Creating a “Culture of Accountability” is the cornerstone of building an over-achieving sales team. And really it’s fundamental to building over-achieving teams in general. As a CEO, President, or Business Owner you probably understand this and chances are most of your leadership team understand this concept as well. And yet, many sales managers (and managers in general) struggle when it comes to holding their people accountable. Why is that?
Here are five issues and barriers we have observed through our consulting practice over the years. There are many more we could list, but this will give you a good place to start if a lack of accountability has been a challenge in your organization. How many of these apply to your managers?
Unclear Goals
If your managers don’t have a clear line of sight to your company’s goals and a clear understanding of what their team needs to do to help achieve them, how can they possibly hold their team accountable to the daily activities and behaviors that will get you there?
No Coaching Rhythm
We recommend sales managers hold a regularly scheduled “formal” coaching meeting at least every two weeks (weekly is better). This is in addition to all the “informal” coaching conversations that happen around the office or driving back from a joint sales call. Without a regular coaching rhythm where your sales manager and each individual sales person review progress toward the goals, activities driving the goals, as well as potential barriers and challenges getting in the way, it’s very difficult to hold people accountable and keep them on track.
Too Much Complaining
There are a couple of ways to look at this issue. In some cases, your sales manager is the whiner (“we don’t have enough resources….operations is letting us down….the competition is killing us in a price war….” and on and on). In other cases, they are too sympathetic and tolerant of the whining and excuses they hear from their team. When someone on their team is complaining about a challenge they have, strong managers ask questions (“What can you do to change the situation?” or “Are you telling me this because you want me to do something or are you just letting off steam so you can focus on solving it yourself?”). Most managers join in and simply add gasoline to the fire.
Too Friendly
While it’s important that your sales managers build a strong rapport with their team and establish a high level of trust, many managers go too far and become too “buddy-buddy” with the people on their team. Or worse, they become buddy-buddy with some members of the team but not all. When that happens they start treating people differently and it breeds tremendous resentment across the team. The key is to establish clear goals, review them regularly, stop accepting excuses, and manage agreements about what needs to happen each week/month to reach the goals.
Too Aloof
Some managers go too far the other way. They don’t invest the time in getting to know each team member, what their goals are (both business and personal goals), and they really don’t know them as people. These managers become unapproachable and come across as inauthentic when they try to be friendly. When your managers can get to know the personal goals of each member of their team and help them see your company as the means through which they can reach that goal, it becomes much easier to hold team members accountable to the daily/weekly/monthly activities need to reach their goals (both business and personal).
Which of these examples rings true to you? CEO Coaching Tip: select one for each of your direct reports and during your next one-on-one discuss your perspective on how it is impacting their ability to hold their people accountable and ask them what would happen if they focused on getting better in that particular area. Alternatively, if you see something on the list that applies to all (or most) of your managers, discuss it during your next leadership team meeting. What would happen to your results if you focused on these barriers to creating a culture of accountability? When will you start?