A lot has changed in the way we sell today, but most senior sales professionals believe that the fundamental core of selling remains the same. They emphasize often that the evolution rests in the advent of technology that equips teams so that they perform well and impact business outcomes. Today, sales professionals have means at their disposal that helps enable them to learn faster and deliver results in time. There’s also more access to information which makes the growth journey of a sales professional today very different from someone who’s been in the industry for more than two decades. However, at the end of the day, every organization looks at its sales teams from the lens of accountability. Companies care about their bottom line and what they can do to equip their sales team to drive business results.
We spoke to Rakhee Chachra recently who leads global sales and business development in IBM and has spent over a decade as a business leader. She reiterated that companies care about driving revenue, and when it comes to achieving that metric and delivering value as a sales professional, building good client relationships is of utmost importance. This is significant because organizations invest a lot of time and money in product, company and process training for sales professionals. However, what really yields results is training them in skills that allow them to not just chase a sale but bring it home.
You can listen to the full conversation with Rakhee on Spotify.
We have previously through our blogs spoken about the various power skills that play a very critical role in driving key sales metrics like win rate. Rakhee in her conversation with us highlighted three things that a sales professional must do on a daily basis. We’ll break those down for you into skills that they must develop to do them efficiently and effectively.
Active Client Engagement
Customer-facing teams that develop lasting relationships with their clients are more equipped to maximize output and increase revenue. Client engagement works on different levels, but many sales professionals make the mistake of approaching it from a single lead generation perspective. If done correctly, client engagement can help increase your Average Revenue Per User while also generating more collective revenue for the company than multiple clients in the long run. Skills like Empathy, Influencing People and Conflict Management play a huge role in determining this.
Empathy is the emotional ability to understand, share and anticipate the feelings of another.
- Understanding client motivations
- Unlocking client emotions
- Building a trustworthy relationship with the client
Influencing People is the ability to modify and affect a person’s thinking, sentiment, behavior, or general perception towards some object or issue through request, reason, demand or indirect methods.
- Using solid data and examples to make a point
- Tailoring messaging and communication to client needs
- Influencing clients with targeted information
Conflict Management is the ability to dissolve perceived disagreements with tact and diplomacy to orchestrate win-win solutions. It limits the negative aspects of conflict and helps parties create open-mindedness within their relationships.
- Managing conflicts in time without process delays
- Aligning key metrics with the team to increase productivity
- Tackling internal conflicts without involving others
Build a Knowledge Repository
The ability to think beyond the obvious and address client needs with innovative solutions is one of the most underrated skills. In order to arrive at this point, a sales professional needs to build a repository of important information that they can routinely go back to and refer to. This allows the sales professional to deliver results that are impactful in the long-term while delivering solid value in the present. Skills like Critical Thinking and Result Orientation are crucial to develop in order to achieve this.
Critical Thinking is the ability to make objective decisions or logical deductions that support one’s views and often solve problems and analyze information.
- Recognizing the implications of actions/events beforehand
- Identifying gaps in information
- Making informed assumptions
Result Orientation is the ability to purposefully create and accomplish goals while also prioritizing, raising achievability standards, and working within timeframes with a strong drive towards target achievement.
- Making clients feel heard to mold their perspective
- Achieving daily targets
- Handling obstacles preemptively
Upskill
Reflecting and continuously developing skills is usually taken for granted at work. However, for a sales professional, continuous learning is the differentiating factor between a good sales professional and a fantastic sales professional. This requires one core skill – Curiosity.
Curiosity is the ability to be driven by eagerness, logic and realistic observations to explore and seek out novel information or experiences.
- Understanding the needs of the client
- Disallowing biases and assumptions to influence observations
- Making informed decisions
These skills, if developed right from the beginning in professionals, can help organizations achieve business goals faster and with minimal friction. Fundamento’s skills readiness platform works with organizations to provide customer-facing teams personalized and data-backed learning delivered in the flow of work to ensure people are equipped with the right skills to achieve outcomes.
Reach out to us at business@fundamento.ai if this is the solution for you.
It’s almost the most common response from senior sales professionals when you ask them about behavioral skills in sales. “No one ever told us that we needed behavioral skills to sell better. We just learnt it as we went along,” and that’s why most organizations struggle with developing high-output sales teams. Behavioral skills or as we call them “power skills” like Critical Thinking, Empathy, Result Orientation, Persuasion, Emotional Self Control are critical skills a solid, productive sales team needs.
However, upskilling sales and customer experience teams is already a challenge for most organizations. It’s often very difficult to go beyond product and process training during onboarding largely due to time constraints, pressure targets and low adoption rates. Across two years, we’ve spoken to over 300 sales leaders and business development heads to understand their priorities and challenges with training sales teams and how they are able to maximize growth.
More often than not, once on the job, sales professionals get caught up in the web of targets and their learning is limited to on-the-job training. However, this hampers long-term growth because most professionals lose out on critical skills needed to do the job unless they’re mentored by their managers. Two skills that hold deep relevance in sales throughout a sales professional’s career are Resilience and Influencing People.
Resilience is the intrinsic ability to overcome hardships and to adaptively cope with stress in a way that allows one to bounce back and resume normal cognitive and physical functions.
We’ve spoken about this power skill a lot particularly when it comes to sales. In a conversation we had with Natasha D’souza of Leap Club, ex-Zomato, we emphasized upon how Resilience plays out across sales and customer experience roles and why it’s crucial to develop in professionals. This is how this power skill plays out in sales particularly:
- Finding new learnings despite not being able to close a sale
- Moving past rejections and overcoming client objections at every stage of the sales cycle
- Maintaining consistent efforts and staying motivated when falling short in target achievement
Influencing People is the ability to modify and affect a person’s thinking, sentiment, behavior, or general perception towards some object or issue through request, reason, demand or indirect methods.
