The Power of Strokes

[0:04] This is the Full Funnel Freedom Podcast, supporting sales leaders and managers to improve their sales funnels from people to prospects. I'm Hamish Knox. In this show, you'll learn how you can improve your results, lead a great team, and hit more targets with Full Funnel Freedom.

[0:21] Welcome to the Full Funnel Freedom Podcast. I'm your host, Hamish Knox. Today, we are are going to be talking about the power of strokes to keep your team motivated when creating full funnel freedom. The full funnel freedom podcast is brought to you by Sandler in Calgary. Sandler in Calgary creates consistent, reliable, scalable sales teams with our clients to discover if we might be a good fit to support you and your sales team. Go to www.hamish.sandler.com slash howtosandler. Some of the ideas on today's episode may make you feel a little uncomfortable because we're going to dive into what is largely considered the touchy-feely stuff, but it is incredibly important. So if you're wondering what the heck stroke is, because your only model for that is petting a cat, a stroke is a psychological unit of recognition. So a stroke could be a positive. You're a great asset to the team. It could be negative. You can't do anything right. Or it can be a rubber band, which starts out positive and ends negative like a rubber band snapping back, which might sound like, I knew you'd figure it out eventually.

[1:44] So we have positive, negative rubber band strokes. Strokes are also conditional. They are based on performance or Or they are unconditional, which they are given just because that person exists.

[1:58] Now, every human being yearns for recognition. So some of the pushback that I have gotten with leaders that I work with on this idea of strokes is, well, I don't need recognition. That much recognition. That's fantastic, but you're not managing a team of you. So you're managing a team of individuals who have their own hopes and fears and dreams and scripts and psychological needs to be recognized on a daily basis.

[2:27] And you'll probably notice this in your career or possibly in your home. If someone is not getting the number of positive strokes that they individually need every single day, they will act out, misbehave in order to get recognition through negative strokes. Because our units of recognition are agnostic to the type of recognition. It doesn't matter if it's positive or negative. It just matters that we are recognized. So, if we have an individual on our team who seems to be acting out or going offside on a regular basis.

[3:07] It may be because they are not actually getting recognized in a positive way as much as they need to. And again, it's about their need for recognition, not ours, that is causing them to go offside and then have these performance review conversations or other types of conversations that we don't want to have, but are getting the emotional needs of that individual met. So we have positive strokes, negative strokes, rubber band strokes. They're either conditional based on performance or unconditional, which is based on the fact that that person just exists. Now, as leaders, we have four types of strokes at our disposal. They are verbal, written, which can either be electronic or physical, and we'll get back to that, touch and the HR implications that go along with that, and time. Time is the best stroke we can give to each of our team members because.

[4:03] As leaders, our only valuable is our time. So a time stroke could be an extra coaching session or another role play, or it even could be something like giving permission to that team member to leave a little bit early so that they can get to a personal event that is meaningful to them. That can be very, very, very powerful in terms of motivation. In fact, if we look at types of recognition, Carol Dweck spoke about this in Mindset, discovered through some of her research that children who were praised for innate abilities, you're so smart, you're so pretty, you're so athletic, eventually did worse over time. Because if we are told that we are something, we will fight at a psychological level to maintain that thing. So if someone says to us, you're such a great leader, we will do absolutely everything in our power to prove to ourselves and to others that we are a great leader, even though we may actually be not such a great leader anymore. Whereas the children in Professor Dweck's research who were praised for effort. You really tried hard. You made a great effort. You must have studied a lot. Over time, we're consistently more likely to push harder and farther.

[5:29] And achieved greater results. Mel Robbins recently wrote in The High Five Habit that children in one study were offered either praise for innate abilities, praise for effort, or a simple high five. And high five being a touch stroke. Those children who received the high fives only were greater motivated. And the hypothesis is that because they were creating a connection with another human being in a positive way and they wanted to do it again so they were more motivated to go out and perform at a higher level.

