Why are top sales people interested in executive functions?

Last week was an interesting week for me - I found myself in front of a team of sales leaders from a top international bank in Canary Wharf. With a background in teaching, training and education I felt a bit out of my depth.  But, on reflection it is easy to see why large financial organisations, with diverse and multi-functional teams are so fascinated by an executive function approach.

As those of you who follow my work will know I am passionate about executive functions and how they impact on everything we do as human beings. I believe that there are very few challenges we face as people juggling 21st century lives that cannot be attributed to one or more executive functions. 

Executive functions are the mental processes that enable us to plan, focus attention, remember instructions, and juggle multiple tasks successfully. I know, through research and my own professional experience, teams with well-developed executive function skills do better, in fact, a lot better than those who lack them. Executive function skills can be developed if management and the team commits to doing so. It’s not easy and there is no quick fix. Over time, however, executive function skills can be developed.  

Back to my week. For those members of the sales team I was working with executive functions were impacting the productivity of their teams in several important ways. 

Through our initial discussion, one example they gave was of a sales team member who needed constant reassurance and praise in order to do their best, even when they were exceeding their targets. They required constant feedback from their manager that they were doing well. The managers, up until now, believed this person was needy, or that they needed a self confidence boost leading to frustration over these “character flaws” as it was obvious to everyone else that they were excellent at their job. 

Ironically, this frustration would then lead to a reduction in positive feedback from the manager and a resultant downturn in productivity from the sales person. The manager was left feeling that they were “carrying” this sales person through their career, with the associated resentment and frustration. 

I worked through this scenario to reframe this with an understanding of executive functions, namely that this person clearly has weak metacognition skills (the ability to self evaluate) and requires constant external validation in order to feel worthwhile. By reframing the management intervention to help the person develop stronger self assessment checks they in turn learn internal validation techniques manager frustration reduces and the productivity of the sales person increases. 

In another case, we discussed a member of a team who struggled to take feedback onboard. When receiving feedback from their manager they would be very defensive or emotional, blame others and find it very hard to receive the feedback and then act upon it.  We identified that this person had a very fixed mindset around their ability to change their behaviour, they were clearly terrified of failure and were struggling to control their emotions and inhibit their responses. By being able to name the executive functions their colleague was struggling with, the managers were able to take the first step in helping their colleague to put an actionable plan in place. In this case, I would advocate work on fixed mindset and neuroplasticity first, before then discussing, and supporting implementation of other strategies to control emotions and inhibit responses to them. 

Whilst there were more examples than I am able to detail here, the main take away for the Sales team was that they identified that executive functions were the brain processes which were the bottle-neck to their optimal productivity, job satisfaction and career progression. They also recognised that coaching colleagues using executive function language can be the key to clearing that bottle neck and creating more effective teams. 

If you think your teams could benefit from learning more about executive functions and their impact on productivity at work then please connect with me through LinkedIn or via [email protected] and I can begin to work with you and your teams to improve productivity and ultimately profitability. If you personally struggle with issues like the above or you know someone who does then they might benefit from working with one of our executive function coaches - please book in a call with Sarah Park, Client Services Manager at Connections in Mind, to discuss more.