Ever wonder why somebody completely disrupts themselves or changes direction even if they were successful in what they'd previously been doing? We see that happen everywhere from sports to entertainment to the world of business. This phenomenon of “personal disruption” is the specialty of Whitney Johnson, CEO of the Human Capital Consultancy Disruption Advisors. Having worked with Clay Christiansen, Whitney took his concept of product disruption and applied it to people. In this episode, you’re going to learn how we can actually disrupt ourselves and what that experience looks like for the individual. In the constantly evolving professional sales space, we need to be constantly changing and developing, so this conversation is deeply relevant to our space. Tune in!
—-
Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
Personal Disruption With Whitney Johnson
Do you ever wonder why somebody completely disrupts themselves or changes direction even if they were successful in what they'd previously been doing? You think of Michael Jordan, one of the best basketball players in the entire world, who retires from the game, and three years later, he is playing baseball in the minor leagues, traveling on buses.
You might think of Lady Gaga, top of the pop charts. The next album she releases is a jazz album with Tony Bennett, where she's starting over again. Sometimes, we force ourselves to disrupt and change and sometimes, events will take place that cause us to disrupt where we are. We are going to learn a lot about that in this episode because our guest is Whitney Johnson and she's the CEO of the human capital consultancy Disruption Advisors.
Thinkers50 ranked Whitney among the top 50 management thinkers in the world in 2015, 2017, 2019, and 2020. She's also a top LinkedIn voice. Whitney is an award-winning author, world-class keynote speaker, and a frequent lecturer for the Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning Division. We are going to be talking to Whitney about her great book called Smart Growth.
The main topic here is personal disruption. We all know about product or market disruption. The Innovator's Dilemma was made famous by Clay Christensen. Whitney worked with Clay Christensen and what she does is she takes that concept of business disruption or product disruption, and she applies it to people. How do we disrupt ourselves and what causes that? Why would we do that? Is it an external factor or an internal factor? What are we going through when that happens?
Interesting conversation with Whitney. One of the things that's so interesting for those of us in professional sales is we do need to be constantly changing, evolving, and developing. Some of the thoughts and concepts in Whitney's book and this conversation will help us with that. I enjoyed speaking with Whitney. I hope you enjoy this episode. If you do, please like and subscribe to the show because that matters to us, and thank you for doing so. Here's Whitney Johnson.
Whitney, thank you so much for joining the show. It's such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Thank you for having me.
We always like to throw the floor over and ask somebody for a short version of their professional journey. Given what you have done, it's such a super interesting story. Tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are.
In my professional journey, I majored in music in college and I studied piano. When I graduated, I got married in college, which is pretty unusual, but I moved to New York with my husband. He was getting his PhD at Columbia, and we needed to put food on the table, so I was the designated breadwinner. I went out and interviewed for a job and discovered Wall Street. As I was a music major and because I was a female, and this was the late '80s, I started as a secretary working for a stockbroker.
I would go to work every day and see all of these young, aspiring stockbrokers, aspiring masters of the universe, saying things like, “Throw down your pom-poms and get in the game.” At first, I was offended because I was a cheerleader in high school. The more I listened to them, I realized that I needed to throw down my pom-poms.
I started taking business courses at night, accounting, finance, and economics, and that was the beginning of me disrupting myself and disrupting what I thought was possible. Especially because I had a boss who believed in me and it allowed me to move from being a secretary to an investment banker. I did investment banking for several years and then got disrupted again because my boss got fired, and they probably would have fired me, too, except that I had a good performance review and I was pregnant. That was helpful and so they moved me, but more like shoved me into equity research. I went from being a banker to doing equity research.
It turns out that became a career maker for me. I was very good at making stock calls and building these financial models. This disruption turned out to be very much a slingshot forward for me. I did that for about eight years. I became an institutional investor-ranked analyst. In my parlance, I was at the top of my S-curve and wanted to do something different.
I went to my boss. I said, “We'd like you right where you are.” I'd now read The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen. I thought, “Disruption might not be about products and services, but also about people,” and so I disrupted myself and thought I was leaving Wall Street forever to become an entrepreneur. It turns out I did that for a couple of years and then connected with Clay Christensen.
I was doing some nonprofit work with him through our church, and he wanted to start a fund to invest in disruptive innovation. I joined him and his oldest son, Matt, and we launched the Disruptive Innovation Fund. I did that for 5 or 6 years. There was this thread of we were using the S-curve to invest and I thought, “The S-curve applies to people, not just the product,” so you are sensing a theme.
