Tag Archives: Developing leadership competencies

Sales Coaching

The Sales Coaching Dilemma

In common with training and management, coaching is unregulated, and therefore anyone can call himself/ herself a coach, and they do.

There are four distinct levels of coach and as you move from one level to the other, the need for skill and experience increases commensurate with the complexity of the coaching process.

LEVEL 1 (L1) – CAREER COACH AND LIFE SKILLS COACH

Level 1 coaching is typified by the coaching process being in the hands of the person being coached, which means that they drive the agenda rather than the coach. This is where most of the coaches in existence (up to 80% of the coaching population) operate. The focus of the coaching effort tends to be on life skills and career coaching. There is a significant gap in experience, knowledge and skills between coaches operating at this and the other levels.

LIFE SKILLS COACHES

Life Skills Coaches will have arrived in the coaching role from a variety of routes; some from training; some from a period of redundancy; in fact – just about anyone, from just about anywhere. They do not need any specialist knowledge, or experience. Some will have been trained; a few will hold a qualification; most will have picked up their coaching knowledge and skills from books or from attending a short course.

Some are very dangerous. They will be self-taught psychoanalysts and can often be found exploring people’s deep routed emotional problems without the ability or experience to know when to stop. They seek to advise people how to be healthy, wealthy, and happy. Most will certainly not be wealthy. Others might be healthy. Significant numbers are blissfully happy to have anyone to listen to them.

Some will have bought an expensive franchise offering untold wealth; most will be earning below average incomes. Some will be advertising themselves as Executive Coaches (Level 4); most will never actually engage in anything close to Executive Coaching.

They represent 90% of the coaching population at Level 1. You will encounter them at each and every networking event, in increasing numbers.

The coaching process is open-ended, meaning that providing the person being coached is able to pay the fees involved, it will go on indefinitely. There is rarely a definable, measurable goal.

CAREER COACHES

Career Coaches are usually to be found in-company; sometimes employed from external sources; often they are in the HR Department. In the same way as the Personnel Department became the HR Department, ‘Jack and Jill from personnel’ – became ‘Jack and Jill, the Career Coaches’.

Career Coaches will be probably be annoyed that I have placed them at Level 1, implying that they don’t need specialist knowledge or experience. Nevertheless, it is true. That said, many internal Career Coaches will have undergone various levels of formal training; some via the CIPD route; some will use career preference inventories to help them add a pseudo form of credibility to their efforts.

As with life skills coaching, career coaching is often disguised as executive coaching although it bears little resemblance to the executive coaching process described at Level 4 here. Career coaching offered to senior managers is usually a precursor to sending them on an expensive study programme in a European Business School which for many has no outcome other than an attendance certificate. No one fails. The only time career coaching is offered to lower levels of employees is when redundancy follows and the expense of providing career coaching is seen as an unavoidable cost in order to mitigate industrial disruption and employment appeals.

LEVEL 2 (L2) – SALES COACHING

Level 2 coaching is where Sales Coaches operate – in theory.

The coaching process at Level 2 is focussed on business outcomes and is driven by the coach. This is why a significant number of coaching initiatives in companies have failed, and continue to fail. The reason being that the people involved in being a Level 2 Coach are either only being trained at Level 1 – which is not a lot; or not trained at all.

A lot of companies who they say their managers have been trained as coaches, have invested at best two days, and at worst half a day in training their managers as coaches. In addition, the coaching models being used begin with the employee’s agenda, not the manager’s, and not the organisation. A classic example would be the use of the GROW model, which begins with either

– What is the Goal?

– What are you trying to achieve?

– What is your Goal?

– What are we trying to do?

The last type of question is meant to show inclusivity – i.e. we are all in this together.

Beginning with the salesperson’s agenda is an abdication of the Sales Coach’s role in ensuring that the organisation’s aims are placed firmly at the front of the queue.

Sales Coaches should have some experience of sales. Not from the perspective of specific knowledge of the product and/ or service being sold, but of the emotional pressures associated with being in a sales role. Salespeople are very sceptical of coaches who do not have sales experience. Whether this is right or wrong is immaterial. The reality is that you will tend to get on better with the target audience if you understand about selling from experience. And getting on with the salesperson is important. Sales coaching in this form works because the coaching relationship is built on trust. Trust from the salesperson of the coach; that performance short-falls and experimentation to improve will not be criticised, even though any lack of effort might. Trust from the coach of the salesperson that the latter is trying to improve and not just pretending.

