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Learning to lead can sometimes be like baptism under fire. Our guest today is Rob Beattie (Bee-Tea). Rob is Senior Director for Thomson Reuters and leads their inside sales division. Rob brings experience, a passion for seeing his people succeed, and many great ideas to today’s podcast. It will be obvious to you that Rob gets what leadership and management is all about. I know you will enjoy this episode of the Manager Mojo Podcast!
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If you prefer to read, here’s the transcript of this podcast:
Welcome to the Manager Mojo Podcast, I’m Steve Caldwell, author of Manager Mojo: Be the Leader Others Want to Follow. We’re here to offer common sense solutions and training for management and leadership issues; we believe that leaders are made, not born and I would love for you to have a free copy of my book. You can pick up your copy by going to managermojo.com, look for the gold box encouraging you to join the mojo movement and sign up, there are other free gifts just waiting for you, that’s managermojo.com.
Now, let’s get started with today’s topic. I want to welcome everybody to the Manager Mojo Podcast today and today I’m pleased to say that my guest is Rob Beattie. Rob is the Senior Director of Sales at Thompson Reuters, he lives in the greater Detroit area and I’m really happy that he’s agreed to share his wisdom with us today, so, Rob welcome to the Manager Mojo Podcast.
Rob:
Steve, thank you very much, I’m very excited to be here.
Steve:
Awesome! Let me tell our listeners a little bit about you; Rob began a career in sales in 1996 and since that period of time, he’s had a complete passion for seeing his people succeed, achieving their goals and as a result of that he’s been promoted in his career and now with Thompson Reuters he’s the Senior Director of Sales for them. He was promoted in 2008 and then to the Senior Director in January of 2014 and I like the fact that he’s a guy that’s constantly refined the process to meet the demands of his people. And one of the things that I really love about Rob, even on his LinkedIn profile, his people recognize his leadership. So, Rob I know you’re a visionary leader and I want to thank you for joining today and if you could, tell us a little about your role there at Thompson Reuters.
Rob:
Sure! Yeah, so happy to. So as the Senior Director of Sales, I’m in what we call the Tax and Accounting Market Space. I manage an inside sales team; a primarily inside sales team, it’s about a hundred and thirty-five people, it’s eight managers, the rest are frontline contributors. We work with what are known as small and medium sized accounting firms; at the end of the day that’s small businesses up to about twenty-nine employees but at the same time they are professionals and so we engage them in a professional way. We’re a professional sales organization not necessarily what sometimes people think of as traditional inside sales, we use that model because of the vast number of these firms.
Steve:
Oh I can imagine.
Rob:
Yeah, having a field based presence would be cost prohibitive
Steve:
Rob:
And we also find that there are so many operational efficiencies that we gain from being in a group that we can work together; we think that’s a tremendous and competitive advantage that we have in that space.
Steve:
Fantastic and I’m going to dive into that a little bit because I also have a background in managing inside sales people so I get that market really well and I know there are some particular challenges as a manager that you face in that market in addition to that. But first, what I’d like to do is to start by asking you to share a little bit about your first experience as a manager and tell us, did it just go great from day one or did you have to learn a little?
Rob:
I think within three days of being a manager for the first time, I wasn’t a sales manager to begin with and that’s going to be an important point here but within three days I was terminating employees so
Steve:
That’s fun! Isn’t that great?
Rob:
Yeah, it was one of those ethical question thing so it was interesting time. I was in a sales position and the time I moved over into a direct training role where I was training clients and there was an opportunity to move into management there. Because I had a sales background I was a pretty attractive candidate to the ownership of the company I worked for; I got to be a manger for them and I was managing thirty-five people from the get-go and it was a challenge. I didn’t have much background in it, I had done some leadership but it was very small.
Steve:
It’s called baptism under fire, isn’t it?
