Your Culture is Your Best Teacher

It was the spring of 1981 and I had just joined Hewlett-Packard as a sales representative. I was drinking from the fire hose. It was my first sales job and I was learning a new career as well as a new company.

It was a heady time for HP. We were undisputed leaders in our market and were growing rapidly in the general business expansion of that time. What I observed around me was a great deal of youthful energy, and the primacy of our new products and their contribution to the markets we served. One example of that was how we interacted with our product divisions. When the divisions came to town, it was a natural rallying event for the sales force. We gathered after hours, shared drinks and refreshments with the visitors, and then grilled them mercilessly for the latest intelligence about markets, competitors, new products. They in turn grilled us for what we were seeing on the front lines. It was intense, but it happened in an atmosphere of shared commitment and collegiality. I found it wildly invigorating.

Looking back on it, I was learning powerful lessons from the corporate and local cultures within HP. As a company, our values included a commitment to technology and making a differentiated contribution to the state of the art in our markets. That had started with Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard in 1939 and it was a cornerstone of HP culture. The behavioral norms I observed in the Dallas sales team included:

1. The willingness to dedicate after hours time to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by the visit.
2. The importance of blending professional and social interaction in building teamwork across the company.

I was also figuring out how to get things done inside HP. The factory relationships that I built over a beer and snacks would enable me later to find my way to the right product development team to get a special feature I would need to close a major sale. I didn’t learn that in a breakout session within a newcomers’ orientation course. We were living it every day, and I learned it in a way that no workshop could teach me.

As a consultant, I have seen many very promising initiatives die on the vine for lack of full adoption. I believe that there are important considerations here for leaders who are considering some form of training to drive an organizational change:

• Aggressively test the new ideas and behaviors against the prevailing cultures. Are they complementary or likely to clash?
• Where the new behaviors are not tightly linked to or supported by the culture, treat the project as a change management challenge. Acknowledge the time, effort, and money it will take to integrate them into the DNA of the organization. Does the benefit justify the investment?
• Consider the long-term impact that you are seeking. As cultures take years to form, it will likely take years for the organization to fully embrace the new ways as “just the way we do things around here”. Can you afford the time? Will the benefits endure over the time it takes to realize them?

Your culture is your best teacher. Put it to work on your most important change initiatives.

You Don't Have to Tell Them How

I was facilitating a workshop this week which included a significant amount of sales coaching content and practice coaching within it. At one point, I broke the participants into small groups and sent them off to coach each other on the pursuit of one of their key opportunities. When they returned, I queried each of the teams on how their sessions had gone. Two of the teams reported sharply different outcomes of their coaching process. In one group, the participant who had received the sales coaching reported back strong success from the exercise. She and her coach had creatively explored the sales situation, and she reported some significant and real insights into the best approach to winning the opportunity. She was energized by the process and ready to go try the actions they had defined together. In the other group, the result was not so positive. After a little prodding, the person receiving the coaching painted a much different picture. He reported being discouraged by the lack of accomplishment and he reported no meaningful progress. Worse yet, he said he felt disrespected by the coach, and reported going along with the heavy handed solutions doled out just to get the exercise over with. All of these participants were successful sales reps and sales managers. What happened in these two sessions and why were the results so different?

In the successful session, the coach respected the front line knowledge of the rep, and listened with an attitude of curiosity as the rep laid out the story. They did not leap to a personal agenda of what the rep should do or how the deal should play out. They used their knowledge and experience to ask open ended and powerful questions that let the rep expand the level of detail of the story. Throughout, the rep was doing most of the talking. The coach fed back what they were hearing in a way that enabled the rep to see issues and gaps in their strategy that hadn’t to that point become evident. The discussion was producing clarity and awareness for the rep which enabled them to build on their own detailed situational knowledge to building a new and powerful plan that was theirs. Together they detailed out what the rep would do to take advantage of the new clarity. The rep’s personal ownership of the plan directly drove their commitment (and excitement) to play it out in their live sales situation.

The less successful coach made it about them. They listened just long enough to trigger a memory of how they had done it in the glory days. They went into telling mode - how they would attack the opportunity. They were teaching. The more successful coach made it about the rep. They let the rep explore the landscape and the options. They let them formulate their own strategy with the knowledge and skills they already largely possessed.

In that difference is the key to successful coaching. The successful coach believes (even if the rep doesn’t quite yet) that most if not all of the ingredients for success are there before the coaching begins. They understand that the coaching agenda starts with the rep and what they want to accomplish. They understand that effective coaching is all about helping the rep learn, and not about teaching them. The trick is for the coach and sales rep to work together to release the power that is already there and put it to work in the hands of the rep to create success.