Refocus Your Sales Team Now That Summer's Over

Note: An edited version of this post was published at FastCompany and is available here.

From an organizational perspective, September is a strange time of year. You and your team are supposedly tanned, rested and ready, after a summer of vacation, outdoor activities, and soaking up the latest novel by the pool. The kids are back in school, colleagues are back at work, and the push is on to prep for the big finish by making the numbers in the dwindling days of Q3 and Q4.

All that being said, it’s important to remember that you and your team are coming off the lowest activity period of the year, when organizational productivity declines, team meetings are routinely cancelled, and “make the numbers” is replaced with “can you cover this for me?” The transition from the drifting, drowsy days of summer to the focused, frenetic days of autumn are a great time to stop for a moment, pull the team together and deliberately focus for the four month run ahead.

Where to start?

At Crew11, we’ve found that a deliberate approach by leadership is key to re-energizing and refocusing any team.

Sophisticated, high functioning teams can knock this out in an hour…less able teams make take a day or longer, often with help from a coach or advisor, but either way, it’s a way to ensure the team is pulling the same direction.

Based on our experience as leaders, advisors and coaches, we recommend starting with four straight-forward activities, as follows:

1. Refresh Your Purpose – A great way to do this is by asking three simple questions: What are we here to do? Are we getting it done? If not, why not? It’s tempting to drag out the mission statements (and sometimes that’s the right thing to do), but a purposeful discussion focused on the end result is less likely to get bogged down in politics, emotion, and victimhood. Purpose discussions often start with eye-rolling, but if you can stay on course through those first three questions, you’ll be ready for the next step.
2. Engage With Others – We’ve all seen the studies from Gallup and others detailing the extent to which our workforce is not engaged. Short-term plans for engagement can help to rebuild a sense of Team, encourage grass-roots coordination, and counter-balance the workplace skeptic. A great way to do this is to review priorities, both for the team and top three for each individual member. Challenge them all, and change a few. It will reveal opportunities for coordination, get people thinking about what comes next, and give them something to talk about with their groups. Beware…in the absence of engagement, snark rules the day.
3. Frame Your Future – How much time do you spend thinking about the Future of your organization? Think…when is the last time you shared your view of the future, whatever it may be? There’s no need to describe the day the unicorns will visit. As you might imagine, that will undermine your credibility, but a leader’s narrative should regularly include realistic assessments of the possibilities that lie ahead, and what’s being done, by the organization, to make them real. What’s important? Growth? Customer sat? Employee recruiting and retention? Imagine a future, and share it.
4. Have Fun with a Human – Go bowling, have a picnic, take the team to lunch. Share your stories of summer’s biggest Fail, your kid’s first time at the beach, or an insight from a book or a sunset. Have a conversation about someone you met, an unexpected development, or the hazards of mountain biking. No matter what the topic, having fun is a critical step towards getting your team aligned and energized. They’ll see you as human, and vice versa. It breaks down barriers and challenges (often inaccurate) assumptions.

 Many of the leaders we’ve worked with return to the workplace with a set of unspoken assumptions. They assume the people in their organization know what’s important, how the organization is doing, what their peers are up to, and what they should be doing next. Many of those assumptions are wrong, often comically so, and we’ve found that the four activities above are the best way to expose and remedy that mismatch between reality and the workplace.

The authors are co-founders and managing partners at Crew11 (www.Crew11.us) , a leadership development and business advisory firm. They formerly served as members of the original Crew11, flying from the decks of USS Ranger and USS Enterprise in search of Soviet fast attack nuclear submarines during the Cold War. They can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected].