Top performing sales organization have three things average or struggling sales organization lack: Transparency, Accountability, Trust. This blog focuses on Transparency, the next two will focus on Accountability and Trust. When assessing struggling sales organizations, the first thing we see is very little (if any) transparency. Sales leaders don’t know what their sales reps are really doing day to day. Sales reps don’t know what sales leaders really expect from them--beyond hitting their sales target. [...]

Ray Dalio's Principles--most of us shy away from radical truth and radical transparency, but Dalio talks about the positive impact this approach has had on employees and managers over 30 years building Bridgewater Associates. His firm's success speaks for itself. This approach isn't for everyone, but judge for yourself. Greg McKeown's Essentialism--great reminder to not only keep it simple, but to eliminate our countless tasks, commitments, and priorities that are “non-essential.” Instead of trying [...]

During different stages of our careers, we’ve all been forced to hunker down and get a ton of work done in a short period of time. As successful leaders, we know the value of staying focused, working hard, and being productive. But are we missing something in our relentless pursuit of “what’s next”? I think we are. When striving for the next peak ahead, it’s easy to fail to think about how far we’ve come, [...]

After finishing the last classroom session of our Productivity Bootcamp in mid-July, we’re exploring ways to reinforce what we learned together. Our goal is simple yet ambitious: To build the most effective approach possible to help busy executives become more productive leaders. This means moving from classroom to company and applying what we’ve learned. Becoming more effective leaders requires us to be aware of, and then change unproductive behaviors. This takes time, discipline, and periodic 360-degree feedback. [...]

  Hello!  We completed Week 4 of our four-week “bootcamp” July 13th on Single Metric Alignment.   We began the session on Organizational Alignment with an HBR article (How Aligned is Your Organization?) and McKinsey white paper (The Aligned Organization) to set the stage. As a caveat to using the Single Metric Approach blindly, we discussed an HBR article by Graham Kinney (The False Promise of a Single Metric), which argues the nature of today’s complex organizations means any single metric will naturally be insufficient [...]

Hello! We completed Week 3 of our four-week “bootcamp” focusing today on RunningProductive Meetings.  Today’s session assumes our companies aren’t in a state of what a recent Harvard Business Review article calls “meeting madness” and assumes psychological safety exists among team members, as Google discovered in their quest to build the perfect team. Of course, unproductive meetings are still common, wasting time and money. Here are some tips to make your meetings more productive: Be sure everyone knows the reason(s) you’re meeting beforehand—the more specific the better Good [...]