Use this Drift Playbook to improve the mental health of your sales team.

David Cancel and the team at Drift understand that the practice of magnifying success vs. failure can significantly impact employee mental health, well-being, and on-the-job performance.

From one-on-ones to performance reviews, Drift created a culture of celebrating wins and downplaying losses, which has led them to a multi-billion dollar valuation and Vista Equity "making it rain" to purchase a majority stake in the company.

Why should you focus on the wins and not the losses?

Traditionally, professionals have had a hard time celebrating wins. While many of us compare success with a hard-working career, individuals are more likely to associate celebration with our personal lives. 

Some managers worry that celebrating small wins will invite complacency or distract people from upcoming goals. Others aren't used to receiving praise themselves and don't associate celebration with ongoing success. 

However, 79% of US employees who quit their job do so because of feeling under-appreciated. Which is no surprise considering that 65% of employees claim they've received no recognition within the last year. Furthermore, 35% explicitly note that this under-appreciation negatively impacts their productivity, and a whopping 78% say they would work harder if only they were given more recognition.

Enter the Drift Support Playbook

Research shows that experts—say, Supreme Court Justices—are more adept at looking at failure and learning from it.

But non-experts? Not so much. The political theorist Antonio Gramsci once said, "History teaches, though it has no pupils."

When we fail, we tune out. To avoid feeling bad about ourselves, we stop paying attention. As a result, we don't learn from that experience.
But, we do learn when failure is less personal.

For example, in our research, participants who struggled to learn from their failures were able to learn from the failures of others. It can be hard to focus on our failings, but the mistakes, recoveries, and hard-won lessons of friends and colleagues?

Those are some teachable moments.

‍

‍

Focus On Success, Not Failure

What you should do as a supportive coach is spotlight success. You may get more bang for your buck if you point out to your teams what they're doing right rather than what they're doing wrong.

This practice of magnifying success vs. failure can significantly impact our people's mental health and well-being.

Use this Playbook recommendation to meet with your team (either sync or async) to overview any success achieved over the past six months to a year.

Make sure to celebrate and align on what made these actions so impactful and how you can use this experience in upcoming tasks and projects.

When to run this Playbook with your team

When it comes to an understanding when to implement this Drift Playbook, there is one question you must ask yourself.

• Is this the proper time to implement a Support Playbook like this one?

In the context of Drift, this Playbook allows managers to support their employees better, allowing more freedom and autonomy, right when a stressed-out team may need it.

In the world of LEON, this Playbook would be considered a Support Playbook.

Start this Drift Playbook today.

Use this Playbook, or find an even better Playbook in the Playbook Library that works best for your team.

You can search, start, set due dates, customize and send it to your team right through LEON.

And even better, you can use our weekly check-in feature to understand which teams need help and how best to support them.

Get started with LEON today.

‍