Management Training:
Management Workshops - Game Players on the Job: The Believer
When you think of the The Believer as an employee, you think of someone who is very committed to the mission and products/services of a company; their enthusiasm is contagious. In sales, the productivity can be outstanding. Think of the MLM structure - those are believers - and that's how they can recruit so many people in their "downline".
In movies, sales meetings or political events are filled with rah- rah- rah, songs, energetic music, powerful speeches and a lot of clapping, cheering... the energy is incredible! The cliches are abundant and repeated often, "Go Team", "We'll get rich together", and whatever other slogan they've dreamed up. This enthusiasm affects how they approach buyers - "you must buy this - you can't be without it". When Believers walk into a room you can recognize them immediately - they're boisterous, smiling, determined and confident they have something incredible to give to the world. We've all seen them, heard them and, some of us, actually have bought into the message.
For sales management, The Believer is the ideal --- management can rev them up and off they go. Believers go out and convince people to buy easily because of their own conviction. The number of sales is the score and they all strive to beat the latest and greatest score! However, their "belief" is fickle so the sales manager's job is to keep providing constant reassurances and find ways to constantly keep the "spirit" alive.
Why? Because at the root of this "belief" is insecurity, a lack of self-esteem and they are unsure of themselves; they're constnatly searching outside of themselves for something ideal. The reality, of course, of any product, service or ideal is that it is not perfect. It is not absolute. There's a constant tug between the idealized version and reality. Thus, they must be constantly reminded of what to see, not how it is. If a manager educates her/his sales team that the world is flat, then that manager must constantly reinforce that belief and provide proof to sustain the drive despite the fact that reality is telling The Believer that the world is round.
Though Believers can be an asset to management, they can also be a drain. We all have some of the Believer inside of us because, as humans, that's the way we are built - we believe in something - have values. The Believer is the extreme of what comes to us naturally. Their belief is associated with a need to convert others, to crusade. For management, there is a fine line between reality and enthusiasm getting out of control; the crash is not worth the energy expended to get the "troops" revved up.
It's best to work in building up the individual's confidence with realistic goals to achieve, good training, and systematic successes in order to build inner confidence. With that combination, The Believer will stay the course on a much more sustainable level. Otherwise the company will be faced with high turnover because when The Believer turns "off", they can't move! At the cost of hiring, it's much less expensive to spend the money while they on the job training and bulding their inner self-confidence.
I've seen this so often in the non-profit world - it is easy to believe in the cause! Volunteers or employees come in truly believing the cause is everything and, soon, when they see that the whole world doesn't buy into their conviction, they soon move on to another cause.
When I was hiring employees, I would always ask whether they believed in what the organization was trying to achieve and gauge that response. If it went overboard, I knew that kind of enthusiasm would wane eventually; I preferred hiring people with moderate or no enthusiasm and good skills who understood it was a job, not a cause.
Lorraine Arams:
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Management Workshops
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