I had an article in the Harvard Business Review called Disrupt Yourself. In 2012, I moved into this brand new world of thought leadership, and over the last several years, I have been building a business and now have a co-founder and partner, Amy Humble. It's called Disruption Advisors. We are all about helping you grow your people so that you can grow your business and we have an assessment tool that we use. We do coaching, keynotes, and workshops. Now, I'm very much in the business in many ways back to where I began, but I'm not now about the momentum of stocks. I'm about the momentum of people. That is my career journey in a few minutes.
You have taught me that I have to work on my introductions. That is fed but the most precise and interesting explanation and there are so many things to unpack. We are going to be talking about disrupting yourself. We are going to be talking about the S-curve, but I have got to throw it out and ask, you are on Wall Street in investment banking in the '80s. The egos in that building must have been shocking, and then it doesn't even matter what building you were in.
It's the late '80s, early '90s. If you saw the movie Working Girl, I was the working girl. Even big hair and all and this was the era of Liar's Poker and The Bonfire of the Vanities. I don't know that I saw the big ego piece. I thought it was exciting. I had grown up on the West Coast, and there wasn't Silicon Valley at this point. New York was the epicenter of financial services. I suppose there were big egos, but mostly, it was exciting.
What a wonderful journey. Very quickly Music Major. Did you have an ARCT and piano? Is that what you did at university? Tell us a little bit about the level of your piano studies.
I don't know what an ARCT is. Maybe that's a Canadian thing, but I do have a Bachelor of Arts in Music, and my emphasis was in Piano, and then I minored in English. I was a classically trained pianist. I discovered a little bit of jazz along the way. I never got as good as I would like to be in jazz, but that was my emphasis. One of my pinnacle achievements was I did a senior recital when I was a senior right before I graduated. That was a great accomplishment. I also got to play in our university jazz band and we performed at the Montreux Jazz Festival. It was pretty fun.
Maybe it is. The Royal Conservatory of Music is here in Canada. I also went through musical training when I was younger, and then you'd go up the ranks of the conservatory, and the accreditation was in front of a board from the conservatory. The ARCT would have been the pinnacle. Believe me. I got nowhere near it.
What do you play? What instrument?
Now I play drums, but I was playing piano then and writing musical theory as a young child. As soon as I was allowed to make a few of my own decisions when I was 14, 15, and 16, I stepped on a drum set from playing piano. No more piano. It was cooler. Being the innovator at the time, I thought being in a band would be a nice way of looking cool in front of girls. It turns out even that didn't work for me, but in theory, it was a good strategy. It was poorly executed.
A young fellow has joined a band in hopes of attracting the opposite sex.
It's the only reason you do it. It ended up paying dividends for me years later because, although she won't admit it, my beautiful wife, Donna. When we first started dating, I was on the tail end of playing in bar bands while I was starting my full-time career. I don't think it hurt because I wasn't the coolest dude, but maybe it didn't hurt that I was in those bands.
She saw you behind that drum set. I can see that. That's fantastic.
I needed all the help I could get. Let's talk about such an amazing journey and connecting. We have all heard of Clay Christensen and The Innovator's Dilemma. I love this idea of saying that innovation and progression, that innovation isn't product-centric. It's people-centric. Let's talk a little bit about disrupting yourself. This came to fruit in 2012 with one of what seems like a gazillion articles you have written for Harvard Business Review, but tell us about the concept of disrupting yourself.
To give a quick primer. Disruptive innovation is a term of art that was coined by Clay Christensen. The idea is it's a silly little thing that takes over the world. The telephone did to the telegraph. The automobile did to the horse and buggy. Netflix has done the Blockbuster and now cable TV. For me, in the emerging markets, it was the wireless was disrupting wireline.
That's what it looks like for a product or a service. The insight that I had is that companies don't disrupt. It's the people that disrupt. What does personal disruption look like? It's where you are willing to become a silly little thing to take over the world. The big difference with personal disruption is that you are the Netflix and the Blockbuster. You are the telephone and you are the telegraph because you are disrupting you.
A high-level example is if you are thinking, “What do you mean? How do you picture this?” Lady Gaga is a great example of personal disruption because in 2008 she goes straight to the top of the charts and she doesn't stay there. For an encore, she decides to go to the bottom of a new chart. She collaborates with Tony Bennett on a jazz album. She then does a Sound of Music tribute, so musical theater at the Oscars, and then she collaborates or produces a country album. She gets to the top of a curve, and then she decides to disrupt herself to become a silly little thing.
