Episode 48
Teamwork is Long-Term Investing
Let's face it, recruiting is a team sport. Christopher Gray, Partner at ThinkingAhead's Energy and Renewables practice, shares the 3 big ways being a team player can give you a boost, 3 real-world scenarios where you might have to choose between a team approach or going solo, and how to overcome a few common roadblocks that can make teamwork difficult.
Transcript
Teamwork is long-term investing.
Speaker:Teamwork is long-term investing.
Speaker:You may give something today And not get anything back for it.
Speaker:But in this business and in this life, at some point you're going to need help.
Speaker:And examples of that in this business, in this world that we're in is a candidate referral, a split deal, somebody that saves a search that's kind of spiraling out of control for you, or you have a deal and you get to the altar, and then it starts to fall apart there, and somebody helps you close the deal.
Speaker:If you needed help tomorrow, who would run towards you?
Speaker:Think about that.
Speaker:I'm gonna give you three examples of why teamwork pays off.
Speaker:The first one is social capital.
Speaker:So every time you share a candidate, every time you help somebody with a search, every time you make an introduction, and every time you even just offer advice, you're building internal equity.
Speaker:You're building internal equity within your team and within your firm.
Speaker:And when you need help, people are gonna remember that.
Speaker:Here's the second way: your whole team gets better.
Speaker:When people are sharing scripts, when people are sharing market intelligence, when you're sharing objections that you're receiving in the market, and when you're sharing closing strategies, everybody improves.
Speaker:And what that means is your reputation is better, so that's your personal reputation as well as the reputation of your team.
Speaker:Your brand for your firm is gonna be better, and by extension, that means your brand for your team and yourself personally, and you're gonna get more referrals.
Speaker:So that could be outside referrals, that could also be internal referrals from your teammates because you've been giving and you've been sharing.
Speaker:So whenever the environment improves, everybody wins.
Speaker:Here's the third way.
Speaker:This is the big one: protection during tough seasons.
Speaker:Every single person that's ever been in search has had a slow quarter.
Speaker:We've all had deals that fell apart, and we've all had searches that were really, really tough for whatever reason.
Speaker:But when you've built goodwill within your team, people are gonna give you grace, they're gonna advocate for you, and quite possibly they're gonna help you recover from a bad spot in your year.
Speaker:In hockey, there's a great example of someone who is an extremely high achiever, maybe the highest achiever ever, and was also a giver, and that's Wayne Gretzky.
Speaker:So most people would admit that Wayne Gretzky is the greatest hockey player that's ever played, and everybody knows that he scored a lot of goals.
Speaker:But here's one fact about him you might not know: Wayne Gretzky has more assists than any other player has total points.
Speaker:When I read that, it was mind-boggling.
Speaker:One of the greatest scorers, if not the greatest scorer ever, also has the most assists.
Speaker:The greatest player ever was also the greatest setup man.
Speaker:And the takeaway from that is you can still be the best, but you can also still lead the league in helping others to score.
Speaker:So are you trying to lead the league in goals or assists?
Speaker:There's nothing bad about wanting to lead the league in goals.
Speaker:I'm just talking about keeping a balance there.
Speaker:Now let's just look at the business world for a second.
Speaker:Looking at the relationship between Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger.
Speaker:Warren Buffett was quoted as saying, "Charlie pushed me to be better," and Munger constantly challenged Buffett's thinking.
Speaker:And the key is they openly disagreed all the time.
Speaker:Teamwork does not mean we all hold hands and sing a song, and everything's beautiful, and we never have disagreement, and we never see things differently.
Speaker:You're gonna see things differently.
Speaker:Look at the achievers, look at the strong-willed personalities.
Speaker:Talk about strong-willed personalities.
Speaker:Headhunters have to have strong-willed personalities to be successful.
Speaker:So when you get a group of them together, even a small group on a team, there are going to be differences of opinion.
Speaker:But with Munger and Buffett, their intellectual partnership helped create one of the most successful investing records ever.
Speaker:And here's the takeaway from that.
Speaker:Great teammates don't just support you, they sharpen you.
Speaker:And this is in scripture, you know, iron sharpens iron, but it's really true.
Speaker:Great teammates don't just support you, they sharpen you.
Speaker:Now for this next part, I want to talk about a, a handful of scenarios, and these are real search scenarios that you could take the solo road or you could take the team road.
Speaker:The first one is you found the best candidate in the history of the universe.
Speaker:They're an A player, they're an A candidate, and you know that if you can place this person, you're gonna get 100% deal, big fat fee, all of that, all the bells and whistles.
Speaker:But they might fit a teammate search better, and if we share that candidate, we-- we're gonna only get a 50/50 split, we're not gonna get 100% deal, and we don't like that.
Speaker:We like, we like to get all the money.
Speaker:But you also gain trust when you share that person.
Speaker:And then later, when you need a referral, or when you need help filling a search, or when you need somebody to split a deal, people remember how you were.
Speaker:And every decision that you make with a candidate in terms of sharing with your team, it builds your internal reputation.
Speaker:And we all have an internal reputation, whether we like it or not.