The Sales Coach does not need a significant amount of knowledge about the product and/ or service the salesperson is selling, but it could reduce the amount of time needed to help the salesperson focus on improvement solutions. On the other hand, often, prior in-depth knowledge of the product and significant experience of the actual sales role can often be a barrier to effective sales coaching. Quite often, the less you know, the better the coaching questions are.

In sales coaching there has to be a clearly defined sales process – the Game Plan. Without a clearly defined game plan, the Coach will be working at Level 1. A game plan focuses both the Sales Coach and the salesperson on what has to be done, and how it to be done, in order to elicit an outcome – the performance. If performance is low, then either the game plan doesn’t work and needs to be changed or the salesperson is not following the game plan – and might have to be changed. Once you have a game plan, it can be enhanced in order to enhance performance but not in one day and not all at once. This brings me to the last point in Level 2 Sales Coaching – timescale.

Many people, when asked the question, is sales coaching short-term or long-term, will opt for long-term. The correct answer is short-term. By this I mean that the focus of each coaching session is on a short-term activity. In football, you often hear the cliché – ‘we take it one game at a time’; and so it is with sales coaching. The football coach may have a long-term goal to win the league, but slavish focus on winning the league is fraught with failure, without the focussed activity of working out what it will take to win the next game. In this way Sales Coaches work on one thing at a time. Taking one piece out of the total sales process and working with it until it is improved. It is called whole-part-whole. By taking a small part of the whole process and improving it, the knock-on effect is to improve the whole.

The Sales Coach should be the line manager.

LEVEL 3 (L3) – METACOACH

The MetaCoach is the Coach of the Coach. In a sales or a business environment this should be the line manager but it can also work by using either internal trainers as the MetaCoach or external MetaCoaches provided there is a significant level of interaction between the MetaCoach and senior management. If the MetaCoach is not the line manager, then the MetaCoach needs to have direct and regular access to the senior line manager, and preferably to the manager above them.

The agenda is driven by the organisation. The MetaCoach should have management experience. As with the Sales Coach, there should be clearly defined sales management process, but there rarely is. One of the main reasons why MetaCoaching fails to materialise in most companies is the lack of a detailed management process. Just as it’s vital to have a game plan for the sales process the same should apply to the management process. We already know that the greatest influence on sales success is management. In the same way, the greatest influence on the success of sales managers is the senior manager they report to.

The MetaCoach does not need either product knowledge of the products and services being sold, or specific experience of the sales or sales management role, and the lack of these is often an advantage. Some management experience however is desirable in order to have empathy with the difficulties of line and senior management.

The timescales involved in MetaCoaching is medium to long-term improvement in management performance and behaviour.

MetaCoaching should be provided by senior management, but rarely is, and therefore external coaches are often used, when the budget allows, to provide coaching to line sales managers. The difficulty is that external coaches have little or no authority and surprisingly (given the cost) minimal interaction with senior management. MetaCoaching by external coaches tends only to work effectively if it is combined with Executive Coaching for the senior manager.

LEVEL 4 (L4) – EXECUTIVE COACHING

Executive Coaching is almost exclusively provided by external coaches to senior management as either a development tool, a career advancement process, or sometimes simply as a way of spending an allocated budget without any particular end game in mind. It should lead to the provision of an opportunity to engender some blue-sky thinking on the part of the senior manager being coached and in some environments it does work. It depends on how experienced the Executive Coach is, why they were engaged in the first place, and where the outcomes of the coaching sessions are reported.

Executive Coaches should have some senior management experience and should be able to use this experience to be upfront in declaring whether the coaching provided is having any effect or not. True Executive Coaches should be charging enough not to be concerned about telling the truth when it is needed, whether palatable or not. Unfortunately there are a number of people who call themselves Executive Coaches who should really be working at Level 1, not Level 4.

Executive Coaches work with senior managers helping them develop leadership skills and behaviours. The instance of executive coaching being provided by internal coaches is rare. In any event, the best coaches are often frustrated by the manner in which coaching is viewed by the organisation and the constant introduction of the latest training fad; and they leave to set up their own coaching consultancies.

THE DILEMMA

The most effective type of coaching in business is sales coaching. However, the budget for developing line sales managers as true Sales Coaches has to be agreed by senior managers, and senior managers have to become involved in regularly supporting their Sales Coaches by the provision of MetaCoaching. Unfortunately because of the proliferation of Life Skills Coaches operating at Level 1, many budget holders believe that coaching exists at only two ends of the spectrum – Level 1 which is generally ineffective as a business tool, and Level 4 which is expensive and reserved for senior management. Regrettably that belief means that many sales organisations miss out on the significant positive impact that sales coaching can have on revenue improvement.

