Your weekly disruption

Your weekly thought-provoking exploration into building disruptive capabilities.

Rhonda McAllister: Call To Courage

In the words of Joseph Campbell “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” And so is a career that lies at 3M, a storied innovation powerhouse. The major lesson is that when you find the courage to enter that cave, you’re never going in to secure your own treasure or your own wealth; you face your fears to find the power and wisdom to serve others.

Download the podcast on iTunes, subscribe or click to listen: Superior Sales Disruption Podcast – Episode 12

Rhonda McAllister has spent her career at 3M and is the rare leader who continually seeks wisdom from the one company. From the podcast we learnt that if you get the privilege to work at a company like 3M why would you leave?

Download the podcast on iTunes, subscribe or click to listen: Superior Sales Disruption Podcast – Episode 12

Story Learning

Attitude Beats Skill

Situational Leadership

The turning point for me is when I did become a manager and I had others to be responsible. And it was a time where, I was called Boss Lady, and not sure if that’s good or bad. But that was when there were very little women in leadership roles. So, I do take it as a compliment. I’m not necessarily a direct style, leader, but I’m a situational leader. And my philosophy has always been that I work for them, they don’t work for me, and that’s taken me places. So, if I can get what they need to be successful in the businesses that they’re running, because I’ve been there, I’ve run the businesses, I know what it’s like when you can’t get what you need. Sometimes I can’t get them everything they want. But I try to get what they need for in order for them to be successful in their careers, both their careers and the businesses that they’re running.

Momentum Begets Momentum

I think some people say they’re ready. You might not be ready. For instance people aspire to run a team of 10 people. That’s a lot of people to be responsible for. So, I’ve always said start out two or three, because you’re still learning. And those people really need you to do a good job for them. It was the same when I moved into the role of General Manager, where you have responsibility for a lot of businesses. It is beneficial to start running one business where you feel like you have a little bit more control. As you progress you do get less involved in part of the detail. But I’m trying to break through that because sometimes people don’t think that they can come to me for little things.

Giving Failure Its Due

Every mistake can turn into an opportunity. And that’s how you learn. There were certain areas where I look at our business now. For instance our service levels to our accounts. And so you think you might make a decision. And you think it’s the right decision. I recalled that we called the Six Sigma Team in to look at how we can increase our service levels, as we couldn’t identify where the problems or the hiccups were, and getting our product to the shelf. Right. So that to me was where some mistakes were made. Everyone jumped in to look at it. And we put a solution in place, which brought up our service level. And now the service levels that we have with that particular account are high. We have gone from having a problem to being a best practice for that account. We looked into it had all connections within the customer, and different parties within the customer and 3M talking and we figured it out. We use the Six Sigma philosophy or the science behind that to do it. But it was really the connecting with the customer and the relationship that helped us put the solutions in place as well.

The Quest of ‘Having it All’

Yeah, there is no such thing as having a perfect life. I’ve learned the hard way that the key is to take care of yourself first. Everybody says it, but sometimes they don’t do it. That’s like buckling up your child next to you on a flight before putting the mask on. If you don’t take care of yourself, you can’t run a business and you can’t get your kids to school. And I go back to that attitude. If you wake up in the morning and say you can do this, you will do it. So that that would be my advice. But what is all to someone to everybody is a little bit different. You’re all might be different to someone else’s all so you can do it all. It’s just what are you striving for?

Behaviours Beat Process

Six Sigma is great yet if you want to put a process map together, and you’re leaving out things that you don’t like, then that Six Sigma is not going to work. Behaviourally you often don’t confront reality and you say it’s this way, but it’s really this way. Six Sigma will draw that out. But if you’re stuck somewhere, because something’s not working, and it’s not a process that you can change, it might be something that people are doing and interfering with it. If you can’t change that behaviour, then Six Sigma won’t work for. Does that make sense?

So you’ve got to be honest to the system otherwise the system isn’t going to work. The answer to that is focus on behaviours, integrity and your honesty to go through the process, and know that you’ll come out of it with a solution.

My greatest lesson is that I don’t need to know everything. That’s a big one for me. And I go back to the pharmaceutical days where I thought I felt like I needed to know everything that a doctor knew, and you don’t need to know everything. You are best to know what you don’t know. And be self-aware of that. Because you can always figure it out.

Often people want the big promotion. I think you learn more from lateral moves than you do from the big promotion. It’s increased responsibility. Because if you call it a promotion, then what is it? You got increased responsibility to do something better, different and more responsibilities. So you’re better just do a lateral and learn a lot more about what your strengths and weaknesses are before you jump?

Learning from different bosses and different leaders that you work with actually helps you add pieces to your management style, because again, there’s no textbook for it. Everyone has their own style. And, definitely different leaders and bosses that you work for help really build that a catalogue of what you’ve got and what you are going to deliver.

So many great takeaways from this conversation. Listen to the episode in the player below, or download, subscribe and enjoy it on iTunes.

Download the podcast on iTunes or click to listen: Superior Sales Disruption Podcast – Episode 12

If you want your Sales team to Gamify it’s performance please contact us at https://www.superiorsales.com.au/contact-us/

Next week we are going to delve deeper into the elements of Creating The Game.

If you are looking at running a Sales Game workshop either email Mark at mark.truelson@superiorsales.com.au OR dig for more information at https://www.superiorsales.com.au/storytelling/workshops/

At Superior Sales we build programmes leveraging all the core drivers of capability – organisation, people, process and culture, not just skills. Refer to our white paper at https://www.superiorsales.com.au/storytelling/whitepaper/

At Superior Sales our capability experts work extensively with companies to equip sales teams, and indeed the whole organisation, to deliver a better customer experience. Please get in touch at https://www.superiorsales.com.au/contact-us/

Happy Weekend!