Fringe Connectors

I recently learned from an old headhunter pro about how they ease themselves in or out of each week as a team.

The network share. As part of their recruiters' 'huddle', each person is expected to pass on potentially vital new insight into their arena, as gleaned from a noteworthy protagonist.

If you are unable to offer any genuine contribution, it is culturally frowned upon.

Turns out, often the most memorable 'share', is of a new contact who exhibits somewhat quirky traits. A potential candidate not fitting neatly all the usual career categories. Yet can be envisaged when cut to outshine many a diamond.

This struck me as decidedly counter-conventional for that industry. My own experience is that unless someone ticks all the same, lame, tired old boxes, they've no interest. Specifically, they tend to seek someone who's done precisely the work for years already that the job spec sets out.

This is a shocker. Contributing greatly to the low esteem in which they can be held.

I appreciate many bosses feel they haven't the scope to train someone into most roles these days. With all the mistakes, availability and too distant dividend that might entail.

I'd state that if your hiring policy is to find someone that's long done the same job before elsewhere, success will elude you.

Check your most recent job ad against that for sanity.

Job-hopping, mediocre milkrounders suck all manner of energy out of your ambitions.

As I recently blogged, it's often life at the margins that stimulates. Drives us to fresh ideas, new avenues and higher results.

Which is why I did like the sharing above of something a little out of the ordinary.

How do you capture such?

Not so much as I blog now - although I sense re-visits brewing - this kind of vital intel could at times be covered in the Friday check-ins over video that became a staple of salesteams, to say around mid-22.

Today, this can even be done async if better suits. Which it may well do. Although with the usual caveats about asking salespeople to provide yet more form-filling parallel reporting admin typing.

It likely better fits with all attending together though. Where you can gather quick updates from around the team.

Got a hot topic, trending issue of the time with confirming/challenging insight emerged?

Relevant nuggets related to sales strategy or direction (and/or process, if not a separate strand)?

Notable learnings from the edges?

And with this last one, to bring us back to the 'exec search' world example cited, you could make it specific to each person bringing a defined new contact that all team members might help, deploy or link someone else to, for the win-win betterment of those involved.

You can literally make all these a sentence each.

Or go for the rapid-fire.

In any of the above, what's the one single biggest hitting item of intel gleaned that week which will most help everyone?

There's plenty of ways to enliven any staid info share routine you may have.

And I've deliberately left to one side the notions of agile team style hurdle-jump routines and 'bulletproofing'. Where whilst excellent in their own right, in a sales share can spiral into a rabbit hole of live (often surface scraping yet attempting to masquerade as forensic) deal analysis, which doesn't really help the issue at hand here.

Finally, if the weekly huddle is not quite your thing, then a short, sharp freshener during your next more formal sales meeting can use this framework for a useful twenty-minuter.

Imagine what it might reveal...