The Sales Manager and Leadership

The manner in which a salesperson conducts their selling activities will reveal the degree to which they are motivated. The extent to which they are motivated will reflect on how they are managed and here I refer here to the 'leadership' capabilities of the sales manager.

A salesperson that operates in an optimistic, enthusiastic and gregarious manner, who is enjoyable to be with, knows their stuff and are self assured and confident, will most certainly be working for a manager who is enlightened about selling and their own role as a manager.

Leadership is an aspect of management practice that has confounded the experts down through the years which is evident by the volumes of written work on the subject. In a business/selling context I would like to offer my definition of leadership as follows:

'Leadership is the process of influencing the behaviour of others
towards the accomplishment of a shared goal taking into account
the imperfections of individuals'.

In my studies of effective leadership I have found there are three very important components:

(1) Vision (11) Passion and Commitment (111) Beliefs and Values.

You would imagine that is selecting managers that these traits would be the key considerations for promoting individuals, however that assumes we are operating in an ideal world. Like selling there are few individuals that demonstrate natural selling ability and in both cases this does not exclude individuals becoming good at 'managing or good at 'selling' because the skills required to perform at a reasonable degree of effectiveness can be taught. A salesperson that is shy and retired by nature is not doomed to failure, but selling is going to be a tough job for them to excel at. A manager that lacks natural leadership ability again is not certain to fail but will perhaps never reach their full potential as an effective manager. These are personality traits and you cannot change people's personalities. I believe that you cannot teach people to be 'Leaders', how for example can you teach people to have 'vision'? How can you teach people to have 'beliefs and values' these are pre-existing traits that are embedded in personality. I do believe however that you can teach people to be good at 'managing in the same way that you can teach people to be good at 'selling'. Many organisations struggle with this dichotomy making them vulnerable to those that claim they can transform their managers into high-powered 'leaders'. They are in constant search to acquire those sometimes-indefinable qualities and make them available to their managers so that they become effective leaders. This is a useless task and one in my mind that cannot be achieved.

Taking a wider perspective on leadership you will have no doubt noticed the topic surface as a prime consideration in the recent selection of a new president of the U.S.A. there was a thirst for strong leadership among the American people and understandably so, given the state of their economy. In their quest the Americans have elected Barack Obama as their preferred choice of leader and for the moment their thirst seem to have been quenched.

The same desire currently exists in Ireland where 'leadership' or rather the lack of it seems to be making a bad situation even worse. This desire for strong leadership has focussed attention on individuals in all aspects of business and political life in Ireland presently and it will be interesting to see who will be the choice of the Irish to lead the next government in a change that seems imminent in the near future. Either way it illustrates how leadership and the consequences of it, profoundly affect the lives of people. The same concept is replicated in a business context, where the leadership capabilities of the sales manager profoundly affect the working and personal lives of individual members of the sales team.

I look forward to expanding this topic in my next post; in the meantime your comments are most welcome.
Cheers
Dave: http://www.davidquinnandassociates.ie/