petencies, but they often overlook the part that physical conditioning plays. Great salespeople speak well, pres- ent themselves well, and can meet the deadlines and demands and handle the travel schedule. There’s also an aura that physically conditioned people have that goes beyond how they look. They give off a feeling of, ‘I’m here with a purpose. I’m sure of myself.’” But much of this work has gone into defining and delineating the third part of the triangle – the perfor- mance-based behaviors. “We know that successful people have certain personality traits,” he says. “They don’t lose focus; they don’t become demotivated. When something slows them down, they take a deep breath and get back on task.”
THE PERSONALITY OF PERFOR- MANCE Are some people just born with these traits? Yes, but he stresses that they can also be developed – some- thing he’s experienced in his own life. In college, he became anxiety- ridden before baseball games and realized “the hardest thing about baseball wasn’t developing the skills; it was developing perfor- mance-based behaviors, such as be- ing well disciplined, self motivated, diligent, and understanding how to overcome fear and doubt.” He saw that “the top performers had a men- tal state that allowed them to stay composed under pressure.” He began to study the personal- ity factors that correlated with peak performance on the field and quickly realized his program had a similar application in the business world. “Some managers concentrate so hard on helping people develop their skills that they overlook a key part of coaching – understanding how their salespeople think and act under pressure. And they often simply don’t know what personal- ity traits to look for and how to measure them. For example, peak performance occurs when subjects are at about a seven on a one-to-ten
scale of relaxed to driven. They’re engaged in the process but not so much that it overwhelms them.” Sometimes, managers fail to understand this. They hire extremely intense personality types who don’t know how to modify that intensity, and then they wonder why these “players” come apart in the field. His move to the business side was a natural one, since his theories provide specific coaching to leader- ship teams on how to create change in hiring, profiling, and selling based on behavioral science.
Even after the right people have been hired and analyzed, the man- ager/coach’s job isn’t over. Peterson points out that baseball is one of the few sports that allow a coach to stop the action and talk to a player in the middle of the game. “When a coach runs on the field to talk to a pitcher,” he says, “he has maybe thirty seconds to redirect what that person is doing. It’s a step-by-step process, just like in sales, so a man- ager has multiple opportunities to talk to sales reps and help them see the changes they need to make. “There’s a balance to it. You can’t
say, ‘Here, give me the ball and I’ll do it for you.’ Nor can you say, ‘You’re on your own out there.’ An ideal manager realizes that there’s no one prototype that works for all situations, because no two sales professionals are identical – just as no two pitchers are alike. And each buyer is like a new batter at the plate who has different stats and therefore needs a different ap- proach. The managers are the ones who must bring the objectivity, the fresh read, the ability to see the situ- ation as it’s unfolding. They might say something like, ‘Slow down and give this guy more details,’ or ‘If you want to connect with this person, here’s the way to do it.’” And, in tough economic times, when a salesperson might feel like a pitcher losing his control, an objec- tive read from an involved manager is even more valuable. “When it comes
to sales calls, you’re not going to succeed every time,” he says. “In economies in which people are ner- vous, there’s even less room for error. By identifying the behaviors that allow people to perform – and giving your sales reps solid feedback throughout the process – you can coach people through hard times and help them overcome fear and doubt.”
STAYING AHEAD OF THE CURVE
Savvy managers/coaches can also help their team go from good to great. One of the performance-based behaviors peak athletes demonstrate is a willingness to make adaptations before they’re required to do so. He cites the case of Tiger Woods who, just after winning the Masters by 12 strokes, decided to revamp his game. “Not many people would have seen it that way,” he says. “Most people have to fall on their face before they realize they need to make a change, but winners change even when things are going well.”
Of course, everyone isn’t a Tiger
Woods, which is where coaching comes in. In 2005 Tom Glavine of the New York Mets had stalled out. “His game was outdated and he was really struggling,” he says. “He had won 260 games by pitching a certain way, and, when we first presented him the information that the batting average against his type of pitching was 400, of course he didn’t want to hear it. There are also salespeople who don’t want to hear that they need to change their game, but – when we showed Tommy the hard data about the level of success he could have with a different kind of pitch – he was willing to redesign his plan. He turned his game around and went on to be on the all-star team for the next two years.”
All this goes against the old school “rah-rah” type of management, which is peppered with phrases such as, “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it,” but this expert believes that great managers, like great coaches, fix things before they break.
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