Rob:
Yeah, it truly was. I mean I was twenty-seven years old and leading this department of people, I was teaching people how to sell computer or how to use computers at a time when computers were relatively new and there was a lot of people who felt underpaid and undervalued in that organization at the time, when the marketplace was bearing out, people leaving so there was a whole talent war that we had going on so that was really what I did. From there I eventually got into the sales management side of things and the same thing, there was some systematic thing that we did well but there really wasn’t a system for sales managers. There was account management and people would say okay you have a sales system, it’s how you manage accounts and what I found to be a source of frustration for myself was, there wasn’t any blueprint for how do you manage sales reps on a day-to-day basis. So what I tried to do over the next couple of years was develop that blueprint; I’m a big believer in the systematic approach to things and I think by having a systematic approach you can actually enjoy the work a little bit more because you have a nice foundation of what you’re doing.
Steve:
Yeah, tell us a little bit more about that. What does it mean to you when you say systematic? Because I’m sure that a lot of our listeners, they’re thinking right now gee I can relate to Rob, I mean I was thrown into a sales position, I really wasn’t given any training. Next thing they’re in the same boat you’re in, they’re having to fire people and they’ve never done that before and
Rob:
Steve:
You know it’s like a lot of stuff coming at you at one time and now here a few years later you’re talking about a system and they’re thinking my system has crashed from day one!
Rob:
Right. Yeah, my system survival right?
Steve:
Exactly!
Rob:
Another manager and I used to joke we should get couple of those little fire hats with the sirens on them?
Steve:
Yeah?
Rob:
That anytime we needed to fight a fire people at least know that’s what we’re doing and then we realized we’d be wearing them pretty much all day long. So systematic approach to sales management, what I try to do, I guess this is probably ten years ago now, somebody asked me to teach this other Sales Manager how to be a Sales Manager. And what you hear there is, you’re thinking okay I have to teach him how to be inspirational and motivational and all these things and what I realized was that stuff is valuable, but it doesn’t last. And I started thinking about successful sports coaches and when you think about the systems that they employ; when you hear Phil Jackson you think of the triangle offense, you hear Bill Belichick you think of the ongoing success of the Patriots, the Steelers, Dick Lebeau. So all of that kind of stuff, I said I’ve got to have something like that, I need something that I can give somebody, a system. So what I did was, I looked at the Sales Rep and I said alright how do you know when a Sales Rep is successful? They’re achieving their quota, great, that’s what you’re shooting for. Now, quota could be a personal target or whatever but whatever that number is that’s the middle of what you’re trying to do; most managers spend majority of their time just trying to get people to that middle and then once they get there they kind of leave them alone and go fight another fire.
What I started realizing, what was making me successful as a manager, as a leader was when somebody got to that level, that middle ground I would then invest time with them in three areas systematically with a defined approach to what are the skills that they need that I can help coach them on once they get there? And those three things above quota were discount percentage; were they somebody that discounted a lot to get to quota? Were they leaving money on the table? The next skill that you really need there is some sales skills; that value proposition, so coaching them on the value proposition. Second is average size of their deals, were they selling large deals, small deals? And the third is product mix, were they selling all the things that were available to them? In our world there’s about fifteen different software products we can sell a firm. This is making sure that you’re able to talk about all fifteen of those products and therefore you’re not just selling one process software that gets you to quota and you’re leaving a whole bunch of opportunity on the table. So that’s the once you’re there approach, if you’re not there, I like to take a step back and rather than go straight to the effort thing which is what I think a lot of people do, I go to pipeline and I examine their pipeline and I say do you have enough pipeline to even hit your goals in the first place?
Steve:
Rob:
Do you close at a three times business? Or do you need three times a business to hit your numbers? Do you need five times? Do you need one time? How do we do that? And you look at it individually and you really invest time in that pipeline and say do we have good deals here? And if we do and they’re not closing then something is amiss and that’s a trigger point to do some coaching with that person. If they don’t, now you know that’s probably what’s holding them back so now you start working on that. Now, what goes in the pipeline? Evaluations, demonstrations
Steve:
Sure, all of the things that you have to add to make it work.
