The Invisible Strength of a Great Team

LOUISE: Well hello all, welcome to Markham’s latest podcast episode. I’m Louise Kirk, part of the Markham team in Australia, and it’s great to have you listening today.

Today we’re thinking about The Invisible Strength of a Great Team, and joining us virtually from Auckland is our special guest Ambrose Blowfield! Ambrose holds a Double Honours Bilingual Degree in International Business with French, and authored ‘The Authority Guide to Writing and Implementing a Marketing Plan’. He currently offers world class personalized sales and sales manager training through his business SalesMasteryCompany.com.

Welcome aboard, Ambrose, tell us about yourself and your experience in working with great teams!

AMBROSE: Thanks Louise, love this topic by the way. So good on Markham and yourself for picking this topic. For me, when I look at teams, I was very fortunate. The school I went to performed at a sporting level at the national finals type events. So I got exposure to it in sporting very young. Then for me, I guess the key moments of seeing what a world class team looks like was joining Procter and Gamble in UK – them being the people who manufacture Pantene shampoo, and Head and Shoulders, and Max Factor, and Cover Girl, and Oil of Ulay, and Gillette. And they are absolutely a world class team from, particularly the sales perspective, but actually at a global level. The challenge that Procter and Gamble have, being a large corporate, is – How do they apply those team skills at a small level right across 30 or 40,000 workers worldwide?

And what we did is we took the lessons I learned from that and we applied it to coaching – particularly sales teams, but also business owners and the director teams worldwide to the tune of several thousand clients in the last 17 years.

LOUISE: Oh very good, thank you! Ambrose, thinking about strength in teams – what is it that makes a team pull together? What motivates that?

AMBROSE: That’s a really great question and I like your wording around the pulling together. I think to me, Louise, that there’s a few key things you’ve got to get absolutely right.

One is you’ve got to be clear around the vision and the goals, i.e. the purpose, the team is moving towards. Whether that’s a World Cup, whether it’s an Olympic medal or whether it’s just achieving sales targets or even achieving business growth, you’ve got to have an absolute clear vision that every member of the team can articulate and feel like they can contribute towards. So that to me is the critical one.

The other one that a lot of people overlook is accountability. And that’s quite a scary topic, when I raise it, because a lot of people, whether it’s school or at home or in the work environment – when held to account, it’s often done in a very harsh way. So what I say – we need accountability to have a team gel and really align themselves. It’s making sure they can hold themselves and each other accountable for the promises they make. And if you aren’t able to do that, you’re always going to struggle to get team alignment to achieve the overall vision and goals. Hope that makes sense.

LOUISE: Absolutely. Sometimes it seems to be an unlikely mix of people that achieve great things. Do you have any thoughts on why that would be?

AMBROSE: Yes, absolutely. So I think if I was to comment on that, and again, I appreciate that this comment, if I was to go back 100 years to one of my favourite topics of all time which is Antarctic exploration, and I look at my greatest hero growing up of Sir Ernest Shackleton, who took a team of real odd-bods, so to speak. He took… He did an advert in the local newspaper in London saying, you know, “Chance of death, high; total remoteness; chance of success, low…” And he was looking for the right people for his team. And he literally took 28 people to the harshest conditions in the world at that time, at the start of World War Two.

And then, if most people understand the story of Ernest Shackleton trying to cross Antarctica, you know their boat was beset in the ice, in the sea ice, and it got crushed and then they were essentially in a bunch of small little lifeboats, miles and miles and miles from everywhere.

And I think to me, the fact that they were an odd mix meant that everybody contributed. I’ve read so much about that one story. I think it’s the harshest environment for any human could physically put themselves in, especially 100 years ago.

And it shows that if you get if you’ve got clear vision around what we’re trying to do – in their case, it moved to, rather than crossing Antarctica, the vision then became about our survival. And he managed to lead all 28 out. But they each contributed their aspect of their role. They each had different skills and I think it’s important in any team, especially if you are a mix, is to make sure you leverage off each other’s natural strengths, but also each other’s personality, which is something we do a lot in – that sort of sales and business coaching.

And particularly, everybody is subtly different and they need to be communicated with and motivated differently – if that makes sense.

LOUISE: Absolutely, and that’s an amazing story. On the flipside, what are the things, in your mind, that might hold a team back?

AMBROSE: Now that’s a good one. I guess, obviously the absence of what I’ve talked about. So you know the absence of a clear vision. I think the absence of a clear culture as a team. So when I talk clear culture, I’m talking about some principles and values that the leader and every member of the team adhere to.

