Every founder hits a point where they can’t do it alone. For financial advisors, this can occur because you’re growth-motivated and eager to expand. Or it can happen when organic growth outpaces your ability to manage it.
“No matter which scenario a firm founder or an advisor is in, you need to hire and partner with people to help you grow,” says Elena Beckius, senior vice president at think2perform. “Both of those advisors say, ‘I can’t carry the weight of the practice on my shoulders anymore.’”
If you want to keep scaling, you need to hire and develop other people you can trust to succeed. And that’s where leadership skills become imperative. “Sales leadership is about finding and leading imperfect people so that they remain on the team long-term, serve clients well and really grow the business,” Elena says.But what does sales leadership look like? What doesn’t it look like? And how can advisors add this skill to their tool kit? On this episode of Making the Ideal Real, we’re speaking with Elena about the importance of sales leadership for advisors who want to scale their businesses and develop their people.
What Is Sales Leadership, and What Is It Not?
Elena acknowledges that sales leadership has different definitions in different contexts. For her, it’s just as important to identify what sales leadership is not. For example, incentive programs, rewards and recognition aren’t a substitute for hands-on leadership.
Other advisors, Elena says, imagine that they were self-taught “through the school of hard knocks” and expect their people to take their lumps and figure it out. Forcing salespeople to sink or swim is “a super-expensive revolving door that you’ve just installed in your team,” Elena says. “That is not the most effective way to do it. And it’s really hard on your culture. It erodes trust and, frankly, confidence in you and the firm.”
Knowing that, what is good sales leadership? After all, most people have good intentions but perhaps aren’t sure what to do instead. To begin, she says, expect to build significant time into your schedule for developing your people.
That might mean juggling your responsibilities as a leader and as an advisor. Or you can hire a fractional leader to develop the team while you focus elsewhere. Sales leadership requires initiative. It requires getting started.
“It’s not about waiting until you have the perfect plan to lead people,” Elena says. “It’s about leading people and continually learning as a leader to say, ‘I am going to get in the trenches with my people, and I’m going to lead them. And I’m not perfect, but I’m going to learn.’”
Get Started With the Whole Person in Mind
When you want to be a better leader, and you understand the effort and commitment required, what’s next?
Start with the concept of “What do I want for myself?” This question “is about having a goal, having a plan, implementing the plan, controlling direction and throwing off discouragement,” Elena says. With this starting point, you can begin leading your team and learn as you go along.
As you set goals, get to know what your people want in all aspects of life. As a leader in a Fortune 500 company, one of Elena’s team members was doing well but had room to grow. Elena eventually took a new approach, asking this person about personal goals. She learned that the employee had suffered the loss of a parent, which led to significant student debt. That employee was determined to prevent his children from experiencing that hardship.
From then on, “I led him differently because I knew what his professional goals were and his personal goals, and we were able to connect it back to his values,” Elena says. “So I can’t overshare how important it is to have that conversation and be clear about the goals that your people have.”
Sales teams also need key activities, or key performance indicators (KPIs), to add structure and planning to their goals. And they need a scorecard and regular one-on-ones to track progress. This is everyone’s responsibility. “It’s not just the follower’s job to implement. It’s also the leader’s job to be in the trenches with them as they’re implementing,” she says.
Make Skills Development Part of the Culture
Just as “the school of hard knocks” is an insufficient form of sales leadership, don’t assume that your team will learn key skills by osmosis or trial and error, Elena says. Leaders must take time to teach the skills that are most important to the business.
“It could be something as simple as practicing and learning a script to be able to ask for referrals. It could be, ‘How do you have an effective conversation with a professional alliance?’” she says. “These are things that we learned over time, but often we learned within an environment where somebody taught us the skill. We just forget to do that now.”
“Win the week” meetings can be another powerful teaching tool. The agenda includes these components:
- What successes occurred? What is the team most proud of?
- How did key activities/KPIs go? If targets were missed, what support is needed?
- Did we meet the week’s commitments?
- What are our commitments for the week ahead?
This approach builds community, rallies the team around a common goal and helps the leader be involved and active in their team’s development. “Being there for people frequently and regularly is the most important thing that we can do as a leader,” Elena says, “because the school of hard knocks, when somebody is going through discouragement, is like a direct path to that revolving door.”
