Alex LLorens, Vice President, Asia at Contentsquare.
getty
Leadership is its own craft.
This might seem obvious, but many new leaders and managers fail to understand that effective leadership demands a unique set of skills in 2023. Becoming a leader means taking a whole new set of challenges onto your shoulders, including communicating priorities in a clear and motivating way, making decisions with limited information and creating a culture of high performance and accountability—along with a sense of belonging and ownership—in your team.
It isn’t only new leaders who struggle with these challenges. Many seasoned sales leaders today don’t truly understand how to elevate their teams—or how to make their team members self-sufficient and capable of operating without much support.
When this is the case, sales leaders tend either to try running the whole show themselves (bad idea) or take the "easy" route by directing their team without acknowledging that everyone in that team will need personal coaching at some point (also a bad idea).
To become a great leader at any stage in your career, you must grow into a role with more complex and specialized skills than that of a manager: You need to become a coach.
Why does coaching matter more than ever?
As noted by HBR, successful managers understand that the role of the manager has shifted from one of overseeing tasks to one of coaching performance (subscription required). On top of the perennial leadership challenges discussed above, sales leaders today must reckon with the global stress crisis undoubtedly affecting their teams.
According to a 2022 McKinsey article, employees worldwide are more stressed than ever. And finally, here comes 2023 with uncertainty in the global economy.
Every one of your teammates throughout the business moves dynamically around this matrix constantly. In sales, though, this happens on an almost daily basis.
Coaching is the key to keeping your sales team members on the higher end of the Y (Motivation) axis—and to preventing sellers from burning out in the face of a potentially never-ending cycle of distress, depression and anxiety.
Fortunately, over the last two years, Covid-19 has helped us to resurface and speak openly and transparently about mental health issues. In this article, I will outline three coaching strategies and some actionable advice to help your team thrive.
1. How do you get great at coaching?
Two places I recommend leaders start are Kenneth’s Blanchard’s Management of Organizational Behavior and Blanchard’s Leadership and the One Minute Manager.
Reading any book, however, isn't enough to fully learn to coach. So what can you do? As Shep Hyken writes, you must remember, “Every interaction you have is an opportunity to make a positive impact on others.”
The best coaches bring their whole personality to coaching, not just their "office persona" or the characteristics and management strategies they draw on for specific work situations.
Why? Because leaders with self-knowledge are better equipped to draw from their personal purpose and strengths—while also accepting their setbacks and blindspots—in order to bring more heart, authenticity and even fun to the business.
2. How can you learn to be a more effective coach and leader?
Coaching can be an extremely rewarding experience, whether you’re a coach or coachee. But having the ability and expertise to help somebody reach their goal or get over a hurdle is not something that just anyone can do. It requires patience, knowledge and years of training.
I speak from experience here. I’ve recently assumed the responsibilities of VP of Sales for Asia in Contentsquare after 17 years of sales in tech, with 7 of those years in leadership.
My career as a coach started six years ago when I took a Sales Director role for a fast-growing tech startup. At that time, many top CEOs were already speaking in podcasts and articles about how coaching is the number one skill they’d choose for their leaders.
Soon after, I embarked on a journey to become a professional certified coach through ICF. While this may not be the route for everyone, exploring such opportunities for development can be a great strategy to improve your leadership.
3. Where can leaders begin putting this practice into play today?
When delegating work to your team, you might experience distress about asking someone to add more work to their to-do list: which today in SaaS/Tech is as hectic as ever. Caring about the welfare of your team and managing their workload is part of good leadership. Here are four actionable strategies I recommend.
• Try delegating as a generous act of trust that gives your employees a chance to prove themselves and grow.
• After you’ve delegated, set regular checkpoints (as a recurring calendar invite) to provide feedback and coaching along the way.
• Focus on the person and not the situation, but the feelings. Address those feelings by focusing on the solution and a clearly communicated illustration of "how it should be ideally."
• Maintain open ears to listen and understand the effort that the employee is going through.
Are you leveraging the skills of both a coach and leader?
I hope this article provides some valuable takeaways for leaders seeking ways to improve their coaching skills. By employing these three approaches to their common coaching and leveraging the right strategies in their interactions with employees, you can enhance your team's cohesion, performance and bottom line today.
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