Does your action (or lack of it) create chaos?

In case you missed this month’s Sales Coaching over Coffee, Coffee Klatch conversation; this week’s post is what Dan Waldschmidt called “the rest of the story.”

Part way through the show, Dan was *poof* gone…
Which prompted an email later from him saying: So sorry. Thought I had enough battery — everything melted down. Which sucks. #CHAOS

Funny in a conversation where we were discussing planning and taking action.

Now let’s be clear – LeAnn and I certainly missed Dan’s input but it wasn’t a show stopper. I’ll take off from LeAnn’s response to Dan: ignoring what you already knew to be true… what you did was create chaos for yourself.

How often as leaders do we create chaos where there doesn’t need to be any through our actions or at times lack of action?

ACTION: The actions that are the issue are typically the ones that have no planning behind them (or would it be in front of them?).

1. coming out of a meeting and parroting a complaint about this months performance vs. translating it into words that will mean somethign to your team.
2. making a requirement declaration that addresses a symptom vs. the root cause of the issue.
3. giving credit for an idea to the wrong person.

LACK OF ACTION: Here is the short list of ‘things’ sales leaders have shared they HATE having to do and therefore sometimes never get around to.

1. talking with salespeople about the stuff that is ‘their job’ You know what I’m getting at right? Those things that as the leader you believe you ‘shouldn’t’ have to talk with them about… those darn salespeople need to just do that!
2. reports; putting together a concise picture of what the team is accomplishing, is never easy because the information is allover the place and you’re the one who has to consolidate it. You have to inspect what you expect!
3. performance reviews – formal AND informal; why is it that we don’t want to talk with individuals on our team about the good and the bad? One of the best pieces of advice I received when becoming a manager was that individual salespeople need to NEVER be surprised by what is on their formal review.

Like in Dan’s case, many times bypassing the chaos could be easy (as easy as plugging in your cell phone in the car as soon as you get in) – other times it will be more difficult to follow up on the planning you did.

Regardless, the actions you take or choose not to take all will affect your success and the success of each member of your team.

next week is the last post in this series – where we will explore reflection. You can always go back in time without a time machine by clicking on < Previous Post below