The reason that we do personal disruption, if you go back to the theory of disruptive innovation, is that when you are willing to play where you haven't played before, your odds of success are 6 times higher, and your revenue opportunity 20 times greater. That was the theory. That was the PhD dissertation that Clay wrote about in The Innovator's Dilemma, but if you want to extrapolate from that, for us as individuals, it's also going to be true if we are willing to take on the market versus competitive risk if we are willing to create something rather than compete with what is.
When you are willing to play where you haven't played before, your odds of success are six times higher and your revenue opportunity 20 times greater.
Can we go through those numbers again? If you are willing to take on that risk, tell us about those two metrics that you shared that he put in his dissertation.
What he found is he analyzed a whole array of companies. I'm fuzzy on the actual details, but here's the top line. He analyzes these companies. He looks at which ones are still in existence several years later, a decade later, versus the ones that weren't. What he found is that the ones that were creating new markets, the ones that were taking on market risk rather than competing with the incumbents, were six times more likely to succeed.
It was only 6% to 36%. There was still a 74% or 64% chance that they weren't going to survive, but 6 times greater. That's a lot. Those odds were not only better, but the revenue opportunity, again, when they were willing to go after and create new markets and new value chains, their revenue opportunity was twenty times greater.
It's 6 times more likely to succeed, and the revenue opportunity is 20 times greater. Extrapolating for us as individuals, when we are willing to take on market risk, we are more likely to succeed because we are not competing with what is. Think about your show. If you try to go do something that someone else is doing, then it's going to be a lot harder to succeed. You create something new and uniquely yours.
That's the idea of personal disruption and bringing it back to an organization. When we, inside our organizations, are thinking about how do we create and how do we take on market risk? How do we play where no one else is playing? I can bring that back to my Wall Street career if you want me to, but how do we play where no one else is playing? If we do that, our odds of success are going to be significantly higher, and we are going to create markets not only for ourselves but for our organizations.
Thank you for that clarity. When we start to hear about this as an individual, we are talking about personal disruption. First, off the bat, it starts to feel or potentially sound a little frightening or scary. “I'm going to be jumping outside my comfort zone. I'm going to be taking on something new. I'm going to be going from the top of the charts to the bottom of the charts in the country, as per Lady Gaga.” Are we hardwired for this type of change generally as human beings? Is this something that's naturally in our DNA or is this something that there's got to be an event that causes us to want to go down this path?
The answer is yes and no. When you think about moving to the top of an S-curve and this S-curve of learning is something that helps us think about what growth looks like. When you get to the top, you are sitting on top of the mountain, you have a dilemma. This is the innovator's dilemma, but in this case, it's our dilemma.
On the one hand, we like being on top of the mountain. It feels good to be the master of all we serve. You have accomplished what we have accomplished. We are at the top of the leaderboard, except that there is something inside of us and there's this deep human longing, urge, and yearning where when we are at the top of the mountain, we are not getting any dopamine, which is a chemical messenger of delight. For us to continue to get dopamine, it requires that we do something new.
That new can be something productive and can be something counterproductive, like sabotaging our peers because we are bored. We now have this dilemma of what am I going to do? Oftentimes, because it is so comfortable to be there and because we are more motivated by what we lose than by what we gain, we can stay there, but that plateau becomes a precipice.
It's always better to disrupt yourself, but frequently in life, we have all had this experience where we get disrupted. Whether or not we disrupt ourselves or whether or not we get disrupted, we are still starting over, and we get this opportunity because now we are going to have the opportunity to get dopamine to grow. A very opening sentence of my book, Smart Growth, is that growth is our default setting. We all want to grow. Sometimes, we help ourselves to grow and sometimes, the universe gives us a little bit of a nudge.
Growth is our default setting. We all want to grow. Sometimes we help ourselves to grow and sometimes the universe gives us a little bit of a nudge.
You start to think about the leaders reading this show and say, “We all have it in our DNA to grow.” They are going to give us feedback that says, “Maybe I have got some members on my team where it doesn't appear like they are growth-oriented.” You said, “Sometimes we disrupt ourselves and sometimes we get disrupted.” How do we help those people with love, caring, and so on to disrupt themselves?