Being able to persuade potential customers to buy in is probably one of those skills frequently taken for granted in a sales professional. While it is considered almost a prerequisite to sales, most organizations don’t invest in really developing this skill in professionals. It is largely expected to be learnt on the job. However, if the skill is actively developed in individuals right from the beginning, it can lead to demonstrable business growth from day one.
- Using data to persuade stakeholders cross-functionally
- Adapting arguments as per needs and interests of relevant stakeholders to align them with your approach
- Using compelling arguments to change opinions of stakeholders
- Understanding complex or underlying needs and choosing words with caution while selling
Sales training needs to essentially cover all ends in order for it to be effective enough to impact business metrics. Organizations often get stuck in the loop of manager training and product training. While this is how conventionally senior sales professionals of today have learnt the ropes, in high-growth startups scaling sales teams rapidly, there is a need for speed when it comes to outcomes. The third missing element in the loop is power skills which actively bridges that gap.
Double clicking on this shows that maximizing growth in sales works on four levels:
- Onboarding training: Ensuring that your workforce is equipped with not only product and process knowledge, but critical power skills required to succeed in a customer facing role.
- Peer-to-peer and top-down learning: Most of the skills required to do exceptionally well in sales are already embedded in people within the system and if that is actively exchanged across teams, it can lead to exponential growth.
- Consultative selling: Going beyond SOPs and getting sales teams to think critically in order to not only bring in customers but retain them is crucial to creating long-term growth.
- Regular refresher training: Implementing learning programs that are easily adaptable and retainable to create a consistent upskilling culture in the team is key to continuous success.
In a recent conversation we had on Skill Flex with Vardan Malhotra, head of business development at AON HR Learning Centre, he said that learning in the flow of work and personalization of learning were the two most effective ways of increasing adoption of learning and improving RoI on learning.
At Fundamento, we believe that’s the way forward as well. Our skills readiness platform integrates with an organization’s workflow to deliver data-backed learning in the flow of work. Book a demo with us today to know more.
An ed-tech company saw a cumulative increase in team potential after implementing Fundamento’s skill-based, data-backed learning design.
The Challenge
A leading ed-tech company needed to improve its Average Revenue Per User through client retention, upselling, and maximizing return. They came to Fundamento with the clear objective of improving long term success by nurturing all leads and maximizing return at every stage of customer journey. One of the biggest challenges that the organization faced was the inability of its sales agents to optimize revenue through client retention, upselling and add-ons. This meant that their sales team lacked the skills needed for customer retention.
While the challenge the company faced had implications on several business metrics, their core focus was on Average Revenue Per User. The company wanted to consistently upsell, but they had never taken a skill-based and data-backed approach before to solve for people issues. Fundamento conducted an objective analysis on what the underlying factors for their low ARPU was. With Fundamento, they sought an understanding of what drains and drives their team and what solutions would be the most effective.
Using Fundamento’s Platform
Using our Skills Finder, the company was able to unlock a detailed skill map which emphasized upon the different skills that must be developed in sales teams in order to achieve high performance. These skills were mapped as per their importance in the role.
The power skills identified were:
- Empathy – Beginner
The emotional ability to understand, share and anticipate the feelings of another.
- Curiosity – Intermediate
The ability to be driven by eagerness, logic and realistic observations to explore and seek out novel information or experiences.
- Initiative – Intermediate
The ability to proactively seize opportunities and achieve beyond what is required or expected.
- Critical Thinking – Advanced
The ability to make objective decisions or logical deductions that support one’s views and often solve problems and analyze information.
- Result Orientation – Advanced
The ability to purposefully create and accomplish goals while also prioritizing, raising achievability standards, and working within timeframes with a strong drive towards target achievement.
- Persuasion – Advanced
The ability to use effective methods of persuasion in order to make a point, achieve consensus, or achieve the desired results.
Analysis
Fundamento conducted a thorough measurement exercise with the company and delivered objective insights on skill levels that are crucial to improve the business metric. These were done using skill assessments.
Furthermore, using detailed 360° feedback surveys, Fundamento also validated the skill scores and dug deeper into blind spots and hidden strengths. This provided the company with deep intelligence that was well grounded in data and science.
Prepared a contextualized learning design backed by data
After identifying the areas of development, Fundamento used the data collected from the company to design a contextualized learning map. This training design focussed on three key aspects of learning keeping in mind implementation as well.
One of the things experts at Fundamento observed at the company was that adoption of learning and time constraints were big blockers in implementing any form of training. Therefore, Fundamento implemented a learning design that embedded itself in the flow of work. This was done across three stages:
Onboarding:
- Acclimating new hires to their role so they hit the ground running
- Hand-holding and guiding employees so they don’t feel overwhelmed by target pressure
Peer-to-peer:
- Inculcating proven best practices of high achievers to bring consistency in employee performance
- Making theme-based, real client conversations accessible for learning at their own convenience
Refresher:
- Reinforcing the ideal ways of approaching customers and improving the primary metric through reverse-engineered mock calls
- Identifying specific problem areas through data insights and addressing them through impactful live workshops
Demonstrated Impact
After implementing Fundamento’s data-backed training design, the company saw immediate impact. The team demonstrated significantly higher cumulative potential than before. There was additionally a 17% increase in the number of potential high performers as compared to before.
Putting together a good sales team is incredibly hard, and ensuring that the team delivers high output consistently is even harder. Most companies struggle with finding the right talent that’s able to understand their company, product and the market to deliver impact. Companies shell out a significant amount of their L&D budgets in training sales teams. The impact of that is meant to directly be on business, but due to several factors, that impact is rarely seen.
Sales representatives need what we call “power skills” in order to deliver high output. There are two hurdles here that hamper the development of sales representatives. Sales teams function typically on the back of targets that they are under pressure to achieve on a day-to-day basis. This means that they get little time to take out to invest in their individual professional development. Despite efforts from the organization’s end, it becomes hard for employees to create a learning culture that’s embedded in their flow of work. Subsequently, organizations are yet to adopt a skill-based approach to people strategy and focus a lot of product and process training versus power skill development.
