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BY TOM CONNELLAN

Rick is a sales manager whose reps are "getting exceptional
results in a tough market."

Maybe you're a sales manager or you're the vicepresident of sales. Or a plant manager, the CFO, the director of marketing, the head of engineering, or someone else in a leadership position.
Maybe you're the VP of HR guiding leaders seeking your help.
Whatever your title and whatever functions your team performs, you can now use the same
three keys Rick used to keep your team motivated through thick and thin. You, too, can get
exceptional results in a tough market.

THREE KEYS THAT WORK

My research on high performance over the last 20 years has covered astronauts, CEOs, Rhodes Scholars, female world leaders, manufacturing operators, top students, top-performing sales reps, military leaders, U.S. presidents, and others. I have found that leaders of high-performing teams that perform well through all kinds of conditions consistently treat team members differently in three skill areas. If you want higher performance from your team, you need to do the same three things Rick and others have done. You need to:

1. Believe in them.
2. Hold them accountable.
3. Provide a supportive environment.

My research into sales managers, for example, showed that the managers of high-performing
reps score 22% higher in their ability to practice those three skills than do the managers of low performers.
We both know you use some degree of all three skills, but even in the best of times, very few
leaders use all three in a manner that consistently gets the performance levels they want. The
most common occurrence in normal times is to overdo accountability and underdo support--
although sometimes the reverse is true.

In turbulent times, this imbalance gets even more pronounced. Leaders load up direct reports with increased accountability and slip even more on providing support. Not surprisingly,
performance slips rather than improves. Here's what you need to do. Go full throttle on all three factors. One firm facing a declining economy did that and reported an increase in sales from 80% of target to 133% of target over a six-month period. Another dropped an additional
seven-figure sum to the bottom line in the next 12 months. Still another reduced
quality defects by two-thirds in less than 60 days.

GETTING ON A POSITIVE TRACK

Here are three skill sets you can use to put your firm on a similar track.

1. Believe in them--acknowledge reality and believe in improvement.

Expectations have powerful effects. To a certain extent, you can cause something to happen simply by creating the expectation that it will happen. If you create the belief in your sales team members that they have the ability to do well in a competitive marketplace, they'll work harder and smarter--and the sales numbers will reflect that confidence.
Confidence is contagious--but so is pessimism. If you allow the belief that economic
uncertainty will reduce sales to creep in, that will be reflected in the sales numbers--just in a
different direction.
Here's where most leaders go astray in this area: they confuse "believe in your team" with wishful thinking. You can't solve problems by applying unguided optimism. You can't just wish for improvement; you have to behave in ways that lead to improvement. Positive expectations can and will improve the outcome when they are based on reality--that is, knowledge of the present situation and a firm belief in the steps that can be taken to improve it.

It's critical that you acknowledge the situation as it is, not as you would like it to be. If sales are down, acknowledge it. If you're getting squeezed on margins, tell people your margins are in a squeeze. If your industry is in a funk, acknowledge it.
Believing in your team does not mean denying reality. It means acknowledging reality--
usually with a brutal assessment of the current situation--and then creating a new reality by
saying "we're going to get things back on track."
Rather than saying, "Everything's great, and we're going to make headway over the next sixmonths," you have to acknowledge present reality. Phrases like "We're 12% over budget on this," "the market is tight," "our cycle time is 2.5 days more than it should be," and "receivables are 18% higher than where we want them to be" all acknowledge present reality.
Then you have to create a new reality with phrases like "...but we've got a strong team and
we'll be able to overcome these temporary setbacks. It might take us three to four months, but we will get there," "...and in the next three days we're going to figure out how to be back on schedule by the end the quarter." Or "with the people in this room right now, we have the
ability to get back on target within the next thirty days."
Put it all together and the model to follow goes something like this: "Things aren't going well
now and I know that you have the ability to get us back on track." This model acknowledges
things as they are and starts creating the belief in a future reality that is better.

