Coaching a Team (part 2) | Customers, Etc.
Focus on the fundamentals and decide what to celebrate.
Imagine you’re the CEO of a small-but-growing tech startup. Revenue is hitting record numbers, but you’re starting to worry about deal quality and you’re not quite sure what’s going on.
“Have you thought about looking at the structure of our weekly all-hands meeting?”, your Chief People Officer asks. What on earth could that have to do with it, you wonder. If anything, the changes you made last year to the weekly call have really helped align the company on the importance of focusing on winning deals. Each week, you share how much revenue was brought in during the past week and you highlight the top three deals in need of help. “I’m open to anything, but I’m not really sure how changing the weekly meeting is going to make a big difference. It’s really been working to get our numbers up.”
“It’s been working to get revenue numbers up, no doubt, but didn’t you mention that deal quality has been suffering? I don’t know if you remember, but the deal you celebrated last week—the big one that closed at the end of the quarter that you weren’t sure the team could pull off—it’s become a nightmare for the customer success team. It seems like the customer may not be a great fit for our product and we may have oversold some of our features to win the deal.”
You pause to reflect. Now that you think about it, there was a lot of complexity to that deal and you did have questions about if the prospect had been a good fit. But you really needed the revenue and getting the company to align on that deal got you over the finish line. What else could you have done?
Last week I introduced the first post in a two-part series on coaching a team. This week we’re going to talk about the importance of focusing on fundamentals, knowing the rules of the game, the importance of learning everyone’s name, and deciding what to celebrate.
Focus on fundamentals
One of the themes I wrote about last week was adding structure, even if it’s wrong. I had said:
The key with the kids was that if you didn’t provide the structure, the kids would fill it in themselves, often with things you didn’t intend. Having a plan made for a good practice.
During practice, we would divide the line up into three “teams”, put one of the teams up to bat, and put the other kids in the field. We played as if it were a real game scenario so we could simulate the fundamentals of the game, e.g. the rules of base-running when there’s a pop-out, how force outs work when there are runners on base, etc. However, even though we played as if it were a game, we could pause for teachable moments to emphasize fundamentals. This was a great way for the kids to learn. It was also a great way for kids to get literal at-bats against the machine.
Early in the season, I would incorporate a key learning that I wanted the kids to pick up on during practice. Then I would emphasize that learning at the opening team huddle, during practice itself, and before we broke up practice at the end. This was a useful way to drill key baseball concepts without feeling like I had to cram it all into one practice.
Connection to business: There are so many connections to business here—where do I start?
When I was managing support teams, one of the things I would focus on would be the quality of our interactions with customers. I covered this in the post Beware of Zombie Values about how we would operationalize our company’s values by having a peer review system in place to ensure our writing to customers was of consistently high quality.
Those of us who tend to work in retention side of the business may be surprised to learn that sales organizations frequently invest a significant amount of energy into nailing the fundamentals of selling, ensuring account executives are carefully listening to customer requirements, sales engineers craft polished demos, and every meeting is followed by a timely email outlining next steps. Training frequently takes place outside of customer interactions so there’s less risk of losing a valuable lead due to a poorly-executed engagement.
Every part of the organization is going to have standard practices that, when followed, lead to optimal performance for the team and broader organization. Discovering the fundamentals of those practices and reinforcing them via how the team is managed is going to lead to a healthier, higher-performing team.
Know the rules (and goals!) of the game
Even though the game of baseball is the same, every league and age level is going to be different in how it applies the rules. There are implicit (or sometimes explicit) goals of each league for what they want the players to get out of their experience. In our case, we were playing in a local church league where the level of competitiveness was relatively low compared to other leagues and the focus was on letting kids play and having them learn the game.
Before we had our first practice, I called the director of the league and asked if there were any special rules I needed to know. It was all pretty standard stuff, a five-run limit most innings, three-strikes-and-you’re-out, no leading off or stealing bases. The goal of this league was for the kids to learn the game and have fun.
I would run practices and prepare the batting lineup for games with these rules and goals and mind. My plan was to begin the season with the best players at key positions and then experiment with more players at different positions as the season progressed. I had each player play their position for two innings in a row so they would (hopefully) learn the fundamentals of the position. The batting order was almost entirely random.
