Leaders of failing (sales) strategies

(3 minutes read)

How many times have you heard a leader in business or sports, complaining that the team failed to implement the strategy as it was initially planned? Or saying that the team did not fully understand the strategy…or even worse; they understood but sabotaged it.

Once I worked with a leader who was blaming the team (including myself) for not being smart enough to understand the strategy. My response was simple: “If you are so smart, why can’t you build a strategy that even dummies like us can understand?”

Whatever the reason, in such cases, most leaders adopt the following behaviors depending on the conditions and their mindset:

Roll the sleeves up and dive into the implementation process and do most of the job themselves.

Blame the team and increase the pressure.

Accept the failure, take full accountability, and resign.

Give up and let the strategy die slowly.

Lose faith in the strategy and try to build a new one.

When they roll up the sleeves, they get lost in detail and lose a lot of time and energy. Even if they succeed, their success is not sustainable because it depends on them only. When the leader leaves, the system collapse. For example, a sales leader cannot assist each salesperson with the customer visits permanently.

Others can blame the team and increases the pressure. When the results are not there, they either set additional incentives or set some sanctions. In both cases there are extreme examples: “If you do not deliver the targets by the end of the quarter you will lose your job” or “If you reach the target by the end of the quarter, the best performing salesperson will be rewarded by a 5-star holiday in the Caribbean islands.” The more the pressure increases, the more the team pushes back and at some points, it explodes in different forms such as strike, resignation, sabotage, or loss of trust and belief.

Some get upset and blame themselves. Those leaders either take full responsibility on their shoulders and end up with immense pressure or they simply give up and leave the company.

In other cases, they see the frustration and the pushback of the team and decide not to push further. They let the team implement the strategy “as much as they can” and avoid additional friction. They let the strategy die slowly for the sake of “not frustrating” the team anymore. For instance, when a sales leader builds a new commission system for the salespeople that are in line with the new commercial strategy and have such a push back, he/she quickly comes back to the initial system for not creation additional tension.

And at some point, the leaders feel stuck and start to doubt the strategy that they built… “Is this the right strategy?”, “It is a good strategy but not for our team”, “It can work elsewhere but our company has its particularities.” Therefore, those leaders lose faith and look for another strategy. And this goes like this again and again…   

Do any of these examples look familiar to you?

But how to avoid it as a leader? And how to react when we are working with such a leader?

We will look for the answers in the next week’s blog.

Stay tuned…