At Fundamento, with our team of I/O psychologists, we’ve identified two skills that if developed in leaders, can dramatically improve the performance of the sales teams. Peer-to-peer learning therefore becomes a key dependent in this effort. These skills are: Planning and Organizing, and Achievement. These skills are also deeply correlated and have a solid impact on how the other skill manifests in an individual.
Power skills deep-dive:
Planning and Organizing is the ability to decide in advance what needs to be done and set up a systematic plan of action bound by time, objectives, priorities and resources.
It is of utmost importance for leaders to set the ball rolling for the team and help them prioritize deliverables. This power skill is the most functional aspect of ensuring that sales representatives don’t take their eyes off the ball and deliver results consistently.
How it manifests in sales leadership:
Leaders that develop the Planning and Organizing power skill are able to set challenging goals and generate action plans for both, the charter they’re assigned and their customer journey node. Additionally, the skill enables them to ensure that action plans across charters and customer journey nodes solve for both short-term and long-term goals.
- Resource management: Organizes resources efficiently to support business needs by balancing key resources across multiple projects
- Efficient goal-posting: Sets ambitious goals that require focus and persistence, monitors progress systematically and course corrects if required
- Informed prioritization: Effectively manages the allocation of tasks in relation to project goals so everyone can prioritize their tasks as per set objectives
- Financial knowledge: Manages budgets across projects and checks for commercial viability to take financially sound decisions
- Vision mapping: Plans tasks/projects in a manner that solves for both short-term and long-term goals of the organization
- Quality execution: Suggests practical solutions to address ongoing challenges that impact the execution of projects and overall results
Achievement is one’s ability to accomplish challenging goals and take calculated risks. It is the drive to raise the bar with consistency and determination.
At multiple occasions, sales teams are faced with situations where they need to take on-the-spot decisions and risk while also improving their output consistently. This power skill allows leaders to inculcate a culture of raising the bar within the team.
How it manifests in sales leadership:
Leaders with Achievement as a power skill are able to accomplish challenging goals by taking complete ownership of their assigned charter and customer journey node and are equipped to measure the risks involved. Moreover, they’re able to develop business positively by taking calculated risks while dealing with challenging goals across multiple charters.
- Enhance productivity: Streamlines operations, optimizes process workflows and eliminates redundancies for increased productivity
- Go above and beyond: Sets challenging goals for themselves in line with business needs and views them as an opportunity to achieve beyond expectations
- Top tier output: Delivers high performance by completing all tasks within the decided time frame and raising the bar on quality of output with minimum guidance
- Experimentation: Challenges existing practices constructively and takes calculated risks to deliver exponential results
- Look ahead: Identifies the challenges and adjustments needed across projects and sets priorities to execute accordingly
- Efficient multi-tasking: Switches back and forth among multiple tasks and stakeholders to ensure all projects are executed with high quality
When leaders are equipped with these power skills, they’re able to percolate a culture within their teams that rests upon delivering quality output. Measuring and developing teams in power skills is the first step to ensuring your team delivers high output.
Fundamento works with organizations to not only measure power skills and design interventions, but also to deliver learning in the flow of work.
An individual’s success and purpose have always been deeply linked because of their ability to enable each other. In any organization, in order to build a high-performing workforce, it is critical to embed a shared purpose within the organization. We’ve in the past written a lot about purpose. This week, we got together with a panel of experts to discuss how enabling a sense of purpose in organizations can overall impact organizational productivity.
The conversation was with Rachele Focardi, multigenerational workforce strategist and Geetika Dang, Management Consulting Principal (Talent & Organizational Consulting) at Accenture Strategy. Both speakers brought in a unique perspective about the world of work and the importance of power skills in building workforces that are equipped for the future of work.
Watch the full conversation here.
Purpose and its layers
The topic in itself is layered and has a lot of different aspects and factors to it. However, for organizations to approach purpose from whichever direction they might see fit, they need to focus on empowering people to perform at the workplace. The perennial question that comes up here is that has purpose always been important to organizations or is it now that the emphasis on building people organizations is centerstage that the narrative is shifting.
Rachele shared that the concept of purpose has really changed and evolved over the last couple of years. She elucidated, “My focus is on helping organizations bridge the generational divide and purpose is an interesting one because I think all young generations are extremely purposeful.” This insight deserves a pause. The younger generations have been extremely vocal about working with organizations that focus on more than functional work. “One of the biggest issues actually within generations or organizations is actually this idea that the young generations are very purposeful and they want to work on things that are bigger than themselves,” added Rachele.
Most older generations are considered unpurposeful. However, that’s not entirely true because the older generations have led change to the extent where we reap its benefits today. It is with time and the rigmarole of corporate life, that their sense of purpose has taken a backseat. The pandemic changed the core of an employee’s relationship with their employer. The workforce of today feels a need to realign their career to a greater sense of purpose. So, all of a sudden the older generations have had the opportunity to re-embrace a sense of purpose that was there always, but was probably long lost.
Geetika touched upon a Bersin study that she was a part of back in 2018. At the time they primarily spoke to people heads to understand how organizations were navigating from being profit driven to being purpose led. Through the course of the study, they realized that organizations that were purpose driven were also more interested in understanding whether the employees’ purpose and the organization’s purpose were aligned. That in fact automatically led to Improvement in performance, employee experience, engagement and a lot more. Geetika stated that as a result, today purpose has become extremely important.
“If you remember the World Economic Forum, everybody was talking about sustainability. Today everybody is talking about climate change. At the end of the day, your organization is a reflection of your people and what you are standing for. Are you standing for the right causes? This matters today,” elaborated Geetika.
