Case Study One – A Sales Group Gone Amuck

Background – A Sales Director received another complaint from one of his best customers about his top sales rep. As his top producer, her typical monthly bonus check exceeded $20,000. Yet, he could see that she was getting complacent and not giving her clients the attention they deserved.

He also knew that her primadona attitude had permeated the whole department. He wanted an upbeat sales department where people supported each other, celebrated the success of others, and enjoyed outstanding success. What he had on his hands was a nest of vipers.

The logical thing to do was to sit down with her and talk about it. However, his communication, especially with his lead sales rep, had gotten so bad that they could barely talk to one another. Their trust level was zero. People were starting to feel hopeless about enjoying work any time soon. The director felt like someone had to go, but he couldn’t see firing her because she would take some huge accounts with her. Privately, he considered leaving himself.

Action – We met with the entire group in a relaxed offsite setting for a full day. We avoided getting into the gory details of the previous months because we knew it would discourage them further. As we taught them some simple principals of human interaction, they began to see their situation from an entirely different perspective.

As their state of mind improved they began to see the truth of the situation; that everyone, without intending to, had contributed to the situation they found themselves in. Each person in the group began to take personal responsibility for the poor communication, the gossiping, and the poor performance. They began to take responsibility for their share in creating it and to forgive where necessary.

As the quality of their thinking improved, ideas for solving their problems began to flow. For the first time in months, they were able to connect with each other as fellow human beings and to feel genuine hope for their future together.

Outcome – Following the offsite, the mood in the group shifted dramatically for the better. People worked together. They communicated effectively and consistently. And they found common sense ways to serve their clients effectively without stepping on each other’s toes. Trust between the sales reps and the manager returned.

Market conditions supported by a group of sales reps that was laughing again and working together resulted in orders increasing from 700 per month to over 2000 per month during the following year.

Summary – Often the thorniest challenges that business leaders face are these kinds of human interactions gone amuck. These situations can feel overwhelming because they are complicated; there is a painful history, feathers have been ruffled, feelings have been hurt, performance has suffered.

In short, people have lost faith in each other.

As outside facilitators, we were able to relieve the stress and enable a paradigm shift in people’s thinking. Once their thinking changed, their feelings changed and they saw the possibility of a whole new reality. The solutions they created were sustainable because they arose from their own common sense, creative ideas and genuine good will.

Case Study Two – Work Group Burnout

Background - A high level manager at one of our client companies, found himself getting buried. He wasn’t alone. Their orders had doubled from previous highs and he couldn’t hire or train people fast enough. His team had been working overtime for months. Exhausted, their morale was dropping fast.

Action – Since this manager was a member of the senior leadership team, we had worked with him in a series of offsite trainings and one-on-one coaching. He had learned that even the best people get discouraged when they are shell-shocked, and when they do, morale, communication and performance suffer.  Our training and executive coaching showed him how to rise above the constraints of his own thinking to find a creative approach.  Using the methods he learned from us, he got together with his key people and in 1½ hours redesigned their entire system for allocating incoming work.

Outcome - The next month their orders tripled the original highs. They not only handled them, but they did it with less stress and little overtime. He called us to tell us that it felt easy. His people were enjoying their first free weekends in months. Morale was on the rise. People felt hope again. Most importantly, the solutions they came up with were so simple that sustainability was a given.

Summary - Best of all, using the simple principles we taught them, they managed these changes in the heat of battle using nothing but their own insights and common sense. No change is more sustainable than that.

Case Study Three – Strategic Planning Made Fun

Background – A company president had good people on his leadership team, but they were struggling to get on the same page with one another and they had no clear vision of where they were going as a team or as a company. Whenever they tried to plan for the future, they would get bogged down in the details and end up feeling frustrated.

Because past efforts had resulted in little more than frustration, and because the entire team was constantly putting out fires, the president found it difficult to generate enthusiasm for new strategic planning efforts.

Action – First we interviewed the team. Then we met with the president. We helped him see that his team was not opposed to strategic planning per se; they were opposed to wasting time and feeling frustrated.

Working with the entire team, we helped them address their concerns and create a list of goals and objectives for a process that would help them create a practical and inspiring vision for the company’s future while, at the same time, finding permanent solutions for some on-going, nagging problems.

The team agreed that focusing on the future would be difficult when they were distracted by current challenges. Therefore, we designed two one-day retreats. The first would focus on current problems, the second on strategic planning for the future.

We met at an attractive offsite setting. Since personal and group concerns had been effectively addressed, everyone arrived believing in the possibility of break-through results. Since everyone agreed that being in a relaxed, creative state of mind was critical to our success, we turned off our cell phones and put our regular business lives on hold for the day.

Outcome – During the first retreat focusing on current concerns, the most challenging issues were resolved before lunch. They resolved personal conflicts, reorganized workloads, modified job descriptions, and designed simple communication systems. Each task had a timeline and a champion. For questions that could not be addressed because of lack of information, they assigned research projects with their own timelines and champions.

During the second retreat focusing on strategic planning, the team could relax and focus creatively on the future because they felt confident that present-day concerns had been addressed. At the end of the day, for the first time, they shared a common vision for the company’s future, a vision that felt practical while inspiring them. It provided direction and a basis for decision-making for months to come.

Summary – We accomplished two important objectives with this client. First, we helped them find their own long-term solutions to business problems that had been nagging them for months, even years. Working together, they achieved results that they could measure, feel good about and that would make a genuine bottom-line difference.

Second, we taught them some simple, universal principles that would allow them to move from discouragement and resistance to inspiration and creative problem solving when faced with new challenges in the future. Each of these leaders now had an understanding and an approach that they could use to solve problems and to bring out the best in people in their own departments.

Perhaps most important of all, we helped them discover how to find hope in the face of despair.