Name: Colin Quinn

Title: National Leadership & Sales Trainer

Organisation: G.J. Gardner Gomes AU

I'm an experienced Learning & Development specialist who is passionate about people and their advancement. I'm Motivated to inspire, challenge and grow those I work with. As a salesperson and manager/leader previously, I have a wealth of mistakes to avoid and even a few wins to share.

Thank you to the 2,000 leaders who’ve generously done the 7 Questions on Leadership!

I hope Colin's answers will encourage you in your leadership journey. Enjoy!

Cheers,

Jonno White

1. What have you found most challenging as a leader?

Consistency. It is easy to do and implement when the sun is shining however maintaining and executing when it's tough, things go wrong or when you are overwhelmed by tasks, can be a real test of a leader. The courage to do what is right and hard rather than letting things slide and hoping they fix themselves or go away. However then making sure you are not acting impulsively without forbearance too, always an interesting balance

2. How did you become a leader? Can you please briefly tell the story?

I was a trouble-making, high-performing salesperson whose success came at the expense of the team I worked with. I was then offered the role of Sales Manager and I then reaped the consequences of my behavior and needed to learn how to lead a team I had adversely affected previously.

I was privileged to receive some excellent leadership training very early on so I was able to learn before I had too many bad leadership habits. I also then worked for a few large global companies that invested heavily in leadership training so this whet my appetite for leadership training and instilled a desire to assist others as I had been assisted.

3. How do you structure your work days from waking up to going to sleep?

Finding the balance between reactive and proactive. Because I have a large amount of requests every week, it is easy to jump around and become reactively orientated but for me, it is just as important to spend an appropriate part of my day looking at and focusing on proactive strategies that enhance and improve.

Having set proactive initiatives at the beginning of the week enables me to control my time wisely and accomplish both the reactive and proactive aspects of my role. I'm not a rigid worker so my style next to have some flex and fluidity.

4. What's a recent leadership lesson you've learned for the first time or been reminded of?

There are always consequences for inactivity in dealing with toxic behavior or conduct. They won't go away and a rotten apple doesn't unrotten (maybe not a word), so having the leadership courage to nip bad attitudes and behavior in the bud, allows others to flourish and tolerance of poor attitudes or behavior will drag others down and as a leader, we don't have the right to do that to our people and ultimately we carry the responsibility of maintaining a healthy culture and performance.

5. What's one book that has had a profound impact on your leadership so far? Can you please briefly tell the story of how that book impacted your leadership?

An excellent read for me was 'The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team' by Patrick Lencioni. It is on point and calls out all the things we suspect and observe but paints it. It has a practical wisdom that I admire.

6. If you could only give one piece of advice to a young leader, what would you say to them?

Make time to lead people and resist the urge to put tasks ahead of people. Unfortunately, when we get busy or become overwhelmed, we revert to accomplishing tasks, usually to the detriment of people. A manager accomplishes tasks, and a true leader builds and leads people. No one bleeds for a manager or follows a manager into battle but a team will follow a strong, confident and empathetic leader into battle and go above and beyond.

7. What is one meaningful story that comes to mind from your time as a leader, so far?

One that stands out involves me saying nothing, which is mildly embarrassing. My team had performed poorly for weeks and so my manager wanted to rip into them on the following Monday morning sales meeting. He had an inferior motivational style reminiscent of the Alec Baldwin character in Glen Gary, Glen Ross.

While I have also worked un and disappointed I implored him not to turn up that following Monday but to leave it to me to fix, which carried risk and was an affront to his ego, however, he reluctantly agreed. Come Monday, all I did was ask 3 key salespeople to take the meeting and for each of them to provide their views on what was going wrong and what they felt needed to happen to change and improve.

I chose a high performer, a middle-of-the-road and a poor performer and they all said the same thing, they all knew exactly what they as a team were doing wrong or not doing and so it didn't need to come from me. They took ownership and accountability as a team and rectified their results a lot quicker and with better buy-in than if I had told them.

That will not always work but with that team and in that environment, it was exactly the solution. My lesson from that is that often the answers already exist and are known by our people. Our berating and instructing can be counterproductive and can wear down, not uplift. Utilise your people, and build advocates and linemen within your team so that you have support and constructive noise.