Podcast Summary


David Sales, Director of First Ascent, discussed the key components of a high-performing team, identifying them as clear direction, high energy, and good communication. He explained that direction was most effective when it was a deeply understood purpose or "why," which in turn fueled the team's energy. Sales emphasised that good communication was about quality, not quantity, and required adapting to the different thinking and behavioural styles of individual team members. The conversation also covered the importance of measuring the financial return on investment for "soft skills" training and explored the significant changes in team dynamics post-pandemic, particularly the challenges of implementing fair and effective hybrid work models and addressing the learning gaps for junior employees.

 

Key Points

  • High-performing teams were characterised by three core components: a clear direction, a palpable energy, and excellent internal communications.
  • A team's direction became a powerful motivator when it was understood as a deeper purpose or "why," rather than just a set of KPIs or business objectives.
  • Energy was described as a direct result of the team being connected to and energised by this deeper purpose.
  • Effective communication involves individualising the message and style to suit the different thinking and behavioural preferences of each team member.
  • The impact of training in "soft skills" like communication could and should be measured, with frameworks available to calculate a tangible financial return on investment.
  • The post-pandemic shift to hybrid work models presented a major leadership challenge, requiring a delicate balance of individual preferences, team objectives, and organisational fairness.
  • Junior employees who started their careers during the pandemic were particularly disadvantaged by remote work, having missed out on crucial informal learning and mentorship opportunities.

 

Podcast Transcript

Transcripts are auto-generated.

 

Announcer (00:01):
The Cambridge Marketing Podcast with Kiran Kapur, brought to you by Cambridge Marketing College. See their range of courses and apprenticeships at marketingcollege.com.

Kiran Kapur, Host (00:13):
Hello and welcome. This week, we are going to be talking about all things to do with team performance. And my guest is David Sales, who is the director of First Ascent, a company that supports leaders globally and support teams to perform at their best. David, welcome. In fact, technically, welcome back to the show because I actually interviewed you eight years ago. Can we start with what's the difference between a team that's performing well and one that just isn't?

David Sales, First Ascent (00:41):
Yeah, thanks Kiran. It's great to be back. I think to state the obvious, one that's performing well is delivering results. However, that team might be choosing to kind of measure their results. I think a slight kind of variation and more interesting question. How can you tell when a team is performing? If you were a fly on the wall or a member of that team, I think it's probably three components I would bring out. One is there's clearly a direction. They're on a mission, and you can feel that in the communications that are going on and in the air. There's an energy. So you can sense the kind of total commitment of all the team members towards whatever that kind of mission and the objectives are. And the third one that comes out every time is you can feel good communications going on amongst the team.

(01:36):
They just instinctively communicate well with each other. Now that could be because they're just naturally good at it, or it could be because they've been trained to do that. But those three things, direction, energy, and communications. When I walk in on a team or start working with a team, you pick up on those things straight away, and you know what kind of job you've got ahead of you to help them perform at their best.

Kiran Kapur, Host (01:58):
Okay. We'll come back to communications at the end, because I think that's such a key area. Tell me a little bit more about direction and energy. Apart from it, how do you feel that? Because it's quite intangible.

David Sales, First Ascent (02:12):
Yeah. I mean, direction first of all, I mean, they can't have kind of energy towards goals unless they've got direction, but the classic thing is that the team have actually kind of discussed and agreed and understood and potentially had a bit of an argument about what are we actually trying to achieve here? What is our mission? I mean, different teams use different language. Some people would call it the vision, the mission, the purpose, if you like. But the key thing is the leader of that team, if you like, has facilitated an open discussion whereby everyone understands what that direction is. They may well have decided as a collective what that direction is. Sometimes it's given to them, but other times they've decided it. But at the end of the day, they know where they are trying to get to. And if you talk to any of them individually, you would get a very consistent answer about that.

(03:01):
So that's what we mean kind of by direction. And it generally isn't just we're trying to achieve this. It's usually backed up by what Simon Sinek is referred to as the why. Why are we trying to do this? Because that leads into the energy then, because if people have got a real understanding of why we're trying to do this, and that could be for society's benefit, it could be for other benefits of a certain group of people, or it could be to achieve something in the world, then the energy follows typically from that. But it is that clear, unambiguous, and agreed direction. And you'll hear them talking about it.

Kiran Kapur, Host (03:43):
Is that a direction towards a goal? So we're here to, I don't know, achieve profits, or we're here to process X numbers of forms or whatever. Or could it be we're here to give the best customer service? When you said direction...

