Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Lessons - The Importance of Building Trust | Danielle Brown - CMO at Points

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Lessons - The Importance of Building Trust | Danielle Brown - CMO at Points · Success Story with Scott Clary

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  In this Lessons episode, you'll explore the critical role of trust in building a high-performing
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  team, especially in remote work environments. Learn how to foster accountability, transparency,
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  and open communication while managing resistance to new process. Discover strategies for
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  empowering your team to take ownership of their work, creating a culture where trust drives
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  real results, even under pressure.
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  Now there's a component of that that I wanted to ask you about. There's also a component of trust
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  that I think is sort of layered on when somebody's working from home because there has to be an
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  extra layer or level of trust. So you're a leader. You're dealing with a relatively large
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  marketing team. You said 90 individuals. How do you trust them to get their work done? What's
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  your process for feeling comfortable and making sure that they know that you trust them?
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  You know, Timmy, I love that question because I do think the job of a leader is to leave
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  space for people to do their work, to do their best work. And you're only going to do that if you
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  trust them. What they said truth thing is, here's the second squishy topic we're talking about,
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  right, which is trust. We're happiness and their trust. And we actually built a trust model on
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  our team as well. And that was again another crowdsource model. I'm really big on if I'm going to
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  ask the team to do something and build it themselves, right? Exactly. And so we did build a trust
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  model, right, where we said, okay, and this goes back some time, this goes back to my first
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  stint of points. And it's actually survived, then survived while I was gone, where it was actually
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  a recipe for solving a problem where the team was a bit broken. And when I went in to try to figure
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  it out, it was because they didn't trust each other. And you have people double checking other
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  people's work, people like going into areas that weren't their own because they weren't trusting
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  the people on their team. And when we finally got down to it and said, okay, what would it take
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  for you to trust the people that you worked with? Again, crowdsource, we got four things. We got,
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  if you could create transparency, sorry, create transparency, practice accountability,
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  deliver results, and have honest talks with people. So if you're pissed off at me, don't go call
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  your body, come and tell me. And if we could all exhibit those four behaviors, then we would all
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  be able to trust each other. And what we actually did in order to reinforce that is, oh my god,
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  my team hated me when we put this together. But it's actually survived was we would actually
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  on a monthly basis, the team was a lot smaller. So it was easier to do is we would give each other
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  a word. So we would have our update meetings. And then I would say, hey, this month I'm going to
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  get Scott the award for honest talk because I screwed up and she actually confronted me on it.
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  And I totally didn't see it from his perspective. And not hot balls. And so here you go,
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  I'm giving you the award for honest talk. And and I also forced the team to give themselves
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  an award. So then I can say, and I created transparency because something broke here and I let
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  everybody know. And this is what I did. And so it was this it was this exhibiting that trusting
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  behavior too, where you could have an open honest form. And people could have those conversations
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  to say, hey, this is broken. I didn't get this from you. And building that trust. I think
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  having that foundational language again made it easier for us to be working from home and say,
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  okay, I'm not I don't actually understand what's going on over here. I don't feel like I'm having
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  transparency in your part of the business. We need to figure out how to communicate better. Or
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  I'm you're laid on this for two days. And I don't know where it is. So let's just talk about the
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  accountability here, right? I liked it a lot. And I have a question because I'm sure you dealt with
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  this. What do you do when you bring in these models? And you're you are getting team buying.
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  You're getting like everybody's buying because they're literally building the things that they
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  think will work best for them. And then you're you're you know, that's what you're going to go with
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  for both like happiness and trust. But there's going to be people that are going to say this is
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  stupid. This is retarded. I don't understand why I have to give somebody an award. Like this is
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  doesn't make any sense to me. I don't why am I giving myself an award? How do you get those people
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  to buy in? Or is that something that every organization struggles with? You can't you can't do anything
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  about that? No, look, I think I think I think people are wired differently, right? And I am I do
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  realize that I defaults to this. Like right? I'm a very like let's start with our feelings. Let's
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  figure something that's going on, which makes people make to make certain people uncomfortable,
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  right? And so so I always say to my team, can you just try it? Can you I know you hate it? And I
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  know how painful this is for you. I just need you to try it. And I think understanding that I they
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  they have to do it. Look, you don't get to opt out of this thing. I'm actually going to make you do
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  it. And then if it's not working, I think it's having check ins, right? Give me three months.
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  Then let's talk again in three months and tell me why it's not working for you. Don't just get to
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  say, Hey, I hate that. Tell me something that would work better. Or I like that. I think there
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  is we as leaders have to give people responsibility for their own careers and their own career
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  development. And it is not just let me give you the map, right? It is I'm going to teach you how to
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  work through this if the map isn't working for you. So if you want more transparency, if you want
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  more responsibility, then you have to show me what you're going to do about it. It's not just
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  up to me to build that to draw that map for you. I like that a lot. I see. So the people that do
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  have an opinion about it. Okay, that's fine. But you have to you have to come up with something
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  because there's a there's a clear gap here that it's causing the business to suffer in this area
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  or the other. So if if you don't think this way is going to solve that problem, you think it's
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  stupid. Think of something that will solve this problem. And let's talk about it. Yeah,
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  definitely something that will work better. Get together with some of your colleagues and build
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  something else. I would love that, right? Yeah, it would take a lot of stress off you. Exactly.
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  That's very okay. So this, you know, what I'm seeing here, what we're getting is a master class
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  and building a culture in probably one of the industries, you know, your travel adjacent that is
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  probably one of the hardest hit. And there's one more point that I want to I want to ask you about.
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  I want to ask you about process and process, you know, especially in a work from home environment.
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  And how that's important. But I want to also get some data points from you on when you build out this
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  this squishy happiness model, this trust model. And then we can go into process as well.
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  What does that, what does that look like in terms of actual results? How has your, how has points
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  performed? How has, you know, how it could be, I don't know what metric you want to, you want to
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  relay over if you have any off top your head and then sort of coming at you, you know, I didn't
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  ask you to prep for this. But I think it would be interesting to take this away and like actually see
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  what it, what the end result is like in some way or another. Yeah, look, it's it results are
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  interesting, right? I think I think if I look at last year where we went into last year with a plan
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  that obviously we didn't achieve, right? We've got people would be flying. We thought people
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  would be, we said it in November, a year before. But when we recast our plan, we achieved our
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  recasted plan, right? Which to me is huge. But we're what that, what that meant for us was things
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  came from different places, right? So I'm talking, so from my marketing team, not, I won't share
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  the breakdown, but my marketing team was previously in the work that we had to do responsible for
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  way less of a percentage of the overall revenue of the company. By the time the end of the year came,
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  I would say the absolute lion's share of the company's revenue was directly related to
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  marketing promotions. And so what you have is a situation whereby you have a team that is now
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  disproportionately responsible for the whole company's revenue and imagine the stress and the
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  pressure on that to not be able to fail, right? In a culture that I'm building that says,
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  you can fail, you can try things, it's okay. And then you're just like, oh shit, but if we don't,
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  if this we don't hit the number, like terrifying, right? So then if I then go back to say, how did we
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  handle the pressure? How did we not crack? How did we hit our reforcav? That's how we did it.
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  Because we were taking care of the squishy stuff and we were making sure that people understood
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  their direction so that they felt hurt and they felt taken care of and they could power forward and
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  get their jobs done. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that
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  subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation,
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  check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.