🔥 Light a fire under your team
Hello! Adam Thornhill here. ‘The Podcast Guy’ saving you 10 hours a week.
Ready for the 66th edition of Podup? Enjoy the best bits from Invest Like The Best.
How do you inspire your team to perform at their peak? According to Henry Schuck, CEO of ZoomInfo, the answer lies in radical candor. He explains why you should clearly articulate your involvement in a project as a way to light a fire under your team.
How to apply pressure
When I’m involved in a project or executing something, I explain why I’m there. It boils down to three things: Competence, Reliability, and Motive (CRM).
For example, if I’m part of a website redesign project, I’ll announce, ‘Listen, I’m going to tell you why I’m here so you can excuse me from this meeting.’
It could be one of the three CRM factors - I might suspect you’re not competent enough to deliver because previous projects had certain issues.
I might doubt your reliability if we have to meet a deadline and the last few tasks weren’t delivered on time.
Or, I might feel your motives are misaligned. While you want a pretty website, I prioritize a high-performing one. I’m here to ensure our goals align.
The path to getting me off these calls, which I don’t enjoy either, is to bridge the gap in these three areas.
Henry Schuck
Why it matters
By openly addressing your concerns, you can clarify your expectations and boost performance. If documented properly, you’re also compiling evidence that might be needed in case an employee needs to be let go in the future.
This approach prevents a common pitfall many managers stumble upon - failing to properly document performance issues until it's too late, leaving the company vulnerable to unfair dismissal claims.
Next steps
How can you implement Henry’s approach in your team?
Self-awareness. Recognize why you're getting involved in a particular project. Is it due to a gap in competence, reliability, or motives within your team? Or are you struggling with delegation?
Open communication. Here comes the challenging part. Clearly express your concerns to the team. Be transparent about the reasons for your involvement.
Encourage improvement. Inspire your team to take ownership of these issues and work towards their resolution.
Re-evaluation. Regularly assess the team's progress on these concerns. Be ready to step back once the team has shown significant improvement.
Propagate the approach. Share this performance management strategy with other leaders. This cultivates a culture of accountability and improvement across your company.
Your thoughts?
Thanks to Apollo.io for making this post possible…
Your sales are slowing. What do you do?
Discover. More. Prospects.
You’re probably missing out on A LOT of prospects because you didn’t even know they existed… until now.
Find, contact, and close your ideal buyers with over 265,000,000 contacts.
P.S. From Stripe to Rippling, millions of companies hit their numbers with Apollo.
Quotes were pulled at different points of the episode. Sentences were left out to make the narrative more concise. Podup is not associated or affiliated with any podcast.