David Sales, First Ascent (03:57):
Yeah. It could be any of those things. I mean, quite often I've worked with a lot of teams where ... I'll give you a good example. A housing association, they thought they were very clear on what their purpose was in this particular team. And the team were basically the team that went around and maintained the houses for the tenants. They were very clear, we want to get a really high performance in the normal statistics that we measure for response rates, quality of work, that kind of thing. And as we talked about that, they were all clear on that, but they weren't necessarily energised by it. So we asked the simple question, well, why is that what you're trying to achieve? And after quite a long discussion, they realised why they were trying to do it, because they all worked there because they wanted to help the people that were the tenants who needed a bit of a step up in life.

(04:52):
And so their real purpose was to give people a better life. They happened to deliver that by doing a really good job on the maintenance of the houses. And so if you can get to that kind of deeper purpose, it's often superficially described in terms of KPIs. It could be profit, it could be manufacturing widgets, as you say, it could be some other kind of key performance indicator. But if you can get underneath that to the why are we really doing this, what gets us up and into work and energised, then you're onto something. And that's what I mean by direction, a really kind of purposeful direction. I'm

Kiran Kapur, Host (05:29):
Going to push on this because I can see if you're working for a housing association, you could honestly say that you were making people's lives better. If you're working for a retailer, and I don't know, I've got to pick Marks and Spencer's just for the sake of it. Is there a direction or a purpose of trying to make people's lives better, or is it actually that you're there to give good customer service or people to find what they want?

David Sales, First Ascent (05:56):
Yeah, I think this is where you would typically boil it down to the individual kind of teams. And if you're kind of a team leader on a floor, for example, in a store in M&S and it might be the floor that's selling particular kind of items or particular segment of garments, if you can get your team motivated, I mean, at the end of the day, you want them to give good customer service, but they will give really good customer service if they have a deeper belief in how they're helping the customers, not just trying to sell as many suits or bras or furnishings as they can. But if they can ... I would expect it would be along the lines of, I want to help people make the best choices that are going to make them feel better as a person in terms of the clothes they're buying or the items that are going to make them feel more comfortable with their life, more energised and motivated in their life.

(06:56):
So if you can get ... I mean, those are the best people that we meet in retail outlets, aren't they, that are genuinely interested in what we need as a customer, and they kind of almost get into your life. They're really good at it. They understand what you need. Even if you're just buying a pair of socks, they'll ask you why are you buying them? Is it for a wedding? Is it for work? And just that interest. And as the kind of leader, if you like of that team, if you can get people energised by that. Now, some people will respond to that and will step up to that and enjoy it. Others, just despite all the training you give, won't get it, and maybe they're not right for the team.

Kiran Kapur, Host (07:40):
Okay. So that's direction and energy. So let's come to the communications because I suspect this is the ... Well, actually, is that the most important thing, the communications, or is it getting the direction energy right first?

David Sales, First Ascent (07:53):
I think it's a key one of the three, but it's probably the one that most people mention most often. I mean, you could have great communications, but no direction, and then you're in trouble. I mean, you've got a great place to work, but you're not necessarily going to achieve much. And the energy gives you kind of resilience over time, but communication is the kind of fundamental kind of glue, if you like, that a team needs to be really good at day in, day out to be effective. So it is probably the most common topic that we talk about when we're working with teams.

Kiran Kapur, Host (08:25):
So what do we mean by communications? Because you can overcommunicate, can't you?

David Sales, First Ascent (08:31):
Can you? You'd have to push me quite hard so you can over communicate when you're members of a team, because the key thing is everyone understands as much as they can about not just the work that's going on, but about each other and their differences, their kind of preferences, their little foibles of things that they enjoy and they don't enjoy it. And the more we can understand that about our teammates, the more likely we are to work in an empathetic way with them, but also to take advantage of the diversity that we will naturally have in any team in terms of where people's strengths are and how they think. So you would have to push me really hard to say over communicate, you can over communicate, particularly given the environment a lot of teams now find themselves in, where we're in kind of remote working from each other.

(09:28):
We're not necessarily ... I know some teams are back into the workplace, if you like, but a lot of teams now are working in a geographically dispersed way, and I'm not sure I would agree you can over-communicate in that situation.

Kiran Kapur, Host (09:42):
Okay. So let me give two examples of where I would say somebody was overcommunicating. You may say this isn't communication. So having just come out of a meeting where this has happened, somebody mansplaining something, explaining how to do marketing, is quite an entertainment. I would have said that was poor communication. I would

David Sales, First Ascent (10:04):
Say that's poor communication, not overcommunication. Yeah.

