What is an extraordinary sales or service team?

I believe it is an entire team of happy top-flight frontline achievers. A unique and special group that is friendly, sincere, efficient, and memorable. An entire staff of frontline "performers" with exceptional attitudes, extra-effort work habits, extraordinary team skills, excellent achievement skills, and a daily commitment to maintaining great team chemistry (esprit d' corps).

A team that inspires customers to remember the experience, return for more, and make a point to enthusiastically recommend it to others.

Building this type of team is best done by developing them. You can recruit or attract achievers, but the "cool aid" tastes better and employees are more likely to become a "True Believer" when they've been motivated, educated, and appreciated since the since the day the company decided to join "The Best of the Best." That's not a problem in most companies. Top achievers are already on the team. They are waiting for the "Achievement Bar" to be raised so they can achieve exceptional success without being accused of being whatever it is the thumb suckers are calling achievers now a' days.

The best way to get people unified and focused on improvement is to have a BIG contest where the stores can compete. A contest about store excellence and team achievement. A contest to find out which team is the best in (pick a category) will drive all teams to excel in that category for the duration the contest. Then move on to the next contest in the next category. Improve, improve, improve, day after day, one by one.

Contests often drive a network of frontline teams to excel well-beyond what they would do without them. If leadership keeps it simple, makes it fun, and makes it exciting, you will learn a great deal about the strengths and weaknesses of your frontline team leaders. They are the key to the Trophy Room.

Teams travel at the speed of their leaders. You are looking for team leaders who have their teams talking more about how to improve various achievement skills than who was at the party last night. Do the team leaders keep it simple and make it fun as they educate, motivate, and appreciate their teams  daily? 

The final chapter of "What Clients Love" by Harry Beckwith should be read by anyone who wants to become extraordinary. Titled, "Why do Some people and Businesses thrive?, he hits it right on the mark thanks to Historian David Landes (The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why some are so rich and some are so poor.), John Dryden, Victor Hansen (The Soul of the Battle), David Pottruck and Terry Pearce (Clicks and Mortar) and a story about Howard Schultz and his belief that the difference between Starbucks and the rest of the coffee chains is his company's commitment and passion.

"Belief and passion: Is this any way to run a company? Give me process, a Gant chart, a system, the hardened executive insists. Give me something concrete: Seven steps, eight keys.

We try. But when we search for the hard nuggets that drive success, we don't find hard nuggets. We find something softer. We find that the equation seems elusive, defying all Intelligent efforts to reduce it to action steps."

I love Harry Beckwith. I am currently reading his latest book, You, Inc: The Art of Selling Yourself, which is as insightful as his previous three books. An excellent read, but I think what he has to say in this final chapter of "What Clients Love," is some of the most accurate, and seldom analyzed, insights he has ever published. But  he had me questioning what I was reading until I read further into the chapter.

"You could struggle for a lifetime to translate these intangibles into your plan. That's why so few companies soar. If every business could reduce belief and passion into easy steps, almost every business would have.

What should managers do? Build something that fills you with passion and then spread its flames into every corner of your business.

Listen to Pearce, Pottruck, Hanson, and Landes: Belief and passion grow businesses. Clients love passionate people and passionate businesses because passion stimulates them-they feel it and feel better too-and because they know that passion produces great work.

Triumph then, then, belongs to those who believe. belief steels us with the courage to take risks that the faithless avoid, and to reap the rewards that follow-to realize that our loves grow in proportion to our courage."

This my take on belief and passion. I think it is fairly simple to put passion and belief into an organization. They are both part of The A's, B, C's, D's, and P's of Achievement. Awareness, Attitude, Action, Belief, Courage, Confidence, Commitment, Desire, Discipline, Development, Passion, Plan, Perseverance

Like everything in life, personal and organizational excellence requires knowledge, insight, and awareness regarding whatever it is a person is trying to accomplish. It all starts with awareness. A daily focus on learning will lead to individual and organizational achievement. It is the end product of an awareness that helps people believe in their ability to excel which in turn leads to commitment  and passion.

In consumer sales and service, few businesses believe they can become extraordinary. Few have a communication (engagement) system that gets everyone on the same page, builds confidence in the company's ability to be special, or even hints at a creating a passionate team of front line personnel.

The Change this manifesto, "Frontline leadership: A Cycle of Engagement," written by George Reavis author of Thanking Customers, is the best  analysis of engagement I have ever read.

This statement begins the manifesto. Right on! The goal of leadership should be an entire team (company) of achievers at every job description in the company. That takes people getting involved with their hearts, minds, and souls. Passion, belief, and extraordinary achievement.

You can add James Cash Penney to that list. He knew "engaged associates will engage customers." He was the first person to know it. Sam Walton was the second. Sam Walton worked for the J. C. Penney company for eighteen months. The time it took him to complete the acclaimed 18 month J.C. Penney Management Training Course. He quit Penney's immediately after graduating and began his own company with the J.C. Penney management program in his briefcase.

In 1970, decades after Walton took the course, I took the very same management training course. I loved the company. When I began what would be a three-year tenure, I was impressed that It was called the Golden Rule company . From day one I trusted them because how could a company focused on the Golden Rule do anything to hurt me?  It was a great ride for a lot of reasons, but learning how to get people involved in a team effort effort to create great teams was invaluable. 

