Developing the Optimum Team to Sell and Service Accounts
Presented by…Art Turock of Art Turock & Associates
Team Selling: Key Issues
- Criteria for determining whether team selling is a worthwhile advantage:
- Common problems to avoid in team selling:
- Laying the groundwork for top-flight team selling:
Overview of Conflict in the Workplace
“The only place in life where there is no conflict is on the last ten minutes of The Loveboat” Art Turock
Conflict blocks productive work performance, there it requires immediate attention. When conflict is present in the workplace, how people attempt to resolve it largely determines whether work gets done smoothly or ineffectively.
Job conflict all too often results in two styles of behavior.
- Avoidance
- Expressing Anger or Other Negative Feelings
PROBLEMS WITH AVOIDANCE
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Problems with Expressing Anger or Other Negative Feelings
What works in your personal life won’t necessarily work in your professional life. When conflict occurs in professional relationships, we often fall back on the rules we’ve learned for handling personal relationships. With friends or family members, an emotional display often influences them to change their behavior. However, this type of response does not work over the long run in professional relationships.
An Alternative Approach: Professionalizing Conflict
Professionalizing conflict is as much a perspective as it is a relationship skill. This perspective assumes that conflict will inevitably arise between people at work.
Step 1: Manage your own stress.
Anger and fear sabotage your ability to accurately diagnose the source of conflict and to persuasively speak about issues.
Step 2: Diagnose the issue in organizational terms.
Instead of seeing conflict as a “personality clash” between co-workers, define the issue in terms of ambiguity or differences involving organizational goals, roles, and procedures.
Step 3: Talk about the issue using the “language of team.”
The primary intention in raising issues is to describe the conflict situation in such a way that the listener is persuaded that the existing problem demands prompt action. This is accomplished by dispassionately discussing the difficulties involving goals, roles, and procedures and negative organizational impact. Leave out personal feelings.
Diagnosing the True Sources of Conflict
Job conflict is often misdiagnosed as a “personality clash” between co-workers. Actually, personality clashes are most often the symptom rather than cause. The source of job conflict typically is a misunderstanding or disagreement about the goals, roles and procedures. These team variables need to be defined, agreed upon, and followed for work to get done effectively.
Sources of conflict
Goals – Conflict
Developing the Optimum Team to Sell and Service Accounts by Art Turock