I can’t imagine doing my job without Glint – here’s why.

Disclaimer: My team sell Glint. We sell Glint because we bought Glint. We bought Glint because we used Glint and saw the impact that it had in driving employee engagement within our company - LinkedIn.

Glint is a People Success Platform?that helps organisations to increase employee engagement, develop their people, and improve business results.?For anyone not familiar with the term “employee engagement”, it can be thought of as an employee’s emotional commitment to the organisation and their willingness to give their best at work.

I lead a sales team of c. 30 people split in to 4 teams that sell software to customers spread across several global regions. My job is to help our customers and my people be as successful as possible. Leading a high-performance team requires data – Sales and Customer data, and People data.

Turning first to Sales and Customer data. Like most Sales Leaders, I would rather go without coffee than go without the CRM for a day (and I have three young kids so that’s saying something)! I can’t imagine planning, forecasting and running the sales business or maximising value for our customers without data.

But what about the need for People data?

The research on the tenets for high-performing teams generally points to:

·?????Alignment on Purpose, Mission, Vision, and Collective Goals

·?????An Environment that Fosters Trust, Respect and Psychological Safety

·?????A Culture of Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging

·?????Highly Skilled Individuals that Practice Continuous Learning

·?????Clear Communication and Clearly Defined Roles that Encourage Collaboration

·?????Leadership that Provides Inspiration, Gives Empowerment and Drives Accountability

·?????Celebration of Success and of the Taking of Intelligent Risks

Historically, knowing how my people felt about each of these areas was a combination of what my people told me combined with intuition, guesses and assumptions. A very patchy data set indeed! Having now had a “CRM for my people data” (aka Glint) I can’t imagine doing my job, or at least doing it well, without it.

Condensing the tenets of high-performance down for sales teams would read something like “having a highly engaged team, consisting of highly skilled individuals that spend their time on high value activities with high value customers”.

So how my teams spend their time is critical. James Clear, in the Brilliant Book, Atomic Habits, shares research from Duke University, that habits account for about 40% of our behaviours on a given day.

“You are what you repeatedly do.”

What then are the habits that my teams need to have to be high-performing? And what role does Glint play?

The habits can be broken down in to four parts:

1.????Regular Feedback – what are we doing well, what needs to be improved.

2.????Leveraging Insights – empowering managers to make informed decisions and have meaningful conversations.

3.????Setting Goals – prioritising high impact areas and taking a step forward as a team.

4.????Continuous Development – a focus on growth over perfection.

#1 Regular Feedback

The key measurement for each tenet of high performing teams listed above – alignment, environment, culture, clarity, continuous learning, leadership and celebration – is how each and every person in the team feels. So, the first habit is to create space for regular feedback.

It’s crucial for everyone on my teams to have a voice and be heard. This means collecting feedback in a way that allows for anonymity, removes bias, encourages open dialogue, and gives everyone opportunity to speak their mind. We do this through sending out Pulse Surveys, once per Quarter through Glint.

As a single point of measurement, I can see in almost real-time whether my teams are highly engaged (“eSat”) and track how we are trending. I can also go deeper on the other measurements which relate back to the tenets of high performance.

#2 Leveraging Insights

To coin a phrase, “Data is the new oil”, in that when it is refined it is very valuable. When data is refined it becomes Insights - and I want my managers to be equipped with Insights.

The second habit is for my mangers (and me!) to leverage Insights. Specifically, to leverage Insights to:

-??????Inform decisions, for example about the time-consuming processes to iterate, or the need for training, more team-building activities or more recognition.

-??????Have meaningful conversations with their teams, for example about coaching, removing obstacles, career development, stretch projects or prioritising workload.

There are two key roles that Glint plays in this.

The first is getting to the context behind the data through comments.

For example, when asked about manager support, someone may score their answer as Strongly Agree but add the comment “I would like to be given more autonomy and be less micromanaged”. The importance here is to provide the manager an insight on what type of support is wanted by the employee.

We see in the example above a positive score but a constructive comment, showing the importance of separating the sentiments of scores and comments. At company-level, going through thousands of comments manually and then trying to group them would be a huge task, so relying on the Natural Language Processing to group the comments and sentiments is key to moving from big data to Organisational insights.

The second is having early warning signals through Predictive Insights. So rather than my managers being left trying to join the dots between data and outcomes they are served insights that allow them to take action.

For example, Collaboration may be an area of relative opportunity surfaced for one of the Managers. This is served with prescribed specific actions, such as “focus on the overarching objective” or “clarify roles and responsibilities” to help guide the manager in having timely, relevant, and impactful conversations.

#3 Setting Goals

Goal Setting is a key component of high-performance. Effective goal setting for a team has four components:

?????I.????????The goal must be aligned to the key objectives.

????II.????????The goal must be sufficiently challenging.

??III.????????The goal must be measurable.

??IV.????????The goal must be owned by all team members.

Glint helps in the first three of components by helping to prioritise which goals to focus on – through visualisation of scores versus impacts. ?So we can focus on the areas of highest impact, be that a weakness to develop or a strength to leverage, in the pursuit of high performance.

For example, we may at first identify “Individual Accountability” as a goal to work on but from reviewing the Driver Impact report we see that the impact of “Understanding Strategy” has a higher potential impact and would therefore be a better goal to focus on.

On the fourth component, Glint provides the ACT framework (Acknowledge where we are, Collaborate on where we want to go, and Take one step forward) that moves ownership of the goal from the manager to the team. This enables the team to move forward together.

With the above example in mind of “Understanding Strategy” this might look like:

·?????Acknowledge that as a team we have different levels of understanding of the company’s strategy and how our team’s strategy aligns.

·?????Collaborate on wanting to have a common understanding of how our team and strategy fit within the overall company and strategy.

·?????Take one step forward by all watching the Company All Hands together each week.

#4 Continuous Development

The final habit is the continuous development of the team to improve in each of the competencies that make up the tenets of high performance.?This is about growth every day, rather than occasional training interventions. This is the power of the aggregation of marginal gains (a term made famous by Sir Dave Brailsford and British Cycling).

The role that Glint plays within continuous development are the LinkedIn Learning courses that are recommended to me and my managers based on our individual survey data. For example, if Creativity comes back as an area of opportunity for a team then the manager would be recommended a LinkedIn Learning course on helping teams to cultivate creativity.

We all need a little help staying on track with good habits – healthy eating, exercising, getting enough sleep. Glint plays the role of accountability buddy by sending nudges in the flow of work (specifically in Outlook and Teams) in the form of intelligent recommendations that offer tailored guidance and encourage the ongoing actions.

So, yes, as mentioned, my team sell Glint. However, I am obsessive about leading high-performing teams and I could not imagine being able to do this without Glint.

I’d love to hear from you:

·?????What have found makes high-performing teams?

·?????What are the habits of those teams?

·?????What data is required?