He lists three primary behavior traits that lead to engagement:

      1. People demonstrate their intentions. They commit themselves.

      2. People are reflective. They continuously learn.

      3. People  pay attention. They are focused.

George Reavis is the real deal. I just stumbled across this, but has a system. Mine is similar to a degree, but the important thing is that we have the same insights and beliefs about employee engagement. We've learned different approaches to creating an engaged work force, but they are based on the same social truths. I am sincerely impressed with this manifesto, but I would add the following to the above list.

      4. People support, often with great passion, what they help create.

      5. People who feel important to the cause, produce important results.

I'm running low on ink, but I'll print this manifesto. If this is a new awareness to you, I'd recommend your printing it also. 

As usual Change this has a couple of excellent manifestos that team leaders should be interested in reading. One of them, "Growing Great New Mangers," written by Erika Andersen, the author of the recently published and highly recommended Growing Great Employees: Turning Ordinary People into Extraordinary Performers, is a great piece about how to develop great managers.

She uses gardening as a metaphor in the manifesto, just as she did in her remarkable book. Painting an accurate picture of how to go about planting and growing a bountiful crop of managers. She teaches effective leadership and management skills with a comfortable style that allows you to grasp the essence of her lessons.

I am not a gardener! We a have kind a gardening cult hero that is a part of the daily news I enjoy, but when he arrives in the telecast I can't change channels fast enough. After reading the manifesto, however, I have this urge to buy a plant as a memory of the day I read a number many of my thoughts and practices regarding team leadership, in a simple, but highly effective, manifesto about raising a garden of great managers.

You have no idea how excited I am by the growing number of people who teach leadership and management systems that are focused on motivating, developing, and retaining top achievers.

I love Seth Godin. his books, blog, and insights. I just finished his most recent book ("The Dip" is due out May 10th), Small is the New Big: and 183 Other Riffs, Rants, and Remarkable Business Ideas. I read it from cover to cover, over the course of a couple of weeks as he recommended. It's the first business book I have read from cover to cover in the past year. While I could write about many other riffs, the one that jumped out at me was about choosing to join the best of the best.

It has been my experience-I have asked that question many times in my career-that, despite a wide range of responses to the question, the root of every one of them is that they choose not to be great because they don't know how to transform themselves or their organization into a focus on excellence.

They can't visualize, imagine, or even set a goal to excel because they don't know what to do next. In consumer sales and service they look at a company like Nordstrom and believe it is about everything they can't afford to do as a company. "Well, we just don't have the budget to afford a return policy like they do." When discussing Nordstrom, the extraordinary quality of their face-to-face service is what sets them apart from most other retailers. As the last paragraph of their history (on their website) states, "The company's philosophy has remained unchanged for more than 100 years since its establishment by John W. Nordstrom in 1901: offer the customer the best possible service, selection, quality and value."

I have been shopping at Nordstrom's for decades and I am yet to meet someone who wasn't focused on helping me as if i was the most important person they were going to meet that day. They recruit, attract, and develop sincere highly motivated personnel. Their leaders educate, motivate, and appreciate their staffs daily. Most of how they became great is about simple common sense.

The questions I would ask myself, my colleagues, and my staff would be: How do we become great?, Does anyone have any ideas? Has anyone been great or a part of a great organization? Does anyone know how, other than their great products, Nordstrom became great?

As Seth Godin says, "You get to make a choice." Choose to start a discussion about how you and your organization are going to be great.

In an interesting article, "Team chemistry and winning share symbiotic relationship," in the Seattle Times, Ted Miller (once again) tries to define team chemistry and how to create it.

In sports and business, exceptional teams have great leaders with a system for acquiring (recruiting, attracting, developing) an entire team of achievers, instilling extraordinary teamwork, training their teams daily, and creating team chemistry.

Team chemistry is said to be an uncommon, elusive, and  difficult to create intangible, yet top coaches do it every year, year after year. A few years ago a head football coach who will eventually prove to be a great assistant coach, but not a great head coach, said what many not-ready-for-prime-time coaches say, "If I knew how to create team chemistry, I'd write a book about it and become a millionaire."  (I hope he is right because I'm writing a business book about creating great teams that does will cover the creation of extraordinary teamwork in depth, but it will not offer much that extraordinary sports team leaders are already doing in their team achievement systems.

Tony Donovan does it every year. Locally Mark Few at Gonzaga and Lorenzo Romar at Washington do it annually. All top echelon coaches have a disciplined firm, fair, and fun approach that focuses on the development of exceptional team chemistry. They are respected for their character and the character of their teams.  One by one, player by player, they  make certain all  players are working daily on "doing things the right way."

The formula for team achievement is simple. Leadership, talent, teamwork, training, and team chemistry. I write and speak from experience, not theory. I have created team chemistry many times.

Which comes first, chemistry or winning? Neither. In sports and in business the team leader comes first. Leadership makes it happen. Top flight team leaders do not have laissez fair management styles, they do not hope their staffs will create chemistry. They emphasize it and manufacture it, day after day, year after year, team after team.