The fact that most organizations are coming to terms with today is that if you move away from profit and towards purpose, it naturally leads to a lot of improvement in business metrics that matter. The big question here is how?
Geetika explains, “Purpose helps people actually engage and more often than not optimizes the full potential of the entire workforce. How that actually happens is because once you’re aligned and understand the whole purpose of where the organization is coming from, the entire workforce ends up being more engaged, motivative and productive. Purpose helps build a culture of excellence and it also helps drive innovation and ultimately leads to performance.”
The post pandemic workplace study 2022 showed that 35% to 45% of employees across generations want to realign their career to a greater sense of purpose.
Articulating purpose
How do you help organizations define and articulate purpose?
There are organizations that just have a purpose in their description. Then there are many companies, organizations and industries that have a harder time with that. However, many of these companies are actually building a task force within the organization of people that are passionate about purpose. They’re trying to make the world better by developing humans inside and outside of our work. If the topmost leader of an organization has a certain vision, how does it percolate down? This is where change happens.
“Making sure that they’re bringing everybody into the conversation and ensuring they’re equally convinced and engaged in making sure that we are bringing that change automatically is how any change will percolate down to the rest of the organization,” said Geetika.
Purpose and Growth
The pandemic showed us that a lot of the challenges we’re facing are interconnected, and we can’t solve those challenges alone. The ability to collaborate and work with diverse people has become absolutely critical. The glue that holds people together, no matter what their background or generation is linked to purpose.
“Collaboration leads to a 35% chance to beat the competition, according to research. Decision making is faster, innovation is much stronger and the chance to become a fast growing company is much stronger. When you look at what facilitates this, you realise that it’s all teams that are connected, that understand each other, that value each other’s diversity. That requires power skills to be able to frankly understand one another in an environment where people are actually encouraged to be themselves as opposed to, you know, fit a specific mold. This is possible only in teams that are purposeful,” shared Rachele.
In conclusion, the one thing that stood out amidst this discussion was that everybody wants to be successful, and feel that they’re working on something bigger than themselves. If an organization is able to articulate that for them and is able to ensure that they can articulate it themselves, then any team is going to see and witness a level of growth that is unprecedented.
The year 2022 was all about corporate buzzwords. Recently, SHRM called these buzzwords nothing but “employee job contingency plans”. However, the rising trends in the world of work vis-a-vis people and culture are hard to look past for employers. Moreover, we saw the market turn on its head as a lot of employers spent the last year struggling with employee retention, while also grappling with the impending recession that led to mass layoffs. Nonetheless, of all of the trends out there, one struck strong and continues to be at the center of discussions – Quiet Quitting.
What is quiet quitting?
Recently, we spoke to Evelyn Kwek, Managing Director of Great Place to Work ASEAN & ANZ. She in fact reiterated the virality of the term Quiet Quitting. In 2022, a 17 second TikTok video discussing the idea of “Quiet Quitting” went viral. This video, along with many news outlets discussing the concept of Quiet Quitting, gave the idea a lot of legitimacy.
LinkedIn described Quiet Quitting as “rejecting the notion that work has to take over one’s life and that employees should go above and beyond what their job descriptions entail.”
The idea was that people should not “lean in” to employers who don’t seem to care. It was popular because it resonated with people who were feeling overworked, especially after the pandemic blurred the lines between personal and work lives.
This trend coincided with another big event in 2022. At the start of 2022, the economy was at an all-time high, but due to layoffs, companies were in a sticky place. Gartner elaborated on this by introducing “Quiet Hiring”. Another buzzword that caught the world of work in a spin. Amidst this shift, it became critical for companies to play a very intentional role to engage, treat and bring out the best from their employees, especially in times of recession.
To better understand how to improve employee engagement, Great Place to Work released a study on Quiet Quitting and found that organizations certified as “best” had an overall higher average of motivated employees and their leaders tended to have the behaviors and abilities to build better relationships with them. To learn more, Great Place to Work deployed their proprietary survey, the Trust Index Survey, to better understand employee experience in the workplace. The survey had a similar methodology to Zenger and Folkman. After analyzing the data, Great Place to Work concluded that Quiet Quitting is less about an employee’s willingness to work harder or more creatively and more so about a manager’s ability to build a relationship with their employees. The results showed that over nine in 10 of the employees working in one of the best companies said that they look forward to coming to work and were willing to give extra to get the job done.
Breaking the data down into power skills
This data is critical. At Fundamento, we sat with this data to get to the core of what impacts these findings. The study concluded that leaders who have the least percentage of team members who are Quiet Quitting are the ones that are performance-driven but also have a focus on building relationships. The number one behavior that drives this is trust. Great Place to Work found that there are three critical behaviors that leaders can demonstrate to build trust: an ability to build positive relationships with employees, consistency in words and deeds, and competence in their field of work.
In order to build trust, Fundamento’s team of I/O psychologists derived that these power skills are critical to develop in teams:
- Transparency
- Teamwork & Collaboration
- Developing Others
Let’s break this down further.
Organizations spend a lot of time focusing on how to improve their baseline and enhance productivity. The most common questions around this are:
- How do I make sure that I get the best out of my people?
- How do I drive productivity?
- How do I use technology to automate, to streamline?
- How do I drive online collaboration amongst the team?
One of the most effective ways to resolve these doubts is to implement a skills-based system in organization. If the above power skills are developed in managers and leaders, a large part of the problem leading to the phenomenon of quiet quitting can be dealt with.
Transparency
The ability to maintain honesty, openness, and integrity about emotions, beliefs, and ethical principles.
For any leader to build a culture of trust within the organization, Transparency is a critical skill. This is how it can potentially manifest in a leadership role:
- Set realistic performance expectations to give a clear sense of direction
- Create communication channels for better and timely exchange of information
- Keep the team together through regular feedback on goal achievement
Teamwork & Collaboration
The ability to respectfully work with others to achieve a shared goal, build group synergy and enthusiastic participation.