People in This Episode
Elena Beckius: LinkedIn
Ryan Goulart: LinkedIn
Transcript
Elena Beckius:
What I have found in leading thousands of people in my career is that it’s not about waiting until you have the perfect plan to lead people, it’s about leading people and continually learning as a leader to say, “I am going to get in the trenches with my people2, and I’m going to lead them. And I’m not perfect, but I’m going to learn.” What are those key components that people can learn and they can think about how they want to incorporate it into their practice knowing that they don’t have to be perfect at it, but they do have to start, and they do have to learn?
Ryan Goulart:
That’s Elena Beckius, senior vice president at think2perform. We’re talking about how to grow your business through sales leadership. I’m Ryan Goulart, and you are making the ideal real.
I have with me today Elena Beckius, one of our SVPs here at think2perform. We are talking about sales leadership and its use in making the ideal real. Elena, welcome back to our podcast.
Elena Beckius:
Thanks Ryan. Happy to be here.
Ryan Goulart:
We’re talking about sales leadership, which I think is a very interesting topic because it involves so much human behavior and is oftentimes an obstacle to growing a business.
Elena Beckius:
Absolutely.
Ryan Goulart:
Let’s just jump into it because we’re going to need 30 minutes to review-
Elena Beckius:
Let’s do it.
Ryan Goulart:
-what this means. So for you, why is sales leadership a crucial component to scaling a business?
Elena Beckius:
It’s a great question. It’s a great place to start. And how I might answer that is just sharing a little bit about the two typical types of advisors or firm founders that we really work with on a regular basis. And the first is somebody that has a really aggressive growth vision. They’re looking to grow, and they’re looking to scale the business. They want to be big. They’re growing something big.
The other group has very different goals. They have organically grown the business because they just serve clients really well, but they also have outgrown the ability to serve all the clients. And so, no matter which scenario a firm founder or an advisor is in, you need to hire and partner with people to help you grow. Both of those advisors say, “I can’t carry the weight of the practice on my shoulders anymore. I have to take some of the weight off my shoulders, either because I want to grow aggressively or because I’m growing aggressively and I need help.” They can no longer work smarter, and they can’t work harder, so they need to grow through people. So sales leadership is really about answering that question of how do I do this? I need to lead people.
Ryan Goulart:
I think of it as just, there’s a lot that goes into that topic of sales leadership. I think even when people hear the term sales leadership, they already have an understanding about what it is. What it is might be completely different to what you and I will talk about. So let’s unpack a little bit about what sales leadership is, and I think one of the best ways to do that is through how. So talk to us a little bit about how sales leadership can be so impactful and some of your experience with it.
Elena Beckius:
I think about sales leadership a little bit more holistically. To your point, when people hear the word sales leadership, sometimes they think this is about identifying the right reward and recognition plans or it’s about finding the perfect person on my team. And sales leadership is not about just finding the perfect person and then letting them go. It’s about leading imperfect people, because that’s a myth. There aren’t perfect people out there. We all are imperfect and we all, in this scenario, are going into a practice where we need to learn and develop and understand the culture and understand the process.
And so sales leadership is about finding and leading imperfect people so that they retain on the team long-term, serve clients well and really grow the business. And you and I have heard Doug Lennick say this a million times: people are not a means to the end, they are the end. It’s what makes our work so meaningful. But one of the things I think about a lot is when sales leadership is not done well, and then also when it’s done really well, it really makes a huge difference.
Ryan Goulart:
And I imagine, too, there’s a lot of key points for our listeners, that as they are listening to you talk about an experience or a problem that they’ve encountered, whether it be a financial advisor who is stretched too thin because they are constantly seeing clients and are unable to pick their head up and look forward, that’s a moment of time for them to engage in sales leadership because it can help grow the business through more people. I would love to learn a little bit more. I’m here taking notes like most of you listening because one of the things, Elena, is that you do such a great job of just outlining the dos and don’ts of this.
Elena Beckius:
Yeah, let’s start out with what sales leadership is not. And one of the things that I want to acknowledge is that nobody goes into leadership saying, “I don’t really want to do a good job.” But to your point of it can be really hard to slow down to go faster later. And that’s really what firm owners need to do, is they need to slow down a little bit to speed up later. And so, here’s what I’ve seen not work that well. No. 1 is like I said before: all I need to do is have the right reward and recognition systems, and people will come in and do what I need them to do. I can be hands-off. That approach does not work. That approach might work for a short amount of time, but it will never work long-term.
The other thing that doesn’t work is sometimes I will hear advisors say, “Hey, I had to do this on my own. I learned through the school of hard knocks. They’re going to have to do it that way too.” And that is an approach that you can take. It’s just a super-expensive revolving door that you’ve just installed in your team. That is not the most effective way to do it. And it’s really hard on your culture. It erodes trust and, frankly, confidence in you and the firm. So those are some of the ways that I’ve seen, in a nutshell, really done not so well.