Rob:
Right. Exactly.
Steve:
I want to dive in a little bit here and help our listeners because not everybody is in sales or sales management but the principles you just talked about, I want to point out those principles so that if they are making notes they can make their notes because what Rob really is saying here is that it really doesn’t matter if you’re in sales or not. What he’s doing is he’s looking at his performers that are already at goal and he’s evaluating those people to say okay now what do they need to move to the next level?
Rob:
Steve:
What do I need to teach them about? What do I need to coach them about? And that ability to look at people and to say I’m not really just putting out fires, you’re already doing well I want you to get to the next level of success. I think it’s a real key in leadership that so many leaders just, they miss; they don’t understand it.
Rob:
Yeah and I think it’s because they feel a responsibility for the poor performers and those poor performers take up so much time. And the irony of that is of course by spending time on the poor performers, your best performers leave you
Steve:
Rob:
Because they see that they’re not getting your attention; people want your attention.
Steve:
Absolutely they do. Everybody wants to feel valued, don’t they?
Rob:
Yeah, absolutely.
Steve:
And the thing that I try to encourage managers and leaders is that if you really understood the power of leverage, you’d spend a whole lot more time with your top performers than you do.
Rob:
Yeah. Yeah.
Steve:
Because they’re the ones that are going to make you great. It’s going to take more time with the people that are not performing but you need to allocate time toward those people instead of doing what you described just a minute ago, which is okay they’re there, I’m going to leave them alone and go work on these others that are not.
Rob:
Right. There’s a tendency when you’re in management and leadership to get sucked into the problems and one of the things that I’m a big believer in and I coach my managers all the time is, don’t ignore performance issues; manage them. Also with a systematic approach, have a way that you deal with those people and be consistent, that’s for your own protection but also for just the fact that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every single time. But boy you need to spend as much time with your top producers and in sales, a lot of times there is awards and things you can win and we have something called achiever’s club, which is a big standard for us to get to and I got to go as a Sales Manager when I first started at Thompson a couple years ago. And somebody asked me how did you do that? I said I managed three people from middle performance to achiever’s club status themselves; that’s how I won the game. They were good people with great raw skills but the poor performers and some of the others on the team were taking up too much time and those people weren’t getting the attention that they needed and that’s really where I think as a manager you can really make a difference.
Steve:
Absolutely you can make a difference and it’s wonderful that you found that out at some point in your career.
Rob:
Steve:
If you don’t mind, tell us what did you struggle with in dealing with people when you first started?
Rob:
Sure. I think the struggle in dealing with people is, I am also a people right? And there’s a part of you that it’s hard not to take on their problems. So if somebody is struggling, it’s difficult sometimes because you kind of look at yourself in the mirror and say okay, what am I doing to help this person struggle? What fault am I bringing here? And back a few minutes ago when I was talking about certain of my seven steps, the bottom step in our world is effort, and I will sit down with everybody and say because I used to struggle with this, I used to sit down and say look the one thing I can’t do is effort, you’re going to have to do that piece. If you do that piece I will help you with everything else but if you’re not going to try, there’s nothing I can do. And that’s quite liberating, so anyways, that was one of the big challenges for me. Recently some of the newer challenges I face is the emerging new millennial workforce, has a little bit different mindset than I do. I think they’re an excellent group of people, when you look at overall what millennials bring to the table; it’s great if you can figure out how to connect with them and work with them in creating an environment where a majority of them will be happy. But that’s a challenge because they think differently and they work differently. I’m in a management role, I’m a Generation X, I managed people of multiple different kinds of generations with very different mindset sometimes than I do and so connecting with those people is an ongoing challenge of all levels, making as much time for the people who aren’t necessarily up and comers but an important part of your culture
Steve:
Rob:
Can be huge.