At the end of the season, with only three games remaining, a coach from one of the teams we were playing came to our dugout and asked me, “Aren’t we supposed to be rotating our players in the field every inning?” I was thrown—the league director hadn’t mentioned this rule. “I’m not sure,” I said, “I can check after the game.” The odd thing was that, being the end of the season, I didn’t have my strongest players playing key positions, so rotating the players would have worked in our favor. When I spoke with the league director later, he confirmed that yes, we were supposed to be rotating players, but it wasn’t that big of a deal. I tweaked my approach for the remainder of the season.
Connection to business: Many business problems come with well-known playbooks. Need to build out a sales organization from scratch? Follow this plan. Need to stand up a help desk for the first time? Here’s how you go about it. Need to roll out a new health insurance plan? Do this thing.
We use well-known playbooks so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel solving problems that already have a solution. However, not every playbook is a match for the business and its goals. Perhaps you know how to run a high-functioning support team, but what’s really needed is client-focused success team that emphasizes one-on-one relationships.
Rules aren’t always clear, but they may be implied. If you’re in the middle of a project or managing your team, you may discover your approach doesn’t quite click with the goals of the organization or customers. Be prepared to adapt and lead with a renewed understanding of the requirements.
Learn everyone’s name
Does this need its own bullet point? Yes, I think it does. I found it really hard to remember every player’s name at the first practice. I made it a point to email parents and ask for a recent picture of their child so I could add it to the Notion page for the team. Then I printed out the team roster—with pictures—and gave a copy to each of the coaches before each practice.
This helped in multiple ways. One practical way was that it easily aided in dividing up the team in different groups during practice. But it also ensured when I was working with a player, I could call them by name to both encourage them and offer correction. During games, I would keep my lineup handy so that I could cheer players on by name from my spot coaching first base.
Contrast this to when I was teaching a Sunday school class at my church this past year. I didn’t make a real effort to learn everyone’s name and felt embarrassed that even as we went into the spring semester, I had to look at the class attendance list to try to recall names. This made it difficult to encourage positive interactions and call attention to behaviors that needed to change. This negative experience is part of why I made such a big deal about learning everyone’s name when I started coaching a baseball team.
You know what else? It’s really not that hard. I just needed to make a list, study it a bit, and put in a bit of effort to learn people’s names. And when I did it, it really helped.
Connection to business: “Learning everyone’s name” may seem kind of obvious, especially if you manage a team where you work with everyone on a frequent basis, but the notes about encouragement and correction may not be quite as obvious. It’s not just about learning everyone’s name. Do you actually use each person’s name in one-on-one’s when offering encouragement and providing correction?
In contexts where knowing everyone’s name may not be quite so automatic, consider how you might learn and remember the names of the people with whom you’ll be interacting. Going on a job interview? Learn the names and research the LinkedIn profiles of the team members you’ll be meeting. Presenting to a client? Try to learn not only about the person you’re presenting to, but also the names of key people they’re related to.
Knowing and using a person’s name is of course a key takeaway from Dale Carnegie’s classic How to Win Friends and Influence People.
Decide what to celebrate
Did I mention that our team won every game?
We won every game, but I almost never talked to the kids about trying to win. We can imagine what that would sound like—“Go out there and win!”—but is that effective? I’m reminded of Coach Jack Reilly from the original Mighty Ducks movie, “It’s not worth winning if you can’t win big.”
The odd truth about sports is that you can’t control whether you win or lose, but you can focus on the things that lead to winning. On the baseball team, that meant focusing on fundamentals.
I focused on fundamentals all. season. long. I got just as excited when our kids would remember to return to the base after a pop-up as I did when they stretched a single into a double. We celebrated throwing to the correct base as much as we celebrated big hits. I honestly didn’t care if we won, but I really cared that the kids learned to play the game the right way and got better.
Connection to business: What you celebrate matters. When I was managing support teams, I made a big deal about quality of responses and shied away from using a leaderboard. If you’re curious why I was cautious about using a leaderboard for customer support teams, I recommend reviewing these articles from a few years back: Drift to Low Performance and High Performance Standards.
Organizations need to celebrate wins. I get it. You’re not going to convince the head of sales to withhold their excitement when they close a big deal. But perhaps you can also figure out a way to celebrate the fundamentals such that the focus is on the activities that lead to winning, not just the wins.
Winning the right way
Every coach says they want to win the “right way”, but this can often feel difficult to execute in practice. Just like the story of our fictional CEO at the beginning of this post, when you’re under pressure to perform, it’s almost impossible not to focus singularly on the end goal and not worry too much about the details. But the details are exactly what lead us to being able to consistently achieve our goals.