“You’re fired.” Possibly the two most gut-wrenching, ego-sapping words one can ever hear. Not that any employee in post-apartheid South Africa will ever hear “you’re fired” stated so plainly. The spectre of a CCMA hearing has put paid to that. One is more likely to hear, “I don’t know how we’re going to do without you; but we’ll certainly try.” Whichever way you cut it, being fired is a real slap in the face that brings your world crashing at your feet in no uncertain terms. I should know, it’s happened to me. Being fired is much like criticism – it hurts. But let’s be honest, criticism hurts because it’s normally true, isn’t it?
To be frank, I was the master of my own destruction and actually lost my job six months before the event. Around the time when I started slipping up on phoning for appointments and skiving off at around 15h00 so that I could get to the gym early and miss the crowds. Oh yes, the writing certainly was on the proverbial wall.
Both my employer and I missed the warning signs. I carried on, heading for mediocrity, whilst my Jiminy Cricket (my conscience), in frustration, pulled out his last feeler. My employer kept his head in the sand and hoped for the best. We were typical of the Frog in the Kettle story: throw a frog into a kettle full of boiling water; it’ll immediately jump out. If you take the same frog and place it in a kettle filled with cold water and slowly raise the temperature to boiling point, the frog will stay until it is too late and it dies.
There’s even a proper term for The Frog in the Kettle story. It’s a psychological concept called “just-noticeable difference.” It’s a change that could be noticed but is absorbed by the process of normalising variance. In English it means that when we see something that doesn’t fit our current frame-of-reference (model), we make it fit.
Often the “just-noticeable difference” variations are truly insignificant, but they can sometimes turn out to be the tail that wags the dog.
It’s the responsibility of both the employer and employee to develop an early warning system to avert a crisis. My mentor, Brian Gibson, said that a crisis happens long before the actual event … there are always signs along the way that we choose to ignore (can we draw any parallels with Hurricane Katrina? Maybe those “mad greens” and their global warming ranting and raving are right? But the propaganda machine is already in action with both “bought” Republican and Democrat senators dismissing, on CNN and Fox TV, that global warming is an “unproven theory” that has no link to extreme weather events. Storm? What Storm? – The Sunday Independent)
In a sales management context, early warning systems can be agreed-upon minimum standards. The minimum amount of telephone calls to new prospects, minimum amount of appointments a week and so on. If a sales professional starts dipping below the agreed standards, he needs to be called in immediately and the challenge has to be faced head-on and rectified. Don’t leave it until it is too late. This is starting to sound like a Jack Welsh lecture, isn’t it? Picky - pedantic - precise.
Let me leave you with a final thought. I think Richard Carlson’s book, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff is nonsense. Sweat the small stuff because God (and the devil) is in the detail. How many of us have lost a deal because of the small things … not returning a phone call, one or two spelling mistakes on our proposal, getting our key prospect’s name wrong …
This
sales tip was brought to you by
sales trainer, Jacques de Villiers
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