Mar

Being Result Driven can Backlash

Eli Lopian Category

People like to be result driven and when given a task, we want to complete that task and clear our desk. This is great and works really well when the task is simple and fast, and it gives us great feedback.

Being Result Driven

But lets see what happens when we have a larger goal. Suppose we are trying to sell Agile consulting to different companies. We give ourselves a week to look for a client, we are really highly motivated, so we call 3 new clients on the first hour, all of them say “No, Thank you”.
We already feel less motivated, but we still pick up the phone and for the next hour we call 3 companies but 2 are wrong numbers and the last contact has left the company. We take a small break and then call another 3 companies where their secretaries screen our call, they either take our number, or tell us to call later. We start getting quite de-motivated, but we call the next 3 and although we get through to the VP R&D, we don’t manage to convince him that agile will solve all his problems (although he is stuck in a waterfall product for over a year and is really frustrated).

You see where I am going, at the end of the week, we have no results, we didn’t manage to make a deal and then we start making excuses…
All companies are bad.
No one knows what they are loosing
Pointed haired Managers are everywhere
I don’t know how to sell
I am not really good at this
I am a failure.

Being Action Driven and Celebrating Integrity

Here is how change the goal to action driven and celebrate integrity.
In order to sell Agile consulting, I will have to call 75 customers, I will probably talk to 10 and 1 will want my help. So if I call 15 customers a day and finish this in a week. That means 3 customers an hour for 5 hours every day. Very doable. (Note I use the controllable breakdown technique)

Now the first hour I call 3 all of them say “No!”. But I get to check off the first action of the day and stay in integrity (Yea!). The next hour I call 4!, 2 are wrong numbers and 1 left the company and I get screened, But hey, I called 4 numbers! better then my commitment! Now I am really charged and on the next call I reach the VP R&D and together we find that we can add great value to his team!

We are doing the same actions but as they are in our control we can celebrate success. This is an amazing outcome of managing integrity. Just like having automated unit tests, helps build your software with integrity and will lead to completing the software at a faster time. The same happens when celebrating integrity at a personal level, you manage to do the controllable actions and this leads to success.

In Typemock we cerebrate our integrity once a day and once a week in our Integrity Meetings. This always has a great feeling and as a bonus we manage to reach our goals!