It also avoids the potential to confuse positive expectations with positive thinking. Positive
thinking often becomes code for "practice Pollyanna thinking and don't acknowledge reality."
This misguided response to a turbulent marketplace is an all-too-common form of denying
reality that makes you look foolish. Everyone knows what you're saying isn't true. Rather than admiring your optimism, they wonder if you've lost your marbles.
Describe the situation as you see it and then drop it, except for discussions on how to overcome it.

2. Hold them accountable by shortening the goal-setting cycle. Most firms set yearly goals
and break them down into monthly or quarterly targets. In times of change and uncertainty,
however, a shorter cycle improves motivation because the closer in time a goal is, the better
performance you'll get.
While there are all kinds of valid reasons for the corporation or division to have yearly targets,
you're facing a different issue. You're looking at how you get the performance you need on a
day-to-basis in a turbulent marketplace. The best way to do that is to shorten the goal-setting
process because the closer that process matches the natural flow of work, the higher the degree of accountability and engagement.
When you have only long-term goals--quarterly or yearly, say--but a competitive economic
environment that changes daily, it's hard for goals to stay realistic or be motivating because
they don't match the natural work flow.
Suppose Bob's goal is to sell 90 units over the next quarter. If only 21 are sold in the first month, and another 10 halfway through the second month, Bob will quickly see that the three-month goal is out of reach. Once that happens, Bob no longer feels the same degree of accountability and his motivation slides for the final six weeks of the quarter. But if someone has a shorter time frame--say weekly goals--he or she has a fresh start at a new target every seven days. If Wednesday rolls around and it looks like the week's goal won't be met, he or she has only two more days of lower motivation ahead. Then on Monday, the individual can start over with renewed motivation.

In turbulent times, we've found that focusing on weekly or even
daily goals increases engagement and performance. In a few
instances, even hourly goals help.

3. Provide supportive feedback by changing your ratio. Our studies have shown that most individuals give more negative than positive feedback--typically delivering one piece of positive feedback for every three pieces of negative feedback. In uncertain times, the negative to
positive ratio jumps even higher, frequently to a ratio of only one positive to four or five negatives. To keep people engaged, you need just the opposite: a positive to negative ratio of 3:1 in normal times and closer to 5:1 in turbulent times.
You think you have a pretty good ratio but how about checking it out. Monitor your own
feedback pattern for a week by keeping a tally of every instance in which you provide feedback--positive or negative. On one side of a three-by-five card, mark a plus (for each
instance of positive feedback); on the other side, a minus (for each instance of negative
feedback). Unless you're a whole lot different from other leaders I've worked with, you may be surprised to find that you're delivering only one piece of positive feedback for every three to
four pieces of negative feedback.

If that's the case, set yourself the weekly goal of changing your ratio by a factor of one each
week. So if you're at one positive to three negatives (typical), set a goal to move to one positive and two negative the first week, one-to-one the following week, then two-to-one positive, and so on, until you have reached a positive to negative ratio of five-to-one. When you hit that point, you'll be at a good ratio for turbulent times.
A quick way to change your ratio is by noticing upticks in performance. Most of us instinctively manage by exception by watching for down-ticks--deficiencies, errors, and other
failures. Then we too often pounce on the situation and try to get it back under control by
pounding it into submission. But you can boost employee engagement and solve problems
faster by watching for positive developments.
Reinforce anybody who contributed to an up-tick, praising specific actions. This both boosts
motivation and encourages that person to increase that behavior. If you specifically reinforce
positive behaviors, the overall effect will be a general upward trend for your company--even
while your competitors are still trending down.

START NOW

So there they are: three proven tools that have worked for others and can work for you. They're not complex and they're not difficult. They're steps you can take as soon as you've finished reading this article. And because they work, I wonder how long it will be before you pick one and get started.

Tom Connellan is a New York Times best-selling author, frequent business speaker for such organizations as FedEx,
Neiman Marcus, and Marriott, and a former Program Director at the Michigan Business School. Because
Connellan's performance team includes a global network of 350 licensed coaches and trainers, it can impact any
organization with a global reach. For more information, visit www.tomconnellan.com or www.salesmanagerbootcamp.
com © 2008 Dr. Thomas K. Connellan