A large part of the message you send to your team is based on demonstration. What you say and what you do must be aligned for your message to gain traction with your team.
Many professional sales agents dream of owning their own business. At James M. Pleasants Company Inc. (JMP), the sales agents do own their own business — as do the vast majority of other JMP employees. JMP, one of the largest HVAC sales representatives in the Southeast, operates under an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP).
I specifically titled this blog The Power of Questions, and I want to be clear that questions differ greatly from questioning. I define these terms like this: questions are asked to gain understanding; whereas questioning is a behavior used to pick something apart to criticize or even ridicule.
If you have a hard time relating to people in your HVAC company, maybe it’s not what they’re saying, or even how they are saying it, but actually how you are listening. This is especially true with feedback on you or your team.
I speak with many HVAC contractors who are frustrated with the way things run in their businesses. When we get to the topic of employee performance, and I ask, “How do employees know what is expected of them in this specific situation?”, I get an answer that just drives me crazy: “They just know.”
Positive workplace policies have long been uncontroversial. Typically, these policies set the expectation for employees that they will represent their employer in a positive light, and won’t make negative comments or engage in gossip. This seems common sense — what could go wrong?
We commonly ask our employees to connect with the customer, from the phone call to the visit at their home. “Get to know them, and ask questions. Connect with them,” is the creed. But before we ask employees to connect with customers, we should ask “How well connected are we with each other?”
When a good employee’s performance drops, almost every time we look into what happened, we find the feedback, follow-up, and support the employee received in the months following training was not consistent over time.