Your Team Has Talent. It Needs Alignment.
Teams can be busy all day.
That doesn’t mean they’re moving in the same direction.
I’ve seen it too many times over the years.
Good people. Strong teams. Capable leaders.
And still… results aren’t where they should be.
For a long time, I thought it came down to talent.
It rarely does.
What you usually see instead is this quiet misalignment.
Nothing dramatic. Nothing obviously broken.
Just small things.
Priorities don’t quite match.
Messages get interpreted differently.
Conversations don’t happen when they should.
Everyone is working.
But not everyone is moving in the same direction.
That’s where things slow down.
Targets get missed, but not by much.
Deals stall, but no one can quite say why.
Decisions take longer than they should.
Individually, none of it looks like a big issue.
Collectively, it drags performance down.
The teams I work with don’t lack effort.
They don’t lack ability.
What they lack is clarity.
And that’s the difference.
Alignment isn’t about getting everyone to agree on everything.
It’s about being clear.
Clear on what matters.
Clear on what’s expected.
Clear on what happens next.
When that’s there, things change quickly.
Execution sharpens.
Conversations get more direct.
Decisions happen faster.
Not because people suddenly improve.
But because the noise is removed.
And when the noise is gone, performance follows.
If this sounds familiar, don’t jump straight to more activity.
Step back and look at how your team is actually operating.
The Nod
I was in a small village pub a few weeks ago. Tuesday night. Not exactly peak hours.
The place was full.
I found a seat at the bar and watched.
Behind the counter was a father and his son. The father — mid-sixties, steady hands, decades in the trade — was pulling pints and talking to the regulars like he’d known them forever. The son — maybe mid-thirties — was moving between tables, taking orders, clearing plates, checking on the younger crowd in the corner.
They barely spoke to each other.
A nod.
A glance.
A shift of weight.
The father would finish a Guinness and, without looking up, the son was already there to take it to table seven. Someone’s glass dipped low and one of them was moving before the customer noticed. A plate landed on the counter and disappeared again before it had time to cool.
No instructions.
No correction.
No “can you grab that?”
They just moved.
Not fast in a frantic way. Not rushed. Just certain.
You could tell they’d done this together for years.
It wasn’t efficiency.
It was familiarity.
There’s something different about people who’ve stood side by side long enough to trust the silence. You don’t need to narrate what you’re doing. You don’t need to defend your decisions. You don’t even need to explain the next step.
You just know.
Watching them, I realised how rare that is.
In most environments now, everything is verbalised. Processed. Structured. Documented. Measured. We talk about communication as if more words equal better connection.
But those two behind the bar said almost nothing.
And nothing was missed.
There was pride in it too. Not showy pride. Quiet pride. The kind that comes from doing something well for a long time.
It struck me that trust doesn’t always look dramatic.
Sometimes it looks like a father finishing a pint and a son already moving before the glass leaves his hand.
Sometimes it looks like not having to say anything at all.
I left before closing time.
They were still moving the same way when I walked out.
From the Desert to the Sea
I grew up in Donegal dreaming of the sun.
Not a good summer. Not a lucky week.
Real sun. Heat. Blue skies that stayed.
At the time, it felt a long way away.
Because it was. Donegal gives you a lot — resilience, perspective, a sense of place.
But 365 days of sunshine isn’t one of them.
Still, the idea stayed with me.
Years later, I had a choice. I’d built a career, moved countries, taken chances.
And at some point, I realised something simple: I didn’t have to wonder anymore where I might live.
I could decide.
So I left Chicago and moved to California — the Coachella Valley. Right in the middle of the desert.
That first summer? 50 degrees.
You don’t forget heat like that. It’s not just warm — it’s something you respect.
But there was something else too.
The light.
The consistency.
The predictability.
Autumn, winter, spring — incredible.
Warm days, cooler evenings. A rhythm you could rely on.
For a while, it felt like I’d found exactly what I’d been looking for.
And then, quietly, something shifted.
Because even in all that sun, I found myself thinking about something else.
The sea.
Movement. Air. Space.
I’d sit outside in the evenings and think about what it would be like to wake up and see the water instead.
Funny how that works.
You get what you thought you wanted — and then you realise there’s more to it.
Then it was time to come home.
After decades abroad, we moved back to Ireland. And somehow, we ended up in Blackrock.