So one of my favourite teams in the world – and I appreciate your being on in Australia and I’m in New Zealand having married a Kiwi – I massively respect the All Blacks simply because the culture that they’ve created, based around the culture of humility, causes their team to seem to work hard consistently, which is why their win ratio over a century is something ridiculous such as 78%. And the next best international team in rugby are the Springboks and I think their win ratio is more likely, I think it’s 63% or something. So it’s a huge difference from first to second. And when people look at the Springboks team – they would hardly define them as humble by nature, it’s just not ingrained into the culture of the team, but the All Blacks are.

So to me you’ve got to have a really strong culture based on almost the power of beliefs, but certainly principles.

And then if I could comment on that, I guess my first recommendation for any good team is to have accountability. I often see teams waver where there are no consequences for underperformance, and there’s no different to a family situation with parents to children. If there’s no consequence for underperformance, then why wouldn’t someone under-perform all of the time? And I see people getting very, I guess wary later on if they haven’t got consequence for underperformance.

LOUISE: That’s an interesting explanation, thank you! And if things aren’t going well, how can we pull together to turn a team around?

AMBROSE: So I love that. So there’s a few things I guess I comment on for that. The first one is it partly depends on the leader, and it partly depends on the leader’s personality or behavioural profile as to what they’re likely to do.

So if they were a dominant profile then they’re typically going to say, “Right, guys, come on, let’s fight this – dig ourselves out of the trenches!” And as a leader they’ll tend to inspire. Though it might be coupled with a degree of threat, they might even say something along the lines, “And if we don’t, then this is what the consequence is going to be. You’re going to lose your job or we’re going to lose our business or miss this project.” So the dominant leader will often revert back to that sort of fight, more of an aggressive type approach. Now that’s going to work fine if the team are prepared to be motivated to move away from the pain of losing their job or losing that project.

Whereas somebody who’s an influencer profile will tend to galvanise people with inspiration. So it will be “Right, come on guys, we can absolutely do this. Well, it’s one for all and all for one. And let’s go make this happen!” And they will be very motivating in the approach and that’s going to work very well if members of their team are an influenced profile people or even a steady profile people, say ‘people-people’.

But that sort of galvanising suggestion isn’t really going to motivate the dominant people because they like a fight!

And then if you slide down to the quieter managers of more that steady or compliance profile, those people are not going to sort of galvanise the troops, they will be more methodical around it. So they would calmly sit down with the team and go, “Okay guys, where are we today? Let’s be honest about it, cards on the table. Where are we today? Where do we need to get to?” And what a steady or compliance profile leader will tend to do is, they’ll talk about the reasons why we want to move towards it and they’ll deliver it in a very sort of soft manner.

So on the one side, you need to look at the leader.

On the other side, which I believe in business, Louise, in particular – this is underutilised – is you need to create a buddy system. So what I mean by that is – if you think about scuba diving or somebody going underneath the ocean, you’re not allowed to dive by yourself. Why? Because if you have a problem, you lean on the person next to you.

And what you’ve just described, when the team under-performs – we have a problem! And the leader – yes they need to set the scene of what we’re trying to do. But from a day to day accountability perspective, you’re better off buddying up two staff members who monitor each other’s performance almost in a, you know, half day perspective. Maybe not hourly, but every half a day. “What activity do we need to do to dig ourselves out of the hole?”

And that’s going to be easier peer to peer rather than superior manager to subordinate, in the same way at school; peer pressure is often more powerful and more motivating, or for that matter demotivating, at school, than having the school principal or the school teacher try to galvanise long term behaviour.

LOUISE: Yes, so it’s interesting. The combination of different strengths actually go towards forming a great team. That’s so good, Ambrose.

And how can our listeners connect with you if they want to find out more?

AMBROSE: Well, as you know, Louise, giving is one of our core principles or values in our business. So aside from people connecting with me as Ambrose Blowfield on LinkedIn, the best single thing they could do, particularly trying to grow a business or grow their team is to reach out to us on Salesmasterycompany.com/podcast. And we’ve got a great free tool to give people free tips and free advice to grow their confidence and grow their skills, absolutely free of charge.

LOUISE: Oh, that’s great! Thank you Ambrose. It’s been brilliant to hear your knowledge of the subject.

AMBROSE: Thanks Louise!

LOUISE: We really appreciate you taking the time to join us today!

And to all our listeners – we welcome any questions or feedback on today’s topic.

We’re also happy to take suggestions for topics in the future. What are your concrete pain points in the field, and how can we help educate the industry? Thank you so much for listening, and don’t miss our next episodes!