Ensuring that the team is collaborating in a productive way is essential to building a culture of high trust. This works in two ways. One from a standpoint of deep work and efficiency and the other from the lens of building a culture of knowledge sharing and team productivity. This is how it manifests in a leadership role:
- Understands and aligns team members basis their complementary skills and expertise to foster collaboration and use resources in the most efficient manner
- Promotes group morale and productivity by being clear, objective and focused.
- Involves others in decisions and plans that affect them to give them an opportunity to share ideas that help them achieve a common goal for the organization
Developing Others
The ability to determine strengths and areas requiring improvement in others and mentoring or coaching them towards enhancing their abilities.
It’s crucial for leaders to invest time and energy on their team in order to trickle behavior and culture down the line. This manifests in the role in multiple ways:
- Effectively transfers acquired knowledge and expertise, and imparts important information to others to increase the overall efficiency and productivity of the organization
- Gives feedback that is constructive and actionable based on facts and behavioral patterns, to help the team understand what they’re doing right and what they should improve on
- Tracks team performance effectively by ensuring the strategy and vision of the organization is translated into timely execution for maximum output
There has been an increased focus on hybrid workforce and productivity in the last two years. This shift is due to the ever-changing and unpredictable workforce environment. Organizations are reconsidering their employees’ optimal working arrangements, which have shifted to a hybrid model. In this model, both remote and in-person employees must find a sense of belonging, connection and collaboration. Discussion has also shifted to how companies can build agile teams and drive productivity. Power skills play a big role in initiating this change effectively.
Quiet Quitting and other trends have also led to organizations shifting focus on culture, leadership development and upskilling, especially in developing countries. Companies are making a conscious effort to invest in their people and help them stay relevant. Evelyn Kwek said, “In countries with a shrinking workforce such as Singapore, businesses are looking to get the most out of fewer workers. As immigration has become a politically sensitive topic, the need to get more done with less becomes even more urgent. Companies need to focus on ways of working as well as benefits, allowing for mental health resources and days off, but also addressing the underlying issues of toxic behavior, workloads, and productivity.”
As we move forward, Kwek believes that we are going to see a lot of organizations take charge of employee well-being and focus on increasing productivity by facilitating growth, trust and relationships in organizations.
Do listen to our latest episode of Skill Flex with Evelyn Kwek, releasing on Thursday, 9th February, 2023, exclusively on Spotify.
Fundamento conducted an assessment exercise with 250+ students across tier 1, 2 and 3 colleges for an education management company
A harsh reality that still exists in today’s world of work is that employers globally continue to value credentials over potential while hiring. Particularly while hiring freshers, students from tier 1 colleges are at an advantage, and interviews and résumés are often misleading in reflecting the skill-levels of these candidates. Over the last year, we’ve highlighted the importance of power skills in improving performance at work and how it impacts business. This is especially true in customer facing roles.
Companies today are adopting a skill-based approach to hiring but the basic filtering of candidates continues to be a problem especially in organizations that hire at scale. Access to opportunity more often than not rests upon external uncontrollable factors like background and education institutions which typically restricts companies from accessing a much larger pool of talent available in the market. Remote work has helped drive this change to a large extent with resources spread across tier 2 and 3 cities and towns. However, there’s still a long way to go.
Fundamento worked with an education management company in the not-for-profit sector to showcase the potential of its diverse talent base. We conducted a thorough Skill Mapping exercise and assessed over 250 jobseekers who were fresh out of college. They were assessed across skills relevant for customer-facing roles in a remote work environment. We found through our study that their future-readiness was not dependent on the college or background of the candidate.
The study
With on-the-job success being measured by remote work performance at the time, it was incredibly important to assess them on certain skills that played a huge role in determining this. Using the Skills Finder, Fundamento identified that the organization would benefit from assessing the following power skills for freshers:
Effective Communication
The ability to exchange information, share and consider different viewpoints and pay close attention to the speaker while responding in clear, concise, and impartial ways.
Under this power skill, sub-skills like Negotiation and Persuasion were also measured. This was critical as these skills are highly indicative and predictive of success in sales roles.
Curiosity
The ability to be driven by eagerness, logic and realistic observations to explore and seek out novel information or experiences.
For customer-facing roles, it’s important that individuals are driven by eagerness and are able to probe extensively to understand a client’s needs to establish specific pain points that can be related to a company’s product.
Professional Reliability
The ability to be responsible for and willing to hold account of one’s functioning, combined with the ability to maintain transparency, autonomy and dependability in all aspects of work.
Keeping in mind the remote work setup, the candidates required an understanding of the importance of getting work done and engaging in appropriate knowledge sharing to accomplish that.
Resilience
The intrinsic ability to overcome hardships and to adaptively cope with stress in a way that allows one to bounce back and resume normal cognitive and physical functions.
In the rapidly-changing world of work, it is essential for individuals who enter the workforce to not be bogged down by objections, rejections and pressure while consistently finding new learnings.
The individuals assessed were spread across all three tiers. Almost 50% of the cohort had completed their Bachelor’s from colleges ranked as Tier 3.
The finding
Individuals from tier 2 & 3 colleges outperformed tier 1 individuals specifically on Effective Communication. The primary differentiator was seen in sub-skills Negotiation and Persuasion, both of which, as mentioned earlier, are predictive of success in specific customer-facing roles. It was determined that students from diverse backgrounds tend to offer unique insights and are equipped with critical power skills crucial to succeed in customer-facing roles.
Considering this assessment was conducted during a remote work situation, the main objective was to measure the readiness of individuals for remote work placements. Resilience stood out as another key skill that students across tiers scored well in.