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Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Frank_Salisbury/4756

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Leadership

Developing Real Leadership: The 5 BIG Mistakes

The 5 BIG Mistakes that organisations make when developing their leadership talent is costing them in productivity, staff engagement, staff satisfaction and staff retention; never mind the escalating costs of replacing individuals and getting them up to speed to do an effective job.

As you read through these 5 BIG Mistakes – and the problems they create – you’ll immediately be in a position to introduce new strategies to develop your leadership talent, increase engagement and reduce those costs associated with employees being disengaged and leaving your company for “greener pastures”. In fact… continuing to do what the industry has always done will continue to get you the same results. Many of the standard old and tired approaches to leadership development simply don’t work and fail to deliver on organisational (and employee!) expectations. It’s time to take a new approach.

Every organisation wants them and every organisation says they’re committed to building them but how many organisations actually produce great leaders at every level throughout their business?

There are many benefits of having leaders, including self-leaders, at every level of the organisation and some of these include:

 

  • Proactivity: The ability to set and achieve our own objectives.
  • Accountability: Taking responsibility for our mistakes and making them right.
  • Motivation: That drive that gets us to the office early and keeps us focused throughout the day.
  • Confidence: Being able to present new ideas and having the self-assurance in ourselves and our capabilities.
  • Harmonisation: Being a team player, making decisions and acting in-line with organisational values.
  • Enthusiasm: Having the energy and “juice!” to overcome any challenges we come across.
  • Inspiration: The ability to move people toward a cause that is greater than themselves.
  • Self-awareness: Understanding ourselves, our strengths, our weaknesses and taking on the challenge of becoming better.

 

#1: Employees will pick up leadership skills on the Job…

If you want to be a great leader the best way to become one is to get close to an individual who already demonstrates great leadership practices. Stick with them as much as you can, learn everything you can from them, observe them, especially in the tough times; get to know how they think and how they make decisions. Most importantly, identify those unique character traits that set them apart and work on developing those within yourself.

That’s the ideal way… regrettably most organisations lack great leadership in the first place and there is a shortage of good leadership role-models. Unfortunately, when people are asked about ‘leadership’ they tend to think ‘management’.

Start developing real leadership skills in your organisation now and reverse this trend!

Another unfortunate aspect of organisation culture is that there is no incentive to developing leaders; therefore we are more concerned about getting the job done rather than spending the time needed with our people to help them grow. We are too busy in our day to day jobs to realise that by developing our teams they will experience the confidence to step up and take on many of the day to day tasks that prevent you, a leader of people, from focusing on where you can add value most. Most leaders don’t have the skill-set to do this because they have never experienced it themselves and lack the knowledge of how to apply it to others.

Bill O’Brien, former president of Hanover Insurance in the United States argues that managers must redefine their job. They must give Bill O’Brien up “the old dogma of planning, organizing and controlling,” and realise “the almost sacredness of their responsibility for the lives of so many people.” Managers’ fundamental task, according to O’Brien, is “providing the enabling conditions for people to lead the most enriching lives they can” (Senge, 1992).

Developing a great leadership culture doesn’t happen by chance. It takes time, effort and focus. It takes an understanding of the core leadership competencies and embedding these into the organisational culture where they are measured and reviewed.

Each member of staff should be on a leadership programme with goals and objectives within this space. Cave and Tappin (2008) suggest that to become a complete leader of tomorrow requires apprenticeship. Learning leadership is like a quest – there’s no defined path to success. It’s a personal journey and is different for everyone.

Identify where your leaders are spending their time. Is their focus on developing their people or managing the things their people do?

Believing that employees will learn on the job without a dedicated leadership culture in place will lead to disappointment and frustration for all involved.

 

“The task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there.” ~ John Buchan

 

How are you going to start developing your people rather than manage them? What activities can you let go of and give to an aspiring team member to free up your time and contribute to their growth?

What are the leadership objectives for your team members or yourself? Remember, leadership is about leading yourself first! What changes can you make in your life to become a real leader?

#2: Sending employees on 2 or 3 day leadership training courses…

If you’ve ever been on a 2 or 3 day training course I’ve no doubt that you learned a lot of valuable information and that the course was a great buzz… a fantastic cerebral hit! You’ve probably come away from the course motivated to make loads of changes and become a truly great leader.

