Sales Leadership Skills: Power Sharing

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Sales Leadership Skills: Power Sharing Means Rethinking Your Sales Management Approach.

by Thomas Kayser, author of Mining Group Gold

True Power sharing means giving up what you most naturally would like to hold on to—your control, via formal authority, for task management—and holding on to what you most naturally would like to give up—your responsibility and accountability for task results. This may run counter to your sales managerial nature, but it must be done this way to share power.

Power Sharing Increases Sales Performance

Empowering individuals or sales teams through delegation means letting go so others can get going with increased discretion, autonomy, and decision control.  It means widening authority boundaries and helping to broaden the windows of independent action so more sales people can do what needs to be done in the most timely and efficient manner to accelerate business performance and attain breakthrough goals.  Jan Carlzon, former president and CEO of SAS Airlines provides a classic example of the negative consequences of centralized management decision power.

“So I [Jan Carlson] sat down with the head of cargo operations and said, “This can’t be so difficult.  What the market wants, of course is door-to-door cargo service.  Develop such a product and call it EuroCargo which will fit together nicely with our EuroClass on the passenger side.”

 

He [cargo operations] obeyed and, as you’ve probably guessed, it was a big flop.  Why?  Because I had made a decision from the top of the pyramid about an aspect of the business that was completely unfamiliar to me.  I lacked the basic knowledge of the cargo market’s special structure and division of labor.  Coming from the passenger end, I did not understand cargo was different—that it is a heavy industrial product sold to major manufacturing corporations through long-term contracts.

 

If I had created an atmosphere in which the cargo managers’ own ideas flourished, of course, the mistake would not have been made.  Instead, I took the easy way out, opting to decide myself, even though I didn’t know what I was doing.”

Empowering sales teams rather than controlling them is the way to improve sales performance. Encourage your team to participate in generating solutions to problems. They’ll feel more accountable for the results, which in the end, is the only way that they’ll succeed anyway.

For more information on Power Sharing, see Thomas Kayser's book Mining Group Gold - available at Amazon.com.