There was in fact a unique correlation between GPA and Resilience for tier 2 & 3 college students. GPA was strongly correlated with micro-behaviors like the ability to work independently, show willingness to learn, and persevere. Nonetheless, the results were unable to capture a student’s ability to be innovative & creative, or negotiate effectively based on a correlation with their GPA. It was concluded that the assessment results showcased a more holistic measure of an individual’s overall future-readiness, regardless of their GPA or background.
.png)
Another unique finding that emerged showed that students pursuing HR specialization showed highest tendency towards innovative thinking & curiosity (60%
average score) v/s other students pursuing Finance, Operations Management etc. (51% average score), and students pursuing Finance specialization displayed the highest average performance in Resilience (56% average score) v/s other other students.
Why is Resilience an important power skill for customer-facing roles?
In the current work environment, there’s a need for agile workforces. Step one in that direction is to develop critical power skills in individuals such as Resilience. Resilience allows individuals to be able to quickly adapt to changing situations. This is how it can potentially play out in a Sales or Customer Experience role:
- Finding new learnings and being determined despite not closing sales or facing rejections
- Moving past any client objections or critique in order to achieve goals
- Maintaining consistent efforts to bridge the gap in target achievement
- Staying focussed and not being bogged down by the need of working consistently under pressure
- Prioritizing tasks in order to deliver high-quality output
- Embracing criticism and viewing it in positive light
Analysis
One of the biggest mistakes organizations make while not taking a skill-based approach towards hiring is losing out on jobseekers who might add immense value to the company. With remote work, employers now have access to an entire pool of individuals who irrespective of background or college, tend to be highly skilled and future-ready to perform well in a customer-facing role.
The top three takeaways of this data insight were:
1. Power skills are objective predictors of future-readiness in individuals
2. Measuring power skills allows for eliminating bias from the traditional hiring process
3. Power skills give employers a better sense of which role an individual is more suited to, for instance, someone who scored high in Effective Communication is likely to be a better negotiator and someone who scored high in Curiosity might be better at consultative selling.
If you want to power up your organization with behavioral skills, reach out to us at Fundamento.
Fundamento conducted an assessment exercise with 1500+ Sales Agents working in a fast-growing tech startup.
Sales agents across industries typically operate on targets and work under immense pressure. They deal with rejection on a daily basis and every sale they make or do not make impacts business tremendously. Sales also sees the highest attrition rates as organizations find it hard to create incentive for employees amidst high pressure and monotony. This doubles up as one of the biggest challenges companies face.
Sales over most customer-facing roles requires behavioral skills that are extremely crucial to consistently show results and to curb attrition. At Fundamento, we’ve spent the last two years working with customer-facing teams and sales representatives. With the data that we’ve gathered, we can safely conclude that behavioral skills such as Emotional Self Control, Critical Thinking, Systems Thinking are crucial to sales success. Nonetheless, most companies do not prioritize behavioral skills while hiring or training sales agents.
However, recently we conducted an assessment exercise with 1500+ sales agents working with a fast-growing tech startup and found that factors like years of experience play a much smaller role in the performance of sales agents as behavioral skills do and that the former has minimal impact on the latter.
In this case, we assessed sales agents on 4 critical skills that are important for their role as sales agents. These skills were choses on the back of the job description and what the role requires individuals to do on a day-to-day basis.
The four power skills were:
Emotional Self Control
The ability to discipline oneself and restrain (with composure) one’s emotional reactions or immediate outbursts.
Professional Reliability
The ability to be responsible for and willing to hold account of one’s functioning, combined with the ability to maintain transparency, autonomy and dependability in all aspects of work.
Systems Thinking
The cognitive ability of a person to adopt a holistic perspective and evaluate the interplay of multiple dimensions to solve problems and make decisions.
Result Orientation
The ability to purposefully create and accomplish goals while also prioritizing, raising achievability standards, and working within timeframes with a strong drive towards target achievement.
The finding
In a cohort of 1575 sales agents, we noticed that the average skills score across years of experience for power skills like Emotional Self Control, Professional Reliability, Systems Thinking and Result Orientation was nearly the same. This meant that agents with no work experience had almost the same average skills score with minimal delta as agents with 3+ years of experience.
In fact, on breaking this data down, we saw that on average freshers with no prior work experience scored better than agents with work experience.
Deep-Dive
A common misconception is that years of experience equals on-the-job training which signals high performance. For sales agents specifically, this is extremely far from the truth. In order for sales agents to succeed, there is a need for them to develop key power skills that help them essentially improve sales. Fundamento’s data validates this.
Sales agents with 3 years of experience only had a marginally better skill score than agents with no prior work experience
In the same cohort of sales agents, those with no prior work experience had a skills score of 57% and agents with over three years of experience only saw a slight increase of 1.5% in their skill score.
Sales agents with 1-2 years of experience actually had a lower skills score than agents with no work experience
In the same cohort of sales agents, those with no prior work experience had a skills score of 57% and agents with over three years of experience saw a decrease of 0.75% in their skills score.
Experience doesn’t mean better skills in customer-facing roles
This data shows no correlation between years of work experience and development of behavioral skills. Organizations more often than not, lay emphasis on years of work experience for better performance in their sales teams. This usually dictates decisions they make while hiring these agents and also while training them internally. To the contrary, Fundamento’s data clearly shows that experience has no impact on behavioral skills in sales agents and these power skills are the key drivers of performance.
Moreover, while hiring sales agents, experience then becomes an insignificant metric as performance depends on the development of critical power skills that directly impact performance. The only way in which years of experience would be relevant in this discourse is if it deeply influenced power skills in individuals, which it does not.
Need for skill-based systems
As we evaluate the current world of work and how it impacts people decisions across companies, it is crucial for us to also look at what lies ahead in terms or people strategy, learning and development. Fundamento’s data reinforces the need for something that’s been massively debated over the last few years and is now being accounted for by many organizations – skill-based thinking.
