Winning From Failing: Build And Lead A Corporate Learning Culture For High Performance, Josh Seibert

Parte din colectia Sandler Management Series, este o "carte de lucru", complexa, despre psihologia organizationala. 

In WINNING FROM FAILING:  Build And Lead A Corporate Learning Culture For High Performance, Seibert draws on his experiences serving aboard a U.S. Navy nuclear submarine, as well as his years as a Sandler trainer, to provide a roadmap for building a learning culture by equipping sales managers with the skills and knowledge to fulfill the four essential roles of a manager:

Supervisor: Oversight, monitoring data, corrective input

Trainer: Ensuring the team is trained in essential sales skills

Mentor: Ensuring that the salesperson experiences, on a personal level, “how it’s supposed to be done”

Coach: Providing a supportive learning environment by giving the person permission to fail within predetermined boundaries

The process for transforming a team’s learning culture begins with answering four questions:

• What behaviors have to be adopted or changed to get a desired result?
• What knowledge and skills do people need in order to acquire these new behaviors?
• What methodology will most effectively deliver that knowledge and skills?
• How should learning be reinforced over time?

WINNING FROM FAILING presents guidelines and strategies for creating a learning culture within an organization:

• Assessing a person’s ability to learn
• Stepping outside the comfort zone
• Identifying SMART goals for a training program
• How to create accountability
• Benchmarking the training program
• Incentives that support and facilitate professional growth

A learning culture, in which failure is encouraged within clearly defined parameters, doesn’t exist in most companies, primarily because sales managers are promoted into their roles based on their sales competence, not on their ability to teach others.  â€śTypically, this person is competent in the supervisory role, but not involved at all in training, not mentoring what’s been trained, and not coaching people to have moments of experiential learning,” says Seibert.

As a consequence, when team members encounter obstacles, managers will often default into blaming either the salesperson or themselves, or else take on the job of rescuing the sale by going into the field themselves to close the deal.  None of these behaviors contributes to the ongoing development of the salesperson.  â€śEffective leadership reinforcement means identifying, ahead of time, the areas within which failure can occur, and then accepting that failure as part of the learning process when it does take place,” says Seibert.  â€śTo experience ongoing sustainable growth, we have to build that learning and that sustainable behavioral change into the culture.”

Seibert illustrates many of the book’s principles with examples from his experiences at Prudential Insurance – where he turned one of the lowest-performing agencies into a national leader, and from his experience at the Navy’s submarine school where he was exposed to the military’s essentials of training and development.

In developing personnel for the submarine program, notes Seibert, the Navy implemented what the Sandler training system refers to as the three points of the Success Triangle:  Behavior, Attitude, and Technique.  â€śThe Navy understood that the Attitude point of the triangle was not enough. The key to optimizing both the Technique and Behavior points of the triangle is failure within a controlled learning environment,” he says.  â€śCreating such an environment is the responsibility of the people in charge of making sure learning happens.”