The Reality of Business

Building Loyalty: How to Create a Trustworthy Workforce

• Bob Morrell and Jeremy Blake • Season 6 • Episode 5

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In the fourth and final episode of The Reality of Business mini-series, inspired by their upcoming book Whose Side Are You On? Disloyal Bonding and Strategic Lies, Bob Morrell and Jeremy Blake uncover the essential steps to building a loyal, trustworthy workforce that will transform your business.

Throughout this episode, Bob and Jeremy reflect on crucial lessons covered in the series – spotting disloyal bonding, eradicating strategic lies, and building a culture of integrity. They offer actionable strategies for attracting employees who share your values, improving management practices, and training your team to prioritise long-term loyalty over short-term gains. You’ll also hear real-world examples showcasing how senior leadership can address toxic behaviours that sabotage your company’s success.

Listen now for the final insights you need to create a high-trust organisation. And don’t forget – this is your last chance to pre-order Whose Side Are You On? Disloyal Bonding and Strategic Lies before it launches on 1st October 2024. Pre-order your copy now on Amazon.co.uk!

For more info, free resources, useful content & our blog posts, please visit realitytraining.com.

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Speaker 1:

Hello there and welcome to the fourth and final episode of our introductory podcasts to our book that is coming out on the 1st of October Whose Side Are you On? Dissolute Bonding and Strategic Lies? And this is presented by Bobby Murrell and Jeremy Blake. And in this final episode we're going to move on from the concept of disloyal bonding and the examples of strategic lies that exist in organizations to ask the question how do different organizations eliminate disloyal bonding in their organizations? So there's three main sections to this recruitment, training and other strategic things you can do to remove these habits. So let's first of all talk about recruitment, jeremy. How would a major company go about recruiting for integrity? How would you?

Speaker 2:

do that. Well, this is major. And if you listen to an earlier episode, I talked about people who are hop skipping and jumping between competing brands, where they are the star of the show, not the brand, and they hope they can take their higher salary and massage their bonuses and be disloyal again. So one of the first things you want to do is find out why people are leaving and if they blame the organization yeah, they couldn't really support me. They didn't understand. I was one of the top You're trying to dig into the past behavior, because quite often past behavior predicts future behavior. We are habitual creatures and we repeat our mistakes and our habits. So if somebody has moved around a great deal, you've really got to question that. And this becomes doubly hard if the person doing the interviews is also a strategic liar on the move, because they'll be looking to also recruit people to massage their bonuses before they move again.

Speaker 1:

And this is why sometimes people move en masse as a disloyal bunching group often companies will recruit en masse, so they'll recruit 30, 40, 50 people for new departments. And it's a very exciting time where you're recruiting lots of people, interviewing them, thinking, can they do this? And you may get people who say, oh yeah, I'm good at this sort of thing. You know, I've got the gift of the gab, you know I'm really good at talking to people. I'm very persuasive, and they will big up their talents as a salesperson to work out whether they're good at selling because they're professional and talented or whether they're good at selling because they're essentially good at lying to customers in order to get deals. And sometimes it's hard to spot because you might get somebody who looks pretty good but actually they're just full of it, and when they come and work for you they can be immensely damaging. So that's the first thing Asking questions that will expose those types of behavior will give you a very good snapshot of the type of person that you're looking for Now.

Speaker 1:

Then we move on to training, because training is really important. We run a training company and we train thousands of people every year, and what we see when we're training is this idea of some people who have that slightly disloyal trait, not wanting to adapt their behaviors for professional behaviors. Now, that's a really interesting thing that through training you talk about asking questions of the customer and developing the value and negotiating professionally, and some people don't want to do that. To them it seems a lot of effort when you can just tell a lie and get the deal over the line. Now, the more lies you tell, the more damage you do and the long-term organizational possibilities are very, very limited. So training for loyalty is really important because once you have a loyal colleague who is selling professionally, they will be winning you new customers who will also be loyal and be more likely to stay with you.