Speaker:So doing things that help to build that up and help to have you characterized as a team player, I, I think is important.
Speaker:And here's the second scenario: a search that's falling apart.
Speaker:We have all had this.
Speaker:You're 60 days into a search, you got nothing.
Speaker:Your pipeline's thin, your client's frustrated, and we are very averse at times to letting people know that we're struggling with something.
Speaker:"I got this. I can handle it. I'll fix it myself." But you know what the best teammates might do?
Speaker:They might say, "Hey guys, I, I just want to bring something to the team here.
Speaker:I'm stuck on this search, and here's what's going on." And just asking an, an open-ended question, "Does anybody have any ideas?" And what I can do with this?
Speaker:Does anybody know anybody in this space or this niche?
Speaker:Or has anybody ever been at this situation before?
Speaker:Here's what's happening.
Speaker:Now the team's involved.
Speaker:All of a sudden, a referral comes in, and your search is saved.
Speaker:And the takeaway is, teamwork sometimes looks like vulnerability, and we're not exactly always good at that.
Speaker:Here's the third scenario.
Speaker:You're in a deal, everything's going really well.
Speaker:There's a love fest between the candidate and client.
Speaker:They get to the offer stage.
Speaker:The client issues the offer.
Speaker:You had the candidate closed.
Speaker:Everything looked like it was gonna come together perfectly, and all of a sudden, the candidate hesitates.
Speaker:Maybe they got a counteroffer, and now you're stuck.
Speaker:And sometimes you can get out of that bad loop by just getting a second opinion from a teammate.
Speaker:Or maybe you can role-play how to go through the counteroffer with them.
Speaker:Or maybe somebody on your team has more experience with that type of situation.
Speaker:Maybe it's the niche, maybe it's a, a specific type of job, a specific functional role.
Speaker:But the bottom line is your teammates are gonna show up for you because you've shown up for them before.
Speaker:Now I'm gonna talk about a couple things here that make teamwork difficult.
Speaker:Here's the first thing.
Speaker:We hear all the time in our training from our leaders, from sales trainers, to embrace an abundance mindset, and some of us like to kind of brag that we embrace it.
Speaker:"You know, I'm all-- Everyone can eat.
Speaker:You know, there's enough placements for everyone.
Speaker:I have an abundance mindset." But when you're struggling in a quarter, that goes away, and now we're in a scarcity mindset, and we're clinging to whatever we can get.
Speaker:And we get in this mindset of, "If I give this away, I lose." And, and our ego gets involved, and it's difficult to ask for help.
Speaker:It's difficult sometimes to give credit, and it's also difficult sometimes to share knowledge.
Speaker:The reality of teamwork, and I think this is the m- maybe the most important thing that you can take away from this, sometimes you help somebody, and they never help you back.
Speaker:Ever.
Speaker:They don't help you.
Speaker:They don't necessarily even thank you.
Speaker:They don't give you that reciprocal feeling that you're yearning for, and that can be very disappointing.
Speaker:But I think the takeaway for yourself to remember is teamwork is not transactional, it's reputational.
Speaker:So let's just bring it back to the core idea.
Speaker:At some point in your career, you're gonna need help, okay?
Speaker:You're gonna need help splitting a deal, you're gonna need a referral, you're gonna need a teammate to come in and help you save a search where it's been open forever and you got nothing.
Speaker:Or even you've gotten the offer, and there's some funny stuff happening at the later stages which freaks us out 'cause we've done all this work.
Speaker:And a teammate might be able to come in and kind of help you rescue that.
Speaker:So, so really the question is: Have you built enough goodwill that people want to help you?
Speaker:And I think kind of the final rhetorical takeaway is teamwork is not charity, it's strategic generosity.
Speaker:Now, that sounds like something a politician would say, but it's really true.
Speaker:And if there's no vocation on earth besides maybe lawyers that has to be more strategic than we do.
Speaker:We are always thinking about strategy, long and short term.
Speaker:One other thing I wanted to talk about is just split protocols.
Speaker:If your team does not have one, I strongly encourage you to get one.
Speaker:That sets the framework for sharing and, unfortunately, when they happen, even disputes, is having a split protocol.
Speaker:Here's what happens when this happens.
Speaker:Here's what happens when there's a split and it's not exactly by the book.
Speaker:Now, I'll tell you that even when you have split protocols, there are still gonna be certain situations that don't line up perfectly with the split pro- protocol, and that is another example of where it's better to think team first.
Speaker:It's really, really hard.
Speaker:When I said before that there can be disagreements, they can be legit disagreements.
Speaker:They can be two good people with two good thoughts that just don't see eye to eye.
Speaker:Whenever we have a disagreement with somebody, we think it's zero percent our fault and one hundred percent the other person's fault.
Speaker:But really what it is is it's probably about twenty percent our fault.
Speaker:But what we do is we focus on the other person's eighty percent and we don't focus on our twenty percent.
Speaker:Get outside your head for a minute and, and look at things without anger and the flight or f- fight thing, and I think you'll, you'll be a lot better off.