Kiran Kapur, Host (10:08):
Okay. So are we arguing about a semantic difference? It's the fact that the communication was bad, rather than there was too much?

David Sales, First Ascent (10:14):
I don't think that's semantic at all. I think you've hit the number of the issue. I mean, the communications needs to be good communications. It needs to be appropriate. It needs to be appropriate to the receiver of the communication as well as the provider of the communication. The conversation needs to land at both ends, if you like. So if you can develop the skill in a team of good communication, then you can't over- communicate, I think. You want to be efficient, but ...

Kiran Kapur, Host (10:43):
Yes. And my other example was actually going to be inefficient communications, but I think you've taken that one. So can we talk a little bit about good communications? Because what you were suggesting was that you communicate with different people differently to celebrate the difference. Is that right?

David Sales, First Ascent (10:59):
Absolutely. This is probably the single biggest factor that we all need to bear in mind and needs to be born in mind, but not just by team leaders and managers, but by members of any team is that we are all different human beings. We know that people think differently, behave differently. We have different preferences for how we communicate to others and how we like to be communicated with. So my responsibility as a team member is to understand my colleagues, if you like, and to adjust my communications as much as I can to what's going to work for that colleague, which means I could be communicating a different style to each of my colleagues to kind of maximise the efficiency and effectiveness of my communications. But yeah, the short answer is we need to individualise communications.

Kiran Kapur, Host (11:46):
So does that mean you can't do a sort of global communication?

David Sales, First Ascent (11:50):
No, it means we naturally need to do that or team-wide communications on whatever scale it is, sometimes it's company-wide communications.

(12:00):
But if we're doing that where the audience is more than one person, which is obviously a lot of the time, what we need to be thinking about there is, in this communication, am I covering off? Am I playing the percentage game if you like? Am I covering off in here points that will resonate or styles that will resonate with the different ways that people will think? We had a great example of this. We were working with a bank, and every year in the bank, everyone has to do financial training to make sure they're up to date with the regulations, et cetera. It's just compulsory training that happens every year in the bank. Typically, when the email goes out to people, say, "Right, get online, do your half-hour mandatory training," they would get a 50% response rate, or 50% of people went on and did their training without further reminders.

(12:53):
We just helped them reword the communication a little bit. So within the communication, there was a bullet point that appealed to the different ways people think 70% response rate the next year. And imagine that in an organisation of 20,000 people. So just by thinking, because typically we write communications if they're kind of broadcast or mass in our own preferred style.

Kiran Kapur, Host (13:19):
Yeah.

David Sales, First Ascent (13:20):
We don't think about hitting the multiple styles that might be out there in our audience or preferences.

Kiran Kapur, Host (13:26):
We're talking about communications and persuading people to do communications. How do you actually, once you've put that in place, do you measure the performance of the team improving or do you just feel it?

David Sales, First Ascent (13:42):
You should be able to measure it. Each team will have their own measures that they want to set if they're going to put some investment of time and potentially money into this kind of development process. And typically what we would recommend, you measure at different levels. I mean, certainly a team should see an improvement in their performance at the standard kind of KPIs that they measure, like going back to what you said earlier, it could be number of widgets they produce, could be customer satisfaction ratings, could be profit, could be sales, whatever. So you'll want to measure that and be able to see a difference, but you should also see shifts in engagement, for example. A lot of teams and organisations measure engagement. Now you should be able to see that. If you get into the detail of that, you should be able to see differences in how people feel about their managers, about their colleagues.

(14:37):
So there's a whole range of measures that are often quite team specific, but you need to decide how you're going to measure this before you start, obviously, because otherwise you can't go back and see, say, where were we a year ago? You need to decide how we're going to measure this, measure it at the beginning, and then measure it again at the end. But you shouldn't be frightened of doing that. People are often frightened of measuring what I would call, is often called soft skills. Actually, some of these are the hardest skills to master. People are often nervous about volunteering to measure the impact of training and development, which we think is not taking responsibility. I think if you're confident what you're going to do is going to deliver results, then why be friend of measuring it? Spending time and money on it, like the organisation would spend time and money on other things that gets measured.

(15:28):
Why not training?

Kiran Kapur, Host (15:31):
I guess that makes sense. But yes, I think there is often a sort of nervousness about, we know we need this, but we don't really want to admit to just how badly we need it, perhaps.

