- Focus on making your Team Feel Important: If your goals and decisions appear to be self-centered followers will lose enthusiasm very quickly. Emphasize their contributions, their skills, their expertise and their effort rather than yours.
- Promote a Common Vision: Followers need a clear idea of where you are trying to lead them and they need to understand how what they do “fits” into the bigger picture.
- Follow the Golden Rule of Leadership: Treat your team as you want to be treated. Abusive and/or task managers attract very few followers!
- Admit Mistakes: If people suspect that you’re covering up errors they’ll hide their mistakes as well. This will cause bigger problems in that you’ll lose valuable information that you need to make better business decisions.
- Criticize in Private: Public praise encourages others to excel but public criticism only embarrasses and alienates everyone.
- Create a Most Likely to Succeed Award: Publicly recognize someone in your organization who has great potential or shown exceptional effort and watch them blossom!
- Stay Involved/Close to the Action: You need to be visible and active with members of your team. Talk to your people as people, go on joint calls, facilitate account strategy meetings, talk with fellow sales managers in other industries to share best practices, etc. Often you will gain new insights that will empower you to motivate your followers.
- Lead by Example: Do what you say that you’re going to do. Demonstrate how to do things. Don’t ask for more than you’re willing to give.
- Create “Friendly” Competition: Competitive drive in salespeople is a very powerful tool if used wisely. Set smaller, incremental team goals and reward those who meet or exceed them. Examine failures and celebrate the group’s success.
- Always Manage “Up”: Get your team visibility with senior management. Promote the efforts/results of your team. Enable your salespeople to get face time with senior management.
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