[6:07] I mentioned earlier that I've gotten pushback on this idea of strokes in the past from leaders who were like, well, I'm not running an adult daycare and that's fair and we're not, but to quote a very distant episode of The Simpsons in the words of Homer, I like being thanked. I mentioned earlier that humans yearn for recognition, especially from other people who they at some level want to impress. And really, our team members do want to impress us in some way. They want to prove to us that we made the right choice in bringing them onto our team and they're going to create full funnel freedom for us. Another way to think about this idea of strokes is in a personal relationship where someone leaves a partner who quote unquote takes them for granted to go to another partner who really gets me. Well, the partner who quote unquote really gets me is probably giving that individual the strokes that their other partner wasn't giving them. And there's a whole bunch of other things we could unpack in that that are not part of this episode. But that's another way of thinking about strokes is that when someone leaves a relationship, whether that's a personal relationship or business relationship, oftentimes it's because they feel stroke-deprived. Another challenge that I've experienced in my work with leaders is that.

[7:30] Leaders want to have been trained traditionally to manage a team. And I've mentioned on several episodes, we don't actually manage teams, we manage groups of individuals. And so we have to individualize our strokes. And as professional leaders, it's on us to adapt our communication style, which includes strokes, to our individual team members, not the other way around. If you look at professional sports, the coaches who often have the most long-term success are the the ones who adapt their models to their team that they have, as opposed to trying to force a group of players into a system that they may not be suited for.

[8:10] So if we're going to adapt our strokes to our individuals, we need to really understand how each of our team members likes to give and receive information. Because we have people on our team who love to be praised in public. Absolutely love to be brought up in front of everybody and showered with strokes and told how awesome they are and given an opportunity to explain how they did all the awesome things that they did that they're getting this praise for. And then we have other people on our team who would rather be somewhere completely else than being in front of everybody getting public praise. They, in fact, may want a quiet word at their office door if we're back in person or a quick private phone call to say, hey, that was really awesome. I really appreciated it. You really supported your team. I mentioned this.

[9:05] Earlier about written strokes can be either electronic or physically written with a pen, pencil, or other implement. There is some data out there that shows a physically handwritten note, even if it's on a three by three yellow sticky note, provides a greater level of recognition and motivation to the individual than any form of electronic text-based communication, email, text, etc. So when we're thinking about our strokes, time is the most powerful. If we go with the high five that Mel Robbins has recently written about, then there's a great example of a touch stroke. Verbal stroke is, again, hey, you did a great job. That was really wonderful. And then the written strokes can be either electronic or physically written. Physically written has proven to be the more powerful in terms of motivation.

[10:05] If we are looking at creating full funnel freedom in our organization and we're not really interested in overly compensating from a monetary perspective our team members, and we talked about compensation in a previous episode, strokes are really key to keeping our funnels consistently reliably full because our team is going to want to continue to perform and deliver for us if they are getting the strokes they need. So what I would encourage all of you to do is make a commitment to the number of strokes you're going to give each day to each member of your team. Verbal is typically the easiest to integrate if you're not really doing it right now, but set a daily goal and track it for 90 days. Also, at the same time, track your team's.

[10:56] Attitudes, and their proactive activities, and specifically how much of that they're doing. And make note of any changes that you see, not only over the 90 days, but right after you give the stroke. It's really fascinating, I've noticed, where a team member who really is probably yearning to be recognized is given a stroke by their leader, and again, could be any one of the stroke types that we've talked about. And then the following day or the following week, they go to their leader and say, oh, I went and did this, or I went and closed this piece of business, or I did an analysis of this new potential market that we were looking at breaking into without actually being asked. The leader, of course, is shocked at why this is the case, but it's because they gave that stroke. They gave that recognition to that person who is seeking it, and that created greater motivation. So this has been the Full Funnel Freedom podcast brought to you by Sandler in Calgary, www.hamish.sandler.com forward slash howtosandler. Today, we had ideas and insights on the power of strokes and psychological recognition in keeping our funnels full. Thank you for listening. Rate, review, and share wherever you find your podcast.

[12:16] If you'd like to get involved as a advertiser or a guest, email podcast at fullfunnelfreedom.com. Until we connect with you on the next episode, go create full funnel freedom.

[12:30] Thank you for listening to Full Funnel Freedom with Hamish Knox. If you want to increase your sales with ease, go to fullfunnelfreedom.com.

[12:40] Music.