a new cell phone? Is it their single mom? Is that they want to buy a house and they want to move out of their parents’ house and go rent.

They want to travel, like if you don’t know that, then you don’t know how to tie in the actions of the salespeople to the results they’re going for and make it about them. Because most managers say, everyone just is here for more money. It’s like no, like some people don’t even care about money as like it’s nice, but that’s not why they do it.

So you got to figure out why they want to do it and I think that’s 100% true. What you said in the biggest thing is right now, I guarantee you there’s somebody that’s listening that is rolling their eyes because that’s ridiculous.

I’m not going to do that. I’ve got 50 people, I’ve got 40 people. It’s not realistic. It’s too time consuming. I’ve got so many other things to do, but here’s what we’re saying. To be the best is hard. It’s supposed to be hard. If you want to have the best team, if you want to have the best results, this is what you have to do.

You have to understand what’s going on in the minds of everybody that works for you. It’s not easy. We know it’s not easy. We’ve done it, but we also know is what is required. If you want to get the best out of each individual, and if you want to be personally successful, just be selfish, right?

If you want to be personally successful, that means you have to get the best out of everybody. And to do that, you’ve got to know everybody and really, here’s what it comes down to and what we’ve been kind of dancing around and talking about. You got to care about it.

You have to actually care what’s going on with them. You should actually care about them because it does impact you in what they’re doing. You’ve got to be a coach.

You’ve got to understand what’s going on. So if you want to be the best, this is what is required.