It is that time of year for me when I need to get everyone involved in planning for the coming sales campaign.
This requires collating useful informatin that the team will find useful and help them make informed choices about the following

• SWOT and STEP re-visited
• Segments and subsegments
• Clients to visit or not visit
• Market share of each segment
• Sales share of each customer
• New staff
• PErformance reviews
• Salary adjustments
• Events planning

Work on this starts mid October and is a frenzy of activity up until Christmas, sometimes even after that.
It involves co-ordinating a team of 7 Area Managers just for the sales and expenses Budget.
This year should be slightly easier as it is the second year involving the managers...and believe me, this has made my life a lot easier.

We´ll see...

 

A Friday afternoon surprise.......

I was feeling pretty content with the week after signing a business deal after being way for several days in Portugal. At the same time, I was tired and looking forward to getting home ....around midnight.Flying back to Madrid only takes an hour but I happended to do some last checks on the teaam before we took off. I read one email that put me in a bad mood and at the same time made me quite sad.

As a manager we need to ensure that the team is pulling in the same direction, the direction we have agreed to go in. Right?

Well, when you discover that not everyone is going that way, we need to find out why, first of all, and then if there is no really good reason, we need to nudge them in the right direction.

It is the nudging bit that can go awfully wrong, especially if it can´t be done face to face and we leave it down to emails or a phone conversation.

This is what happended last week.

A local Area Manager has not responded to two reminders for herself and her team to carry out essential product training via webex.  This essential product training had to be done at a time when the reps are on the verge of  closing sales of a new product in a new segment and therefore require as much help as they can get. It is clear that if we fail to sell, then the budget will be affected negatively.

I sent a fourth reminder, thist ime to each individual and they all agreed to carry out the training on the Friday. However, when the time came, the Area Manager allowed her staff to do other work instead of the training, It wasn´t so much the fact that she overrode an order after ignoring requests for a month, but the fact that, after so many years of working together she took this "nudge" as personal and this made me feel bad, especially after working so hard to build a the team spirit.

I wonder if her reaction was due to tiredness and the stress of the campaing more than anything else...  I hope so because if not, then it would seem to indicate that a boss is always running the risk of annoying, hurting or disappointing someone.

Day off

Today is a public holiday in Madrid and it feels rather strange as our sales team, the vast majority who do not live in Madrid, and are therefore working as usual, are in the middle of their sales campaign.

In fact, we are just at the time of the year when schools start deciding which course materials to adopt.

Not surprisingly, I am not taking a complete break. Rather, I am using the time, sitting in my garden , to think of each individual I work with: how each person is unique and comes with  strengths, needs, weaknesses, fears, a wide range of internal and external relationships, education and dreams.

As managers, unfortunately, we have the power to ignore the individual.  On the other hand, we can also attempt to understand each person, and I do not simply mean, the work colleague, but the whole person, the real person behind the role they play at work.

Worth the investment?  I am convinced of it... Try it, even if it takes a year. You'll be on your way to creating an invincible team.

 

Tender Loving Care

I have just spent two days in the Spanish city of Zaragoza at a teachers' conference we had organised. The aim of the conference was to create a positive emotional experience for our customers so they would go away having a long lasting smile on their faces.

The first speaker ended her presentation entitles "Tender Loving Care"  with a poem which brought tears to everyone´s eyes. She was able to make every single person in the auditorium feel special. As a result she recieved a standing ovation which made her cry too. Wow!...we all react so well to such stimuli because we are all  in need of care and love,  we all are, wherever we are and whoever we are with. 

You get what you deserve

A twitter colleague just sent me a quote by George Orwell which read "at fifty everyone has the face he deserves". This jolted me into sharing this idea.
We are all the result of our past experiences, whether we are proud of them or not, whether we have been treated well or badly. There is no way we can escape from our past.
With this in mind, it is worth taking a look at each day and thinking how our actions, words, emails, jokes, smiles and frowns will affect everyone around you.
Take a look in the mirror, and ask yourself which chapter of your story your face is revealing and more importantly, how you would like the story to end.

What this is all about

I have been a manager for just over then years, did my MBA and started on the typical mangement path and, surprisingly, it wasn´t a comfortable ride at all.
Not until that is, I decided I had to make my own decisions about managing.
I had been reading newspapers, blogs and books about Management for over 12 years.
Fairly recently I also started to find some ideas to share on Twitter. Even so, I still have not found any entry or article which describes my vision of managing people.
It is for this reason, I decided to embark on a new adventure; a journey I take everyday with those I work with and which still has the occasional crash along the way.
This blog is not meant to be from an expert giving sound advice to the less experienced. Its aim is for anyone to participate, anyone who is really interested in people and would like to share their experiences.
This way, we can, I know, find some great ways of making a positive difference to the lives of anyone in any place of work.
A challenge? You bet it is!
But one that is worth it.