Vince Poscente, this year’s Green Industry Expo keynote speaker, knows a little something about focus, commitment, and defying the odds. At age 26, he decided to take up speed skiing and pursue it competitively. Only four years later, he was a member of the Canadian speed skiing team vying for a gold medal in the 1992 Winter Olympics, held in Albertville, France. Poscente made it to the final round of the games and on five different occasions held a national record, with his personal best being 135 mph.
Now an internationally sought speaker and consultant, Poscente is the founder and CEO of Be Invinceable Group, a business consulting firm based in Dallas, Texas. He’s managing partner in a successful media/communications agency holds a master’s degree in organizational management.
GIE Today recently sat down with Poscente to get his insights on management, overcoming challenges and achieving business and personal success.
GIE: How did you go from being a recreational skier to an Olympian in just four years?
Poscente: A good idea won’t go away. And at age 14 I saw the opening ceremonies of the 1976 Olympics in Montreal. At the time I was a clarinet player in the band, so I wasn’t exactly predisposed to being an Olympic athlete.
The idea of wanting to participate in the Olympics wouldn’t go away and from age 14 I realized that I would never know unless I tried. I think in life either you go towards something you want to create, or you realize you don’t want the regret of not knowing if “I could have.” And that provided the motivating force for me to compete in the Olympics.
GIE: You have been known to say, “Never underestimate the value of an outside perspective.” What perspective can you provide that would be useful for our industry?
Poscente: Much of the competition for landscaping is from the do-it-yourself (DIY) market. The thinking among some consumers is, “How hard can this be?” It’s human nature to not know, what you don’t know.
The opportunity then for the landscape industry is to give consumers a perception of the value we bring to the table. The second people see value, they will move forward. The sales process has three elements. One, you have to attract attention. Two, you must build rapport and, three, you have to demonstrate the value.
We often skip the first two and just go right to the value. But, as an industry, what innovative ways can we use to attract the consumer’s attention? And how are we building rapport with consumers?
Another thing to keep in mind is that there are two principal motivators: the opportunity to gain; and the fear of loss. Those two elements are critical, especially the fear of loss when it comes to the DIY market.
GIE: Explain your five “C” strategy and how it can impact companies and individuals?
Poscente: The five Cs are: Clarity of vision, Commitment, Consistency, Confidence and Control.
Clarity of vision is far more than just saying, “I want to make more money,” or “I want to build my business.” It is the emotional buzz. Does your vision have an emotional buzz and what mission are you on? What is the thing that will get you out of bed in the morning as though you were a 9-year-old excited to take on the day?
That emotional buzz is the critical component of the next “C,” which is commitment. Commitment is almost trivial-ized today. Take for example the fact that 50 percent of marriages today end in divorce. People think they understand commitment, but they often don’t. Commitment is a process. Being committed to a task, means being committed to the process of commitment.
Commitment is often interpreted as a moment, such as the moment someone stops smoking. But any smoker trying to quit will tell you that it is an every day fight. It’s less of a moment of time and very much a process.
| GETTING R.E.S.U.L.T.S. |
Finding out what makes people tick is the source of imrproving organizational effectiveness and teamwork. A strategy using the acronym R.E.S.U.L.T.S. helped us obtain better performance form our sales team and will help take your team and company to the next level. Repetition of the corporate vision. We shifted from just putting our corporate vision on the wall to getting the team tuned into what the vision meant to them. At our Monday morning meetings we revisited the vision with people presenting on how the corporate vision would contribute to their personal vision. Exchange information in open forums. Again, at the Monday morning meetings, we would visit last week’s sales and progress. Instead of focusing on the actions towards a good sale, we had success stories where the salesperson would describe what the sale meant to him. The benefit was two fold. First, it kept the salesperson in tune with his personal attitudes around the sale and second, other employees identified with that person’s attitude and recognized it as his own. Strategize consistent application. As an Olympic athlete I relied on a strategy that was consistently applied. Unfortunately, sales people, as a rule, rely less on strategy and more on a “hit and miss” approach. Therefore, we sat down with each person and mapped out his or her own individual strategy. Understanding unconscious fears. Mismanaged fear produces poor results and many fears are unconscious. Here is an example of how we found these fears. We asked one of our sales staff what her preferred results would be. Her first response was to make more money. More questions revealed, making more money meant more time working. After a few more questions she said she got into sales to have more freedom. It was as if a light bulb was turned on. This person realized she unconsciously thought that making more money meant less freedom. Low and behold, it was not the market. It was her getting in her own way. She instantly made a decision to work smarter on moneymaking activities, delegate the others and retain her freedom. When all team members’ fears are outlined then they can help one another deal with and eventually overcome fear. Locate each team member’s core