But let’s chat a little bit more about when it’s done right, because that’s what we’re all about. I mean, nobody goes into this like, I just don’t want to do this very well. People have good intentions to lead their people, they just don’t know how.
Ryan Goulart:
Right. Those two items that you just… I can hear the voices of advisors that I’ve talked to on both sides of that don’ts of just like, “This was a hard business to get into, and now I’m expecting the same results from the people doing the same things that I did.” That’s really hard. That’s a really hard behavior to install and a really hard behavior to get rid of.
So, what does it look like to do this well with helping encourage and empower people to do things and take the business in a better place, different place?
Elena Beckius:
At the end of the day, and this is an oversimplification, but it’s really about so much of what we’re about here at think2perform, is that when we think about recruiting and attracting a team of advisors to work for us, we know that we have opportunities to serve existing clients or opportunities to grow within our geography or our niche market. But ultimately, we have to remember that yes, it is about the business, and it’s also about the people that we lead. So at the end of the day, if we want to retain the best people, it’s truly about helping them get what they want for themselves. And that’s no easy feat. I mean, you and I talk about this or we’ve talked about it before, that to lead people effectively, it could take 30% to 50% of somebody’s full-time schedule to lead people. That’s a lot because people need leadership.
To help somebody get what they want for themselves, they need support, they need leadership. It is not an individual sport. It is a team sport, for sure. And most teams, it doesn’t matter what business or sport you’re in, most teams actually have a leader. They have a coach. It is really hard to be an individual contributor and a leader. It’s why we tell people you need time to lead their team. And there’s a couple of different ways that you can go about doing it. As a leader in your firm, you can take and put on that leadership hat. I might wear an advisor hat for a period of time, and then I wear my leadership hat for a period of time. Or you might have, in the case of a client that I work with where the firm owner just said, “I’m unwilling to do that, but I’m not unwilling to lead my team. That is something that I won’t sacrifice on. They need leadership to be able to grow and develop and to achieve the goals that I’m asking them to achieve, and I’m not going to let them go at it alone.”
And so, she made the decision to hire fractional leadership to come into her practice. And so it is not a question of do people need leadership? It’s just how you as a firm owner want to deliver that. If it’s you, somebody else on your team, or in the case of this situation I just explained, hiring somebody else like myself to come in and to lead your team of people.
Ryan Goulart:
One of the things that you said earlier that I think is such a really big point of the turnover that leading by your bonus plan or leading by your heart, that is so expensive. So to do a different way of getting to a result in a more thoughtful way by bringing in experts or bringing in resources or even, I know you have a lot of other examples too of what this looks like when done really well. It’s such a good thing to start off with. As you look at the behaviors of sales leadership, what are the things that really good sales leaders do that help grow the business?
Elena Beckius:
It’s a great question. It’s a really practical question because what I have found in leading thousands of people in my career is that it’s not about waiting until you have the perfect plan to lead people. It’s about leading people and continually learning as a leader to say, “I am going to get in the trenches with my people, and I’m going to lead them. And I’m not perfect, but I’m going to learn.” And so what I can go through, Ryan, is just what are those key components that people can learn and they can think about how they want to incorporate it into their practice, knowing that they don’t have to be perfect at it, but they do have to start, and they do have to learn? And I think what I might do is use our WDYWFY, our What Do You Want for Yourself template, or as a template to talk through it.
So WDYWFY is about having a goal, having a plan, implementing the plan, controlling direction and throwing off discouragement. And so, if you think about that as a template for leadership, if this is all you do, this is a really good place to start, and then you can continue to learn. But the folks need to know what their goal is. They need to have a goal. And sometimes those are professional goals that are set within the business. Sometimes they have other professional goals as well. I’m also very interested in understanding what’s important for them to achieve personally in the next year. And by the way, it’s the middle of January when we’re recording. This is a perfect time, January, February, March to have some of these conversations with the people that you’re leading. But understanding what people want professionally, personally, and from a self-development standpoint. And even better, connect those goals back to their values.
