How much support should I offer my Team?
How much support should I offer my Team?
This question presents the age-old dilemma for a Sales Leader, if you support your Team too much, they become dependent on you, but if you don’t support them enough, they will fail without you. So how do you navigate this situation? The simple answer is you don’t. Let’s start by creating 2 groups of employees and then presenting some ideas.
Employee Group 1
This group of employees are new starters in their first 4-6 months in your business. You need to over invest in these individuals.
This group of people deserves a lot of your time, and a lot of your support. In reality, the first 6 months (or whatever your ramp up period may be) of a person being on your Team is the most important. Not only from a development/training/coaching perspective, but from an employee retention standpoint. You’ve heard the expression ‘people do not leave businesses, they leave leaders’. This is true for the most part, so the first 6 months of working with someone new on your Team is the most important as you are building the foundation of what should be a successful relationship for years to come. So instead of asking ‘how much should I support a new starter’, the question should be ‘how do I set this person up for long term success’? With this group of employees, we would encourage you to give them as much time as possible and fair. How do you make them fall in love with the role? How do you make them buy into you as a leader? How do you make them fall in love with the business? How do you help them put money in their pockets? How do you inspire them? How do you make them leave their work week with a smile? How do you get them to respect you? You give them your time! You support them. You engage them. You need to be spending time with these people every day. The new guy ‘Brian’ on your Team might only need you for a simple question, but you will get so much buy in when you stop what you are doing to support him. There’s a great leadership expression, which is that ‘sometimes in leadership you need to invest in someone’s success, more than they are investing in their own success’. Once you’ve done this for the first 4-6 months of their role, they know you care. They know you’ve put the time in. They know you have their back. Now, you also have to be careful, because you don’t want them to become too dependent on you, so gradually you need to start pulling back, and transitioning into the next style of support:
Employee Group 2
Anyone who has been with your business 6+ months – This group of employees need Transformational Support:
This style of leadership support only works when you have put the work in for the first 4-6 months of them being on your Team. Once you have invested, now you start to cash in. This type of support is when you start to transform the person/Team into what you need them to be. You need them to be energetic, positive, problem solvers, and competitive. Now when ‘Brian’ reaches out with that simple question, you can put it back on him. “OK Brian, what do you think the answer is”? You can start to transform the person who used to come to you all the time, and you can make them self-sufficient. In time, they will start to come to you less and less, with all of their low impact problems. We worked with an amazing leader once that created a rule, you cannot approach your leader with a problem, without a potential solution. Even if it’s the wrong solution, he forgave you, but the most important thing was that you tried to solve the problem. Challenge them to solve their problems! After 6 months, most of the problems and questions they have, arguably they should be able to take an educated guess at solving these problems. This encourages a lot of self-learning, and self-development, which in turn creates a lot of confidence and aptitude. Once your Team members have been with you for 6 months, you need to start to transform who they are, transform how they approach their role, transform how they solve problems. One of the most rewarding things about being a leader is watching someone grow into a rockstar. That can only happen if you start to scale back how much you support them, and what you support them on. Of course, all of these people still get 1-on-1’s, and regular touch points, but they do not get as much of your time. Your time with these employees needs to be on moving the needle in performance with coaching, it should not be focused on supporting them on the low impact areas of their role. A pro tip here is to also empower your more tenured employees to support the less tenured employees. ‘Hey Brian, the new girl Mary is struggling with xyz, can you give her a call and walk her through it’. Doing things like this will create a positive Team culture, and a sense of camaraderie within the Team.
In short, the amount of support you offer your Team depends entirely on the amount of time they have been in the role. if your employee is new, you need to over invest and give them as much support possible. If your employee has a respectable amount of time in the role, you need to start offering them transformational support so they can start supporting themselves. If someone has been on your Team for over 9 months, and they still need support on basic questions, that’s on you and not them.