Steve:
Absolutely. It requires for you to constantly be on your toes to listen for new and better ways to innovate.
Rob:
Yeah, definitely.
Steve:
And that certainly makes it harder I think, for people today when there are multiple generations. But I often tell people that to me, this is the real opportunity for you to learn how to listen.
Rob:
Steve:
So, do you find listening to be advantageous to you in dealing with millennials?
Rob:
Yeah, definitely! Yeah, for sure. I actually found one of the advantages of having an inside team is I can pull together and do some things. This morning I had forty people in a training class and we were talking about in sales listening is an important skill and I said I went through college where I had notebooks of stuff; I didn’t take any notes in it. I had nice drawings and I didn’t really engage myself that way, I didn’t necessarily need to; I was always okay at getting through school so I didn’t have to really invest in it. When I became a Sales Rep though that wasn’t easy for me, that was a different path and so I found myself taking pages and pages of notes and what I’ve since discovered is that leading people, the same thing. They’re my clients, so when they come and talk to me I’m constantly writing things down, keeping track of things. It’s difficult, you won’t see it in my office, if the video recording is working or not but I’ve got several whiteboards where I just write down ideas and what I’ll do is, the important piece of listening there is communication after the fact. Letting people know what they told me was important, so, in today’s world, you get so many impersonal communications
Steve:
Rob:
E-mail, text, I tried to, when somebody sends me something that I think is an idea that they’ve put some thought into, I try very hard to find them and say, “Hey, Jason got your idea, now I don’t know what we may able to do with it now but I really think there’s something there.” I tend to involve people in the process when we change something, especially people who I know are passionate about something so we changed our onboarding a couple years ago. I had two or three reps who would come up through our ranks, who were very passionate about their experience and what that look like. They were the first people I brought in and said okay, how would you do this differently? What would you have done differently? They felt empowered, they felt like they have something to say about where the organization is going and they certainly do. And then I took that, gave it over to a couple managers and said okay, here’s the framework what do we do with this? And what we ended up with was a best in class sales onboarding program but it wasn’t just me doing it. It wasn’t a consultant coming in, it was some of these people specifically millennials, were most of who are onboard now, telling me this is how it needs to be, this is how we learned in college. This is how we like to be engaged with content and that’s what we do.
Steve:
Yeah and it’s wonderful what you learn whenever you ask
Rob:
Right. Exactly.
Steve:
Seems like a simple concept but we live and work with so much pressure and so fast these days
Rob:
Yeah
Steve:
That I think we actually really underestimate the power of listening and the power of involving other people
Rob:
Steve:
Inadvertently we sometimes make them feel like we don’t care, even when we do care just because we didn’t take the time that they needed.
Rob:
Yeah and that’s an important point too, as I was preparing myself to talk to you today, one of the things I thought I wanted to make sure to bring up is that communication piece and not being afraid. One of the challenges I faced when I was first leading people was admitting when I was wrong; I was so worried that if I said I was wrong that they would somehow lose respect for me. What I found was when actually admit that I’m wrong I gain way more respect from them because I’m no longer just this management shell, you know, I’m not just coming out and saying, well this is how it is and blah blah blah. Instead, I come out and say yeah, you know what this policy, I get it, is a bad policy and we’re going to change it up. And what that empowers me to do is when there’s a policy I can’t change, I can say as you guys know if I could, I would as we’ve done in the past. In this instance, not going to be an option, I need everybody to step up just handle it.
Steve:
Right and it makes all the difference in the world whenever you have that kind of attitude about it. I find so many managers fail just because they’re trying to do everything perfect.
Rob:
Yeah. Yeah.
Steve:
It’s okay to make a mistake.
Rob:
Right. Yeah, I’m a big quotes guy and one of my favorite is “Perfection is the enemy of good enough.”
Steve:
I like that “Perfection is the enemy of good enough.”
Rob:
Steve:
That’s one to live by.
