"Try to Have More Fun"

A personal reflection on the way work has changed as a result of COVID-19

The air has been sucked out of the room...

April 2010 – today I am student teaching at an elementary charter school in Trenton, NJ. My professor sits in the bleachers, as she observes me and a fellow student teacher leading our class of third grade physical education students.

I feel stressed. There are thirty students, eagerly waiting to run around the gymnasium and wreak havoc on my well-crafted lesson plan.

At the end of the lesson, the professor approaches my co-teacher and me. She looks at him first and asks, "You're supposed to be a big bad football player and you let a bunch of kids walk all over you like that?" My co-teacher puts his head down and elects not to respond.

Then the professor turns to me and said, "And you... Can you please try to have a little fun out there? You’re sucking the air out of the room.”

She was always direct.

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June 2012 – today is the last day of my first year of teaching 10th grade at Miami Northwestern Senior High School, in Miami, Florida. I ask the students in my Intensive Reading class to share their feedback on how I can do better next year. Most students use this exercise as an opportunity to make one last jape, but a few provide insightful and actionable ideas for how I can improve.

One of my students, who would go on to graduate from Morehouse College, writes, "Try to have more fun." I vividly remember reading those five words written on a narrow sliver of paper:

“Try to have more fun.”

It had been a tough first year of teaching. In October, I returned to New Jersey for the first time since departing for Miami with my parent's yellow 2002 Subaru WRX packed to the max with my clothes and guitar crammed in the backseat.

I remember waking up at my parents’ house. It was a Friday morning. My folks had gone out that to run some errands and I found myself, for the first time in months, alone. Silence seemed to fill the house. And yet, for some reason, the stillness did not bring about a peaceful feeling, but instead triggered all the stress and pain and loneliness I was suppressing to come roaring out of me.

I screamed! And I kept screaming. I paced throughout the large empty house just yelling sounds, not even words. In the kitchen, down the hallway, standing in the shower. And then, I just broke down and started crying. I couldn’t stop.

Finally, after what seemed like hours, I was able to compose myself and I drove over to the local pizza joint to meet my parents for lunch. We ordered a few slices and then sat down at one of the booths towards the rear of the restaurant. They asked me how I was doing.

I broke down again. I started crying my eyes out, in public! I couldn’t compose myself. I said, “I would give anything not to have to go back.”

My parents had never seen me like this before. My Dad tried to encourage me. He said, “It’s only until June and then you can come home if you’d like.” I said, “I know,” but the way I said it, he knew I didn’t see that as a good option. He said, “It’s not like you’re in Iraq fighting in the war.”

He was right, of course, but that’s how I felt, as if I was caught in a war zone. The truth is that I was simply overwhelmed. I was working from the time I got to my classroom at 7am into the early evening each day, as I struggled to learn how to write an effective lesson plan for the following day. I hadn't seen my friends or family in months. I did not fit in well in Miami. It was hard!

Two days later, I caught the last flight out of Newark and was touching down at Miami International just as Hurricane Sandy approached the the Jersey Shore. Talk about small vs. big problems!

As the weeks went by, I searched for resolve. I focused first on winning the day in the classroom. Then winning the week, meaning, did at least three of the five school days each week go as I had planned within my four walls? If yes, I won. If no, I lost. While this win / lose model may have been imperfect, it at least gave me a way to track my progress outside of the day-to-day or even hour-by-hour.

By late Spring, I had my teaching legs under me, or so I thought, as I was starting to feel more confident in my relationships with my students and my abilities to manage a classroom.

Then, in late May, the results from the Florida Comprehensive Achievement Test in English Language Arts came back. Only 19% of my students passed the exam. Never have I felt like more of a failure. Never have I ever completely missed the mark so badly. I put a hole through my bedroom door with my forearm that afternoon. I was distraught!

As the final weeks of the school year wound down, I calmed myself and reflected upon the journey. I had made it to the finish line, with emotional bumps and bruises, but still very much intact. And, five words summed up what I needed to do: “Try to have more fun.”

My student was 100% right! I let the pressure of trying to reach an unattainable goal (80% of students passing the High School State Examination for English Language Arts) negatively impact my relationship with my students. And instead of teaching my students the joys of reading and critical thinking, I became a tyrant, because I let the stress of metrics become more important than humanity my job required.

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September 11, 2020 – today is my 7th anniversary at IBM. And while most will agree that 2020 has become synonymous with the word “Hell” it’s important to note that Covid-19 has changed everything we hold sacred, but perhaps nothing more so than the way we work.

Before Covid-19, I was tethered to my cell phone. Calls from the car, emails at dinner, sleeping on the road. In contrast, today, I find myself handcuffed to my laptop. Zoom, Webex, Microsoft Teams, and Google Hangouts are the new normal. And while this change was necessary, some others were not.

Metrics tracking has become pervasive, across industries and job functions. For the purposes of this article, I'll focus on what I know: enterprise sales.

Brian Burns, of "The Brutal Truth About Sales & Selling" podcasts stated in his recent video "In sales the bean counters have taken over. We are spending too much time counting activities instead of doing activities. And why is this so destructive? It's because nobody allocates any time to the number one activity. And that's thinking. Thinking about what to work on, how to work on it, with whom we work on it. And how we win the deal. That is the most important activity in sales: THINKING!"

