Leadership Lesson 2: Good Leaders… Inspire?
I’ve spent most of my career at high growth, private equity-funded companies. People who are successful in these organizations are generally type A go-getters whose internal compass and intrinsic motivation compel them to achieve goals.
Revenue target? Too easy.
Pie baking contest? Hold my spoon; I’ve never baked before, but I’m going to win anyway.
I spent my early management career rallying my team around meeting and exceeding key performance indicators (KPIs). As a team, we improved both the quality of our offerings and the revenue those products generated.
As an example, we had sixty locations across the US—our products were sold in one year increments, with the ability to re-sell each year. A few components of our plan included:
Identifying the key dates and actions/deliverables that would optimize sales,
Standardizing the outreach/sales process, providing customized templates, and aligning deadlines across all sixty locations,
Setting high but achievable sales targets for each location based on the prior year’s performance, and
Following-up both before deadlines to assist, and after missed deadlines to course correct.
The result? History-breaking revenue growth, resulting in almost a 10% increase in company revenue year over year.
The process we designed was key to our success. It:
Streamlined dates to follow-up and track each location’s results for our small but mighty team,
Decreased (drastically) the time each location had to spend on designing their re-sale process,
Improved the cadence and quality of communication to potential customers, and
Engaged different departments (ie: marketing, data, forecasting) by leveraging their expertise and uniting everyone around the same goals.
However, the best process would have failed without the energy, buy-in, and excitement we built around achieving our goals. Inspiring my team was easy—all of us were wired to care deeply about meeting and exceeding our goals, and that brought everyone’s best ideas and best work together.
Check back soon for leadership lesson 2b—where my “inspiration” fell short, and required me to grow as a leader to succeed.
