My Story:
Because of my strong background in sales, I tended to think that I was very good at establishing rapport with people and building effective working relations with clients and colleagues.
Being a person who values open communication, loyalty, creativity, flexibility, challenge, I tended to be drawn to people who had similar values and in sales there are plenty of people of this 'type'. When I came across someone I didn't immediately connect with, although I felt slightly uncomfortable, I quickly linked up with someone else who I believed "spoke my language".
In 1991, I was working with an organisation where project team working was a large part of the business strategy. For once in my career I found myself working on a cross-functional basis with different divisions of the business in project teams. This was new ground for me and at times I found it challenging. The problem was that I found people outside of sales behaved differently and even used a different language. Occasionally, I found myself thinking things like;
"Why do you need that amount of detail, let's just get on with it!"
or
"Say something, do something, do anything, but do it now!"
The more "reserved" I thought someone was, the more uncomfortable I felt dealing with them. The more creative and flexible I found someone else, the more I felt I had found a "kindred spirit".
A couple of years later I was tasked with recruiting my own team with a business objective of increasing sales in my particular area. I must have interviewed dozens of people and found myself selecting people based on one very particular criterion– they had a similar attitude and behaved in a familiar way to myself. I ended up recruiting a team of people who were a "mirror image" of myself!
Initially this was great, we had great fun and the motivation, drive and enthusiasm to achieve was fantastic. However there were areas where things were not great. Although we were all very creative, attention to detail and business analysis were lacking and there was an increasing amount of last minute panic and "fire-fighting" when sales reports and rational planning were required. Increasingly I found as a manager that my behaviour that I had once thought was my strength- flexibility, spontaneous, creative, supportive, trusting – became my Achilles heel as I became more aware of the strengths I did not have. I needed to be more practical, do more day to day planning, have a much more analytical approach to certain tasks and business objectives. The real issue was that no-one in the team had these strengths either! I couldn't wish for a better bunch of self-motivated, fun and adaptable people, but who was going to produce the detailed report with impartial recommendations that my manager needed next week?
What had gone wrong? Have at look at "The Name of My Game".