Right on the sea. Now I wake up and look out at the water.
It changes every day.
Calm, rough, clear, grey.
Nothing like the desert. And yet, in a strange way, exactly right.
Looking back, none of it was accidental.
Donegal to Scotland.
Scotland to the US.
Chicago to California.
The desert to the sea.
At every stage, there was a decision.
Not always easy.
Not always clear.
But mine to make.
That’s the part people don’t always see.
From the outside, it can look like luck. Timing. Opportunity.
But at some point, you take responsibility.
For where you go.
For what you build.
For the direction your life takes.
Early in my sales career, I believed — without really knowing how — that one day I’d lead a global sales team.
No roadmap. No guarantees.
But I believed it anyway.
And over time, it happened.
Not by accident.
By decisions.
By backing myself when there was no obvious path.
The same applies to how you live your life. You don’t need every answer.
But you do need to take responsibility for it.
Because no one else will.
I dreamed of the sun.
I lived in the desert.
Now I wake up beside the sea.
Different places. Different chapters.
Same idea.
You don’t wait for life to happen.
You take responsibility — and then you move.
Didn’t Miss This One
Talking to my brother Eunan recently, I realised something.
I haven’t been back to Davy Brennan Memorial Park since I came home.
Not yet.
I played there countless times before I left Ireland 38 years ago. blue and white with Naomh Conaill. I also wore the green and gold with Donegal at under-16 and minor.
In Ireland, pulling on a county jersey isn’t just sport.
It’s identity.
You’re not just representing yourself.
You’re representing your place.
That was another life.
Since then, I’ve led global teams. Sat in boardrooms. Measured performance in revenue, targets, P&L. Built something on the other side of the world.
The boy who ran onto that pitch in blue and white feels distant now.
And then Naomh Conaill made another county final.
Their 13th since 2003. Seven wins already. I’d missed every one of them.
Thirty-eight years abroad means you miss things. Not just matches. Weddings. Funerals. Birthdays. The ordinary moments that quietly matter.
But this time I was home.
October 2025. O’Donnell Park. Two finals. Senior and reserve. Back to back.
I’d walked through those gates before.
September 1978. Sixteen years old. Donegal U16 versus Dublin. Green and gold on my back.
Forty-six years later, I walked through them again.
Not as a player.
As someone who had been away long enough to wonder if he still belonged.
The answer came quickly.
A hand on the shoulder.
“McGlinchey, is that you?”
A laugh I hadn’t heard in decades.
“Jesus, look who’s back.”
Faces older. Hair thinner. But the feeling was immediate.
You don’t realise how much you’ve missed something until you’re standing in the middle of it again.
We stood there for over four hours.
Two games.
Two wins.
The second final whistle — our 8th senior county title — the roar wasn’t just noise.
It was release.
It was pride.
It was the sound of people who’ve stood beside each other for years, believing together.
And I was there.
Not watching from across an ocean.
There.
A few weeks later, Ulster quarter-final. We lost.
It stung.
But not the way losses used to sting.
Because this time it wasn’t about the result.
It was about presence.
About not missing it.
About standing shoulder to shoulder with people who knew me long before job titles and travel schedules and airport lounges.
I talk now about alignment. About teams. About trust.
But none of that started in a boardroom.
It started on that pitch.
Learning to move together. To back each other. To take a hit and get up because someone beside you expected it.
Standing in O’Donnell Park, not playing but watching, I realised something simple.
Success changes.
Belonging doesn’t.
The jerseys I wore are long gone.
But what they built in me isn’t.
I’ll go back to Davy Brennan Memorial Park one day.
I know it’ll hit harder than I expect.
That’s where it started.
For now, it was enough to walk through those gates in Letterkenny and realise something I hadn’t fully admitted to myself:
I didn’t miss this one.
Narin
There’s a beach near where I grew up in Donegal — Narin and Portnoo.
No towering cliffs. No drama.
Just miles of golden sand, the Atlantic rolling in steady and cold, and Inishkeel island sitting just offshore — close enough to walk to when the tide pulls back.
It’s not loud beauty.
It’s open. Wide. Honest.
When I go back now, I walk it.
At first it was practical. Stretch the legs after a flight. Get air into the lungs. Shake off the travel.
But somewhere along the way, it became something else.
