Back in 2018 I made a confession: I think stack ranking your team is stupid.
There I came right out and said it (again).
Why? two reasons actually…
the public reason: the only people who care about ranking are those who are competitive when compared against other people.
Now you might think that is everyone in sales, but in my years of coaching I’d like to tell you that although competitiveness does run in salespeople, that isn’t’ how all of them measure success.
In fact it isn’t even how MOST people that I’ve worked with measure their success. Here are the top three I hear:
1. better than my last year
2. against my goal
3. vs. the expectations I have for myself
the running your team reason: I don’t see how stack ranking is a valid way to determine where to spend your time, energy, or effort.
No matter what your list will always be 1 to X. Which is why I’m always confused about how can you motivate everyone on your team, if the goal is to beat other people on the same team.
This is the reason when people try to share their stack rankings with me, my first question is “what do you want the result of reviewing stack ranking lists to be?”
- It’s important for people to know where they stand
- It pushes them to do better
- I want them to know their importance in the orginization
Wait… do you REALLY think one or all of those things is what sending out a stack ranking does?
*poof* magically you don’t have to have management and coaching conversations?
Instead of emailing a stack ranked list of some statistic – schedule REGULAR meetings with each person who works directly for you.
- learn what’s important to them
- figure out what would motivate them to do more
- measure their successes based on the goals you discuss