David Sales, First Ascent (15:40):
Yeah. And we're frightened of measuring it in case we don't get a result, and therefore people will think we've wasted money on it. So it's just like any other business investment. There should be a return on investment when you spend money and time is money. I know it's cliche, but time is money, but typically there is actual money involved in training as well, not just time. And for example, when we're working with our clients, we give 40 times return on investment guaranteed. If we don't hit it, then don't pay us.

Kiran Kapur, Host (16:13):
Wow. And how do you measure that? Because you must have quite robust measurements to be able to do that.

David Sales, First Ascent (16:19):
Yeah. There's a recognised ... I mean, there's various frameworks for measuring training, but one of the most widely recognised in the training world is something called Kirkpatrick, which is a framework that has got four levels. The first one is, do people intend to change their behaviour, result of what they've learned? How much have they remembered about what they've learned? Have their behaviours changed? And what are the financial impacts of that? And we always encourage clients, if they're up for it, to measure to Kirkpatrick level four, which is the highest level, and it's level four is where we can say, we'll guarantee that return on investment. So you can measure it. You just need to decide upfront that you're going to measure it, put in place low measures so you can track it and then do it.

Kiran Kapur, Host (17:09):
Okay. So I want to come back a little bit more to back to communications and different styles of communications. And you talked about coping with differences. So, can you give the listeners some examples of the sort of differences in communication styles people might come across?

David Sales, First Ascent (17:26):
Yeah. So one of the models that we like to work with, I mean it's actually a psychometric tool, but it's called emergenetics. It's one of the more world research tools in this field. And it describes the different ways that people think and behave. So for example, in behaviour terms, some people talk more than others as their preference. They just do. And if you're communicating with someone, you can pick up signals as to whether they are more of a expressive with a language you use, but their expressiveness is higher or lesser and try and match your communications to that. We all have different styles, how we assert ourselves. I might be more direct, you might be more kind of collaborative or gentle in your style. The key is to pick up what your audience prefers and then match it or mirror it. And then there's also thinking styles.

(18:20):
We all ... The human brain has got four different ways of thinking. We've all got elements of all four, but we'll have preferences for some of those. So some people for what we would call an analytical thinking style, and if you're communicating with me and my preferences in that area, I will need facts, figures, proofs, evidence from you to persuade me. If I've got more of a kind of pragmatic or structural thinking style as a preference, I'll want to know how this is going to happen. Have we got enough time? Who's going to do what? Have we got the money? Much more kind of practical. Some people have what we call a social preference, which is I want to know how it's going to impact other people, how people around here are going to feel about that. And other people are more interested in the kind of vision or the long-term strategic reason that we are doing this, and the creativity of what we're trying to do.

(19:11):
And it's very easy once you can understand these things start to spot them in other people, and then tailor your language to what are the preferences they're demonstrating to you. So it's very easy.

Kiran Kapur, Host (19:25):
You're literally tailoring language as well as...

David Sales, First Ascent (19:28):
Style.

Kiran Kapur, Host (19:29):
Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

David Sales, First Ascent (19:32):
Yeah. Language and style. Style being more, how much are you talking or how little are you talking? What is your kind of tone and kind of firmness and adaptability, if you like.

Kiran Kapur, Host (19:46):
You said emergenetics, it's been very well researched. So, and is this a sort of long-held area of research or is it relatively new?

David Sales, First Ascent (19:58):
So psychometric tools. Emergenetics is an example of a psychometric tool, more oftenly called personality kind of preference tools. I mean, this all goes back to the middle of last century. I mean, the first of these tools that were ever created, most people will have heard about this is Myers-Briggs or MBTI as it's sometimes called, the first ever on the market. In today's standards, not well researched at all. I mean, embarrassingly researched, many would say, but it's been out there for many, many decades, and therefore it gets used in a lot of organisations. Lessons have been learned, maybe that's the best way to say it, about how to develop these tools in a scientific and robust way over the years. That's not to say every new tool is well researched, but you have to be selective about the ones that you want to use. If you don't just want a bit of fun, if you want to have something that's reliable for your team, for your organisation, then you want to pick a tool that's well researched.

(21:04):
And we work with Emergenetics because we looked into the research that went behind it, and it is incredibly impressive compared to most of the more popular tools. So we recommend it to our clients because of that robustness and its ease of use.

Kiran Kapur, Host (21:21):
So you mentioned that things have changed a lot, obviously, with us people working from home and the rise of slightly more globalised teams. Have you seen any other changes in team performance and team behaviour post-pandemic? Has the pandemic caused any other changes?

