Why People Leave After One Bad Quarter with Rob Potter

0:10Welcome to Revenue Builders, hosted by John Kaplan and John McMahon. Right now, plenty of revenue leaders are watching good people walk out the door after a single bad quarter and wondering whether it's the market or the culture. Rob Potter, CEO of UMNITSA and a veteran sales leader from RSA, EMC, and Symantec, has run teams through years of these cycles and seen exactly what separates the leaders who keep their best people from the ones who don't. In this clip, Potter breaks down the line between transactional leadership, which runs on threats and quotas, and transformative leadership, which builds the kind of pride and belief that survives a missed number.

0:46Get this wrong, and you're rebuilding your team every time the market turns. Let's dive in. I think the number one thing that I learned from the leaders that I've had exposure to is that, look, honesty is the most important thing. And, you know, I've been very fortunate to work for leaders that had high integrity and were very direct, transparent and honest people. And now, granted, in the business world, there's aspects that you can't give 100 percent of the picture, but I've never seen any of them mislead knowing, you know, know what they've got there. And I think when you think about culture, the most important thing is people have to trust you as a leader.

1:28They've got to believe that what you're telling them is the truth. And I think the other part of that is you've got while you've got to make sure that the business is is number one. Right. Well, customers are number one. The businesses is number two and your employees are number three. Right. Because the employees support the business that supports supports the customer. I think you've got to understand the difference between making business decisions for the business and empathy, having empathy for your employees. Right. And there's a fine line there. I think, you know, organizations that look at people as statistics and as a name on a list in a company, and I've seen it.

2:14I've seen organizations where, you know, when we get in times of layoffs or we get in times of contraction in terms of investment, there's a lack of empathy to understand that these are the people that the company's foundation are built upon. And I think if you combine the ability to understand how you leverage empathy in your leadership model and you leverage that and combine it with transparency and honesty, I think those are the two core characteristics I see in the great leaders that I've worked for. I see a common theme in the people that Johnny listed there from a leadership perspective.

2:58I feel like one of the things that they do so well and great leaders do so well is they're honest, authentic, and realistic about the journey that it's going to take to get somewhere. So I think the best leaders I've ever seen are the ones that tell you where you're going. And then they make the journey exciting enough or worthwhile enough, but they definitely talk about something in the future and then paint a picture of what that journey is going to be like. And I find that that's the difference between really, you know, good leadership and bad leadership. Because when people can't see themselves in the future or they see the future and it's like no big deal or it's too much effort for the reward.

3:51Give me your thoughts on that. How do you, as a leader, you know, constantly people, you know, they call it, some people call it keeping an eye on the prize. With your athletic background, you probably, that probably means something to you. You know, John, one of the things that when I was playing hockey, I had coaches that came up with some really cool concepts. And one concept was this idea that we played. We played a series of Stanley Cups. I think I told you this when we were in class at one time. So our coach never measured more than beyond seven games. And if we could win the cup in every seven games, we were going to have a pretty successful season.

4:31And, you know, I think in the business world, you've got to be careful that if you put the reverse timeline too far out, you can't build to it because there's too many things that happen dynamically that you control and don't control, you know, in the business world. So I think, you know, the answer to your question is that the first thing you have to do is you've got to set milestones that are ambitious, but you can clearly help people understand how exactly they're going to get there. And I think one of the places, you know, you talk about revenue building. One of the areas that early on in my career, I think I did a pretty, pretty good job of was I would sit reps down and I would make sure they believed they could hit the number we were giving them for a quota.

5:23and I would build it out. I'd say, you're going to need this many transactions at this band. You need this many at 150. You need this many at 500. You need this many at a million. And then start to build out where are they going to come from? Who are the accounts in your territory that can fall in this band? Who are the accounts that are? And as soon as you started to map that out for them, they started to buy into, yeah, I can go get those. Yeah, I've already talked with them and they start to build that belief in that momentum. That's no different when you're managing the entire company. Like you've got to have an ability to let marketing see where they can achieve their success, engineering, see where they can achieve their success, tech support, customer success, consulting, the finance organization, legal.

6:11And I think as each one of them has that opportunity to start to see where that is, It's your job as a leader to then show them where those dots connect and how engineering success and product success is going to be tied into marketing success to generate leads and sales success to convert those. Right. And I think that's the part where, you know, I've had the opportunity to work for some people that really demonstrated what that path looks like and what those connections look like. I love the point that you're making because, you know, a lot of leaders will tell me, man, you know, I can't get people passionate enough.

6:51You know, there's a lack of passion. And I've always found, for me, that passion only comes from belief. And belief only comes from evidence. And so, like, what you just kind of, you know, it's like, hey, I want to get you to climb Mount Everest. But if I don't teach you how to get to base camp one or base camp two, your lungs are going to explode. You're going to die on the way up. And so I like the way that you articulated that is that, you know, you can talk about a grand vision. But, you know, if you can't help people, you know, visualize how you're going to get up that mountain and what are the, you know, how we're going to measure the base camps or what have you.

7:32And then, you know, your job as a leader is to help people believe. I've heard people say, well, that person doesn't believe. So, you know, I think, well, it's your job as a leader to help them believe. Yeah, totally agree with that. That's what you do. Yeah, I think if you can't, you know, Art Coviello used to tell me all the time, your best asset is your passion. Sometimes it might be my worst asset. I don't know. But I think if you're someone who believes in the company, when I look back at, you mentioned Joe Tucci, Art Coviello, Mike Brown, some of the great CEOs that I've worked for, Ed Potts, Mike Potts.

8:15There's so many people that when I look back at them, the way they could get up and talk about the company, the direction of the company and the value the company brings to the customers, it was genuine. It was a genuine passion. And, you know, to me, that's contagious in an organization. If you can see it in the leader, it's easy to have that spread down through the organization. And I think, you know, you know this better than anyone. There's nothing like a person who is representing your company that is passionate and believes in the value they bring to the customer they're selling to. That's the most powerful revenue builder there is out there.

8:52what you guys are talking about really is the difference between what i always think is transactional leadership and transformative leadership yeah yeah so i've been part of a company where it was transactional leadership like you're going to make the number or we're going to put a bullet in you and they didn't do anything to develop you zero yeah just all threats Yeah, yeah. Or you can be part of transformative leadership where they are trying to develop you. You are learning. You are growing. And because of that, you're starting to win. And when you're starting to win, you develop pride. And now you're proud to be part of the company, proud of the people you work for, proud of the leaders, proud of the company.

9:40And that's a culture that people want to be part of. Yeah. They don't want to be part of, you're just a freaking hired gun. And if you don't make it, that's too bad because you're not growing. You're not developing. And no one wants to be part of that. And they will stay part of it until something happens at the company level where they miss the number. And then all of a sudden, here come all those people just running off that ship quick. And you see it every day today, every day. And you can tell the type of culture that they had at that company. because other companies can miss the number, but almost no one wants to leave the company.

10:19Why? Because they're being transformed. They have a manager that's developing them, helping them win. They're developing pride. And they're not going to leave that because you missed a quarter, one quarter.

10:32Rob Potter: Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you enjoy the content, please subscribe. Rate and review the show to help us reach more people. This show is brought to you by Force Management, where we help companies improve sales performance, executing the growth strategy at the point of sale. Check out forcemanagement.com for more information.