Don't Have an Enemy? Get One.
Having
friends in business is very nice. But not very helpful in the long run. In the
emerging post- pandemic world, you need to motivate your team around a common
foe, real or imaginary.
BY HOWARD
TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH
INVESTORS@TULLMAN
Any successful entrepreneur of a certain age
will tell you that "warm and fuzzy" fantasies and "feel
good" goals don't work as effective long-term motivators for your people.
Age and painful experience are important predicates for this understanding,
because if you're a kid CEO who flipped your startup to Facebook, a meme
"investor" who made a mint on GameStop, or if you've recently banked
a bundle on Bitcoin, then the sadly practical advice which follows probably
isn't for you. While you can afford to have your head stuck in the clouds or
elsewhere and pontificate about peace, progress and purpose, the rest of us are
concentrating on resetting and restarting our businesses and pointing our
people in the right direction.
Having a professed purpose or two like ESG is
clearly more desirable in your portfolio than MSG in your pot stickers. But
it's even more important for the tip of the spear -- your sales team -- to have
a specific point. Climate change is certainly a crucial concern and saving the
seals -whales - wolves may be a great salve for the soul, but neither is
concrete and immediate enough to translate into day-to-day direction.
Teams need targets. Not "nice to
have" aspirations, but "need to have" objectives and the more
particular and focused they can be, the more likely your business is to
succeed. Good teams hit targets that others can't hit. The best teams hit what
other teams can't even see, but only when they're given actionable information
and ground-level guidance.
Importantly, successful salespeople require
passion and commitment - the best of the bunch take things personally. We're
talking emotion, energy and enthusiasm. Passion, as a practical matter, trumps
purpose in the here-and-now and, interestingly enough in our post-truth world,
the source, substance and sanity of the passion is almost irrelevant. You've
got to believe it in order to sell it and whether it's actually true isn't that
big a deal.
As your people slowly return from a two-year
COVID-19 hiatus, you're going to need to fire them up and, as often as not,
you're going to be fighting a fair amount of apathy, angst and indifference. In
these very confusing and conflicted times -- when half the world doesn't seem
to even know which way is up -- sending your people out with warm words, a
smile, and a pat on the back to fight the good fight just isn't going to get
the job done. A concrete plan with some measurable and achievable goals, the promise
of some financial rewards based on results, and a modest kick in the butt are
much more likely to bring home the bacon than even the best of intentions and a
heart of gold.
Today's highly scrutinized managers can no
longer employ some of the tried-and-true motivational methods. For a variety of
reasons, good and bad, managers need to be much more sensitive to the
"feelings and needs" of their employees. Apparently, this is all
about carrots now and not sticks - especially with a newly returning and entitled
workforce that seems to think that you owe them a living and an
explanation for everything.
So, if you can't prompt, push or pick on your
people, and you're getting tired of putting out the politically correct pablum
that passes for acceptable encouragement these days, I have an alternative
approach that apparently will still pass muster, as long as your choice of
target is a competitor's expected actions and not based on its country,
culture, color or any other disqualifying criteria.
Any good leader knows that you need to tell
your people a compelling story about an important journey and then show them a
path to reach the promised land. But to jumpstart your journey, what your story
really needs is a villain because, as we see every day, hate has been
normalized and weaponized into a stronger driver of all manner of behaviors
than love.
So, the first step is to find an available
villain. And, if you don't happen to have an aggressive competitor you can
transform into an evil enemy, just feel free to invent one. I don't mean to
suggest that you should go around making enemies gratuitously. Unlike friends,
who come and go, enemies accumulate. But invented enemies, the nastier the
better, are perfectly fine. Make them greedy gargoyles who want to take the
food from your team's children's mouths and put their parents out on the
street. Or reveal wanton weasels who want to take your people's jobs and
customers away. They could also be scoundrels and scam artists selling
second-rate products and services to your friends and family. The objective is
to get the whole team hyped up, focused on protecting and advancing their own
futures, and going full speed ahead for the gold.
The size of your illuminated or invented
opponent doesn't matter. They can be a huge corporate player or the next hot
startup in your space. Whoever's most likely to be aiming to eat your lunch.
It's never about the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight
in the dog that makes the difference. And your guys are the fiercest fighters
in the contest. As hokey as this sounds, this is what works to get everybody
back on their feet and ready for battle.
Fighting a common enemy is a contagious
sentiment and builds connection, cooperation, and camaraderie. You may think
that the sheer joy of finally coming back together in one place will be a
reward in itself and sufficient to get things back to normal but (a) it's a
"new" normal for sure; (b) you're gonna have some new people in the
mix who never knew the old normal; and (c) some of the new folks and some old
hands as well will be working remotely forever so you're going to need to
really work hard to bring them all back into the fold. The bottom line is that
things aren't simply going to take care of themselves.
You need a plan that's more than putting
personalized hand sanitizers on everyone's desk with a couple of Hershey's
Kisses. You are going to have to expend more time, effort and resources
than you expect, and the ongoing messaging will be just as critical as your
other actions. Your people need to work hard, stick together, get a little bit
better every day, and ask themselves regularly how badly they want to win. The
simpler your message the better.
My favorite: You can make dust, or you can eat
dust.