Psychological Safety Case Study: The Sales Team

One of the most popular requests from the newsletter feedback survey was for some case studies of psychological safety in practice, so here’s the first one! It’s an interesting case that illustrates why we need to consider the wider systems and structures that people work within. Some of the finer details, names, and a few other bits have been changed to protect identities and any commercially sensitive information.

I was contacted by a senior leader in a pharmaceutical company with a large sales function who were, in their own words, very dysfunctional. People in this team didn’t feel psychologically safe; there was a lot of interpersonal conflict and poor retention of staff. Whilst sales teams often tend towards a higher turnover than other teams, this team had a big problem, and it was perceived that the team members needed some help to learn and practise more psychologically safe behaviours.

The way we work with teams is much like the sociological practice of “action research” and unlike many consultancy firms, we don’t do formal “discovery” phases. We find out the essentials prior to the engagement, and get stuck straight in by working with people and teams in activities that serve as both delivery and discovery. This way, organisations realise the benefits straight away, and we can learn and adapt throughout the process.

In the early phases of working with this group, we surfaced a few issues:

The “Team” was not really a team. It was large (over 75 people in total), and there was no sub-structure – a very flat hierarchy. Flat structures sound great, but due to the size of the group, nobody “felt” like they were in a team. It was really just a big group of people who did similar jobs. They didn’t share a common goal or values (at least not that anyone could articulate) and the group was too large for there to be close working relationships between all team members.

This effect was made all the worse due to the incentive structures. Each person had their own individual targets and bonuses. In fact, most of their pay was made of bonus and commission, rather than salary. This meant that people were very strongly motivated to maximise their commissions, with little regard for how their teammates performed. To make matters worse, on occasion, someone would “disappear” from the team due to poor performance. An email would go around the following day just saying something like “Don is no longer with the team, Carmen will be taking over his clients.”

The team were also set very ambitious quarterly targets and resultant bonuses, and this sometimes incentivised closing smaller sales this quarter rather than larger sales a few weeks later if that meant they would be recorded in the more favourable quarter for the employee’s bonus. Smaller, short-term wins were prioritised over longer-term, higher value but higher risk wins, because working on a large future win didn’t prevent someone being penalised for a less impressive current quarter. 

Notably, there was a finite resource of clients and opportunities. This scarcity, combined with pressure to meet high targets, individual rewards, and somewhat arbitrary deadlines meant that people were incentivised to compete with each other in unhealthy ways. It was rare anyone would ask for help closing a large deal because that risked their deal being stolen by a colleague. Even if they did ask, colleagues may well not be keen to help, because by spending time helping someone else, they might risk missing their own targets. In this competitive environment, admitting a mistake or showing vulnerability would have only put people at risk of being exploited or having opportunities taken off them.

With the intention of maximising performance and achieving great results, the company had unintentionally created a zero-sum game where people felt the only way to win was through someone else losing. Add this dynamic to a very large and distributed team and it resulted in unhealthy competition, game-playing, aggression, stress and burnout.

So what to do?

This took some work to change, it certainly wasn’t overnight, and it didn’t please everyone. To those of us who work with psychological safety and organisational dynamics all the time, it’s fairly clear to see what was going wrong, but these sorts of practices are very common in sales environments, and many in the organisation believed without this level of heated competition, sales would decrease and the business would suffer. Nevertheless, they could see that the retention was at a crisis point, so we were able to work with the leadership team to change the incentive structures and the way that opportunities were distributed. The large group was segmented into smaller teams, based upon their particular specialism and location. Sales targets were changed from purely individual to team-based targets with added individual bonuses. Crucially, people were also now rewarded for “assisting” activities: in theory, someone could personally close zero sales in a quarter and still receive a big paycheque if the team performed well and they helped close those sales. 