Rob:
Steve:
And I like that a lot. So, one thing that you mentioned here, and I want to give you a chance to talk about it; you were talking about getting information from people that have been through training, but what is your attitude about ongoing training of your people?
Rob:
Sure. I think it’s crucial, I think that if you want to retain talent anywhere you’ve got to constantly do that and it’s difficult to do because it often feels like it’s an expensive investment. One of the things we do is we try to empower our people to teach each other; we think that’s very important too. But again, strangely enough, I’ve said it before, we have a systematic approach to how we do that too!
Steve:
That’s good!
Rob:
Yeah, so what we did last year was we defined what we think a Sales Rep, in our case Sales Rep, needs to look like in the year 2020, what are the skills that they need to have? What are the technologies that we think will be in play? And how do we now build an effective ongoing training program that’s going to help our current state of reps, whatever generation they may be, be ready for the challenges of that year? We called strangely enough core 2020, our department’s called the core sales department and there are five areas that we look at; we look at their sales skills, we look at social and thought leadership, we look at emerging tools, we look at industry acumen and we look at product knowledge, very basic things but we’re trying to provide learning opportunities in all five of those in an ongoing basis and we take our training very, very seriously. We have a learning coordinator on our staff that I work with to make sure that we get the resources we need when we need them.
Steve:
Rob:
If we need to go external, we build out content internally. The nature of what we sell which is software to accountants, gives us a few months in the winter time that are much slower from an activity standpoint, we actually call that pre-season
Steve:
Got it.
Rob:
And we treat it like training camp; we have people in training, we have four classes running a day and hour each and you can take as many of them as you want and we run up to forty classes during that timeframe. So we really invest very heavily in that because we see the value of that, there’s another great old quote where a CFO says to somebody, “what if we invest all this money in the people and they leave?” And the CEO says “what if we don’t and they stay?” We really are a big believer, I’m a big believer in training and so is my boss which is helpful but I think again, you need a systematic approach; if you’re just willy-nilly throwing stuff out there, everything becomes flavor of the month.
Steve:
Rob:
And flavor of the month doesn’t stick.
Steve:
One of the things, Rob that I like to encourage managers, I think so many managers are working in a company that doesn’t have the formal training mindset that you do. And so they’ll tell me, they’ll make a comment, well it’s not my job to train and they have this idea in management that they’re not trainers
Rob:
Steve:
But in reality you’re always teaching and teaching is training
Rob:
Steve:
And so, were you in positions where you encourage your managers to make sure that your people are learning? Is that part of your evaluation? How do you approach that?
Rob:
Yeah. So I think a manager fills many, many roles and when you define those for somebody you want as the manager; the person has to get something done, then you mention a big one which is teacher, which is different than coach
Steve:
Right
Rob:
Right? Teacher installs the skills, coach makes sure that they’re learning and learned over time and repeat it over time. And then the third thing I think is motivator, so the teaching piece to me is a huge component of it and in fact I think the most effective managers on my staff are teachers. They’re able to sit down with somebody, in fact I would say that all managers on my staff on some level can teach something and some of them are better individually.
Steve:
Rob:
But that’s the other thing, I think sometimes people confuse teaching with presenting and really teaching is probably best served in a one-on-one capacity
Steve:
No doubt about it.
Rob:
So having those one-on-ones, but again, back to the structure piece; when you have a one-on-one you’ve got to have a structure for it.
Steve:
Rob:
There should be a component of what skills are you working on? What are we seeing from improvement standpoint? I’ve seen some measurable impact here, keep going in this area and we’re seeing no success here, let’s cut that out, whatever it might be.
Steve:
You know Rob, it’s a great distinction to talk about teaching from presenting and the reality is that people forget that many people really learn best when they are in a one-on-one situation and in school we would call them tutors.
Rob:
Steve:
We would hire a tutor to help somebody with math, for example, or some specialty. Well the managers have to constantly assess what people need and if they’re really good at teaching that themselves, why not spend a little time and teach them?