Can it be something where we drive that? Does it have to come internally? I will say that it seems like the best example of something disrupting all of us was the pandemic. Right off the bat, for years and years, we came across hundreds of thousands of folks, if not millions, who said, “I can't learn new technologies.” Suddenly, everybody and their brother is fantastic at video conferencing and managing remote meetings immediately overnight. Weeks later, maybe it was the S-curve, but they are on a huge growth curve in terms of trying to interact with people differently, leverage technology differently, and manage their lives differently. Is that a reasonable example of the outside world forcing us to disrupt ourselves?
It's a terrific example because every single one of us is on this S-curve. It's an S-curve of learning where you have got the launch point, the sweet spot in mastery, and you can draw this S. I would argue that pre-pandemic, we were all at the top of an S-curve. It may have been an S-curve we liked. It may have been an S-curve we didn't like, but it was comfortable nonetheless.
What happened with the pandemic pushed all of us off the curve at the same time, which is part of why emotionally and psychologically was so challenging because there wasn't anybody else who was at the top of the curve to pull us along. We are all at the launch point together. What that meant is that whether we wanted to change or not, we now had been thrown into a sea of change and we got to make a decision.
That, in many ways, was a gift because many of us who had gotten potentially a little bit flaccid with that muscle of disrupting ourselves from doing new things, we now had the opportunity to strengthen that muscle. For many of us, that was a huge gift, which is why, as I think about the next several years, there's going to be so much growth that's going to take place because we all strengthen that muscle, that ability to disrupt ourselves. There were many difficult things about the pandemic, but one of those gifts was that it strengthened our ability to disrupt ourselves. We got better at it because the older we get, the more we can insulate ourselves from never doing anything new, which requires us to do something new.
Is that why you referenced in another HBR article where everybody talked about the Great Resignation? I think that term is a misnomer. We are talking about the Great Aspiration because people have leveraged this event to start thinking about what they want to do. Maybe acknowledging that they can change and they can evolve and things are going to be different moving forward.
I continue to stand behind that is that we were looking at it and saying. Everybody is resigning. When you think about resignation, that's like, “I'm resigned too and I'm going to give up.” Some people do give up whenever there's something difficult. There are going to be people who are going to give up. In general, what we saw were people rallying and saying, “I did this hard thing. I can do hard things, whatever it was.”
Now, when we come out of the pandemic, if someone wants me to go back and do the same thing that I was doing before, I'm like, “No,” because I can do hard things. I have realized that I'm capable and so I want to do more. If we as a leader recognize that in our people, we will harness that and know that they want to grow and develop. If we give people an opportunity to do that, we will not only be able to hire people, but we will be able to retain them because we are going to give them an opportunity to grow.
What a joy when someone hasn't had that, and then, for the first time, they understand, “I can learn. I can develop.” You point to the dopamine, but it's life-changing. It is life-altering. In a funny way, we see a lot of this in what we do, even with our limited sphere or limited line of sight within the funnel. Oftentimes, we get brought into, let's call it turnaround an underperforming sales organization or transition it to a better future. We get to do this with SaaS companies, but we also get to do this with lots of different other industries. Be it manufacturing or industrial services. I have noticed this over the last years when we will come into a manufacturing business. We will start to talk to their sales organization.
There will be an enormous amount of fear. If we can get them through that, where we take them through that chasm and teach them some new skills, they will trigger this life-changing event where people will realize where they have come from in 4, 6, or 8 months and it starts to dawn on them. They can learn anything they want.
It changes everything. I'm not sure where you align with Carol Dweck's work and growth mindset and fixed mindset, but it aligns. To see that in action and I have lived that personally as well. It’s life-altering when you start to say, “Hard work will get me through anything. I will figure this out. It's going to be uncomfortable at times.” It's always uncomfortable at times, but we are going to get there, and then what's the next thing? Then it becomes a matter of saying, “The Great Aspiration.” What do you want to do?
A couple of thoughts are coming to mind. First of all, it must be thrilling for you to be able to be a part of that process and enjoy watching people unlock their potential. I want to acknowledge that. You mentioned Carol Dweck, and then I want to come back to that question of when people are in that place that they are not sure that they want to change.
As I think about Carol Dweck's work, I have quoted her in every book I have ever written. When you think about the S-curve, what it does is you have this growth mindset, but the S-curve of learning allows you to trace the emotional arc of growth. It allows you to say, “When I'm at the launch point, I'm going to feel overwhelmed. I'm going to feel excited, but I'm also going to be afraid, and this is normal. That means I will keep growing.”
