Episode Summary
When the COVID-19 pandemic began, the world had to adapt to a new way of life and work. Remote work has become commonplace, and both companies and employees are facing many new challenges. Mutual trust has become very important, and companies have been looking for ways to drive the engagement of their employees.
Even before the pandemic, so many organizations struggled to hire someone for entry-level positions. But a lot of companies don’t accept retail experience as one of the entry points, even though retail could be great preparation for a job in sales.
In the new episode of Taking the Lead, Christina Brady welcomes Gianna Scorsone, the Head of North America at Aircall. Christina and Gianna get into why retail is a good starting point for a sales job and discuss the importance of creating more empathy in the workplace.
Guest Profile
- Name: Gianna Scorsone
- What she does: She is the Head of North America at Aircall.
- Company: Aircall
- Noteworthy: Gianna has been helping scale organizations in the SaaS and tech industry for nearly two decades. Her expertise and guidance have been instrumental in improving processes and cross-departmental efficiencies to drive organizations forward. Gianna's impressive results and visionary leadership were recognized by the prestigious Stevie Awards for Women in Business when they awarded her the Bronze Stevie Award for Female Executive of the Year in 2017.
Key Insights
- Retail prepares you for a job in sales. There are so many companies that are really struggling to hire even entry-level positions, and they don't usually consider candidates who have experience in retail. According to Gianna, it's such a missed opportunity. "We have to draw parallels between what type of sales environment it is and what type of sales it is. If you think about express, high traffic, you have to touch a lot of customers, all at the same time. So it's using your voice to project, pointing out different pieces of clothing that are going to be most appealing to most people and solve the problem. As you're helping one person, how can you share it so that others see it as well and make them feel special? So it's personalization at scale. [...] I was at a brunch, and my server was phenomenal; she was great. We hired her, and she's one of our BDRs. That's how it should be. Because, again, you're meeting people you don't know, and you're trying to build instant credibility, instant connection, and you have all of that experience right there."
- Empathy, understanding, and vulnerability in the workplace are important to drive engagement and employee morale. Gianna believes people need to build healthy relationships and work on how they treat each other. "One of the biggest things we can do to drive engagement is just allowing our teams to understand that we're there. We're here to work with them or alongside them, and they might need a push or a pull at times, and they can depend on us to do so. [...] It's okay to share, and being open to saying, 'I'm not the best at everything,' or 'I need help sometimes,' or 'I failed sometimes,' allows others to mirror that same sentiment. When we think about how to drive engagement, it's about removing obstacles. To remove the obstacles, we need managers to understand what those obstacles are. So by creating this environment where people feel comfortable sharing what they're experiencing, feel comfortable to say, 'Hey, I'm not the best at this. I need some help,' managers are now able to better step in to remove these obstacles a lot faster, which is going to drive higher impact and exponential growth. And people will learn more, feel supported, and therefore, retention is going to increase as well."
- Win-Learn-Change tool. Some companies want to be there for their employees, understand them, and allow them to be vulnerable. But employees need to notice this so that there will be mutual trust and respect. Speaking on how to do it, Gianna suggests the Win-Learn-Change tool. "It's identifying some wins that you had, which have to be very action-oriented. You can't just say, 'I had a great client call.' What specifically did you do? It's behavioral and action — pinpointing. Learnings – what are some things that you learned? And then, changes — what are you going to do as a result of those learnings? We cross-sector all of the teams; we've got these Win-Learn-Change groups. And they each share win-learn changes based on their week. We open the door and the space for cross-collaboration so we can create mutual respect among different teams that are traditionally siloed from each other. And it also creates more empathy and allows people to say, 'Hey, I'm giving myself an improvement plan,' which is really cool."
Episode Highlights
Engagement Surveys are Fantastic
“It’s not just rolling out an engagement survey but sharing the results with the entire organization. And then, it’s creating a plan — how we’re going to go about improving some of the opportunities identified — and putting the responsibility and onus on the business leaders, the directors, the managers, and people with teams to also address the results with their teams. So actual feedback, getting more feedback, getting more context, and taking action based on engagement results are really important because that’s going to show that we actually care. It’s going to show that you want to further build that culture where feedback is welcome, appreciated, and used to harness greater results.”
Set Boundaries and Build a Good Relationship with Work
“Don’t text or Slack after a certain hour, and don’t expect your employees to work on the weekends. And if you do, create really clear boundaries around why you expect them to, in certain cases — a client escalation, a massive new deal that we want to close before the end of the quarter. Make sure that people take a vacation. This is vastly important. We know studies show that when people take a vacation, they’re far more productive, they’re able to communicate better, and they’re able to collaborate in a more functional way. So tracking vacation, not to be the police about it, but to make sure people are taking it. […] I’m not a mom, but I see a lot of moms. I saw what my sister was going through, and it was intense. But I also saw the stat, and it was interesting. It was something like, ‘Women found the pandemic to actually be a little bit easier on their workload while fathers found it a lot harder.’ And I think that’s so interesting that it changed this dichotomy a little bit on who is expected to do all of the caretaking, extra work, and homework.”
If You Have Emotions, You Will Have a Healthy Balance
“One of the components to creating boundaries and having that healthy balance is emotion. I think it’s really important to recognize — and this is something that I’ve worked on over the years and need to continue to work on — that I’ve always driven my self-worth through work. My self-worth is attached to my job: having a job; what I’m producing; what I’m doing; and the validation that I receive from it. And it’s very specific to the one function that I’m in or the job that I happen to be at, and it has to be that one, and I can’t fail. It’s a very unhealthy relationship. And it’s only over the last few years that I really started to flip that narrative and say, ‘It is okay. Look at how much experience [I have], and how I built myself up and got to where I am.’ I don’t think that I’m the only one to share this or to feel this way.”