But what happens when you get back to your desk? Generally there are hundreds of unread emails waiting for your urgent attention. That little light on your phone is blinking away telling you have several phone messages also waiting for your urgent attention. Don’t forget about your team… They’ve been fighting the fires while you were away and now they all need a decision on this and a decision on that. Soon those valuable lessons you learned during those two or three days recede into distant memory and you never get the opportunity to make any real and lasting change.

Organise your training in a series of short hits over a period of weeks to allow time for practice and feedback.

Apart from the inconvenience of being out of the office for two or three days at a time and never really being able to shut off to give the material the attention it deserves, does the core content actually deal with real leadership competencies?

And more to the point, does it help you develop them? I would argue that they don’t and they can’t. Orr and Sack (2009) suggest that no one has time for anything that isn’t going to help them do their job better or faster today. Make sure that you provide skill building opportunities that are just-in-time for on-the-job application.

Real leadership stems from character and the thing with character is that it can’t be developed in a couple of days… no matter how well the material is delivered. When I mentioned above that most courses are a ‘fantastic cerebral hit’ I wasn’t exaggerating. Intellectually they are very stimulating but that’s the problem.

You see, most people know the competencies of great leaders but very few know how to develop those traits that makes them stand apart. If it was as simple as understanding these traits we’d all be leaders but unfortunately this is not the case. It’s not the case because the area of the brain that is involved in, say, developing empathy (a core leadership attribute), is different from the area that is used to understand an intellectual task, such as risk analysis.

A large part of your leadership development should be on creating awareness, developing rapport, influencing and active listening skills.

Developing leadership competencies takes longer, it takes practice and it is largely a personal journey of understanding yourself, your fears and what makes you tick.

Sending employees on a two or three day training course is largely a ‘tick the box’ exercise for most organisations (merely an output) that rarely delivers on helping your people transform into great leaders… the real outcome.

Emotional Intelligence involves the circuitry of the brain that runs between the executive centres (prefrontal cortex) and the limbic system, which governs feelings, impulses and drives. Skills based in the limbic areas, research shows, are best learned through motivation, extended practice and feedback. The limbic brain is a much slower learner [than the neocortex used in intellectual learning] particularly when the challenge is to relearn deeply ingrained habits.

This difference matters immensely when trying to improve leadership skills: At their most basic level, those skills come down to habits learned early in life. If those habits are no longer sufficient, or hold a person back, learning takes longer. Re-educating the emotional brain for leadership learning, therefore, requires a different model from what works for the thinking brain: It needs lots of practice and repetition (Boyatzis, Goleman, & McKee, 2002). That’s why standard two or three day leadership training courses don’t develop true leadership skills.

 

“Leadership cannot really be taught. It can only be learned.” ~ Harold Geneen

 

Are you going to continue to be a follower and send your people on the same old “trusted” leadership courses or are you going to be a leader and try something new? Something that will make all the difference!

Do you trust that you have leadership skills in you now or will you rely on a training course to tell you what they are? Are you going to step up and trust yourself… and surprise yourself?

#3: Focussing only on the intellectual competencies…

Management is largely about the ‘head’; it’s planning and control, systems processes, problem solving, written communications, and so on and it’s really important for organisations to have people who excel at these functions. There’s no doubt that in order to be competent at any of the above there is a certain level of intelligence (IQ) needed. However, this is management.

Leadership, on the other hand, is all about the heart; it’s feelings, it’s emotions, it’s connectedness, our sense of respect and values. It’s about being aware of ourselves and being able to understand others. These competencies are much more intangible and are often referred to as ‘soft-skills’… they’re called this because they’re much harder to grasp. People who exhibit these skills generally have a high Emotional Intelligence (EQ).

Real leaders, and people who are, in general, happier in life, have a high level of EQ. An example of some of the research on the importance of EQ as a predictor of success is the Sommerville study, a 40 year longitudinal investigation of 450 boys who grew up in Sommerville, Massachusetts. Two thirds of the boys were from welfare families, and one-third had IQ’s below 90.

However, IQ had little relation to how well they did at work or in the rest of their lives. What made the biggest difference was childhood abilities such as being able to handle frustration, control emotions, and get along with other people (Snarey & Vaillant, 1985 cited by C. Cherniss, 2000).

Measure key soft-skills in all performance reviews – the application and measurement of these will be different for leaders and for staff.

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