Do you recall the first time you tried lighting a match?

Strike the match without enough force, and you won’t be able to ignite it; strike the match with too much force, and you break it. It’s a delicate balance to gracefully exert the right amount of force to light a match. Who knew such a simple action can also translate to how we should handle business relations?

When faced with business situations, especially when other people are involved, we’re often unsure how to approach them. The match metaphor applies here: do too little, nothing happens, and if you do too much, you end up pushing people over the edge. I provide two examples below to show how this concept applies internally and externally.

INTERNAL

I learned this recently while coaching my team. I needed to observe and learn where each team member is at with their skill set, how open and malleable they are to trying new concepts, and their ability and speed to pick up new skills. As with everything else, every person has their own pace, and ‘striking a match’ for each of them to motivate them takes a tailored approach.

The description to strike a match also describes what I see when I observe a team member getting excited about something; you can tell when they get it — their eyes light up a little — there is excitement. You can also tell when they don’t get it, in which case you will need to adjust and try another approach.

Look for a sign of excitement from your extroverted team members (their eyes will light up and their hand movements or facial expressions will become noticeably more pronounced), and for those introverts on your team, look for a sign of understanding. If you see this, then you’ve lit the match.

On the other hand, you don't want to go too far and break the match. As a team leader or business owner, you want to encourage and build their confidence when adopting a new skill. You don’t want to push them so far that you break the match, which is, in this case, their confidence by setting them up to fail.

It’s a delicate balance to strike, but helping your team member set up some easy wins can build their confidence, and setting stretch goals will let you observe the limit of their potential. For example, set some completion-based goals to get them started, such as writing ten quality article headlines in an hour. They may first think that they can’t do it, but once they see that they can at least complete the task, you can set a performance-based goal. You can take the headlines they come up with and connect them with performance metrics, such as a clickthrough rate (CTR). A great headline makes a big difference in an article’s CTR, so their new skill set is now tied to a performance metric. As they learn and develop this new skill of writing article headlines, you can move up the target CTR so the team member can see how they’re performing at a higher level as they refine their new skill.

It’s a win-win, but both parties have to be patient.

EXTERNAL

You want a client to adopt a new marketing channel, but they aren’t familiar with it. How do you strike a match in this scenario? A tried and true way is to be the guinea pigs with our brands before we ask for a client to commit. Even as children, it was much easier for someone else to adopt the same behaviour when they see another kid doing it. Remember when you hung upside down on those monkey bars? You did it after seeing another classmate do it, didn’t you?

Back to using our brands as the guinea pigs, we would open an account on said marketing channel ourselves and either place ads or generate organic content to test the algorithm. We would then take our learnings and hopefully successful case studies to share them with the client.

“Look! We tried it on ourselves, and it worked. Here are our learnings and how they would apply to your brand. What do you think?” At this point, the client would have their objections, which you would be prepared for (because you already tested it on yourself, right?), and the goal of the meeting is to have your client excited about the new marketing channel and map out the next steps to get their next level of commitment. The conversation should end like this: “If we can do these further pilots and tests, and we generate X results, would you be able to commit Y?”

If you can get a yes to the above question, congratulations — you’ve lit the match.