values. We used a series of questions that uncovered what each person was good at. Then we asked them to identify the experiences that produce the positive results they had in their lives. Again, like pealing the onion, we looked for core experiences. For example, one fellow was known for entertaining Tie the corporate vision with the individual’s core values. This was simple. Each person had to come up with three of his or her core values that paralleled or fit with the corporate vision. We instantly made each person a tangible, identifiable part or our corporate vision. Our vision became their vision and vice versa. Support their decisions. Command and control leadership is dead. Our strategy was useless if we did not trust each person’s decisions. We made research materials available, hired speakers, purchased sales tapes but none of it was mandatory. The benefits were instant. The moment we stopped pushing, the sales person stopped pushing back. He stood on his own two feet and made his own decisions. We built trust and respect by trusting and respecting each individual’s decisions. Our corporate results shifted slowly at first. We were patient and stuck to our plan. By the end of our fiscal year we had doubled production and seemed to have more fun doing so. Twelve months later we doubled sales again. Not bad for a simple shift in processes and systems. – Vince Poscente |
The third “C” is consistency. Most businesses operate under the precept of doing what the competition is not doing. But every business is doing that and why would you want to compete on a level playing field? Why wouldn’t you want the competition to be running uphill the whole time? So I advise businesses to build your company around what the competition is not willing to do. Those are often the things that you are not willing to do either. Business is not supposed to be comfortable or easy. You must be willing to do what others are not willing to do.
GIE: How do you motivate your team to do what the competition is not willing to do?
Poscente: Typically command and control is the method we used. For example an owner might say, “Do this because I told you to do it and I am the one paying you.” Today, there is a shift, and people want to have a sense of meaning behind what they do. Events like those of Sept.11, 2001, further reinforced that trend. So you have generations of people asking, “Is there more to this? How can I be fulfilled in my career?”
So, even if you are hiring somebody for $10 an hour to work in landscaping, command and control isn’t going to work. The vision for your company must have an emotional buzz for employees as well. Take for example, Coca-Cola. In the 1980s they had a major flop with “New Coke.” However, quickly after that misstep, the company changed it’s mission to read, “To put a Coke within reach of every human being on the planet.” That single phrase fired-up employees at Coke so much that they turned the company around almost in a heartbeat.
What that means for a landscaper is if the work you and your employees do has no emotional quotient to it, then it will be virtually impossible to motivate your team to do what the competition is not willing to do.
A lot of things fall into place when there is an emotional depth to what your business is doing.
GIE: That’s where your metaphor of The Ant and The Elephant comes into play.
Poscente: The ant, which is minuscule, is the conscious mind, whereas the elephant is the subconscious mind. So often leaders in landscape companies lead with their head. They say, “This is where we are going, this is what we are going to do, do you all understand that?” Then they complain that employees don’t get it. Well, that’s because you haven’t invested in the emotional quotient of what you and your people are doing.
There’s lots of emotional aspects of creating and maintaining landscapes. You are helping families with their self respect. You are creating environments in which children can play, learn and grow. You are increasing the value of someone’s property, which may lead to an improvement in his or her life.
That’s the leaders role, to make the emotional connection and remind your people of that.
GIE: Explain the fourth and fifth “Cs?”
Poscente: Confidence is the fourth “C.” If you look at any activity, much of success is confidence. In fact anywhere between 60 and 99 percent of it is confidence. But, we often spend the majority of our time with employees, and ourselves, on skill, rather than training for confidence.
Confidence comes from experience. So, why not build confidence through mock experiences? For example, you could create flash cards of worst case scenarios and go through them with employees. The flash cards would be situations that would cause stress. So you give yourself the experience of this situation, and the more imagined experiences of performing well in stressful situations, the more confidence you will have.
For example, in the landscape business, maybe you would create a scenario where you have a very lucrative job, but it’s only lucrative if you can meet the customer’s demands of completing it in six days. One of your supplier calls and says your material for that job is going to be two days late and, in the meantime, a couple of the crewmembers on this job quit. How would you handle that? And what would that feel like? Running through that scenario in your imagination will give you and your people experience. That experience translates to confidence, which will translate into success.
That takes us to the fifth “C,” which is control. We know we cannot control the environment of the situation. But, we can control the routine we use in the situation. Routine sets up the momentum for peak performance. For example, I used a four-part routine as an Olympic athlete and now as a speaker. It is: 1) Get there early; 2) Breathe deep; 3) Visualize the outcome; and 4) Make the decision to have fun.
The author is editor of GIE Today.
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