This was my first taste of team leadership. This came on the back of my strong consistent sales performance where I was encouraged to coach other team members on sales. One thing led to another and eventually found myself leading a team of Sales & Service Consultants.
The objective I was assigned was to drive IAG's Sales & Service teams to achieve national sales targets.
After several years managing teams and outperforming our business unit targets, I wasgiven the opportunity to onboard a brand-new team from scratch. I was excited because I was empowered to go out in market and hire staff who wanted to make adifference. This was an area that I wanted to take ownership on as I wanted to experiment with particular hiring questions on top of IAG's standard skills interview questions. My thoughts were that we could do a better job with hiring people who had strong internal drive and motivation to perform in a high-pressure environment and make a difference.
Throughout the interview process I had been looking for candidates where IAG may not have taken the risk on, or would be considered second to someone who had decades of experience in a call centre role. The reason I did this was because as a team manager, most of our time was being unintentionally allocated towards performance management conversations with staff who didn't want to do their job. I had designed a series of challenging questions to ask candidates in the interviews on top of the standard IAG hiring questions to really understand the internal motivators and how they responded to pressure. Some great candidates were identified and we made our offers.
Witha team of highly motivated sales and service staff who all had their own unique diverse flair to add to the team, it was time to get started with building a high performing team culture in and around the standard onboarding compliance training. The initial team meetings were set up with fun activities for each team member to get to know each other better, and also for them to get to know me better to initiate our journey of building trust and safety.
A session that I found great to run when working with a brand new team was running a MEMO session - Meeting to Explore Motivation Opportunities. This was a session I came up with where I would spend an hour with each individual team member with a several activities to understand what their internal motivations were. The intention was for me to identify how I could help them get there. I was always amazed with how much I got out of these sessions as many people don't see themselves in the same role for 5-10 years and tended to have ambitions to do other things. Some members of my team were studying and wanted to get into finance, others had a passion for HR, while some were happy where they were in sales.
Regardless of what they wanted out of their professional life over the next 5-10 years, I would find a way to link their future ambitions, whether at IAG or not to their role and identified other opportunities for them to develop their skills.
For example, an individual who was keen to move into a finance role, I would allocated them my team management financial responsibilities and gave them the space and empowerment to do the work so long as they were open to constructive feedback so they could improve and build skills in their passion areas. I had also set the expectation that they had to perform in their day to day roles.
These sessions allowed me to truly understand what drove my team members and also build a deeper connection between us, further adding to the sense of trust and team safety.
Having a highly motivated team and a strong sense of team safety, trust and empowerment made the working environment a great place to be, despite working in a high pressured repetitive sales environment. This led to happy staff having great conversations with customers, leading to more sales and more customers compliments. Six months into my teams tenure, they were the second highest ranking team out of all IAG Sales & Service teams in Australia.
Other teams were blown away by the results. My team won Team of the Year despite only being in the business for 6 months - a massive achievement. I shared the methods and approaches broadly which landed me with the Leader of Year award FY14/15. Another great win is that several years on, most of my team members are in roles / divisions they were aspiring to get into from our MEMO sessions.
"Saj took his leadership to new heights this year and achieved an amazing result with his brand new team. After hearing about his methods and approaches to leadership and team building, its no wonder why Team 28 is the best performing team in our business unit. We can all learn something from Saj leadership style. Keep up the great work!"
Emma H - Sales & Service Manager, IAG