This is a tale of three stories. One about a butterfly, one about a bully and one about psychological safety.
Story 1 the Bully
I had an unusual email. A sales manager had written me a two page email, CCi’ng one of my team, viciously attacking her. She was understandably shaken. We are an outsource sales agency so we do the sales work for companies. Her crime, apparently was to have cold called his company and he took umbrage at the call, so he stopped his day, looked me up on Linkedin, ignored the mobile number on our website and emailed me. After attacking her character (an 18 year old with the guts he lacked to actually pick up the phone and cold call) at length, he went on with another full page dissertation on how a cold calling was dated and how sales should be managed correctly by a professional organisation.
Let’s forgive the blatant hypocrisy that this man was a sales manager and emailed me rather than picking up the phone. I will come come back to this story I promise. To anyone else that wants to have a crack at my team, for future reference, my mobile number is on our website.
Story 2 the Butterfly
A monarch butterfly is one of those pretty orange and black butterflies. To a bird the bright orange colour is like to a ravenous late night truck driver, the beckoning golden arches of a McDonald’s sign. But despite the lovely colour it is rarely attacked, not because it is pretty, or dainty or that it makes the world more lovely. When a bird eats a monarch butterfly, the bird encounters an incredibly bitter taste and toxic chemicals that cause violent vomiting. Even if the bird “wins” the battle by attacking and eating the butterfly, the experience is so traumatic that it learns to never attack a monarch again.
Story 3 Psychological Safety
My first ever sales job was hard nosed phone sales. Everyone else in the fifty person team was female. The team leader was a particularly sour and grumpy person who demanded a weird amount of respect. Then one day I found out what demanded the respect. As phone salespeople we get very overzealous answers from people who go out of their way to be as hurtful as they can. I mean really nasty stuff. One of the team got a powerfully hurtful response and cried. The team leader rang the person and impolitely asked who they thought they were to treat someone like that. A manager’s job is to protect their staff. Yes, be an intermediary between staff and clients. But first be that shield.
I have always stood up to tyranny. In fact I believe it is a core identity of being an Aussie, primarily because of the way the British treated us as fourth class refuse. The Australian Army taught me the lesson that while the Diggers at Gallipolli did the last cavalry charge in history, the English officers drank tea and made commentary.
Anyway, back to the story about the sales manager. All my life I have had people think they can step on my face for being a sales guy. That’s OK I probably earned it, my staff didn’t though.
Sales is ruthlessly hard, soul crushing work, without the people too scared to do the work attacking us. Good salespeople are disagreeable by nature. I score 7% on the trait of agreeableness, which means I actively look for conflict. I pulled a reversal. I told my team to stop work and listen.
In front of them I looked up his boss and rang him. I explained that this spineless jackass, who wasn’t willing to pick up his own phone and cold call me, had viciously attacked an 18 year old gfirl as a sales representative of his company. I forwarded him the email while I was on the phone to him, explained that it was his logo on the words and then I requested a face-to-face meeting with the bully and he at their offices so that they could voice those concerns and lecture me in person
The owner was appalled at the way his staff had represented his company. And no, strangely, the keyboard hero was suddenly called away and not available to voice his concerns.
My staff said, “I can’t believe you’ve done this, how embarrassing.” But to a gangster, respect is 100% of the game. In fact one of our company values is that ‘if anyone speaks badly about you, your team or the client, we expect you to fistfight them’. Company culture is not fancy words on your mission statement.
This is where the three stories converge. Like the monarch butterfly, defend your staff to the point that even if you lose, the person will have a serious rethink before they attack again. That’s how you create psychological safety. Staff must know that you have their back, even if it’s distasteful work.
More of this kind of thinking lives at www.outsold.com.au/blogs.
The research behind this
Psychological safety was defined by Harvard’s Amy Edmondson in a 1999 paper in Administrative Science Quarterly as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. Google’s internal Project Aristotle, which studied more than 180 of its own teams between 2012 and 2015, found it was the most important factor separating its most effective teams from the rest.
The butterfly story comes from Lincoln Brower’s classic experiments, famous for a photograph of a blue jay vomiting after eating a monarch. Monarchs store toxins called cardenolides from the milkweed they eat as caterpillars, and a jay that has been sick once learns to avoid monarchs on sight.