It became the place where I couldn’t hide behind pace.
For most of my career — Scotland for 26 years, the US for 12, and a lot of airports in between — I’ve operated at speed.
Decisions with consequences. Targets that mattered. Teams relying on clarity. You don’t survive in that environment by hesitating. You survive by leaning forward. By anticipating. By acting early.
That rhythm shapes you.
It becomes normal to move.
Then you stand on a stretch of sand that doesn’t move for you.
The tide comes in.
The tide goes out.
Inishkeel appears. Then disappears again.
No urgency. No reaction to you.
And you realise something.
Not that you’re obsessed with control.
But that you’re deeply wired for momentum.
When my calendar emptied after moving home, I wasn’t anxious.
I was unsettled.
There was no friction. No immediate demand.
My instinct wasn’t to rest.
It was to create movement.
What’s next?
What can I build?
Where’s the edge?
That instinct built my career. It helped me lead. It helped me grow businesses. I’m not disowning it.
But standing on that beach, with nothing requiring anything from me, I felt how constant forward motion can narrow you.
When you’re always pushing ahead, you can miss what’s already there.
You miss the pause in someone’s voice.
You miss the quiet disagreement.
You miss the moment because you’re already shaping the outcome.
The ocean doesn’t shape outcomes.
It just moves in its own time.
And walking there, tide out, crossing to Inishkeel on wet sand that will disappear in a few hours, I’m reminded of something I’m still learning:
Not everything needs accelerating.
Not everything needs improving.
Some things just need noticing.
Strip away the targets. The meetings. The noise.
Who are you then?
I’m still answering that.
But I know this — standing on that beach, with nothing to optimise, feels different.
And different, at this stage of life, might be exactly what I need.
All or Nothing
I don’t do moderation.
Never really have.
If I’m in, I’m all in. If I’m out, I’m gone.
For the past two years, I was gone.
Not once in the gym.
I went from five days a week — structured, disciplined, consistent — to nothing at all. No tapering off. No “I’ll just keep it ticking over.” Just stopped.
The move home. The disruption. The reset. I let the routine break.
And when I let something break, I tend not to half-break it.
The weight came on.
A lot of it.
I’m not proud of that. But I understand it. This is how I operate. When the switch is off, it’s off.
Now I’m back.
There’s a gym in the building in Blackrock. No commute. No excuse. So it’s five days a week again. Sometimes six.
First week back, I tried to lift like I’d never left.
Bad idea.
Two years off is two years off. The bar doesn’t care about your past discipline. The lungs don’t care about your former pace.
My trainer just shakes his head. He knows the pattern.
He knows I’ll show up.
He also knows I’ll try to compress two years into two months if he doesn’t rein me in.
Here’s the thing about being all or nothing.
It builds things.
It built my career. It drove the long hours. The travel. The standards. The refusal to drift. When I committed, I committed completely. That intensity creates momentum. It creates results.
It also means that when I step away, I don’t step back gradually. I drop it.
There isn’t much middle ground in me.
I’ve tried to manufacture it before. “Balance.” “Moderation.” It sounds sensible. It sounds healthy.
It’s not natural to me.
What is natural is commitment.
Right now, the switch is on again.
Five days.
Sometimes six.
Sore most mornings.
Trainer still shaking his head.
Not because I’ve found equilibrium.
Because I’ve chosen direction.
There’s risk in being wired this way. You can burn too hot. You can disappear entirely when the focus shifts.
But there’s power in it too.
All or nothing isn’t always wise.
But it’s honest.
And at this stage of my life, I’d rather work with the wiring than pretend I’m built differently.
AI Scales Activity. Leaders Scale Revenue.
AI will scale activity.
But activity has never really been the hard part.
Artificial Intelligence is everywhere right now. Every conference, every boardroom conversation, every strategy discussion seems to circle back to the same idea: AI will transform sales.
And it probably will.
Just not in the way most people think.
When people talk about AI in sales, the conversation usually drifts quickly to productivity. How many emails can be generated. How quickly research can be done. How many prospects can be identified in seconds. All of that is impressive, and it’s getting better by the month.
But when I look at it through the lens of someone who has spent most of his career building and leading sales organisations, I see something slightly different.
AI is going to scale activity.
