How do Pat Cash’s comments on Roger Federer’s tennis style changes help your teams performance?

How do you transfer knowledge within your business? Its funny I had a client the other day who was speaking about how some people in the organisation were no good at learning.

In fact you could spend serious time with them in specific situations and they would come back the next day having not retained a thing.

I had read some days before an article by Pat Cash on Roger Federer: Pat was commenting on how Roger had made some significant changes to his tennis style, here is some of what he said:

Roger is “Now hitting the ball earlier and stepping into a more advanced position on the court. He is hitting his shots harder, courtesy of his fantastic racket-head speed. That’s a great bonus here in Melbourne because this year the court surface is sticky, which makes the balls fluff up quicker than normal and consequently sees them coming more slowly onto the racket.”

So how does this effect the way you are training your people to perform. Well what I like about Pat’s description is that he really breaks down some of the things, most people would have no clue about what so ever. Things that are crucial to Rogers performance, in fact it was only a couple of weeks after the article was written that he won the Australian open again.

To see the article – Click here

In your business how are you transferring the knowledge that is crucial to the success of your highest performers. Do you have the ability to break the crucial things down to a level that actually anyone could understand them?

There are many different ways of training like:

• On the job training
• In front of a room
• Being tested via online tests or surveys
• Getting the individual to be buddied up with experts and having them work together then be tested afterwards by the same or other people.

Knowing, what you need to break down how and why can be a big link the chain of success.

Pat goes on to say about Roger:

“By taking the ball earlier and hitting it harder he’s in effect shortening the length of points. Also, by playing that little bit further into the court, he’s not covering so much ground. Somebody such as Nadal who plays way behind the baseline might need seven or eight paces to get from one extreme to the other but being more advanced to take the ball almost on the half-volley a lot of the time lessens the effort.”

Consider the following scenarios:

1)    You are a bank teller and have no idea how to bring up the topic of insurance with a client.

2)    You work in a contact centre and sign people up to phone planes and don’t know how to help the people see by spending just another $25 a month or the cost of one meal, that they can get a far better deal.

3)    Your team on the factory floor have one team member who is able to produce more than 200% more than the others.

4)    A sales force of 10 people has one person who uses specific presentations that enable them to close at 300% higher ratios than the others.

What questions might you ask the performers, how would you then record those things, to get significantly better results from the changes you then have to make?

• How can you bring it to life so that as performers get better this new knowledge is captured?
• What process could you use to transfer this knowledge?
• How might you educate the masses?
• Where would you store the data?

There are very good answers to all these things, some of which lie in the technology. Others need to have been thoroughly designed as business processes which then become part of the “Way things are done around here”.

As most of you know there are 100's of different team performance "Sales" solutions out there in the market at present. Do any of them actually work and or can they make a quick difference in your team’s performance?

I was speaking with someone the other day about their business and they were telling me how they have "Coded" every single sales behaviour possible, and so they can now go into a business and sit within a specific sales environment and "Know" what’s missing or is needed within that team.

A great idea, I guess although whether you use this kind of process, or a more major global sales strategy and trust me I've seen most of them. It never ever seems to get as good a result as if you were to figure out exactly what your best ever internal people do, and consider how this matches to the biggest and best sales programs then build these attributes into your program!

You see over the past 10 years I have attended read or worked with clients who paid a fortune to get results from structured sales programs that have not made the difference they had hoped for, or thought they would have.

You may have experienced this yourself with programs like Solution Selling, SPIN selling, Cowan Brown, Exceed or one of many others. They all have incredible value, but ONLY if they can be tailored to fit and work in the specific context with which you find yourself. E.g. if you are in Financial Services and Retail banking you will need to use this process in quiet a different way to if you were in Life or General Insurance.

If you are in manufacturing and selling to wholesalers or in Telecommunications and you try to teach your teams to sell like people in another sector you may be in for a shock. So often clients have told me, we spent $XXX,XXX on this particular program and only achieved a 15-20% increase accross 5% of a population.

Damn I say feeling sorry for them, well rather than throwing the investment away, in some cases it may have actually worked extraordinarily well in the 5%, so lets code that and replicate it.

We have also rolled out many of our own solutions and seen exactly what works and does not work best. One of the biggest lessons we had in the early days was where you have a sales head, that refuses to change his or her own coaching and mentoring style.

One organisation we had where we knew exactly what was needed but could not get through to the person at the top of the sales team who never changed a thing and therefore results only occurred in segments where the other managers did not like him anyway. Hmmm - What was the lesson, make sure you have your most senior managers on board first! Understand who your talent is and how you need to manage them. Your ability to talent manage will in almost all cases significantly influence your results.

The ability to understand and box the key distinctions of your best people in key areas enables you to create results in your business much faster than other organisations in your industry. Whether you have a population of 10, 50, 500 or 15,000, the ability to roadmap what your best people do that differs from what the others do can create a massive competitive advantage.

Listen to Tom Young (BP's Global Knowledge Management Team) from Knoco talk about the value of understanding the key smarts of some of your most talented people when they are on their way out of an organisation. If you start this process as a part of your talent management program, the savings can quickly add into the millions of dollars.

NOTE: The sound at the start of this video is slightly poor, but it gets better.

Key Areas

Isolate key areas and then break these down into Heuristics, the hands-on approaches that your best people use to get results. These approaches tend most often not to be in procedures yet, as talented people generally do things for which procedures have not yet been invented. Procedures tend to come much later down the track after everyone else finds out about the strategies and then starts to use them. Eventually someone says, "Hey, we should add this to the procedure manual."

Heuristics on Key Areas

• Take those key areas and ask yourself what heuristics were needed in order for this to work with that particular person?
• What was the outcome required?
• Where could things fall down?

Stories & History of Key Incidents That Caused Big Results 

Look at actual stories or case studies. What happened in those key areas in the past where great things have happened? How was this used to get as good or better results in later instances? Also what was needed in order to get much better results?

By mapping these kinds of things around your highest performers, you build accurate models of what your most talented people do to get results.