And here’s my learning, is that for about the first 10 years of my leadership career, I just stayed in a professional lane. I didn’t connect the dots from somebody’s professional goals back to their personal goals and back to their values. It’s OK, but it’s not the best. And I had a lesson the first time that I actually hired think2perform, when I was still a client. I was leading a team at a Fortune 500 financial services company, and I had a director on my team. And the first couple of years that we were working together, he did well, but I wouldn’t say he was hitting home runs. He was hitting singles, sometimes striking out. I had just started to work with think2perform as a client, and I was getting coaching from our colleague, Ray Kelly, and we had brought in Doug to do some education about the What Do You Want for Yourself process. And I had the conversation with this director, and I understood what his professional goals were, but even though it was outside of my comfort zone, I asked him to share with me what he wanted personally. And it was the first time I had that conversation of what would it actually mean if you hit this professional goal? If you hit this goal and you make X amount of money, what would it mean for you personally? And I remember that he shared with me that he had graduated from college with a lot of debt. His father had prematurely passed away unexpectedly, was a primary breadwinner in their house. And he graduated with, I don’t even remember, but a lot of student loans. And he said, “What I really want for myself is to put my daughters in a position where they would not have to deal with that.”
And we talked through his personal goal of saving money to be able to put away in their college plan. And it was very detailed, and it was very personal to him. And from that point on, I was able to connect the dots between his professional goals back to that personal goal, time and time again, not to manipulate him, but to make sure that we had that alignment, not just with his personal goals but also his values of financial stability and security for him and his daughters. And it made a world of difference for him. And you know what? It made a world of difference for me as a leader. I led him differently because I knew what his professional goals were and his personal goals, and we were able to connect it back to his values. So I can’t overshare how important it is to have that conversation and be clear about the goals that your people have.
Ryan Goulart:
Hey, listeners, Ryan here, if you don’t know your values or the values of your employees, go to www.think2perform.com/values to take our free values exercise.
Continue on. I’m over here taking notes.
Elena Beckius:
Yeah. The second part of that is of course having a plan. And this is oftentimes where sometimes we see people under-leading. A lot of people can come up with goals, but actually I have seen that a lot less can actually come up with the right clear activities or some people want to call them key performance indicators, leading indicators. People have a harder time developing the plan. And so, when we’re leading a sales team of advisors, they need to have clear key activities. They need to know what they need to do on a daily and weekly basis. I think the closer you are to revenue generating, the more important this is, especially within the context of sales leadership, but the plan might need to involve prospecting and marketing plans.
It may need to involve client segmentation, it may need to involve client service schedule, but I’m working with a team right now within a fractional sales leadership environment, and even just getting really clear on a couple of key basics for us to start with that we can build off of is being super clear about how many prospect meetings we have to have a week, how many total appointments are we going to have a week, how many times are we going to ask for referrals and tracking how many referrals we receive every week with a target of one. Even getting as clear as that and keeping it in front of us weekly, it kind of takes it from having a plan to having a specific plan, knowing that not am I just going to be held accountable to that, but I’m going to be supported in that as well. And that’s a key component of this, is the support.
Implementing the plan for sales leaders. We think about this a lot of time as, hey, this is something a follower does. They implement their plan, they execute on the key performance indicators or the key activities, but the leader needs to have a really active role, especially early on in implementing the plan. They’ll learn as much from you, hopefully, as they will from anywhere else. And a lot of times this is preventing some bad habits from happening. So it’s not just the follower’s job to implement. It’s also the leader’s job to be in the trenches with them as they’re implementing.
The next part, Ryan, that I think I’d love to spend some time on is controlling direction. And this is where I think sales leadership is really one. It’s being clear about a couple things. You need to have a scoreboard. When you take the time to have goals, and you take the time to develop a plan, I hope you take the time to make sure you know if you’re winning or losing. And it doesn’t have to be fancy, it can be a simple spreadsheet, it can be a whiteboard. It doesn’t have to be fancy, but everyone on the team needs to know, are we on track? I think for leaders, we need to have regular and frequent one-on-ones. That could mean that you are launching and developing someone on your team brand-new and you need to be meeting with them weekly for a one-on-one. It could mean somebody that’s a little bit more tenured and you only need to meet with them twice a month to set direction and throw off discouragement. But you need to have those ongoing meetings dedicated to the person that you’re leading.
I think the other things, too, when it comes to controlling direction, Ryan, is sometimes as leaders of firms, we forget some of the basics that we were taught early in our career. And our leaders use them for a reason. And some things just to make sure that you’re incorporating into your culture is that there are some real specific skills your people need. They can sometimes learn that through the osmosis of just observing you, but sometimes leaders need to set aside some real time to talk about skill development. It could be something as simple as practicing and learning a script to be able to ask for referrals. It could be, “How do you have an effective conversation with a professional alliance?” These are things that we learned over time, but often we learned within an environment where somebody taught us the skill. We just forget to do that now because it’s been so many years ago. So that can be a really important meeting that happens monthly or a couple times a month or when needed. Make sense?
