Sales Leaders Rule #17: Only Wear One Hat at a Time

As a leader, you're going to have many different roles throughout the day when you interact with your team and your coworkers. We call them the four hats of leadership. Those four hats are supervision, training, mentoring, and coaching. All four of them are equally important so sales leaders need to be ready to change hats often.

The majority of your time will be spent in the supervision role. All the day-to-day activities that most people consider general management like goal-setting, setting expectations, having daily conversations, and sales funnel management is supervision.

Training is teaching the skills necessary for your people to succeed. The training need will be different by person and by role. For example, a sales person in charge of finding new business might need defined training on how to get past the gatekeeper on a prospecting call. However, that same training might be useless to an account manager that primarily provides customer care support to the existing client base. Leaders need to assign appropriate training to the person to be successful in that specific role.

Experienced and trusted leaders of an organization should be mentoring newer employees or team members that are struggling to find success. It's not necessarily an older leader instructing a younger employee. It's an experienced leader, who is proficient in a particular role or skillset, assisting a less experienced person. Most sales leaders have spent time in a sales role and their team can benefit from the sales leader's lessons learned.

Coaching is where you're showing people how to apply the necessary skills to be successful. Coaching focuses on consistent individual improvement that helps take the team member's game to the next level. Coaching should help uncover hidden areas that are holding them back from being even more successful. Coaching is often more focused on intangibles like fears, doubts, and worries that keep the team member from executing on their sales plans.

Whether you have the supervision, training, mentoring, or coaching hat, here's what sales leaders have to figure out. Where are you spending your time now? Create a pie chart for yourself. Over the last week, how much time have you spent coaching? How much time in training? How much time is spent on supervision? How about mentoring? Do an as-is model for yourself.

Once you've seen that, determine what it should be. If you were in total control of your time, what would the ratios look like? Weight those ratios to what you think would create the biggest impact for your team. Look for the gaps on what you are not delivering.

If you're skewed too heavily in one way, how do you backfill that? For example, if you are spending all your time on supervision then employee development must be suffering. Eventually, your stronger people will leave because they want to be developed. When people stop stretching and growing, they leave the organization. As we said, every hat is important so if one role is being neglected, it will result in negative consequences.

You have to be well rounded as a sales leader. By wearing and understanding each of these four hats, you are well on your way to being flexible enough to meet the leadership needs of your sales team.