You receive an email from your direct manager that you’re up for a annual appraisal of your work. Heart stops, anxiety sets in. The dreaded day comes and the performance reviews begin. You soon realize that any disagreement with what is being said is futile no matter how empathetic the manager sounds. Survival mode ensues and a “I just want to get through it” mentality takes over. Sound familiar?
One of my top sales people had been missing for a couple of days and hadn’t called in sick. I called his home and cell with no luck. Around the third day his dad called and wanted to talk to me. This was kind of odd but I accepted and we met. He told me his son had prostate cancer and didn’t want anyone to know. Of course I was concerned and advised him to have his son take all the time off needed just keep in touch periodically. He agreed. Unfortunately, about two weeks later, I found out he was working for our competition. Maybe it was time to fire someone?
I had passed out the sales playbook and gave my sales team some basic instructions with a completion date. So far so good. Yeah… not really.
As managers we spend a lot of our precious time locating and hiring the “right people”. Performing interview after interview until we finally find that person that will help take our team to the infamous next level. We on-board them with sales tools and send them on their way. We are fired up and believe they are going to make the difference desired. Then over time things have changed unfortunately. We are now less than impressed and not sure without micromanaging we can trust them to bring in the needed sales. We stopped believing.