Ryan Goulart:
Yeah, makes total sense. You had mentioned too, and I love the phrase of this, and I’d love for you to tell us a little bit more about it, is the purpose of the “win the week.” Tell us a little bit about that.
Elena Beckius:
The win the week meeting is a meeting that I’ve always done as part of my sales leadership career. And we’ve called it different things, but ultimately the “win the week” is an opportunity for you to pull together the advisors that you lead and make sure that you have an opportunity as a team to describe what it would look like for you to win the week. And so to be real transparent, a sample agenda for something like this, and this is exactly what I do now as part of some of the fractional leadership roles that I work with, is we take the first five minutes to share what went well last week, what are we most proud of, what were the successes? We talk about our key performance indicators or our key activities.
When it came to appointments or prospect activities or asking for referrals or receiving referrals, how did that go? Did we hit our targets? If not, what do we need for support? Is there something that I can help with or is there something that the team can help with? But often, when people bring something to the table that they need support on, one of us can help. And so people feel a lot less lonely if they’re not able. It’s not about, “Oh my gosh, you didn’t hit the target. What’s going on?” It’s like, “Hey, what do you need? How can we come alongside you?” Things like that. It’s just, “How do we make sure that you hit this next week?” We always set commitments in the “win the week” meeting, and so we share what our commitments were for last week, and if we hit them, it’s a reason to celebrate. And then we also share our commitments for the week coming up.
I don’t think it matters what your role is on a team. Sometimes it can feel a bit lonely. People walk into a Monday and boom, they’re in client appointments or back to back to back, and that can be a really good thing. It can be a sign of productivity, but it can also be pretty lonely for folks that are in the building stage. And so having an opportunity to win the week with your peers and then to share how you’re going to win the week coming up is really important. The other thing that comes to mind, Ryan, too, is having opportunities to work together around a common goal. I think that it’s great to have individual goals, and it’s also great as we’re leading a team of advisors to have reasons to celebrate and to work towards something together. It helps us to remember to share ideas and share resources, and it motivates us to help each other out.
But also it’s just really fun to celebrate as a team from time to time, even if it’s a 90-day sprint. We know that maybe an extrinsic motivator like, “Hey, if we meet this goal as a team, we’re going to take a Friday afternoon and go bowling and have a couple of beers and appetizers and celebrate with our spouses.” That doesn’t work as an ongoing, always extrinsic motivator to get people to do something different, but it sure works as a 90-day sprint. Like, “Hey, let’s focus on this together, let’s have a little fun with it and let’s work as a team.” So just a couple of examples of outside of a one-on-one, as a leader, how can you throw off discouragement and really work together more effectively as a team.
Ryan Goulart:
And you had me at bowling. I mean, that sounds great. Let’s do it.
Elena Beckius:
Let’s do it.
Ryan Goulart:
But one of the things too, I would’ve to imagine that when it comes to throwing off discouragement, would you say that, from a sales leadership perspective, is that an art of being able to help people through that? Or are there certain questions that you would ask in a situation like that to help people that are maybe struggling a little bit? They might’ve been striking out a few times. They thought they hit a single, and then all of a sudden, they’re out.
Elena Beckius:
I think of leadership, especially when somebody is discouraged, it is an art, and it is a science. And some of the science of it is just being there for people. It is really easy when you’ve been successful for a long time to forget how much heavy lifting it takes to get this business off the ground. So even if you can just be there for people, being there in person with your body and your mind, and that’s just the science of walking through the door. As adult learners, we actually learn by doing. So the reason why I’m answering that way is because I think sometimes people think, “If I don’t have the art of leadership finessed, I don’t know that I’m the person to do it.” And actually, a lot of leadership is just being there for people and throwing off discouragement in the way that’s authentic to you, that’s in alignment with what somebody’s really going through.
I share it like that because there are questions that you can ask, and there’s great ways to handle that no matter what the discouragement is. And I’m sure there’s ways that I can still learn and finesse in my own leadership career, but ultimately, being there for people frequently and regularly is the most important thing that we can do as a leader, because the school of hard knocks, when somebody is going through discouragement, is like a direct path to that revolving door, that super expensive revolving door that we installed.
Ryan Goulart:
Like “Go get ’em, champ, you got this” doesn’t work always.
