THE 3 LEVELS OF LEADERSHIP SPEED
Do your managers accelerate the results of their team and the entire sales organization? Do their teams produce more, learn faster, and generally perform at a high level because of their efforts?
A manager needs to provide “Leadership Speed” – increased speed and results due to their added value. Yet, managers are often unsure how to improve their team’s momentum and default to their comfort zone rather than learning needed leadership skills.
Typically, we observe managers performing at three different levels of “leadership speed”:
1- THE DEAL CLOSER
The Deal Closer is the manager that dives into every deal their reps have, and they typically lead all of the critical customer meetings. In most cases, they were high-performing reps that have been promoted and are now applying their selling skills across every sales opportunity.
They are also known as High-Speed Deal Closers – because they primarily focus on simply closing deals and hitting the quota number. They confuse their speed with the speed of their team. The result is that their team is entirely reliant on them. Depending your market and product offerings, deal closers may be just what you need. In their favor, you can be assured that this management style will readily provide support if a critical deal needs focus and attention. But the drawback is that they can be a bottleneck to their team’s output – the entire team relies on them to close deals.
Many deal closer managers can move to the next level once they know their tendencies and learn and implement new skills. But unfortunately, many managers become complacent in their ways and continue to do everything themselves without developing their teams.
While they may succeed for a while, this management style could lead to burnout, falling behind the revenue growth curve, or their team will quit on them. Usually, such managers end up demoted. However, this is not all bad – they will probably be happier as high-performing individual contributors.
2- THE INDIVIDUAL COACH
The Individual Coach has learned to transfer specific skills and knowledge to leverage individual team members’ work styles. They can identify specific gaps in individual reps and provide mentoring and coaching to address them. In return, this ability increases skillsets and could even set staff up for further success. Most Individual Coach managers have success hiring and developing reps that become strong performers.
The best Individual Coaches can assess the skills and strengths of each rep and develop personal development plans for them. However, most Individual Coaches tend to hire reps that remind them of themselves. This pattern may make for an easy working relationship but may not fit the necessities of the business. Also, their team’s success is usually limited by the number of reps they can personally coach.
In an ideal scenario, they will develop a small group of competent and consistently productive reps. However, this is no small feat, and many sales organizations would benefit immensely from a leadership team of Individual Coaches. However, a myopic focus on individual performance means their results will hit the ceiling, especially in dynamic businesses and competitive markets with rapidly changing sales team requirements.
3- THE TEAM BUILDER
The Team Builder is a simple term for a complex set of leadership skills. They can build a successful sales team today while concurrently evolving it to meet the needs of tomorrow. Team Builders can focus on individual reps, accounts, and territories and simultaneously transition the team to drive growth. They build their team strategy based on their overall market position, industry dynamics, and competitive trends.
They then translate this strategy into a vision for the makeup of their team and can develop that team. The challenge is delivering results while adapting and evolving the team to meet future needs. To accomplish this, teams will often need to continually drive the adoption of new skills and knowledge, change roles and responsibilities, and upgrade the makeup and talent level of the group
What is your Leadership Speed? Are you and your team positioned for success? Are you positioned for growth tomorrow? Leave us a comment with your thoughts.
