Four people, one job description

Once a month for three months, four experienced Business Partnership Managers at a national education technology provider stepped away from their clients for a full day to sit in a workshop and learn how to be their colleague.

After that, the business ran a three-month review to see whether any of it had stuck.

The colleague in question was genuinely brilliant with people. Warm, quick to read a room, the kind of person clients rang for a chat and somehow ended up renewing with. Their conversion rate ran about 10% ahead of anyone else on the team, and it had done so for long enough that the business concluded there must be a method behind it.

So the obvious move was to work out what the star was doing and teach it to everyone else.

I understand why that felt sensible. People skills look like behaviour. You can watch someone at work and list what you see: they listen more than they talk, they remember the small personal details, they follow up the day after a meeting with something useful. Once it’s written down as a list, it looks exactly like something you could put into a workshop and teach.

The trouble is that the list only describes what came out. What produced it was who that person was, and a series of workshops was never going to install that in anybody else.

Nobody becomes warmer because a facilitator asks them to. What happened instead, and I’ve watched this in enough businesses to recognise it, is that four capable people spent six months being gently told that the way they did the job was the wrong way.

Add it up, and it’s a lot of time. Four people, three full-day workshops each, which is 12 days away from clients before anyone had checked whether it was working. Then a review period where they were comparing their numbers to somebody else’s personality.

And there was something inside that 10% that nobody had looked at before building a programme around it.

The star’s conversions weren’t always good clients. A fair number of them turned out to be heavy on service, raising far more support tickets than other clients and coming back with a steady run of custom requests. All of that took time and attention from people elsewhere in the business, and none of it showed up in the conversion figures.

The warmth that won those clients in the first place set up an expectation of a close relationship, and somebody else then had to deliver it. So the headline number was real, but it carried a cost that only showed up later, in other people’s diaries.

Meanwhile, the other four were each good at the job in their own way.

One of them made a habit of solving the client’s problem well before the contract was due to end. By the time renewal came round, there wasn’t much left to sell, because the client had already seen the value and the conversation had become a formality.

Another was very good at spotting when a client wanted a transaction and had no interest in a relationship. Plenty of education clients want the product, a sensible price, and nobody ringing them every fortnight. This person gave them exactly that, cleanly, and those clients renewed because they’d been left alone to get on with it.

Neither approach looks anything like the star’s, and both were being trained out of the people who did them best.

A new Sales Director ended it.

With fresh eyes, they saw what had been there from the start: the star’s results came from their personality, and the rest of the team already had the skills the job needed. So they stopped the programme and let everyone go back to working in the way that suited them.

Conversion across the team went up by 15 percentage points.

That’s a bigger jump than the gap they’d spent six months trying to close. A group of people good at different things turned out to cover far more kinds of clients than one excellent individual could, and the team as a whole became considerably better than any single member.

Science has a useful habit that fits this neatly. A result only counts once somebody else can reproduce it, in a different lab, without the original researcher in the room. If it only works when one particular person runs it, then what you’ve got is a finding about that person, and you need a different explanation before you can teach it to anyone.

The business had a result that only one of its five people could produce, and it read the failure to reproduce it as a failing in the other four.

It’s worth running a quick check before you commission the next best-practice programme. Take whatever your top performer does and try writing it down as instructions someone else could follow on a Monday morning. If it survives that, you’ve probably got a technique worth sharing. If it keeps turning back into adjectives like warm, natural and good with people, you’re looking at a trait, and the training budget is better spent elsewhere.

And have a proper look at what the headline number is made of before you build anything on it.

Who in your business are you trying to clone right now? And what are the other people on that team already doing well that you’ve never properly looked at?

Have a brilliant week!

Dave Rogers, The Business Explorer

If this struck a chord, my Substack goes further on the same questions. Want help applying any of it to your business? Book a call.

Need a speaker who’ll bring a fresh perspective? Reach me at info@fuelledfitandfiredup.com.

For 30 years, I’ve worked with business owners and leaders who are stuck on the wrong question. My job is to find the right one.

That usually means sitting with the messy “what if” long enough to turn it into clearer thinking and harder questions.