What they saw was a marked increase in psychological safety, team cohesion, collaboration, and performance. Whilst some people had been sceptical about the changes (which is understandable), the overall result was dramatically positive. Notably, as a result of these changes, the “performance” (i.e. the £ sales closed) of the “highest performing” individuals reduced, but team performance improved by much more overall. Results became more consistent over time as well, because teams were able to compensate for individual differences in success. The size of the largest deals closed increased, because people were able to work together on them without fear of losing commission or status, and less emphasis was placed on closing short term deals. Whilst the performance of a few “rock star” sales people decreased slightly, the performance of the organisation as a whole increased. 

Although psychological safety is primarily affected by the behaviours of the people we’re in a group with, we cannot ignore the effect that systems, structures and incentives have on behaviour. “Tell me how you’ll measure me and I’ll tell you how I’ll behave.” It’s disturbingly easy to unintentionally incentivise behaviour that damages psychological safety and performance, even if our intentions are good. In this case, blame had been placed on the individuals for how they were behaving, but in fact a lot of the bad behaviour was as a direct result of the systems and structures they were working in.

All the awareness, knowledge, workshops and training in psychological safety wasn’t going to “fix” those behaviours without first tackling the systems and structures that people work within.

Links

What is Action Research?
The Choice, by Eli Goldratt

Related articles:

Edgar Schein’s Three Layers of Organisational Culture
Leadership and Management
Static work vs Generative work
Deming’s 14 Points of Management
Psychological Safety is not the goal
Sociotechnical Theory

Psychological Safety at Work

Psychological Safety and the Ancient World

You might remember we introduced Beatriz Poyton in our last newsletter, who we are lucky enough to be working with for her placement at the moment. Well, inspired by her learning about psychological safety, Bea’s written a thought-provoking guest post about the connections between psychological safety and her own studies of classical civilisations and mythology –  Psychological Safety and the Ancient World. This is a wonderfully fresh perspective on psychological safety and definitely worth a read!

Photo by Constantinos Kollias on Unsplash

Toxic Workplaces

Thanks to Nick Drage for sharing this with me, an episode of Adam Savage’s “Tested” titled “Is Your Workplace Toxic?” Adam talks about blame (and blame cultures), buck passing, micromanaging, and more. I like this statement that Adam makes, reflecting on organisations where people are fired for mistakes: “They can’t make any decisions, because nobody wants to make the wrong decision.”

Six Thinking Hats

Here’s a great little writeup by Mike Bowler on how he’s adapted DeBono’s Six Thinking Hats method for use in an agile retrospective. I really like the process used in this approach, and Mike’s done a great job of showing how the use of coloured sticky notes helps participants to put their hats on 🙂  

Congratulations!

And I want to give a huge shout out to the fabulous team at Warner Music Group including Jo, Jasmine and Chevelle, who won a silver award at the Learning Awards yesterday for the brilliant Management Explored programme, for which we deliver the psychological safety element. It was also wonderful to meet my fellow facilitators for the programme too!

This week’s poem:

Excerpt from You Are Who I Love, by Aracelis Girmay


You, selling roses out of a silver grocery cart

You, in the park, feeding the pigeons
You cheering for the bees

You with cats in your voice in the morning, feeding cats

You protecting the river   You are who I love
delivering babies, nursing the sick

You with henna on your feet and a gold star in your nose

You taking your medicine, reading the magazines

You looking into the faces of young people as they pass, smiling and saying, Alright! which, they know it, means I see you, Family. I love you. Keep on.

You dancing in the kitchen, on the sidewalk, in the subway waiting for the train because Stevie Wonder, Héctor Lavoe, La Lupe

You stirring the pot of beans, you, washing your father’s feet

You are who I love, you
reciting Darwish, then June

Feeding your heart, teaching your parents how to do The Dougie, counting to 10, reading your patients’ charts

You are who I love, changing policies, standing in line for water, stocking the food pantries, making a meal

You are who I love, writing letters, calling the senators, you who, with the seconds of your body (with your time here), arrive on buses, on trains, in cars, by foot to stand in the January streets against the cool and brutal offices, saying: YOUR CRUELTY DOES NOT SPEAK FOR ME

You are who I love, you struggling to see

You struggling to love or find a question