We’re All Clamoring for More, But That Betrays What We Have

Rob Whitfield, CEO, Ferrazzi Greenlight

Abraham Maslow famously said, “Man is a perpetually wanting animal.” This doesn’t just apply in our personal lives, but in our work lives too. Having coached hundreds of executive and leadership teams around the world, I consistently hear requests and demands to secure more people, more budget, more resources, and more time.

Oftentimes, executives and leaders start with that focus on needing more before considering what they have and whether they are using it well. Indeed, optimizing for what we have is typically so far down our ‘to do’ lists, that we’d rather fight to get more than seek to be better with what we have.

Times are changing now and as the global economic outlook continues to look less and less appealing, organizations are cutting roles, reducing headcount, slashing budgets, and so on, meaning that our ever-increasing targets must be realized with less and less.

But let’s pause for a moment. We’re missing something here. Our relentless pursuit for more betrays what we have; we have hardworking teams who, during the pandemic, found ways to be revolutionary and agile in what and how they were able to deliver regardless of what was happening around them. We have this powerhouse in our teams, and I’ve seen even most amazing leaders take them for granted. While that’s a separate topic for another time, the point here is that we aren’t making the most of the strength and abilities that lie nascent around us. In all honesty, our research shows that we’re losing up to 50% of the outcomes that are possible for us to achieve from our teams due to a lack of teaming competencies.

Rob is an International Behavior Change Specialist, Certified NLP Trainer, and Executive Coach. He has spent more than 20 years in consulting with the specific intent of helping clients deliver a return on investment from behavior change in the workplace. Rob’s passion is to help individuals, teams, and organizations reach their highest goals. Rob’s experience of igniting and driving to sustainable transformation in organizations across the world delivers practical advice that can drive to human behavior change in complex strategic, technology, and process environments in diverse sectors. A speaker, experience designer, and writer with a proven track record in driving complex customercentric transformation in multiple industries, Rob is a strong, motivational leader who is able to connect people to ideas and inspire them to think critically and differently. He holds them accountable to take actions that will lead to new behaviors and 10X results.

As we grow in our roles, we shift through learning specific, technical competencies and often learn leadership competencies while we ascend through the organizational ranks. Most companies fail to help their executives, leaders, and teams understand and apply teaming competencies, which means we are effectively working with individuals doing their own thing and not harnessing the exceptional power of the interdependencies between members of teams, and further, across teams.

By embracing teaming competencies, we can elevate our performance, we can accelerate our results, we can do more with less, and all while making it easier to do so. The challenge most teams face is that they are not good at optimizing what they have now, and we’ve facilitated and coached some of the world’s best brands, startups, and non-profit organizations to embrace what they have and unleash their true potential.

Imagine if we could get 50% more from what we already have without making people work harder - indeed, they’d have to work differently but it would get them where they want to go - or beyond - faster and more joyfully. Wouldn’t that be amazing? And the best news, is that it is entirely possible!

For accelerated and elevated outcomes, get in touch or take our free team diagnostic to benchmark how your team is doing compared to our decades of research in thousands of teams. With solutions for every budget and our clear guarantee, you have nothing to lose and significant results to gain.