In Centered Leadership, authors Joanna Barsh and Johanne Lavoie of McKinsey & Co introduce the importance of mind-sets to effective leadership. They note that leaders often unfortunately attack a challenge without addressing the underlying attitudes and beliefs that drive the challenge.
Barsh and Lavoie focus on ideas that allow leaders to find new behaviors, enabling their leadership to emerge naturally. Although the book is about leadership in general, we thought the lessons were particularly important for sales leaders.
Find your strengths – As we’ve written before, sales leaders spend a lot of their energy focusing on weaknesses. Of course everyone has areas that need improvement, but by shifting the focus to strengths, sales leaders can be more inspiring and are more likely to drive creativity and innovation in others.
Practice the pause – When facing demanding internal challenges and customer crises that generates stress, pausing before reengaging can help shift a sales leader’s mind-set from the negative fear of failure to a more positive one about success.
Forge trust – People define trust differently, so understanding how the members of your sales team perceive trust is critical to building it. Barsh and Lavoie suggest four aspects of trust that deserve attention:
Reliability – keep commitments and deliver on promises
Congruence – align language and actions with thinking and feeling
Acceptance – withhold judgment and separate the person from the performance
Openness – state intentions clearly
Choose your questions wisely – How you formulate a question has significant implications for how a conversation plays out with a sales director or sales leader. Questions like – What’s the problem? What’s the cause? Who’s to blame? Why hasn’t it been fixed yet? – more often than not will leave the person on the other side of the table feeling defensive.
When the conversation is focused on a problem where there’s a definite right answer, all that might work. But as issues become more complex, sales leaders need to move away from problem-focused questions to ones that are solution-focused, like: What would you like to see happen? What are some of the alternatives we need to explore? How can we get started on fixing that?
Make time to recover – Find 10 minutes twice a day to recover and recharge, whether it’s walking up a flight of stairs, learning something new, gazing out the window, or a call or email with a friend. Senior executives report that making time to recover helps them spend more time in high-performance mode.
In summary, sales productivity requires creating a superior sales team. Moving from good to great starts with excellence at the top.