It's going to tell me that when I'm in the sweet spot on that steep part of the curve, this is exhilarating. No problem growing here, but it's also going to tell me that when I'm in mastery, this place is where I have accomplished what I set out to accomplish. It tells me I'm a little bit bored and have done it. I need to do something new. I need more dopamine. I need to give myself a challenge so I can continue to grow. I think about the S-curve of learning as a way to operationalize or trace that emotional arc of growth that we experience when we have a growth mindset.
You asked me a question. This is important. I wanted to come back to it is, “What do I do? What do you do when you have got a sales leader who's like, ‘I'm good. My numbers are good.’” You are like, “You could be better.” The way that about it is that when you are at the top of a curve, and we have been talking about dopamine, that feelgood chemical, what that means is that you figure things out. You are good at what you are doing. You have got these thick neural pathways and these comfortable routines, but you are also a little bit bored. When you are bored, your plateau can become a precipice because you start saying things like, “I have dialed this in,” and you are not learning and not growing.
What I do and suggest, and you can do this with your people, is draw this figure and give them a way to say, “Here's where you are. You are at the top of the curve. Your brain needs dopamine because learning is the oxygen of human growth.” You need to learn. Importantly, because you have these thick neural pathways, you have the latent innovative capacity.
Learning is the oxygen of human growth.
This is easy for you. We want to unlock that. The way that we are going to unlock that is to invite you to do 1 or 2 new things, navigate some launch points, get some dopamine, and get your brain with oxygen so you can continue to learn because then you are going to go from being good to even better, or in the words of Jim Collins because my business partner worked with him, from good to great.
What great coaching. Those reading, we are always looking for these things strategies, processes, or tools so we can grab them from this show and apply them today, tomorrow, and the next day. There's no question. We have got folks on our teams who have a fixed mindset or are at the plateau of the S-curve.
I love that idea of saying, “Clearly, you are fantastic at this, but you need that next challenge to stay active, engaged, innovative, and physically feel better. You get the hit of dopamine. We are going to give you 1 or 2 things that are going to take you outside your comfort zone.” This is the thing we should all remember when we are in the uncomfortable launch of the S-curve because it's okay to see it on the curve. When you are in the middle of it, it doesn't always feel great.
It feels so horrible to feel like I don't know what I'm doing. We don't like it when we are 15, but people don't like it when they are 35, 55, 65, or 75. It feels so uncomfortable and that's part of why this S-curve is so useful because then you can say to people, “You are at the launch point. It is true that you may not be good at this, but right now, we don't have enough data to know that. All we know right now is you are doing something new and you are probably not very good at doing new things because you don't do it very often. I want you to stay with us.”
We had Seth Godin on the podcast and he said, “When you feel like an imposter, what do you want to say? You want to say good. There's something fulfilling in knowing that you might mess up.” That is so powerful. This is something I was thinking about if I can riff for a second. When you are selling, you are inviting the people that you are selling to be on the launch point of a new curve. It's uncomfortable for them, too. Your job in sales is to help them navigate that new launch point. Buying something from you, working with you, or whatever that looks like, they are scared, too. How do you make it so that they can feel safe doing something new, which is buying what you are selling them?
Is that the first time you came up with that?
Yes, it is.
That is pure genius. I was looking down team while Whitney was speaking because I was writing it all down. It's a complete genius. The challenge we have is we think sometimes, as salespeople, we don't even think of that S-curve. We want to pitch because we think people are already at the peak or they are already at the top, and we want them to move forward as long as they understand what we are doing.
We don't emotionally guide them through this journey, understanding there's risk involved. We don't think of it this way because it's so relevant that you may have heard of a book called The Challenger Sale by a couple of guys, Matt Dixon and Brent Adamson. Matt's latest book is something called The JOLT Effect, and what he's saying is, “Deals are going to no decision because your buyers are not making it through the S-curve.” They are launching, but you are not guiding them through it, and they are stopping. Too many companies are coming back saying, “I'd rather miss out than mess up.”
This is exactly the issue in professional sales. You and I need to write an article together for HBR on exactly this topic,n addition to the book Smart Growth: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company. It’s so smart. You have written other books. One is to build an A-team. As we go back to this concept of the S-curve, tell us that we are all naturally inclined to want to innovate, elevate, disrupt ourselves, and grow. How do I apply that when I'm trying to build my next team, whether it's executives or salespeople? How do I take some of those concepts and what are some of those tips for building that A-team?