Sales teams have always been able to increase activity. More calls, more emails, more outreach, more follow-ups. You can always find ways to do more. In fact, many organisations have spent years trying to engineer exactly that.
But doing more has never automatically meant achieving more.
Revenue doesn’t come from activity alone. It comes from direction.
Who you choose to engage with.
Which problems you decide are worth solving.
When you step into a conversation — and sometimes when you don’t.
Those are not technical decisions. They’re leadership decisions.
AI can generate thousands of potential leads in seconds. It can analyse conversations and highlight patterns. It can help people move faster.
But it can’t tell you which markets matter most right now. It can’t replace the judgment that comes from years of experience sitting across the table from customers.
Technology can help people move faster.
It just can’t tell them where to go.
And that’s where leadership becomes even more important, not less.
In fact, the more powerful these tools become, the more important human judgment becomes. Because if everyone suddenly has access to the same technology, the real advantage moves somewhere else.
It moves to clarity.
To knowing where to focus.
To understanding the problems that genuinely matter to customers.
To helping teams spend their time in the right places rather than simply more places.
There is another side effect coming as well. AI is about to dramatically increase the amount of sales activity happening everywhere. More emails, more outreach, more messages that appear personalised but often aren’t.
When that happens, the organisations that stand out won’t necessarily be the ones generating the most activity.
They’ll be the ones generating the right activity.
The real opportunity with AI isn’t replacing people. It’s freeing them. Freeing them from some of the repetitive work that eats up time. Freeing them to spend more time understanding customers, building trust, and helping organisations make better decisions.
That’s where revenue has always been created.
AI will scale activity.
Leaders still scale revenue.
Who Are You When the Noise Stops?
Moving back to Ireland didn’t feel like a homecoming.
It felt like someone switched the engine off mid-flight.
For 26 years in Scotland and 12 in the US, I lived in acceleration mode. Airports. Pressure. Scale. Deadlines that mattered. Teams relying on decisions. You get used to that weight. After a while, you don’t just carry it — you need it.
Then suddenly, nothing.
No flights.
No full calendar.
No noise.
And the silence wasn’t peaceful. It was unsettling.
I realised how much of my identity had been built on momentum. On being needed. On solving. On delivering.
Strip that away and the question isn’t philosophical. It’s blunt.
Who are you now?
There was another question too. One I didn’t say out loud for a while.
Had I become too set in my ways?
After decades operating at pace and at scale, was I adaptable — or just effective in one environment? Would Ireland feel too slow? Too small? And quietly — would I be too slow for Ireland?
That thought bothered me more than I expected.
Because I’ve built a career helping people navigate change. It’s uncomfortable when you’re the one unsure.
So I went back to Donegal.
Walked the coastline I knew as a kid. Not for clarity. Not for strategy. Just because I didn’t know what else to do.
The Atlantic doesn’t care about your CV.
The tide doesn’t care how many countries you’ve worked in.
It just moves.
And somewhere in that blunt indifference, something clicked.
There is no work-life balance.
There’s just life.
The grocery shop shaped how I think about customers.
Wiring houses shaped how I think about precision.
Scotland hardened me.
America sharpened me.
Pressure formed me.
None of that lives in separate compartments.
Leadership didn’t sit beside my life. It grew out of it.
And when I felt disoriented coming home, it wasn’t because I’d lost a title.
It was because I was being forced to integrate everything.
To stop hiding inside momentum.
To accept that without the noise, I was still the same person — just without the armour.
That’s the reset.
Not softer.
Not smaller.
Just clearer.
And maybe that’s the real test of leadership.
Who are you when the calendar is empty?
Beyond 100 Percent — Inside Out
People say you can’t go home again.
Maybe that’s true.
But sometimes you need to stand where you started to see clearly where you’re going next.
For years, my life was airports, boardrooms, and sales teams spread across continents. I went from wiring houses in Ireland to helping lead a company that tripled revenue in the United States. The phrase “beyond 100 percent” wasn’t a slogan — it was how I tried to live and lead.
It’s what eventually led me to build SalesCraft. I’d seen too many capable people struggle because no one had ever really taught them the craft of selling properly. Not scripts. Not pressure. Craft.
Now I’m back in Ireland. Living in Blackrock, looking out at the sea most mornings. And something shifts when you slow down enough to notice what matters.