Rob:
Definitely. Yeah, I’m a big believer in that and I like that idea of a tutor mindset.
Steve:
I think if manager managers would actually think more like that, I think that they can get over some of this idea that I’ve got to be a world-class presenter.
Rob:
Steve:
Most people don’t have to be world-class presenters, it’s just not a necessary skill.
Rob:
Right and most people aren’t.
Steve:
Without a doubt. Well, you know, one of the things that I know you deal with because you’re in inside sales world, is this topic of personal productivity.
Rob:
Steve:
We have so much stuff to do these days, what would be a couple of tips that you could give our listeners that would say, hey, here’s some things that I do that’s really helped me become more personally productive
Rob:
Yeah. Well, I think from a cadence standpoint, one of the things that, it’s going to sound strange because so many people tell you to try to eliminate meetings; I’m a big believer in eliminating bad meetings.
Steve:
Me too.
Rob:
Yeah. Exactly, but I think meetings are important and so for myself, I have eight direct reports who are dealing with fourteen people each, who are bringing their problems to them every single day. Well, if I got a one manager dealing with one today, I can promise you another one is going to deal with it tomorrow. So one of the things I do to help myself and my managers stay productive is, we meet every single day; sometimes it’s only fifteen minutes, it’s usually only fifteen minutes. So what we’d do is Monday we’ll have a fifteen minute meeting, starts our day; many use names for this, most people call it a huddle, we call it a huddle. So we have a little huddle before we get going on Monday and Tuesday we have an hour and a half forecasting meeting; where we sit down and we go through because we’re in sales, performance is what we’re all about. We go through that, we dissect some of the important deals so we can share and get best practices working across the teams, so that’s a very structured meeting; everybody has eight minutes and they have a certain topic that they have to cover. We literally have a stop watch and we try to stay on pace with that, so we’re not running off into the weeds. That’s the problem with bad meetings is, you go off in the weeds and you waste a bunch of time.
Steve:
Rob:
Come back Wednesday and Friday, we also have another fifteen minute meeting. On Thursday, what we do, we started this actually this year because it was creeping into our other time, is we do another hour meeting, but this one is focused on long-term strategic ideas. So we look at eliminating bottlenecks for our sales reps, talent retention, talent attraction
Steve:
Rob:
Culture; we’re ruthless about our culture as in working on our culture at all times. Does this fit in our culture? Do we think this is an important part of what we do? And what we’ve done is from a management standpoint to find the four areas that all things have to work towards: customer excellence, talent attraction, talent retention, sales rep effectiveness and if it’s not a process that will help in one of those ways or get in the way of one of those four things, we eliminate it as quick as possible.
Steve:
Amen. That’s awesome, that’s a great policy.
Rob:
Yeah, again, it’s that systematic approach and I think if you haven’t defined those things, you will be finding yourself running off to do whatever’s out there.
Steve:
Well I think, from my experience in dealing with so many different types of managers, the vast majority of them really are not managers, they truly are firemen.
Rob:
Steve:
They get up in the morning and they’re putting out fires until the time that they leave at night to go home and it doesn’t work.
Rob:
Steve:
Now, one of the things that you talked about here are meetings, I really enjoy this. I appreciate your perspective on how you guys time people and you hold them to that timeframe, you keep organized which is really a wonderful practice. One of the things that’s always bugged the heck out of me is somebody calls a meeting, they don’t have an agenda and they don’t start on time which absolutely drives me crazy. I think that people don’t realize if you’re late, ten, fifteen minutes, it can throw off the whole day, by the end of the day you’ve lost an hour of productivity.
Rob:
Steve:
And I think that that’s one of those great things I like to hear that you’re actually doing that timing.
