Pull Management is the term I use to describe a company culture of focused collaboration and open communication, in which you are dedicated to the success of your company by being first dedicated to the success of your employees. (Location 181)
When very fast action is needed, a temporary Push Management burst can help get you through a situation. (Location 202)
It’s easy to keep making decisions for people. It’s easy to keep telling them what to do rather than helping them find the answer themselves. (Location 204)
Anyone can spend up to $500 on behalf of the company or a client, no questions asked. They can spend up to $5000 without executive approval if they get approval from any two other team members. (Location 215)
It’s often more convenient, taking less time and energy, and thus tempting to tell people to do things rather than working with them to help them create them together (“co-creation”). (Location 222)
If you overly depend on cash to reward performance, peoplewill startworking just for the money (extrinsic motivation) rather than for the exceptional performance for its own sake and the pleasure of a job well done (inherent motivation). (Location 229)
“take it when you need it, no questions asked.” Employees don’t drop the baton on their responsibilities. They work with their peers to ensure that they aren’t leaving at a critical time and that others can cover for them. (Location 237)
By letting them stumble, especially when it counts, employees will get a much faster education and developed sense of independence and self-direction. (Location 245)
“By letting my employees stumble, I rediscovered my weekends and they’ve ended up surpassing me in what I was teaching them in.” (Location 247)
Of course! Setting clear boundaries and expectations help create a productive, enjoyable culture. Anarchy isn’t fun. (Location 250)
Negative employees are like rocks in a river — they slow down and disturb the flow. (Location 251)
consider the enormous difference between assigning goals to someone (Push) and working together to set goals (Pull). (Location 254)
how Salesforce.com treated me as a mini-CEO and empowered me to create a new kind of rockstar sales team that increased their new business growth in the F2000 market by more than 50%. (Location 268)
opportunity. I knew that before I started another company, I had to know inside and out how to build a phenomenal sales organization. (Location 274)
but they were starving for pipeline and leads. Their rolodexes turned out to be, with very few exceptions, irrelevant. (Location 288)
The team I created focused on ONLY ONE thing: generating new qualified sales opportunities from cold companies (ones at which we had no activity or interest) and (Location 296)
passing these qualified opportunities to quota-carrying salespeople to close. (Location 297)
The team only contacted cold new business accounts at which we didn’t have a relationship or current interest. (Location 299)
To develop mini-CEOs, you will have to let go of your own assumptions, including the ones you “know” are true. Your assumptions often will only stunt your mini-CEOs. (Location 336)
From his experience, these kinds of inside sales teams don’t add true incremental value. Either they end up pushing papers for field salespeople who take advantage of the support, or the inside sales reps on the team take credit for leads that they didn’t really produce on their own. (Location 338)
major part of the success of our team at Salesforce.com stemmed from our design of a bulletproof (yet simple) audit process that ensured the integrity of the results the team took credit for. (Location 342)
includes letting go of your own assumptions. What you know to be true might not be true! Encourage your people to challenge you and experiment, as long as you all have a shared, aligned vision for the company. (Location 346)
The plan stands for Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, and Metrics. (Location 363)
He understood that it was important to have the help create and update the process in order for us to adopt (Location 410)
feedback from the team in order to refine, get buy-in, and ultimately create a better process. (Location 412)
removes his ego from the equation, and empowers his people to build something inspiring that’s more than the sum of its parts. (Location 414)
How would the team operate if the manager disappeared tomorrow? 2. What would have to happen for the team to not just continue operating as its current level, but to actually improve its results? (Location 425)
“The graveyards are full of indispensable men.” (Location 432)
See how this works? You get what you give. Create more freedom and upside for your people, and you’ll get it in turn. (Location 440)
it’s a perfect opportunity to use the 80/20 rule to clear out non-essential tasks. Rather than distributing 100% of the work of the manager, divide the work into two parts: 1) the 20% that is the most important to keep within the team or company, and 2) the 80% that can be eliminated, automated, or outsourced. (Location 442)
how can you use the core CEOFlow values of Transparency and Trust to eliminate 80% of the reporting, monitoring, checking and auditing? (Location 447)
try eliminating the approval process entirely, and transparently publish everyone’s expense reports or team expenditures against budgets. (Location 449)
