By Joe DiDonato | Chief of Staff | Baker Communications, inc.
Thought I’d begin this blog post with two quotes by Vince Lombardi, an executive in the NFL and best known as the head coach of the Green Bay Packers in the 1960’s. During that time, he led the team to three straight NFL championships and a total of 5 in seven years. He also never had a losing season as a coach in the NFL:
“Don’t succumb to excuses. Go back to the job of making the corrections and forming the habits that will make your goal possible.”
“The quality of a person’s life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor.”
Nothing can negatively impact a person’s sales performance and improvement like excuse-making. As a Sales Manager, the longer you let excuse-making continue, change will never happen. As long as you let a seller blame other factors for their performance, they’ll never take responsibility for their results. And until they finally do take responsibility, they’ll never ask what they could have done differently.
Those are the magic words a coach looks for, “What could I have done differently?” That quest for knowledge is what helps an individual continually improve their performance.
Back in 2014, a veterans group asked me to help them to train returning military and veterans. The objective was to train them in current web technology versus having them come back into civilian life prepared only for a fast food or security position. The reason this was the default position for returning military is that their military experience was typically a tour of duty with a job that was not easily transferable to civilian life.
Excited to help, I agreed. The course was in a web technology called Drupal. At the time, there were 17,000 job openings for people who knew how to use the technology.
After renting a training space about 25 miles north of Boston, we proceeded to create an 8-week Bootcamp for the returning military and veterans. In this 8-week boot camp, we basically flipped the classroom. We provided them a library of 1100 videos that they were to watch in the evenings. During the day, I wanted them to build websites. In that way, they had a portfolio to show employers.
There was one individual that I partially comped into that class because he just seemed so eager to learn. His dad helped with the rest of the tuition. He was a 10-year Navy cook, who was loaded with metals for cooking and other related food support roles.
At the time, his dad had helped him get a degree at a technical college, but that degree was in very common languages like Basic, C, and HTML. There were 100’s of thousands of people being graduated with those elemental skills, but they were not very valuable to most companies.
This one individual, who I’ll call Will, lived in downtown Boston, and worked in a Burger King as a cook. He reworked his schedule so that he could attend the classes during the day and makeup time by working part-time at night. But that really wasn’t his biggest personal compromise. When he couldn’t afford the $2 bus ride up from the city, he would ride his bike to the class – a 25-mile journey each way. He never missed a day.
When we saw him come in soaked from the ride, we knew what had happened. He was out of money. If we saw that he didn’t bring his lunch, we invited him along and paid for his meal. He hated that charity and promised he’d cook us all a 5-star meal for graduation day. And he did.
But that day was extra special for all of us. Will was the first person to be hired out of that first Bootcamp – and it happened on graduation day.
But the real special surprise for everyone was his starting salary. It was $95,000 and in Vancouver. How’s that for going from riding his bike when he couldn’t afford the $2 bus fare?
Of course, we all loved Will, and we broke out into applause when we heard it. He was finally on his way to his new life. And the best news was now he could afford to get married and start a family – his biggest personal goal.
Did he get help along this journey? Of course. Did he ask for it or expect it? No. He was going to make it work no matter the obstacles he faced. He took responsibility and made no excuses. And when others saw that about him, they were more than happy to help him along the way.
Will is now head of the department in his new company and approaches each day with the same rigor and responsibility that got him there in the first place. We think that this is one of the key competencies for success. Find this in a candidate and watch that individual soar.
If you’d like to learn more about how to use this predictive data to drive your hiring, onboarding, training, and coaching decisions, we invite you to listen to the advice and outcomes of a sales executive who changed her entire hiring and training process over to the data-driven approach. Watch the video here: https://www.bakercommunications.com/tailoredfit.html.