Rob:
Yeah, I would love to say that we start everyone exactly when we’re supposed to so, you’ve given action item to remind myself of because one of the things that we find is, the first five minutes of a couple of those meetings everybody’s sort of chit chatting and catching up
Steve:
Rob:
I’ve been trying to get people to get there a little early, but I often find that I’m running from one meeting to a next
Steve:
Well, my advice to managers is to try to build in buffer time on these meetings. If they’re having that many they need to push back and say look we have to find a way to cut out one of these meetings
Rob:
Steve:
And then my favorite tip for people is that if I call a meeting at 8:00 and you’re not in by 8:02, I shut the door and you’re out.
Rob:
Steve:
And I promise you, that eliminates the people coming in late.
Rob:
Yeah, it does. It definitely does. One last thought on those meetings
Steve:
Sure
Rob:
It’s important to distinguish what are important meetings
Steve:
Rob:
So in our world, those management meetings are important but more important is the one-on-ones that the managers have with their Sales Reps on a weekly basis.
Steve:
There you go, I’m so glad you brought that up, Rob because I can’t tell you how many managers tell me I don’t have time to do one-on-ones.
Rob:
Steve:
And I tell them, how do you not have time to do one-on-ones?
Rob:
You don’t have time to do them because you’re not doing them.
Steve:
Yeah, how do you hold people accountable to that?
Rob:
Steve:
What’s your advice?
Rob:
So, I think first and foremost is myself; I hold myself accountable to my team’s one-on-ones. Again, with an agenda and this is something that comes and goes because the frequency with which you see people can sometimes make it like yeah we’ve already covered everything we need to cover, we’re all good. But what I find is every once in a while refreshing what the agenda is and saying alright we’re going to talk about this issue for now because it’s important, but in another week I want talk about this piece of your personal development or whatever.
Steve:
Rob:
Yeah, so that’s an important piece and then quite frankly the huddle structure that we have leads itself to have that sort of peer pressure of maintaining the one-on-ones and what I find very interesting is when I also walk pass people’s offices and just see that they have people in their office sitting down which is great and every once in a while I’ll somewhat interrupt one and just come and say hey how’s it going? What are you guys dealing with? Oh that’s kind of interesting, they typically find that a great opportunity for a sales rep or a front-line contributor to give me an idea.
Steve:
Rob:
Yeah, and then, I sort of lost my train of thought on something I was going to say there. Oh, there’s another thing I find very interesting, we challenge our Sales Reps to make one-on-ones valuable for them too.
Steve:
Rob:
And here’s what I find, my top performers never miss a one-on-one, my bottom performers never have a one-on-one. There’s something to the fact that those people are hiding or ducking what they need to be doing, there’s an accountability there that strangely enough, they kind of go hand in hand.
Steve:
Yeah, without a doubt they do. One of the things that I really like about your philosophy is that you state, even right on your LinkedIn profile, which I think is awesome by the way.
Rob:
Steve:
Very well done and I’m a big LinkedIn guy and I have lots of connections. I really enjoy looking and interacting with people, but I love the fact that one of your top four priorities is to develop your team and actually help them take their career to the next level.
Rob:
Steve:
What I know now is, where did that start? Because you had to have had somebody kind of emulate that for you because it’s just not done anymore.
Rob:
Yeah. So I think for me, I’ve always thought that the only way I’m going to get promoted is somebody can see somebody to replace me, right? If I’m going to be good at what I do, I don’t want to be afraid of somebody that could replace me because that typically gives me an opportunity, something to go oh you know what the organization, Rob can leave and the organization is going to be okay.
Steve:
Can I stop you there for just a second?
Rob:
Yeah
Steve:
I just want to make sure our listeners hear that.
Rob:
Steve:
He’s not afraid to develop somebody to replace him, hello? That’s such a great statement, very powerful. I’m sorry, now go ahead.