Elena Beckius:
Yeah, it doesn’t work.
Ryan Goulart:
Or rarely works.
Elena Beckius:
It doesn’t work. And one of the tools that we use a lot at think2perform is a tool called Everyday Leadership. And it is not OK to put somebody in a position where they need to do certain things to be successful in their job, no matter what those skills are, and not give them the tools or transfer the skills to be able to do that.
It is our job as a leader. That’s horrible leadership to say, “You’ve got to figure it out on your own.” You’ve got to be the resource, or you’ve got to broker that out to somebody else. Because people, again, will feel that immediately, and in maybe a best-case scenario, they hold on, and they try to figure it out, but they feel discouraged. It leads to low confidence, or again, they find the way to the revolving door, and now we’re back to square one. We’re attracting and recruiting great talent, and it’s expensive, and it takes a ton of time. And had we just spent the time to get in the trenches with them to understand what their needs were and to either be the resource or the resource broker, we could have moved them forward and on their way to goal achievement.
Ryan Goulart:
One other thought before we wrap this up. On that point, about the skill development and where we all bring our own experience to every situation. So my experience is different than your experiences, which is different than the audience’s experience, and that’s great.
And at the same time, do you think that why it happens this way, of why those don’ts show up, and they show up in the designing of comp plans. And while it is an important part of the process, you don’t lead with it, or you don’t lead with my experiences of having been in the industry for X amount of years, and you got your leads, you went through them, and you had to go buy more, and you did it again, and you did it until you had a book of business, and then it was time to deepen. Do you think that’s just because of a place of that’s what people know or what is comfortable and the idea of what you’re presenting here, of being more intentional with the skill development, being intentional about the tracking, being intentional about the commitment and the time of being able to do it, that just hasn’t been thought of yet because it hasn’t been the experience?
Elena Beckius:
Yeah, I think you’re bringing up a good point, and I think it’s just, especially for a lot of successful advisors, and I’ll use my own experience, it’s easy sometimes to look back and think, “Oh, I did all of this on my own and look how hard I worked and all of the things that we did back in the day to grow a successful business.”
And it can be easy to forget some of the leadership that we had along the way. And for myself, I probably learned as much from not-as-good leadership as I did from good leadership, meaning you’re in an environment where you’re constantly learning. And sometimes we discount because it’s just so long ago. Folks that came alongside us, even if they weren’t perfect leaders, they weren’t great leaders, they weren’t inspirational, but they transferred those skills, and they took some time. And maybe we learned what not to do because of their influence as much as we learned what to do. But that’s all learning, right? I’m not giving people an excuse to not be an effective leader. I’m just saying, know that people need leadership, and they need imperfect leadership more than leadership down the road. They need it now.
Ryan Goulart:
Yeah. Awesome. There’s a lot of takeaways. I have a lot of takeaways here, but how would you like to wrap this up? I mean, what are some things that you would like to impart on our audience?
Elena Beckius:
I would say a couple things. No. 1 is that people don’t expect you to be a perfect leader. That’s OK. You’re not going to be perfect. You’re going to learn, just like the people that you’re leading aren’t perfect people. Or you’re leading imperfect humans that need your leadership to get better. It goes both ways. So just start leading and take the time. No. 2, be the resource or broker the resource. Be the resource broker. But it’s not if you need leadership in your practice, it is that you need leadership, and you need to figure out how it is that you’re going to deploy it. And third is, if it is you that is going to deploy it, ask for help, because that’s exactly what we tell the people that we lead to do. We’re not expecting everything on day one, but ask for help.
And if you don’t have help, then leverage some of the tools that we went through today. Be really clear about goal planning with your people. Be really clear that they have a plan to go about achieving it. Be really clear that they have the skills. Have the scorecard and meet with them frequently to support them and throw off discouragement. That’s a lot, but that also is enough to get started to lead people probably better than you are now, if you are not at all. So I think that’s how I would end it.
And then most importantly, care for your people. Like Doug says, people aren’t a means to the end. They are an end, and they deserve our love and care, and they deserve to get what they want for themselves, and we can be such a powerful conduit to help them do that.
Ryan Goulart:
Awesome. Thanks, Elena.
Elena Beckius:
Yep. You bet. Thanks for having me.
Ryan Goulart:
As we wrap this episode, we’re committed to helping you make the ideal real. If you found this program helpful, share it and help someone else make their ideal real too. Until next time, for think2perform, I’m Ryan Goulart. Take care.