David Sales, First Ascent (21:40):
Yeah. I think what, yes, is the short answer. I mean, there were changes that happened during the pandemic. The teams that were forced to work in a more remote way, different people adapted to that in different ways. For some people, it was like, this is heaven has just arrived for me in terms of how I work. They just loved it. Whereas for others, it was their worst nightmare to be stuck at home on their own. They missed the kind of social interaction and face-to-face that they got in the workplace. So the first thing we noticed during the pandemic was different people had very different reactions to that or responses to the situation, which meant leaders and managers had to work much harder in terms of making people feel part of a team because you couldn't rely on just being in the room and

(22:31):
Absorbing the vibes and hearing and talking to people informally, you had to manufacture, if you like, or create opportunities for the team to engage with each other. So the first thing we saw in the pandemic was managers and leaders for the successful teams that survived well and performed well, they upped their communications levels significantly, both for a collective, but also individual. What's interesting as we come out of the pandemic now, each organisation is kind of, if they haven't already decided, they are actively thinking about, "Where is the pendulum going to rest now?" Because we might not want to go all the way back to everyone in one location in a team. Equally, we don't necessarily want everyone at home all the time. So most organisations are finding what they're calling a hybrid model. And a lot of the work we're doing with teams at the moment is helping individual teams find their balance, how they want to work and agree that within the team, given whatever their role is within the organisation and the realities of that combined with people now, to be honest, expecting more choice and influence about how and where they work.

(23:40):
And you can't make people unlearn the freedom that the pandemic gave them. So most teams are now working through this to decide how do we want to work so that we can deliver our objectives, but also make it a more engaging and happy place for people to work in. And this is quickly, we're noticing this going from, we need to get this right for our teams so that they're happy and engaged to, if we don't get this right, this is a competitive disadvantage when we're out recruiting people. Because if we don't have an environment that suits the talent out there that we want to join our organisation, they won't even look at us. So it's really a very interesting situation, and it comes back to this individualisation. I think you cannot assume everyone in a team wants to work in the same way. Some people in that team, if they have the option, would spend more time in the office than at home, whereas for others, the balance would be the other way around.

Kiran Kapur, Host (24:40):
I know from my own experience, the difficult part of that is they're making it fair. So if as an organisation, you need something staffed for whatever reason, you want to be fair and reasonable to those that want to do one way or want to do something else. It's quite an interesting balancing act.

David Sales, First Ascent (24:57):
It's tough. Yeah. And fairness is one, or lack of fairness, one of the main triggers that the human brain reacts to if it doesn't see fairness going on, both for yourself or if you see it happening for others. And this is one of the biggest management and leadership challenges in front of organisations today, because even within one organisation, you may have a team that could perform perfectly well working at everyone working at home. They do all of their stuff online. They can do Teams calls, Zoom calls, whatever, and work just as effectively remotely. Whereas that's not going to work to your example. If all the Marks and Spencer's shop floor team members said, "Well, I want to work from home." It's not going to work, is it? They have to be physically in the office. So whereas the finance team in M&S, perhaps they could work at home much more.

(25:47):
So you have to manage fairness within a team, but also across an organisation, so that people understand why different teams may have different models.

Kiran Kapur, Host (25:57):
And you've also got an element of training and teaching people. We learn at work from other people, particularly when you're starting your career. So coming into a sort of hybrid or a very remote team is actually a huge disadvantage.

David Sales, First Ascent (26:13):
It is. And this is probably one of the work groups, if you like, that have noticed this most during the pandemic. I mean, it's very real experience for me. Two of my kids started work during the pandemic and daughter was working in central London, but didn't meet her team for over anyone in her team face-to-face for nine months. And she'd joined a new organisation and at that stage in her career , where ideally she would be absorbing, learning, not necessarily just by talking to people, but by hearing conversations that were going on in the office. So yeah, that group that are starting their careers have been particularly hurt, I think, by this. And organisations need to be thinking about how they're going to compensate for that.

Kiran Kapur, Host (27:03):
Yes. And there is something I think the organisations will be wrestling with for a very long time. David Sales, thank you so much for your time and for coming on and for that overview of team performance, direction, energy, and feel-good communications. Thank you very much indeed.

David Sales, First Ascent (27:21):
It's a pleasure. Thanks, Karen.

Announcer (27:24):
The Cambridge Marketing Podcast from Cambridge Marketing College, training marketing and PR professionals across the globe.