Setting Clear Direction

Have you ever tried doing a puzzle without seeing the picture on the jigsaw lid? (If you haven’t then try it.) It is the most difficult and infuriating task imaginable. It takes much longer to do, and you simply don’t know what you are doing. You spend the majority of time guessing what the picture is about and when you pick up a piece you have not got a clue where it fits at all. More often than not you give up.

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One of the biggest mistakes that managers make is to ask their people to work without seeing the jigsaw lid. People are asked to do a particular job without seeing where that job fits in the grand scheme of things. They have no idea what their business is trying to achieve or what the issues are and as a result simply cannot contribute as much as they are capable of. In essence many Managers pay their people to be as efficient as they would be if they were doing a puzzle without seeing the picture on the lid of the box.

What makes things worse is that the manager knows exactly what the picture on the jigsaw lid looks like. This makes things awkward for the manager because they can’t understand why their staff don’t operate and work more effectively. After all, the picture is clear to the manager so why can’t the staff just get on with it? This is particularly the case since lockdown with many of us working from home and managers potentially less accessible.

The answer plain and simple is that the manager has not communicated their vision to their people. More often than not, staff have no understanding of where they fit in to the bigger process or how their role contributes to the overall success of the business.

The danger for managers is that we forget just how much we know and assume that our people must already know as much as we do. Couple this with the old management adage that “knowledge is power, and we don’t want to tell our people too much” and you start to see why this one sole leadership principle is so very difficult to achieve.    

The most important thing is to make sure that your people understand what your business is trying to achieve and how they themselves fit in. Most businesses have vision and mission statements and based around these some general values that the business aspires to. Unfortunately, most individuals within the business struggle to see where they fit in to help achieve the mission and so the mission is at best something that is paraded on the walls and at worst something that the executive and management have difficulty coming to terms with and never use.

For salespeople you might say, ‘they know their targets, why don’t they just get on with it?’ This is a disastrous way to manage salespeople because it sends them all the wrong messages. It’s disastrous because it encourages salespeople to hard sell rather than take the time to fully understand the needs of their customers.

As sales manager your role is to help your salespeople plan how they will achieve their targets, through strategic prospecting and developing a sales plan based around QDQ (Quantity- Direction – Quality).

If your salespeople don’t know where they’re going, how do you expect them to get there?