Coming home hasn’t been about stepping back. It’s been about stepping deeper. Back to the values I first learned in my family’s grocery shop in Donegal — hard work, straight talk, resilience, and showing up with a good attitude whether business was booming or quiet.
This is where all of that meets.
The ideas that don’t fit neatly into a slide deck.
The lessons from a walk by the water that somehow apply to leading a team.
The reflections you only get when life isn’t moving at 30,000 feet.
Professionally, I’m expanding too. I’m now licensed to deliver UpAGear — a system focused on team alignment and performance. If SalesCraft sharpens the individual, UpAGear strengthens the collective. And in my experience, you need both.
But this space isn’t about programmes. It’s about perspective.
It’s about integrating everything — electrician, executive, Ireland, America, success, mistakes, ambition, and reflection — into something that feels whole.
Over time, I’ll write about:
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The inner game — mindset, resilience, clarity.
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The craft of leadership and selling.
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Discipline and performance — in business and in life.
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And Ireland — because being home again changes how you see everything.
If you’re here, thank you.
I’m looking forward to sharing the view from this chapter.
Masterclass on the Perfect Sales Call
I have always admired those who are experts in the chosen profession.
Whether that’s in the business world, entertainment, sport, movies or construction, watching a skilled individual do their job with confidence and proficiency is a thing of beauty. It just flows and they make it look and feel so easy, as if we all could do it - and we probably could, had we put in the hard work and hours of practice to get that accomplished.
In my world of sales management, I am generally on the selling side. Very occasionally I get to be on the other side of the transaction, the person buying the service, and recently I had the good fortune to have been giving a master class on how to sell by someone who was an expert in their profession, salesmanship.
At CompTIA we are exploring some options to develop our sales team and to ensure we are all maintaining our sales discipline and keeping to those good habits.
We got a lead from one of my peers and set up a call to discuss their services. The organization we were speaking with was Habits at Work and we were fortunate to have the CEO Andrew Sykes attend the meeting.
Prior to the call we got an agenda from Andrew, which in itself is not unusual but how often have you not received an agenda for a meeting? Increasingly I am seeing less and less structure to meetings with agendas unfortunately becoming a rare thing.
The agenda gave us a great insight to what we were about to experience. It set out the purpose of the meeting, the benefit to having the meeting, the attendees, all with their names hyperlinked to their LinkedIn profiles.
Andrew had done his research prior to the call and knew his audience. The agenda also broke down the meeting into time slots, identifying what we were going to discuss. Finally, it had next steps, a next meeting date and feedback. The process was very much aligned to my post “A super system for the salesman” .
It was clear this was shaping up to be an interesting call.
When we joined the call, Andrew opened up with confidence and charisma making us feel relaxed and had us buying into him as a person long before we even discussed his company.
Before we moved onto the business element of the call, he asked us to give him feedback after the call. He wanted us to tell him what he did well but also asked us to give him feedback on what he didn’t do so well. It was the first time anyone has ever asked me for that type of feedback after a sales call or any call or meeting for that matter.
It was truly refreshing, and gave us an insight into his thought process. He definitely had a growth mindset. We gave him his feedback on what he did well but we really struggled to find anything he didn’t do so well.
As you can imagine Andrew had us eating out of his hand and the call went extremely well, exactly as he would have imagined it. His next steps were to set up another meeting at his office where we could continue our discussions. We finished the call and as promised, he followed up within the hour with the action items.
A few days later one of my colleagues received a delivery to her office.
It had three books, authored by Andrew, one for each one of us on the call. Inside each book was a hand written note thanking us for our time on the call.
Oh, and the book’s title, “The 11th Habit: Design Your Company Culture to Foster the Habits of High Performance”.
Now, very few of us have written a book on improving performance in the workplace but sending a hand written note after a call or meeting is a great way to build a relationship and should be standard practice. Sadly, like agendas, hand written notes are no longer a regular occurrence but they can be a clever way of differentiating you from all the competition.
Andrew was a true expert in his field, and it was a pleasure to be sold to in that manner. He was slick, polished and accomplished.
I am not in the field selling as much as I used to be but when I am, I am going to make sure I adhere to all those disciplines and habits that make the experience so much better for everyone.
John McGlinchey
John McGlinchey is the Global Sales Leader, Executive Vice President of CompTIA