1.
An ex-colleague from 20~yrs ago – let’s call him Sam – is the best salesperson I’ve met.
Sam built great relationships with his clients, knew what solutions would support his clients’ goals, positioned our solutions at the right time/place etc. His clients loved him.
He was my best sales director. Except that internally, he was a miserable colleague.
Aggressive to the point of being unreasonable, Sam would cause internal support teams to regularly complain about him to me.
I constantly told Sam what to do – use his considerable client-management skills internally – but that didn’t lead anywhere.
2.
The iceberg model is often used to explain the hidden aspects of many things.
When an executive makes a brilliant presentation, what lies below the water line is the hours of practice.
When an app is launched with many bugs, what’s not visible is that speed to market has been favoured over quality.
These two examples are intuitive enough.
Question: if a person’s questionable behaviour is visible above the water line, what lies hidden beneath the water line? What factors hidden from plain sight explains a person’s behaviour? And to change that behaviour, what hidden factors must we address?
There are many such factors and I’ll just highlight one category here. In Sam’s case, it was the beliefs (a) that he knew better than anyone else and (b) that as the head of the account team, everybody else’s job was to support and take instructions from him to win his client’s business.
I didn’t understand this until years later. As we didn’t address and reframe these two beliefs, Sam’s attempt at behavioural change was an uphill slog.
So leaders, next time we want to nudge a team member’s behaviour in a new direction – whether they are in sales, marketing, HR, legal etc – think of the iceberg, look below the water line and help them reframe their intrinsic motivations.