Building and maintaining trust is the foundation of success in revenue leadership. If you oversee revenue in some capacity for your business, you have a commitment to your customers, your employees, your board and yourself to create an environment of extreme trust through your words, your actions and your approach to solving problems.
Ensuring ethics and morality, centered around the people you serve, is due north on your personal compass gives you a necessary foundation to succeed. Building trust can be time consuming and oftentimes difficult as it takes only one true lapse of judgment to destroy permanently.
Principles to build and maintain trust:
- Be honest, communicate clearly, ask for feedback, and dig deeper to truly understand the feedback you receive
- Take a long-term approach to creative problem solving and optimize for long-term outcomes vs short-term gains
- Align goals with people as quickly and thoroughly as possible – where the goals aren’t overwhelmingly aligning, don’t proceed
- Put the people you serve at the center of every decision you make
The power of honesty with your direct reports will make all the difference in employee retention and ensuring their buying. They don’t have to guess if you’re being honest or what you’re omitting and that lets them stay laser focused on their objectives as well as feel comfortable being honest with you in return. No matter how good of a leader you are, how deeply entrenched you are in your industry, or how good you are at using data to inform decisions, if your team isn’t comfortable being brutally honest with you, you’ll miss critical opportunities to improve. The lengths that your direct reports will go to reciprocate your candor is often underestimated. It may be easy to omit hard truths or to spin the story to make the data say what people want to hear but it doesn’t ultimately lead to better outcomes. Knowing you won’t always get it right and asking for different points of view will help you and your team level up a lot quicker. When you receive that feedback, don’t hold back on asking questions to truly understand it.
The old saying goes, hire fast and fire faster. I’ve found that the key to building high outcome teams (besides a good hiring process testing for the necessary prerequisites and being mutual) is ensuring alignment. Describe the current situation exactly how it is vs selling them on why. See if the prospective employee is excited to tackle the challenges before you paint the bigger picture. The best talent already likely knows why this opportunity is great for them. Taking the time to understand how this role aligns to their personal goals and how you can define timelines for their success, in line with company milestones, will save you a lot of time, missed targets and costs in rehiring. If you offer all the reasons why not upfront and align mutual goals, you’re left with the right people and substantial trust from day one.
Making decisions that won’t always optimize for short term gains can be challenging as a revenue leader, especially in growth based businesses with VC backing where there’s an expectation to deliver consistently. While it may be appealing to focus on short term revenue vs long term foundation building, it’s a trap the best leaders have learned they have to avoid. Some quick examples include, selling clear bad fit customers to hit targets, letting CRM hygiene be an afterthought, and doing for your employees vs teaching and letting them learn – especially for your front line managers.
Legendary investor Warren Buffet famously says, “Price is what you pay, value is what you get”. If you can be relentless about building long term value in every interaction you have and every decision you make, that investment will continue to return for you over the duration of your career in ways you’ll never be able to calculate up front.
