Counterpoint: When Is Directive Coaching OK?

[rifat28dddd]

The Best (and Most Boring) Way to Help Your Team
As I discuss in Chapter 1 of The Sales Leader They Need, one of the key traits of great leaders is also the most boring; predictability. But it can also be a key trait of those who fail to motivate and inspire their teams.

Leaders who are predictably directive often succeed in conditioning their teams to either wait for their orders or come to them for every single decision. This results in a decline in their initiative and overall engagement and longer decision cycles, sitting at odds with everyone’s objectives. By contrast, a predictably collaborative coaching style can both save leaders time and boost engagement. And the approach is simple.

Over the years, when a team member came to me with a problem and asked, “What do you think we should do?” my favorite and highly predictable response was, “I don’t know. What do you think we should do?”

By conditioning reps to bring leaders not only bosnia and herzegovina telegram data problems but potential solutions to them before we dive in and help, we build their sense of resilience, autonomy, and creativity.

That’s why one of my most memorable leadership moments was the first time a rep came to me for advice and opened with, “David, I have a problem that I’d love your advice on. Now, I know you’re going to ask me what I think we should do, so let me explain the problem and how I’m thinking of solving it.”

If your goal is to become the type of leader your team would fight to work with again by helping them grow and unlocking their discretionary effort, predictably biasing toward the collaborative mode of coaching is the approach you’re after.



When I was interviewing for a vice president of commercial sales role at Salesforce, the EVP of our division, Tony Rodoni (who graciously wrote the foreword to The Sales Leader They Need), asked me a powerful question about the balance of directive versus collaborative coaching. He said, “David, I know as leaders we strive to coach our reps and lead them to the answers they need. But under what circumstances do you think it might be OK to just tell them what to do?” Indeed, there are periodic instances when directive leadership makes sense. For example.