We have talked about the S-curve as a way to think about personal growth. What you can then do is zoom out a little bit and you can use the S-curve to configure your team. The reason that you can do that is because people at different points along the curve have different strengths. People at the launch point of the curve have asked the question of why we do it like this.
They need training and yes, they are feeling uncomfortable, but they are also saying, why do we do it like this? Which can open the door to innovation. Whether it's people around products and it's around processes. You have people in this sweet spot who are still able to ask, “Why do we do it like this?” They are part of the way up the mountain, but they are not up. They also can execute because they have got some skills and training.
These are people who can both ask why but also answer. Then you have people who are in a master who can say, “Here's why we do it this way.” They are very much the people at the top. They have this perspective or the institutional and tribal memory. What we have used and would suggest you use as a starting point when configuring your team is to use the standard bell curve distribution and have 60% of your people in the sweet spot overall because everybody's going to have a portfolio of curves. They are not on one curve, but overall, they are in the sweet spot because they can ask and answer the questions. In the launch point, you want no more than 20% because they are able to ask, why do we do it like this? They also need training. They need support.
That can be a big tax on your people in the sweet spot in mastery, and then you don't want more than 20% of your people in mastery because, on the one hand, they are able to answer the questions of why do we do it like this? They have the institutional memory, but they are going to need a new curve. That new curve can be doing something and taking on a new role. It can be taking on a new project, but if you have got all your people and master, you are going to have a cliff.
You want 20% at the launch point, 60% in the sweet spot, and 20% in mastery. Now, depending on your team, depending on what your team is trying to accomplish, if you are a startup versus a storage company, and we have a whole bunch of detail on this in the interstitials of the book Smart Growth that may adjust. If you start with 20/60/20, that will allow you to start thinking, “How is my team configured? Am I optimized not only for innovation and growth but also for succession planning, and then you can use this for a talent development conversation.” That's how you can use it to build an A-team to zoom out a little bit and think about the configuration that way, that 20/60/20.
If I can, I will share a couple of challenges. A lot of folks reading the show or maybe dealing with it, and we can talk about how applying these concepts can help. One of the big challenges in professional sales, it's a unique field. If you are a Chief Revenue Officer, which I am, and as part of the In-the-funnel business model, you have the three most important and demanding stakeholders in the business.
You are reporting directly to clients. Ultimately, the most important bar is anyone. Secondly, I'm managing a sales team, which takes active time and effort management, and then finally, I'm reporting to my board or my executive team. Frankly, all three of those groups have very definitive black-and-white metrics by which they can measure my success.
Nobody else on the executive team has such a black-and-white scorecard of, “Are you doing a good job or not?” Also, I don't know the scorecards of everybody else on the executive team, but they know mine. “We are hitting our goals.” “We are not.” This interesting dynamic as a Chief Revenue Officer or VP of sales creates a bit of a pressure cooker.
What we have found in this pressure cooker is two things. One fact-based one. Gartner Group, McKinsey, and others will say, “The tenure of that person is eighteen months.” Think of that for a second. “The Chief Revenue Officer lasts eighteen months.” Who knows where they get on the S-curve for a new business when they take over?
They think they are in mastery. The other problem is they have to project they are in mastery because they are new in the business. They are trying to make an impact. They were brought in because something wasn't working. After all, nothing is ever working in sales. It's this interesting dynamic where my experience has been that individuals won't ask for help.
Sales is a performance art. If they are running a team of performance artists, they don't want to ask for help because it looks weak and they are new in their job. Yet the coaches of some of the best performance artists in the world have loads of help. I'm Canadian. The hockey team I love is the Toronto Maple Leafs. They have a head coach, fitness coach, speed coach, shooting coach, mindset coach, nutrition coach, and strength coach. They will bring in anybody who can help. One of the reasons we have this short tenure in sales leadership is they won't ask for help because they look weak. Maybe they think they are going to look weak if they do. Do you have any thoughts on how we might address that or help some of those people who are reading?
The challenge is that if you are good at what you do, you are getting brought in because you are a domain expert. We know you can sell. Then the question becomes and this builds on the whole conversation that we have been having as you come in new to this role, I know you can sell, but I need you to take a hot minute to figure out who you are selling to in this new role.