Speaker 2:

I think one of the things I've seen increasingly just in the last few years with a few clients is those salespeople If we talk about that department who don't do enough research, are just armed with the pitch to be disloyal and go in and to sort of point their products and prices and services, which is why you need a structure that enables proper research to see what are the ambitions and pain points, if you like, of the organization you're selling to and also as a consumer. If people are just good at pitching, that's a bit of an alarm that they are prepared to pitch and be disloyal at all costs, how much they want to understand the customer. And our training and other good training companies out there focus a lot more on how you understand people, how you ask great questions and understand their outcomes that they're desiring and get to know them so that what you recommend isn't just selling them something once but selling them for life, which goes back to what we've just said. Isn't just selling them something once but selling them for life, which goes back to what we've just said.

Speaker 2:

Recruiting people who are constantly moving to look for the best products, to pitch, to just massage their own bonuses are probably not great at retention. You know you've got hunters and you've got farmers. You don't just want a team of hunters who will sell at all costs without the renewability, because retention is far less costly for an organization. So we've talked about recruitment, about training. What's another thing that, if someone's listening to this going gosh, I've got disloyal bonding going on. They could be a large company, bob, they could be small, but what else could they do to identify and begin to reduce stroke, eliminate these behaviors in their business?

Speaker 1:

In many cases it comes down to managers, managers, team leaders, sales managers, sales directors anybody who is managing the sales and service process. They are responsible for spotting these habits when they occur, coaching them out of people. That's really important. We do lots of work on coaching so that we can identify what it is somebody said, challenge them on it and get them thinking about what they could say differently. And the point we make in the book a lot is that so often it comes down to language that you could have the exact same effect on a customer by choosing slightly different language which doesn't in some way denigrate, devalue and damage your organization. So a good manager will coach their individuals to choose better language to use with customers. And that's where the work that we do comes in, where we'll create a structure which they can then use as part of their conversational journey. But also that structure makes sure that the right behaviors are engaged in and the wrong behaviors are discouraged if you are a national organization or an international one, you'll have different sites.

Speaker 2:

If you've got, say, a number of managers on a site but they're not connected, you might end up with three disloyal and one loyal, and if you haven't identified that as the leader of those leaders, you're not going to fix the problem, because the three that are continually disloyal will continue to encourage behaviors in their team members and any other leaders that they're managing, and so this becomes, as Bob's saying, a really important management issue that managing for integrity is as important as selling for integrity. Where are you going with this? What are we doing here? It's, you know, it's a career and we talk a lot about sales because that's where it appears the revenue comes in. But you can have disloyal behavior where people are shortcutting even parts of the manufacturing process or shipping things that aren't complete. You know it lives in any department, it isn't just in the revenue. But it's easier for us to talk about that with our expertise and our work, about sales and revenue and profit, because that's where we camp out in our day jobs. So anything else, or shall we now encourage people to maybe listen back to any episodes that you haven't?

Speaker 2:

We've made four. We've talked about the introduction and the concept of why it matters that you understand what disloyal bonding is. We then went in episode two about, you know, design, strategic lies. We give real examples about that coming down from the top. Episode three some real everyday examples that you might experience. And in this final one, what can you do to reduce that? Anything else from you, bobby, before we close.

Speaker 1:

I think. Finally, I'd just like to say that, as we've already highlighted quite often, the strategy can come from the top, and I think if very senior people and board level people have very clearly understood what these habits are and how they proliferate and how damaging they are, then you can have a company wide policy policy which eliminates it and that will do more to sustain your company's success into the future than just about anything else you can do with your people and, of course, with your customers. So we would urge you please, now that you've listened to our podcast, to look out for the launch of Whose Side Are you On this Law Bonding and Strategic Lies On the 1st of October. It'll be available on Amazon, on Kindle, as an e-book or as a paperback, delivered to your door.

Speaker 2:

So please, look out for that and make sure you get hold of your copy. Thank you.