create a process in which individuals must seek advice from others before spending money. (Location 451)
When my sales team grew to 15 direct reports, well past my ability to give each person the amount of attention they deserved, I divided the team into three sub-teams of 5 people. (Location 458)
people), I would recommend you make team lead roles rotating positions, say every three-to-six months, so different people can develop and practice leadership skills. (Location 463)
spread responsibilities across the team by creating functional leads: “Goals Setting Lead,” “New Hires Lead,” “Education Lead,” “Coaching System Lead,” “Recruiting Lead,” etc. (Location 466)
When you have a function that does need internal ownership by someone (like coaching of new hires), select a single person to be responsible for it — no committees. (Location 472)
What is important is they are responsible for it getting done and better than before. (Location 474)
I focused much of my time on coaching the team leads — training the trainers. (Location 488)
By distributing responsibilities to the employees touching customers, the ones closest to the action, you can get better quality work and results. (Location 492)
rule: how much of the goals setting process isn’t that important? Do you really need to set and track 15 goals? What are the 20% of the goals that matter the most? (Location 496)
In fact, any time a single person is a bottleneck to any process, your growth is capped. (Location 501)
Those with more experience or expectations could earn the extra compensation through higher results. (Location 540)
I put all the sales results into a single spreadsheet, with the calculated commissions. (Location 550)
Before moving on, Meeting Leader asks team to share immediate feedback with the speaker. (Location 570)
Meetings averaged about 1 hour to 1:30, and the meeting leader was responsible for keeping it on time (another great mini-CEO skills practice). (Location 582)
Be aggressive in moving towards this model, of making changes and trying new methods. (Location 589)
Plan for several weeks or longer - not several days! Keep pushing the boundaries, taking baby steps and practicing patience. (Location 590)
As a team we’d regularly reflect on programs like SalesforceU and determine if they were stale and needed refreshing, or whether just putting it on hold for a couple of weeks was enough. (Location 593)
Semco has a policy of “every meeting is optional.” This forces people to make meetings relevant, useful, and entertaining. (Location 600)
how would that force you and your people to get focused on what really matters and ensure it is communicated in ways that others (Location 608)
One option is to bang your head against the wall as much as you want to, trying to force or coerce salespeople into doing things. However, it’s a very painful and frustrating way to try to drive behavior. This is Push Sales Management. (Location 618)
Great design is hard and takes time, and with our “urgency addicted” culture, we tend to think “How can we get this done now? How can we roll this out now?” (Location 624)
“never making assumptions by always asking why about everything”. (Location 746)
you must allow them to think for themselves and challenge rules (both inside your company or your marketplace). (Location 751)
Actually, an even more valuable use of their experience was to coach employees on making their own decisions. (Location 892)
Bakke believes the amount of fun in an organization is largely a function of how many decisions the people get to make. (Location 909)
Bakke wondered why they needed a handbook at all—couldn’t AES trust people to use their best judgment? (Location 916)
The purpose of business is not to maximize profit to shareholders but to steward our resources to serve the world in an economically sustainable way. (Location 950)
What if you measured and compensated the mini-businesses on metrics that completely align with your company’s key metrics, such as Revenue, Profitability, and ROI of their mini-business? (Location 977)
employees will not trust a company more than the company trusts them. (Location 998)
Try letting them explore it and see what happens. (Location 1001)
As an investor in companies, I want the CEO to get the hell out of his office and work among his people, so that he’s in constant sync with them. It’s the right business decision.) (Location 1014)
trust, transparency and alignment are synergistic. (Location 1018)
Now, this kind of comp transparency won’t work well if your comp plans vary per person or aren’t fair - usually because of special deals or arbitrary plans. (Location 1040)
Avoid special tricks or custom compensation deals for people, ESPECIALLY in sales. Arbitrary compensation plans are corrosive to companies because it reduces trust and increases jealousness. (Location 1043)
3) Have a goal of “No Surprises ” — I personally love this as a fundamental operating and management principle. No one, including the CEO, employees, customers, or investors like surprises. What would it take to have a company in which no one is surprised?Neither the CEO, employees, clients nor partners. What kinds of systems would you have to create for customers and internal operations? (Location 1062)
Follow the Golden Rule: if you were working for your company, what would you want to know, and when? (Location 1113)