Brian is far from alone on this topic. From conversations I've had with peers across the industry and even in adjacent ones, measurement of activity is becoming more of a focus. In sales, it can include tracking client calls made per week by rep, the number of new opportunities identified per week by rep, and the like. There also seems to be a focus on daily cadences and deal progression updates.

Altogether, the hyper-focus on daily activities and tracking, combined with an endless number of internal and client video conference calls has created a vortex around the sales force that is sucking the energy out of the room and detracting from the culture sales leaders have worked tirelessly to foster with their teams, begging the question: What happened to the fun part of sales: preparing for sales calls and then executing with your team in front of the client?

The new maniacal focus on metrics, tracking, reporting, and daily, sometimes even hourly updates, is shifting the seller's attention away from the bigger and more important goals: serving the client and growing the business.

Consequently, the activities being tracked over time become stale. Burnout can set in. Tasks like call logging, which can be beneficial, especially for recording notes, and planning follow-on meetings, lose their purpose. People start cutting corners in order to check a box. A sense of distrust begins to permeate. People start wondering, “What’s next?” The energy leaves the room.

And leadership, perhaps unknowingly, creates a culture of “magical thinking” whereby front line sellers tell management what they want to hear, rather than the facts and the truth.

Follow "The Brutal Truth About Sales and Selling" page for more on the topic.

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2020 is arguably the ugliest year any of us have lived through. Misery abounds. And yes, we all need to roll up our sleeves and show some resilience. But, leaders can either help their teams rise above adversity or they can create, unintentionally, additional challenges for their teams.

One of the best ways to break this cycle is to step back and look at the bigger picture.

When I was teaching in Miami, I took my eyes off the most important goal and I became a tyrant in my classroom. As a result my students (my team) suffered. And it didn't happen overnight. It was progressive. We were constantly directed by school leadership to track our students' vocabulary, fluency, and reading comprehension progress. We also had to teach a different state mandated benchmark every two weeks. Our lesson plans had to be written in a specific format. 45 minutes every lesson for whole group and 45 minutes for differentiated instruction. A Bell Ringer as a warm up and an Exit activity before the bell to track daily understanding of the content and skill covered that day. Teacher creativity and energy vanished.

Bottom line, the focus on all the ancillary details became more important than the end goal: teaching kids to learn to love to read and become lifelong learners!

In sales, it seems like we may be on a similar trajectory. But, what I don't understand, is, what is driving the shift? Did metrics and tracking become more important because all employees are suddenly remote? Well, in sales, we were already remote. Is it because we're in a pandemic and performance is taking a hit across our client's industries so we know we face greater headwinds as we compete for new and repeat business? Is it to report to shareholders that ancillary results related to sales and operations are improving when growth is absent? I don't know!

Going forward, we need clear and decisive leadership. Leaders who can look at the environment we are living in and not only acknowledge the challenges we face - forest fires consuming the West and hurricanes pummeling the Gulf, as well as the battle for what the soul of the United States of America will look like, depending on how our citizens vote and what actions local, state, and federal government officials take in response to systemic racial inequality and omnipresent police brutality – but we also need leaders who promote humanity over metrics. Personal relationships over metrics. Client centricity over metrics. Having fun over metrics!

I know we will emerge from Covid-19, but I don’t know when. And, I sincerely hope the focus around metrics and tracking will be replaced with focus on longer term, bigger goals that are attainable and meaningful: for our clients, our employees, our shareholders, and our society as a whole.

While this belief may be na?ve or lofty, each new challenge presents an opportunity for new leaders to emerge. For new voices to be heard. And for impactful change to follow!

I’m feeling the effects of the “New Normal.” And I know you are too! It’s not as easy as saying, “Stay positive” or “Find a Silver Lining.” It’s a relentless struggle for each of us, daily, against all the negativity we're hearing on the news and on social media.

Let's face it, we are all working harder, and yet, we're being asked to prove our value more than ever before through metrics and tracking. But as Brian points out, that's not what is needed. What is needed is greater focus on what's most important: thinking through how we win the deal and grow our business in the process!

What's kept me going through this year is finding ways to pay it forward through mentoring and coaching. I've been fortunate to be in a position to help others secure promotions and find new roles and opportunities. And in the process, I’ve met interesting people from around the country and rekindled longstanding relationships I’ve let fall by the wayside.

Yet, the focus on metrics and tracking has consumed precious time and limited my availability to do the things that I love and know I must continue do to maintain strong mental health.

Now, more than ever, we need decisive and clear leadership. We need humanity. And we need leadership across industries to embrace their employees as family and lead by example. Not only in words, but through action. We know it’s tough out there. And we compete and fight everyday for our livelihoods under the banner for which we work. But, we need less mandated activities and more freedom to do the things that inspire us and fuel us with passion! That's when sellers get creative; that's when the fun starts!

Joe Aleardi, one of the best sales leaders I've worked for, once said in front of his team at a sales kickoff meeting, "Knowledge breeds confidence and confidence breeds passion!" In order to have knowledge we need to continue to learn and think about how we can best partner with our clients to address their most pressing challenges! Now, let's get out there and win! And have some fun, already!

I welcome you to share your thoughts in the comments below.