Building Psychological Capital in Your Sales Team

Last week we introduced positive psychology—the study of what conditions and behaviors lead people to flourish and find meaning in their lives. This week we’re digging into what positive psychology can tell us about creating a workplace culture that fosters productivity, creativity, and happiness.

We often think about getting educational training, either for our employees or as an employee ourselves, but what about psychological training? According to professor, researcher, and organizational behavior expert Fred Luthans of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, organizations would do better (and have a competitive advantage) by focusing on psychological development. Luthans and his colleagues coined the term “psychological capital,” and it is definitely worth investing in.

WHAT IS PSYCHOLOGICAL CAPITAL?

Luthans defines psychological capital (or PsyCap for short) as a “positive psychological state of development that is characterized by: (1) having confidence (self-efficacy) to take on and put in the necessary effort to succeed at challenging tasks, (2) making a positive attribution (optimism) about succeeding at challenging tasks, (3) persevering toward goals and, when necessary, redirecting paths to goals (hope) in order to succeed, and (4) when beset by problems and adversity, sustaining and bouncing back and even beyond (resilience) to attain success.”

Yes, it’s a long definition, but one worth studying. Lucky for us, Luthans also understood how human brains work and gave us a handy acronym with which to remember these psychological traits—HERO. It stands for hope, efficacy, resilience, and optimism. Think of these as the four ingredients that, when added together, build up our psychological capital. Much like a recipe, while each ingredient has worth on its own, it’s when they are combined that they’re at their best.

What’s great about these four traits is that they are malleable. Yes, there are some people who are naturally more optimistic than others, but you can also teach yourself to be more optimistic. Think of them less like character traits and more like habits.

WHAT’S SO GREAT ABOUT PSYCAP?

So, what is so great about psychological capital and its four components? Bad habits can be hard to break, and good habits can be difficult to build. Is it really worth working toward increasing your psychological capital? In short, yes. Both on an individual level and on an organizational level, more psychological capital has impactful results.

Employees with higher psychological capital have been found to have higher levels of job performance and lower levels of “turnover intentions.” Not only do employees perform better, but they also have more positive attitudes like satisfaction and commitment. This is important because, as we wrote about last week, positive attitudes are contagious.

The 2015 Gallup Strengths Meta-analysis Report found that by leveraging positivity, business units had a 7% increase in performance, a 15% increase in customer engagement, and a 29% profit increase. Individuals with the HERO traits perform better in large part because they feel better equipped to deal with challenges, overcome adversity, and recover after failure.

More psychological capital isn’t just good for business, either. It has been tied to lower body mass index (BMI) and cholesterol as well as higher satisfaction with relationships. One’s ability to overcome obstacles, find more than one way to accomplish goals, and bounce back after a setback applies just as much to your work life as it does to the rest of your life.

WHY SALES AND PSYCAP ARE SUCH A GREAT MATCH

Can you think of a profession in which it’s especially important to quickly bounce back from setbacks? Perhaps one in which you’re told “no” a lot. Yeah, I’ve got nothing either.

All kidding aside, it is clear to see why psychological capital would be of huge benefit to those in sales. While all of the HERO traits are important to overall psychological capital, hope and resilience as they are described by Luthans and his colleagues seem almost as though they had sales professionals specifically in mind.

Hope is described as being characterized by “persevering toward goals and, when necessary, redirecting paths to goals in order to succeed.” These elements of hope have been described by others as “willpower and waypower,” and that’s what being in sales is all about.

At Maestro, we teach how to best prepare yourself, how to get all of the information you need from a prospect, how to mitigate risk—we’re not giving step-by-step directions on how to make a sale, because that’s not how sales works. Our goal is to give you all of the tools and all of the knowledge you need so that when an obstacle comes your way, you are confident you will be able to navigate it by quickly adapting, altering your path, and moving forward—willpower and waypower.

Resilience is described as being characterized by “sustaining and bouncing back (and even beyond) problems and adversity to attain success.” Again, doesn’t that seem like it was written with sales in mind? The great thing about resilience is that you gain more of it each time you are able to successfully navigate the same kind of setback, and sales gives you a lot of opportunity for practice.

HOW CAN I GAIN PSYCHOLOGICAL CAPITAL?

Increasing your psychological capital is not a quick fix—after all, it’s changing your habits. So, we are not saying if you do these few things, you’ll have built up all of the psychological capital you’ll ever need. We do, however, like to provide tricks and tools that you can use right away, so here are some good places to get started in building your own psychological capital.

Building Hope

• Practice setting goals (real ones that are SMART—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound), plans for achieving them, as well as contingency plans.
• Break larger goals down into sub-goals and be sure to appreciate and celebrate each step that you complete.
• Develop a “mental movie” of how you will reach your goals.
• Look back at past goals that you have accomplished.
• Create if/then scenarios—if this happens, then I will do this. Better yet, develop question trees!

Building Efficacy

• Focus on your past successes.
• Practice social modeling (following others that are accomplishing what you want to accomplish). Think about who has been a HERO in your life? Have you been a HERO for someone else?
• Reframe negative experiences. Think back to a negative experience and find any positives that came out of it.
• Try things that are just on the edge of your capabilities.
• Seek positive statements from others, like referrals and testimonials.

Building Resilience

• People shouldn’t have to go it alone. Create a shared knowledge network as well as a shared resource network.
• Connect what you are doing to your values. Challenging events are worth the work if you can connect them to something you care about.
• Take a look at something hard you have already accomplished. Who helped you? What strategies did you use? How can you use those strategies moving forward?
• Get your thoughts and feelings about a challenge down on paper. Once you’ve explored the dark side, look for the silver linings.
• Cut out the negative self-talk. This is hard to do, especially when negative thoughts have well-worn pathways in our brains. When you notice the negative thoughts, try taking a physical break, like taking a walk, to break the thought cycle.

Building Optimism

• Practice gratitude. Write down things you are thankful for each day. Write down three things that went well each day. Be sure to thank others for a job well done or help provided.
• Surround yourself with other positive people.
• Make a conscious effort to focus on the things that are going well.
• Reframing negative events—if that bad thing hadn’t happened, this good thing would not have happened either.
• Focus on the things you can control rather than those you can’t.

Most of us tend to think that when we accomplish something, we will be happy. If I can just get that promotion, or just land that deal, I’ll feel great. Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage (we mentioned him in last week’s blog), says that we have had it all wrong. “Conventional wisdom holds that if we work hard we will be more successful, and if we are more successful, then we’ll be happy,” says Achor. “..this formula is actually backward: happiness fuels success, not the other way around.”

Investing in your and your employees’ psychological capital can lead to a more positive work environment full of happier people. Plus, it helps your bottom line—definitely something to be thankful for.

Thank you for reading, and thank you in advance for getting in touch with us at mastery@maestrogroup.co to schedule your training!