Rob:
No worries. So strangely enough, my first real manager, he’s now a head football coach in a prestigious high school in Virginia and he had a lot of different ideas around that stuff but that was a big one for him was, hey look if I’m going to be, I can’t run the defense and the offense. I need to develop somebody to be able to do those things, so once I develop that person then I can take the next level step myself and he really ingrained in that. And it comes back to just the redundancy idea from that and then the other organization that does that extremely well strangely enough, is the US Marine Corp. Now, I’ve never been a Marine, never served but I read a book called Making the Corp which is about how the US Marines say okay we’re in a combat situation, we’ve got to have somebody ready to step in right away. If something happens to the Lieutenant, I need a Sergeant that can step in and do the Lieutenant’s job which means I need a Corporal that can do the Sergeant’s job. And so I’m a big believer in developing people along those same lines because I really feel strongly that there isn’t anything super-duper special about being a manager but there is about being a leader.
Steve:
Rob:
And so, how do you ingrain that in an organization? And if you have organization of leaders, you will do amazing things.
Steve:
Without question. Rob awesome comments and thank you for sharing your passion on that.
Rob:
Steve:
I’d just can like to end the podcast today on this interview, I’d like to hear your thoughts. What would be the top two or three things that you would advise managers to begin to do right away that’s going to make a huge difference in their life and their career? What would be those top two or three things that you would recommend?
Rob:
Yeah. I think one of the most important things you can do is strength, weakness, opportunity, threat assessment of yourself; I think that’s really important. If you’ve never done a three sixty, have a three sixty done, get some kind of foundation of who you are and what you are to your people today; that’s really important. So start with something like that
Steve:
Rob:
The second thing is, not always worry about fixing what you would perceive as a weakness of yourself but when you know what your strengths are exploit them and make sure that you’re focusing on those things too. It’s very important to, for myself, one of my strengths is communication and the ability to present in front of people. Well that can mask some other weaknesses until I get them up to speed or maybe never need to all and so understanding what some of your strengths are, and developing those just as much as you attack your weaknesses. We the culture are always saying oh this is weak we have to fix this, fix this, fix this. I always say, hey look if you’re good at something, be really, really, really good at something, it will bring up other stuff with you
Steve:
Without a doubt.
Rob:
Then the important thing is I really am a big believer in that playbook and as the manager developing what your playbook is. Yeah, the third thing is a playbook; I’m a big believer in that like I’ve been saying that systematic approach, making sure that you can explain your processes. One, that’s an important part of developing the people underneath you, because how else can you teach them if you don’t have a book or whatever it is to teach them from and the second thing is, people ask me all the time around that, how’d you get to be a director? Well I was able to sit and interview with people and show them exactly how I would lead the department that I have and they had great confidence from that because I knew what I was doing. I wasn’t a well, I think I might be able to lead this way, I think this theory might work out, no. I’m going to ruthlessly manage my top producers to be even bigger, I’m going to give everybody a systematic approach so that they understand, I’m going to set these expectations and I’m going to manage these expectations and when someone is not meeting them, here’s the skills I’m going to focus on. It’s not willy-nilly, it’s very organized and I think when people see that from you, they get that trust that you’re doing the right things, that you have a plan and I think as a manager if you want your people to believe in you, make sure that they know you have a plan; that to me is huge. Otherwise what happens when you don’t, everybody just sort of wanders off, does their own thing and that’s where you get a lot of negativity in an organization because they don’t know where it’s going.
Steve:
Rob, great wisdom, great advice. On behalf of our listeners, I want to thank you for participating in the Manager Mojo Podcast today. The wisdom that you’ve shared will benefit a new lot of people, so thank you very much.
Rob:
Steve, my pleasure. Thank you very much, anytime, love to help out.
Steve:
Thanks for joining me today on the Manager Mojo Podcast. Let’s rock the world, please encourage your friends to subscribe to the podcast and I would love for you to share and connect with me on social media. I’m on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and don’t forget to pick up your free copy of Manager Mojo: Be the Leader Others Want to Follow by going to managermojo.com and signing up to get your free gifts. Until next time, I encourage you to exercise your mojo and become the leader that others want to follow.