There is a deep and urgent need for skill-based systems to be implemented within organizations in order to activate real growth. These are behavioral skills, that we refer to as power skills, which are transferable and easy to develop in individuals. If organizations are able to measure these skills in teams right from hiring to training and make it a part of their approach to people strategy, it would dramatically change the landscape of work.
This has been the year of corporate buzzwords especially when it comes to employee productivity. From quiet quitting to productivity paranoia, the one thing that’s been at the forefront of discussions is the feeling of discontentment either amongst employees or within teams. Moreover, organizations have over the last few years witnessed a huge change in the world of work. Today, remote and hybrid working environments have become commonplace and are indeed preferred by employees at large. This is bound to come with its own undercurrents that can now be felt setting themselves strongly in organizational systems. Quiet constraint highlights the latest one in the mix.
What is quiet constraint?
A conscious or subconscious communication gap within the team leading to low information-sharing between team members that can potentially affect work culture and productivity in the long run.
Let’s break this down further. The Kahoot!’s 2022 Workplace Culture Report highlighted that many employees tend to withhold important information and knowledge from other team members despite knowing that it might be beneficial to them. In fact, in the research study conducted by them, 58% of workers said they are holding valuable knowledge that could benefit their co-workers. While this trend reflects a serious communication gap within organizations, it also shows that culturally, organizations need to think more deeply about employee engagement and productivity than ever before.
How does quiet constraint impact an organization?
There are multiple ways in which organizations can be affected by this new workplace trend. One of the most effective ways of learning within an organization is peer-to-peer. In the absence of adequate knowledge sharing between employees and within teams, a company can face three main issues:
- Poor team collaboration
- Negative competitive culture
- Low collective productivity
These issues directly impact business metrics within an organization and can over time, if unchecked, create a culture of silence.
But, what leads to quiet constraint?
There are multiple reasons for quiet constraint to occur and can reflect problems within working systems. Employees could be feeling threatened, they might perceive the culture as not open enough or there is likely to be a disconnect within teams. Knowledge sharing is often encouraged because it accelerates productivity. The remote work environment stunted this spike in productivity to some extent by reducing face time between employees.
At Fundamento, we sliced the trend to understand underlying behaviors in employees that lead to reluctant knowledge sharing. Our team of IO psychologists and data experts identified power skills that played a critical role in curbing quiet constraint by establishing a culture of trust, strong work ethic and reliability. However, these power skills are divided under two main categories – leaders and teams.
We believe that employers must invest in both leaders and team members to develop certain power skills that promote adequate knowledge and information sharing in a manner that doesn’t allow stagnation of expertise or productivity.
Power skills for leaders
It is critical for leaders to develop these skills in order to curb quiet constraint in their teams and to establish a culture of knowledge sharing.
Curiosity
The ability to be driven by eagerness, logic and realistic observations to explore and seek out novel information or experiences.
Inspirational Leadership
The ability to inspire, influence, and lead by example. This involves creating a shared vision and articulating a mission towards achieving common goals.
Empathy
The emotional ability to understand, share and anticipate the feelings of another.
Deep Collaboration
The ability to collaborate or operate in cross-functional capacities for a shared purpose. It involves acknowledging interdependence, transparency, cultural diversity, and individual or team contributions to help accomplish organizational goals.
While these skills are self-explanatory, it is important to understand how they manifest in day-to-day work life. In plain words, this is how these skills play out at work and can help leaders work with their teams better:
- Ask questions and actively show eagerness to know more about the team and their work so that it motivates them to share information
- Lead the way for ideal knowledge sharing at work with openness to feedback and by accepting different point of views
- Understand team’s concerns, opinions and thoughts behind actions to know where they are coming from thereby creating a more positive work environment
- Encourage cross-functional collaboration, within verticals, to share ideas and learn from each other
Power skills for teams
It is critical that team members are checked at earlier stages of development in a company in order to prevent quiet constraint at work. Developing these power skills in them is step one in that direction.
Professional Reliability
The ability to be responsible for and willing to hold account of one’s functioning. It is the combined ability to maintain transparency, autonomy and dependability in all aspects of work.
Conflict Resolution
The process of putting an end to a dispute by utilizing active ways of rectification. It involves finding a solution to a disagreement or opposition.
Teamwork and Collaboration
The ability to respectfully work with others to achieve a shared goal, build group synergy and enthusiastic participation.
Organizational Awareness
The ability to recognize formal and informal relationships within an organization. It involves reading emotional currents and power dynamics.
In leaders, power skills focus on how they can enable their teams to perform better, but in teams, these skills directly impact their own performance and productivity. Therefore, how these skills play out in day-to-day work life are slightly different:
- Focus on getting the work done and understand how it impacts overall organizational productivity through appropriate knowledge sharing
- Avoid unnecessary conflicts to come in the way of key information sharing
- Work respectfully with others towards a common goal
- Understand power dynamics and emotional currents in the company and alter approach accordingly
These power skills play a huge role in ensuring that in the new world of work, with hybrid and remote work becoming the norm, employees feel engaged and comfortable enough to actively participate in healthy knowledge sharing on a regular basis.
Companies today are dealing with an inevitable dark cloud over their heads – attrition. From the great resignation to quiet quitting, trends over the last couple of years have dictated the shift in the way companies are now looking at employee retention. Organizations are understanding the roles their leaders play in retaining or attracting talent. However, attrition continues to be a huge business metric for companies because it comes with a huge cost. Replacing talent can be very expensive and also lead to a significant productivity drain.
A few weeks ago, we’d broadly discussed how to navigate the talent war in our podcast. This week, we’ll dive a bit deeper into what companies can do to curb attrition significantly.
At Fundamento, we’ve been working with employers to understand critical power skills that drain and drive their customer-facing teams with regards to specific business metrics. When it comes to attrition, irrespective of whether customer-facing or not, our team of IO psychologists and experts have identified that leadership plays a huge role. After understanding our data and analyzing this further, we’ve narrowed down the power skills that organizations must develop in their leaders and teams in order to improve employee experience, enhance productivity and dramatically curb attrition.