I need you to map the territory. Who are your clients? Who are your internal stakeholders? You need all these people internally to help you do this job, and you need the buy-in of the senior executives. What my recommendation would be is to say, “I'm on the launch point of a curve. I knew I only had eighteen months, but I probably have more time than that if I do this.” Start by saying, “I'm going to take a couple of months and I'm going to get to know everybody, but here's what I'm doing.” The challenge is that when you come into sales, you are going to only look at what they sell. You have got to give me another metric in place of that or in lieu of that.
For the first three months, I need you to not focus on this, or maybe it's a month because that will freak them out to do three months, but let's do a month. For the first month, the metric that I want you to measure me by is, “Did I talk to all of our stakeholders? Did I find out what they need?” I'm going to come back and report to you what I learned. That will be my metric for the first six weeks.
After we have done that, we have collected the data. We are at the launch point. We have explored. We have collected the data that we talked about in Smart Growth, and then I will come up with a plan for what we are going to sell, and you can measure me by that. If you bring everybody along in this process of, “Here's my hypothesis, and here's what we are going to learn. We are going to collect and build this together and get buy-in for the metrics by which you are going to be measured early on. That's going to allow you to have the runway that you need to be able to succeed.” It takes real humility and it's important because oftentimes people think that salespeople aren't humble.
That allows you to come in and be like, “Here's where we can go.” You are used to painting this future or on this vision of who and what we can be. That's the pixie dust. That's what's amazing about salespeople, but the initial part is the pixie dust. You have to know who your people are and what pixie dust they need.
What a fantastic answer on the spot. As everybody who reads this show can tell, when I host it, we don't prepare. We prepare for guests but don't prepare questions or anything of that nature. Whether you are a sales leader or a salesperson coming into that new role, the first thing is to say, “I may be at the mastery level in terms of core processes and guidelines for running a sales organization, but I'm at the launch point for running your sales organization with your clients, your industry, and your particular situation and niche.” The first thing I want to do, I'm going to get out there and I need to speak to 50 clients. I'm going to gather some data that's going to help me ramp up that curve and also interview internal stakeholders.
How interesting you landed on that answer. At the core, one of the reasons companies in the funnel exist is because so few sales leaders successfully go in and take over a new environment that after this happens 2 or 3 times, CEOs or boards come to us and go, “What are we supposed to do here?” Our answer is, “I don't know.”
We are in the mastery stage of running sales organizations, but it's the same thing. We don't know you. We don't know your business. We don't know your industry. We don't know your team. Let us come in and interview all of those people for 60 days, and then we will come back and tell you. It's almost our whole business model you came up with on the spot. Tell me a little bit about when we start to think of this S-curve and then I take a look at your vision about the Great Resignation being the great aspiration.
What can I do as a leader continually with those pressures? I have got to hit my numbers. I got to have a full team. We have got to compete and win in the marketplace, but I also want to take that time to develop my people because, for many leaders, that's where the true joy will come from and it pays dividends years from now. What would be some ideas or tactics for me to make sure that's front of mind as many of us are going into a brand new calendar year, this being January of 2023? Do you have any thoughts or ideas for the leaders and CEOs to leverage some of this learning?
For many leaders, true joy comes from developing their people.
The first thing that I would suggest is you look at your computer right now, your phone, and your calendar. Look at your list of things to do and ask yourself, “On my list of things to do, how many are tasks and how many are conversations with people? How many interactions with people? Are there any people conversations on there?” For most of us, like me, it's the task and there are no people. Now, you can keep your tasks, but make sure when you are in the conversation how you are thinking about people. The second thing that I would say is that these people's conversations don't take a ton of time.
I had one. I was on the road with a person on my team. I delivered a keynote at an insurance company. Afterward, this person on my team was having lunch and I started grilling her. Grilling her in the sense of, “Tell me what you care about. What do you like doing? What don't you like doing? Tell me about some personal goals that you have.”
For us, anyway, if we are not able to grow our people internally, then we are not authentic. If I'm telling you to grow your people and I am not growing the people on my team, then there is something seriously wrong, but I digress. Those conversations don't take a lot of time. We were together for half an hour talking about that and then, and it was very organic as part of the conversation.
Here's what I would say to you. If there are people on your team with whom you do not want to have that conversation, that is important data for you. It either means that you haven't done the work to get to know this person or maybe they are not the right person in that role. If you can't get invested enough to have that conversation, there's either something going on with you or there's something going on with them in that role and you need to figure out what that is fast because it's not fair to them, to you, and your organization.
