Inform Yourself

In the course of doing the research for the Genius Project, Jay Niblick wanted to find out what differentiated those who suffered from The Problem from those who did not. That was his primary objective. But he also wanted to get a better understanding for just how significant the implications of The Problem were. What were the effects of such a large percentage of people being dissatisfied with their results, frustrated with their constant attempts to improve and left feeling unfulfilled with their jobs in general? The impact is sobering!

Just imagine what The Problem means to a single company. Think of the profits left on the table by a company with a workforce that is uninspired, unmotivated, and unfulfilled. Imagine the impact if even 10% of the workforce suffers from The Problem. What does it do to service levels when those who are serving don’t feel well served themselves? When you move past one company to all the companies out there, how many millions of dollars are wasted on remedies that fail to address the real problem and how many billions of dollars are never realized in the first place because a significant percentage of the workforce’s true potential is never maximized?

Who knows how much this problem is really costing the world, but here’s your chance to tell us what you think the real impact is. If you go to www.whatsyourgenius.com you can share your thoughts on this question and check out what others think about the real impact of The Problem as well. While the problem at the organizational level is probably immense, what The Problem
does to the individual is even more significant.

At the Human Level
Today Gretchen Dougherty is one of the top sales people in her company, but this wasn’t always the case. Her company sells home security systems, and Gretchen’s job as an inside sales agent is to prospect over the phone to schedule home visits where a field sales representative gives a security consultation (otherwise known to you and me as a sales pitch). She spends her days sitting in a cubicle dialing out to homeowners trying to get them to schedule a home evaluation. Gretchen gets paid a sales commissions for every security system that gets sold to people she scheduled.

When she first took the job she was taught that sales is a numbers game. They told her that she had to make a specific number of outbound calls every day in order to beat the odds and find that one needle in the haystack who would agree to a home visit. Gretchen was told, “If you want to make money, you’ve got to call on more people.” The best sales people in the company made approximately seventy to eighty phone calls a day, and ended up scheduling three to five field appointments, out of which one would normally sign a contract. Management really stressed to her the importance of making a high volume of calls. Each sales person even had a call quota for the day.

Gretchen, however, thought differently than most of the other sales people. Unlike the majority of them she had a very high natural talent for empathy. It was this empathy that actually got in her way because while other sales people would spend no more than a few minutes trying to push for an appointment, Gretchen found herself talking to people for five, ten even fifteen minutes or more. She knew she had to generate a high volume of calls so she was constantly trying to suppress her empathy and not connect too much with the person on the other end of the phone.When she did this, she was not being true to who she was. She was awkward and preoccupied with watching the all-holy clock that sat next to her computer. The more she tried to ignore her natural tendencies and think differently so she could follow the script and stick to a time limit, the more awkward and ineffective she became. Gretchen was in trouble. She wasn’t performing well at all and the top question on management’s mind was would she quit before they fired her. She was definitely ready to quit when I first met her. I had been asked by her company to consult to them on why she wasn’t performing.

After Jay spoke with Gretchen, and did some preliminary work it became pretty clear right up front that the issue seemed to be a poor fit between her and her role. Because of this he gave her a battery of assessments to help understand what her true talents were and how well they were aligned with her existing role. One of these assessments was the Attribute Index that we used in the Genius Project.

The moment he saw the results it was obvious to him what the problem was, and Gretchen confirmed. Her extremely high empathy was causing her to want to connect with the people she was calling far more than the predetermined time limit would allow. The rest of the sales people in the company didn’t have anywhere near her level of talent in this area, so they didn’t have any problem running scripts and pushing through enough people until they found one that would agree to an appointment. Getting on and off the phone as quickly as possible wasn’t a problem for them, but it was proving to be a big problem for Gretchen. She felt bad about talking at people instead of talking with them. The result was that Gretchen was trying to be something she wasn’t and it was negatively affecting her performance in a big way.

Luckily, the company was pretty open-minded about how to fix the problem. They had spent a lot of money training Gretchen and, already suffering from a higher human turnover rate, they gave me the latitude he needed to attempt to correct the problem. What did he do? He simply told Gretchen to figure out how to be true to who she was. He told her that the objective was fixed (schedule X many appointments per week), but the way she went about doing that was up to her. He asked her how she would do the job if she were in charge. He said, “Just do you.” As a result, Gretchen got rid of the clock on her desk and decided that she would not have a daily call quota, or any call quota for that matter – just a single quota for how many appointments she scheduled.

A very interesting thing happened when she did this. Gretchen, instead of suppressing her natural tendencies, started letting them guide her. She spent much more time with those she talked with. She got to know them and understand their needs much better. She once even told him about one call where she learned about the caller’s teenage daughter, what her name was, how often she was home alone, where she was going to college and what she was majoring in. This was typical of the level of communication Gretchen was having with the people she called on. She was really connecting with these people.

Instead of trying to force herself to ignore her empathy, Gretchen was now using that natural talent to connect with people on a much deeper level than the rest of the sales reps were. Doing so meant that she spent a lot more time with each person, and only made as few as twenty to twenty five calls per day. But doing so also meant that she was establishing relationships with people, relationships that were returning results. Despite the fact that Gretchen was making less than 20% of the calls the other reps were, she still averaged to book three to five appointments each day. Even better than that, instead of the company average of one signed contract for every five appointments, Gretchen was averaging two signed contracts for every five appointments.
Pretty soon, the field sales people were fighting to see who would get to call on the appointments that Gretchen had scheduled because they knew their odds of making a sale were a lot better.

The lesson of this case study is that by being inauthentic Gretchen was hurting her performance. When she became authentic, though, not only did her performance reach the expected levels, but actually exceeded them. When she was inauthentic she was no more satisfied with her job than the job was satisfied with her. Now that she is authentic, though, she views her job as a vehicle for her passion for meeting and helping people and now she is as satisfied with the job as it is with her.

If you ask the field sales representatives who they want booking their appointments, they will tell you, “Gretchen man, she is a genius at finding people who sign contracts.”

The Long “X”
Gretchen is a good example of what Jay calls the Long “X”, which is a simple but effective way of understanding the relationship between how much effort you have to put in versus the results you get back.

When you are authentic, you are making sure that the work you do, and how you do it, is well aligned with your natural talents and the result is that you achieve more success with less effort. When you are inauthentic, you allow your success to be dependent on your non-talents and what results you get are hard won and feel like they took lots of effort.

The benefits of being authentic are significant, not only from the perspective of how well you perform, but also with regards to the satisfaction and sense of fulfillment have you got out of your life. Basically, being authentic is much more productive. You just do better when you are authentic.

The Long X is a term that describes the level of results you get when you are inauthentic as opposed to authentic. When you are inauthentic you are inverted and feel like the effort that you put in exceeds the results you get back. When you become authentic you become converted and you start to feel like you get back more results than the effort you felt you had to put in. Authenticity is the Geniuses secret to consistently high 5th level performance.