Furthermore, we’ve broken down these skills into micro behaviors that reflect manifestations of each skill in day to day work life. Organizations must constantly attempt to answer certain questions in order to genuinely solve for attrition.
Does your company have solid leaders?
While there are several aspects of a leader that are critical to business success within an organization, it is important that the leader is also one who is able to inspire and motivate their team to do better. This ends up being one of the biggest gaps when it comes to employee satisfaction. Investing in the development of leaders then becomes a priority for organizations dealing with high attrition. Therefore, the power skill associated with this is Inspirational Leadership.
Inspirational Leadership refers to one’s ability to inspire, influence, and lead by example. This involves creating a shared vision and articulating a mission towards achieving common goals.
This power skill allows leaders to become role models for their team members wherein the team follows their footsteps to deliver high quality work.
- Lending ownership: Leaders are able to provide autonomy to team members while allowing them the flexibility to build new capabilities
- Leading by example: Leaders are continuously a positive influence on the team and motivate the team towards ideal behavior by delivering best practices themselves
- Identifying talent: Leaders are able to unlock latent potential of the team by understanding their strengths and challenging them on a regular basis
- Setting goals: Leaders enable goal-setting exercises for the team and inspire them to have ambitious goals so that they can step out of their comfort zone
Do your leaders communicate openly?
A lot of discontentment in the team comes from the fact that there’s limited or selective top-down communication. More often than not, teams feel disengaged or disconnected due to low transparency and trickling information delivery. At every level of leadership, clear and open communication goes a long way in instilling a sense of trust within the team. It is considered a significant driver in curbing attrition. The power skill that organizations need to develop in their leaders is: Transparency.
Transparency refers to the ability to maintain honesty, openness, and integrity about emotions, beliefs and ethical principles.
This power skill allows leaders to build trust within the team which enables team-bonding, better collaboration and higher productivity.
- Setting benchmarks: Leaders are able to establish realistic performance expectations by issuing a clear sense of direction for the team so that there’s no scope for confusion or misunderstanding
- Creating communication channels: Leaders are equipped to establish better modes of communication that ensure timely exchange of information
- Enabling team bonding: Leaders are able to activate practices that keep the team together with minimum conflict
- Giving feedback: Leaders do not hold back feedback, deliver it effectively, regularly and work actively with the team towards goal achievement
Does everyone on your team contribute to peer growth?
Leaders set the ball rolling when it comes to peer-to-peer learning. If a leader invests in the growth of their team, the team invests in each other’s growth. Lifting each other up is step one to enhanced productivity because it taps into the strengths of each individual. For this, we’ve identified two power skills that once developed ensure the entire team contributes actively to peer growth: Empathy and Developing Others.
Empathy is the emotional ability to understand, share and anticipate the feelings of another.
This power skill allows leaders to make the team feel heard and invested in. This correspondingly creates room for an approachable and open culture within the team.
- Taking time out for the team: Leaders are able to make the team feel heard and their contribution valued
- Offering support: Leaders show genuine interest in their team member’s life and challenges they’re facing
- Being approachable: Leaders are easy to speak to and always available for discussions to ensure their team is on the same page
Developing Others is the ability to determine strengths and areas requiring improvement in others and mentoring or coaching them towards enhancing their abilities.
This power skills allows leaders to make decisions on the back of their team’s needs and make their growth a priority.
- Developing team strengths: Leaders are able to recognize the development of existing strengths as a priority
- Communicating consistently: Leaders share constructive feedback consistently and tie it to improved business outcomes
- Taking the team’s needs into account: Leaders are accustomed to taking inputs and altering their approach to suit the team’s learning needs for a stronger impact
Does your team focus on solutions over problems?
Conflicts within a team are unavoidable, but how they’re addressed is key. If the leader sets a problem-pointing culture over a solution-finding one, the team’s morale can take a big hit. Therefore, a power skill we believe is crucial to minimizing friction within a team, hence retaining employees is Conflict Resolution.
Conflict Resolution is the process of putting an end to a dispute by utilizing active ways of rectification. It involves finding a solution to a disagreement or opposition.
This power skill ensures that leaders initiate a culture of problem solving within the team and reduce friction to the extent possible so that teams are able to perform better.
- Being unbiased: Leaders are able to focus on events, not personalities
- Knowing problem areas: Leaders are in a position to anticipate possible conflicts and prioritize issues that need immediate attention
- Staying involved yet distanced: Leaders are able to maintain a balanced approach when resolving conflicts and intervene only when necessary
Does your team reflect often?
A metric such as attrition is complex and there are several factors that must be considered while solving for it. However, behavioral skills go a long way in creating a work culture that employees don’t want to leave. The power skills elaborated above manifest in ways that significantly help curb attrition. None of that is easy to maintain though without an extremely critical power skill: Emotional Self Awareness.
Emotional Self Awareness is the ability to identify one’s internal states – feelings, emotions, values or goals and to be conscious of their effect on one’s speech and actions.
This power skill is the one way to ensure that neither the leader nor the team is unaware of their own strengths or weaknesses. This allows then to be open to feedback, not make emotional decisions and understand consequences of their actions.
- Accepting feedback: Team members are able to ask for and accept criticism from others
- Being aware of own tendencies: Team members are able to regulate themselves on an ongoing basis and not make rushed or emotional decisions
- Understanding behavioral impact: Team members are constantly aware of their body language and know how others perceive their actions
While all of these skills are primarily focused on leaders, it is important to note that leaders precisely set the tone for the way their teams function. If these skills are developed in leaders, the chances of them transferring to the team are manifold. In order to curb attrition, the most effective way is to develop necessary power skills in leaders and see a trickle down effect in the team. When the team collectively feels more productive, individuals are more likely to stay and deliver high quality output.