I would look at my list and if I don't have any people on the list, I have a goal to have at least one people conversation a week. If you don't want to have a conversation with any people on your team, ask yourself why. Get curious because there's likely an action item there for you as well. Maybe you have to do some work and maybe they are not the right person in the role or need training, but there's something. There's data there, so make sure you mind for that data.
What a great canary and cold mind. You look at your actual week and there are some meetings you can't wait to walk into and there are other meetings you are not looking forward to. It's a good thing to take a pause and go why. It's funny that I tended to start to think about all of these things so much more when I became an entrepreneur because I felt like I had so much more freedom running in the funnel that I was only going to do things I wanted to do. When I was thinking in the corporate world, it felt like jail at times because there were so many things I didn't have to do, but in my waning years in the corporate world, I took the same approach anyway.
You always have much more control than you think you do.
You do. You have so much more control and you end up being so much better at what you do. The other thing that everybody reading this will resonate. There's so much joy in elevating the capabilities of your team. That wind in your sails is so important because when you feel great when that's happening, that then becomes contagious and you are passing it along and so on and so forth, and then they are building their team.
The truth is, I encourage anybody reading this, I agree with the Great Aspiration. Start with doing what you want to do, but know you can control your environment. You can make a positive impact on your environment. You are not a cog. You can influence what takes place in a positive way. You have to want to do it. You have to make it happen. The joy of this show and everybody knew I say this that I am a lifelong learner. I love learning and I love these conversations.
This conversation, both preparing for this conversation and then having it, has triggered so much for me. Next time I'm going to be doing a ridiculously deep dive into your career and what you have done in all of your books, not just Smart Growth. I'm sure the folks reading are going to want to do the same, but first I want to say thank you so much for joining. How do folks learn more about you? If everyone wants to go out and buy Smart Growth: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company, the title alone tells you why you want this book. In addition to that, how do people learn more about you?
You can go directly to our website, TheDisruptionAdvisors.com, which will give you lots of resources. As you said, in addition to the book, we also have a podcast. That will give you an opportunity to do a deeper dive into this material. Specifically, I would suggest podcast Episode 205, where we talk about an article that we wrote in Harvard Business Review titled Managing Your Organization as a Portfolio of Curves. That could potentially be very useful to you.
Smart Growth: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company
A great place to start is to read the book or go to the podcast, which will allow you to do more work on these topics. You can always email me at WJ@WhitneyJohnson.com or you can do WJ@TheDisruptionAdvisors.com. We changed our website, so I forget which website we are using, but those are probably the best ways to connect.
Folks, buy Whitney's books and have a read. These are excellent resources for you. I took a quick look at what looked like about twenty articles or artifacts at Harvard Business Review. You will want to take a look at those. Whitney and I were referencing something from 2012 and 2003, her initial article called Disrupt Yourself, of which there's a book of the same name.
Folks, take a look there for all of these amazing resources. Thank you again to Whitney for joining me. Team, thank you for reading the episode. If you enjoyed the show, please like and subscribe to our show and tell your friends. If there's something we can do to improve the value you get from this investment in time, please tell me. You can reach me at MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com and we love constructive criticism. That's my email and we respond to every note we get. Thanks, keep those tips coming our way. We will continue to get better at this and we will see everybody next time on the show.
Important Links
Disrupt Yourself – Article
Seth Godin – Past episode
Episode 205 – Past episode
About Whitney Johnson
Whitney Johnson is the CEO of Disruption Advisors (thedisruptionadvisors.com), a leadership development company, helping you grow your people to grow your business, and was named by Thinkers50 as one of the ten leading business thinkers in the world (2021).
A world class keynote speaker and a popular lecturer for Harvard Business Publishing’s Corporate Learning, she has 1.8 million followers on LinkedIn where she was selected as a Top Voice in 2020; her weekly podcast Disrupt Yourself, is in the top .5% globally in terms of listenership.
Whitney is the Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author of Smart Growth: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company (Harvard Business Press) which Publisher's Weekly described as "cogent...insightful...practical...inspiring."
A former award-winning Wall Street equity analyst, she co-founded the Disruptive Innovation Fund with the late Clayton Christensen and has coached alongside Marshall Goldsmith. Whitney understands how companies work, how investors think, and how the best coaches coach.
Whitney is married, has two children, and lives in Lexington, VA where her family grows strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries and enjoys making jam.