Sales Leaders Rule #18: Create the Curbs on the Roadway.

Too much supervision creates learned helplessness. Here's a tricky question for many managers: do you want to create learned helplessness on your team? The obvious answer is, "Of course not". But if we're being honest, part of us probably does. Our ego desires being the driving force for business decisions and wants everyone to ask what to do next. Sales leaders want to be needed. They want to be the person who has all the answers. Sales leaders need to resist the compulsion to be the key component to all business development activities and rather create guidelines for the sales team to meet individual and group goals.

Sales leaders are often former sales people that used their competitive juice to drive them toward consistent success. That drive actually works against many sales managers because it does not translate into great supervision skills. Supervisors have to create an atmosphere where people feel self-sufficient. Of course, they need to provide direction by setting goals, creating roadmaps, reviewing activity in the CRM, and managing the sales funnel. However, sales leaders need to take a step back after setting those strategies so that they don't micro manage their team into learned helplessness.

Supervision really is setting guardrails on a highway. That highway should lead to the team's goals and the team needs to operate within this framework. This allows the sales leader to keep corporate and departmental goals on target while allowing flexibility to the individual to drive there in their own way. It also makes sure that objectives and rules of the road are clearly explained so that expectations are clearly set.

Supervision can be tricky because it's one of the few leadership roles that happens independently from your relationship with the sales team. The company has put you in a position of leadership, typically without input from the team that you are leading.

Don't allow that sense of authority to lull you into a heavy handed style. If you insist on micromanaging and things being done in "your way", you inevitably remove the team's ability to think on their own. That learned helplessness will trap you in a cycle tedium and approval that ensures the sales team will never outperform the personal level of focus that you can devote to each individual deal.