Andrew was beside himself. “How could this happen?” he exclaimed. “We had that bid locked down. That was our contract. We have literally worked for 16 months to position ourselves. We built the infrastructure. We built the relationships with the customer at all the levels. Then one guy gets promoted and we get a form letter saying that our contract has been terminated, thirty days notice.”
“What do you think the problem is?” I asked.
“I don’t know, sometimes I think my whole team is incompetent. To let this slip through, when we worked so hard for it.”
“Do you really think your team is incompetent?” I followed up.
Andrew shook his head from side to side. “No. Heaven’s no. What am I thinking? To every person on the team, I wouldn’t trade a single one. They are all A players. I just don’t know what happened.”
It was my turn. “Sometimes, when we think about competence, we think it is our ability to control the parts of the world that cannot be controlled. Events of the world will occur in spite of us. So, what is competence?” Andrew was listening, but not sure if he liked what he heard. I continued.
“The Boy Scouts’ motto is Be Prepared. I believe competence has to do with preparedness. We often try to control those things in life that cannot be controlled. And we fail to control the one thing in life that can be controlled, ourselves, our preparedness, our own competence.” -TF
___
Our next Sales program kicks off with a preview on January 31. Visit www.workingsales.com for more information.
When we play chess, we want to predict the next moves of our opponent. Once figured out all the possible moves, we control the game. And still… world chess champion Kasparov lost from a computer…
This is something that the CEO of the company in which I work, taught me.
There are too many things that we cant control directly and there is no point in thinking or feeling bad about it. We must focus our efforts on what we can do in order to minimize their effects on our plans. I think Stephen Covey called it “circle of influence”.
Mukul,
You are in the right direction. You use the words “focus our efforts.” Keep reading. We are going to spend some time working on what it means to “focus our efforts.”
Thanks Tom.
I am glued to you blog since I found it!