Leaders who micromanage

Management is dead. Leading employees as machines has been passed off as a bad practice in modern businesses. However, it seems many companies are still in the mindset of using the outdated mode of management efficiency as postulated by F.W. Taylor, who wrote The Principles of Scientific Management (1911). Taylor’s concept revolutionized the way business was managed at the turn of the century, however the best companies have evolved since then and are no longer lead employees like they were textile workers on an assembly line, or leading their frontline as machines just as a means to an end. The best leaders are valuing their employees’ thoughts and creative thoughts. They are not spokes on a wheel of a machine but pivotal business experts that are need to make companies great. Great leaders don’t control, they lead and inspire. The problem is not how one manages. The problem is management. The new innovative leaders that will succeed in this turbulent business environment must create a paradigm shift from managing their people as machines to managing their people in truth, valuing and respecting their minds and treating them as human beings. For the business leader, knowledge is power; therefore, leaders should share knowledge to expand knowledge throughout the organization and as knowledge expands power will expand creating self-empowered organization that will gain respect, produce growth, and positive gains in any business climate.

Leaders who focus on the lowest performers

Many leaders make the mistake of spending all their time trying to rehabilitate their lowest performers. This is a fatal mistake. In the book, Good to Great, by Jim Collins, instructs companies that the key to success is simple: get the right people on the bus and in the right seats and get the wrong people off the bus. Collins states that you don’t have to motivate the right player, they are self-motivated. Low performers must, therefore, change behaviors or get off the bus.

Instead, leaders must spend the most time with their best people to produce the best results. Successful leaders spend the most time with the most productive members of their staff.  Star employee need five times more recognition and attention than the rest of your team. Many managers make the fatal mistake by focusing most of your time with the strugglers, and will eventually stop being your top performers. Star employee have the talent and skill to produce more results than a struggler. The time you invest should be spent of the team player that will give you the best return on investment (ROI).

Leaders who set goals for top sales reps.

Another vital mistake leaders make is to put a sales number as a goal for top selling sales reps. Many leaders will insist an employee to sell a certain amount of production instead of allowing the employee to come up with their own strategy and goals. Managers may limit what the employee’s real potential. For example if a manager sets sales production at one million dollars to meet ten percent over quota, the sales associate may set the pace to meet that goal whereas they could really do 2 million dollars. Leaders should empower their sales staff and have them view their job as business owners who come up with their own strategy to maximize profit.

Leaders who create stringent sales processes.

Many sales organizations from car dealerships to software companies have some way of tracking their goals and sales. Some managers particularly are obsessed with numbers, forms, spreadsheets, white boards, posters, signs, digital gadgets all to do about the same thing. The danger of using all this data and ways to track different metrics is that communication becomes redundant and loses its effect on goals, production and creativity. What is worse than pollution? Maybe noise? Music can be great, but when one plays multiple songs at the same time, it loses its enjoyment and becomes annoying noise to the listener. This is the same effect with too many forms, sales metrics, and goals to the sales team. When managers demand sales teams to compile too many numerous forms of numerous data it becomes very tedious, redundant, and lacks any meaning and does not motivate. It becomes a task instead of a tool. Tools are made to help teams succeed in tasks, motivate and coach. Many team members feel that when they are given tasks to fill out any form with information that they already have is utter punishment. There are a few concepts that managers can take in mind to develop winning teams pertaining to forms, sales goals and sales metrics; (1) Managers hire sales experts, not secretaries. If managers want someone to fill out forms and spreadsheets all day, they need to hire an office assistant from a local temp agency. Successful managers hire skilled professionals that are passionate about selling, therefore, successful managers do not stifle the fire by giving their people clip boards and sticky notes. (2) Empower your team as unique individual leaders. As the philosopher Martin Heidegger, so aptly highlighted, is that humans are not machines or computers, but unique beings, “Dasein,” designed to be aware of their own experience, and to treat them as robots that can be programmed is a futile task. (3) Coaching your team to success. Many managers coach all day about numbers and metrics but never show their team how to achieve sales results. Successful managers will coach on behaviors; if the behaviors and actions are there—results will come. Here are five secrets to team success:

Goal setting. Goal setting is great but many managers do all the talking and make imperative statements, jot down some notes, and bid the sales professional a good day. Successful managers will have the sales professional design his or her unique strategy to succeed. Manager may then ask questions to help the sales professional exceed their goals. They find out what their goals are, what is his or her dream, does the sales professional want to be promoted, make more money, if so, how much? If they want to make 100K, do they have a daily strategy to achieve that goal?

Give Real time coaching feedback. Let them know that they are doing a great job and ask them to do it again.

Behavior enhancement; “Teachable moments.” When sales professionals make mistakes or fall short, what is the approach? Show them “what right looks like” and hold them accountable. Give them the tools they need to be successful in the next opportunity.

Inspect what you expect. After managers have communicated the team’s tasks and empowered the team to lead the organization, it is imperative to be involved with your team. The manager should make his or her own goal each day committing to help team members that need help the most and add value to the identified sales professional’s day.

Don’t duplicate yourself. Managers use this phrase all the time. Encourage them to reinvent themselves to become better. The idea of “existence precedes essence,” that Jean Sartre coined, means humans are free to choose who they want to become. They are not pre-programmed machines that have no real choices in life. They are determined to be free. Therefore, managers should encourage their team to flourish into what is possible—a team without vision can never be a “dream team!”

Leaders who offer extringent rewards or spiffs to motivate their staff.

In the book, Drive: surprising truth about what motivates us, by Daniel Pink, combats the traditional method that managers use to motivate staff. The basic premise is that if you have the right staff in place your job as leader is not to de-motivate them. Pink states that rewards will motivate staff in order to get more rewards. When management offers extringent rewards and uses an “if, then” approach to motivate it actually de motivates staff. For example, if a manager has a very tight deadline or goal to meet and intices an employee to sale on more unit, the manager may say, “Kelley “if” you sell just one more unit today “then” then I will give you Justin Beaver tickets tonight.” This according to Pink, is a mistake because if she is the right person for the organization she should already be driven to make that extra sale as required by the company. To incite her with a reward will only set the expectation of the “if then” relationship going forward in her job. On the other hand, Pink states that it is perfectly fine to after the fact give her a reward after the fact. When asked by an interview with Time, if he thought intrinsic motivators are stronger than external rewards he said, “I think they’re more important for creative, conceptual tasks. If-then motivators — if you do this, then you get that — are really good for routine algorithmic tasks. The problem is fewer of us are doing that kind of work.”

by Joshua Cook

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