Frustrations of the Overachiever Turned Manager
Doyle Slayton | Nov 23, 2008 | Comments 18
Top producers often get promoted into management. The strong desire to achieve drives them to move up within organizations. When an overachiever moves into management, the opportunity often turns into great mental conflict. It doesn’t hit them immediately. For the “Top Performer Turned Manger,” real challenge begins in the second and third month on the job.
Overachievers think much differently than everyone else. Let’s look at some of the areas where they often experience frustration and have trouble connecting with the people they are leading.
High Standards – Managers that set extremely high standards can kill morale when instituting goals that are perceived to be unattainable.
Mental Conflict: “I did it… why can’t they?”
Skill – Top performers are amazing when it comes to figuring out what works and creating a cumulative effect that produces MASSIVE results.
Mental Conflict: “If they would just do it they way that I taught them… word-for-word, they would succeed.”
Celebrating Success – It is very difficult for an overachiever to celebrate the small victories.
Mental Conflict: “Ok… nice job everyone… we’ve been celebrating for the last thirty minutes on something that we should be doing every day… now let’s go produce 10 times that result!”
Break Time – Over-the-top producers don’t really need breaks throughout the day. Year after year, they often have sick time and vacation time roll over and go unused.
Mental Conflict: “I have to be careful. I’m creating a culture where everyone feels guilty (just like I do) when taking time off.”
Motivation – When overachievers self-motivate, they have internal conversations that are pretty fierce. Those same conversations often backfire when used on others.
Mental Conflict: “Why is this person so upset? I’m trying to get them fired up to go be the best they can be.”
I often hear people say that top producers don’t make the best managers. I’m not convinced of that point. I think it is a matter of development. The question is…
How do you develop an overachiever to overcome the mental conflict described above? How do you develop this manager’s leadership and management skills to effectively work with people who don’t share the same mind-set?
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Filed Under: Blog • Featured • Leadership • Sales • SalesTaxi
Are we certain that good managers can be made, not born? I think the scenarios you describe are largely due to a lack of empathy. Empathy is very hard to get if you don’t have it naturally.
Yes, strong achievers are often self-absorbed and rarely like to see that in themselves when it results in team failure. But the company that benefits from their results also benefits from that self-absorbed mentality. Promoting a trail-blazer to management is a risk to see if their gifts are scalable. Some are, some aren’t. Wouldn’t it be better to realize a high achiever’s strengths with a more customized view? They don’t all have to become managers. They can be mentors, trainers, strategic committee members, etc., thereby utilizing their particular gifts in a way that is concurrently productive for the company. Always keep core skills in mind.
Being a very sucessful saleperson is the best position in the world. Being responsible for underlings,as their manager, most of which can’t sell, is a recipe for an ulcer. Enjoy what you have
I’ve been a manager and had the very issues discussed in the article. I agree, being a salesman is the best job in the world. Being a manager is much harder. You need to develop the disipline to understand you are raising someone else to your level by leadership, and accept the frustration and challenges that come with that.It’s a much different reward.
While I agree to the issues discussed in the article, I wanna mention a simple point.
Over achievers are over achievers for the qualities that they possess and also because these qualities are absent in their peers (before promotion) and subordinates (after promotion). This leads to problems which have been mentioned in the article.
The best if not the most practical way out would be to provide such overachievers with subordinates who match at least their zeal to put in the hard work if not the other qualities.
This coupled with some counseling/mentoring from the immediate boss of the manager will help the over achievers to adjust in the long run.
I agree with the Brophy response. Many of the skills and attitudes of a great sales manager are different than that of a top salesperson. I’ve seen many top performers take a manager’s role and be extremely frustrated, have their energy drained and decide they had it better as a sales rep.
And empathy is important, but there is more. The items you list Doyle are all “me” focused and great managers are “we” focused.
The key in selecting a potential new manager is to dig into the motivators for THAT top performing over-achiever and help them determine if a management role – and the responsibilities associated with it – are really going to be right for them.
If they decide to make the move then the next question is how to develop their skills. If a person is ready and willing to take on a manager’s role – the key is to provide clear expectations, a vision for what a manager/leader needs to be within that company, and then training and mentoring/coaching to help them get there. Help them see that their sales team are now their “customers” and they need to communicate with them in many of the same ways. They need to ask their sales reps great questions, listen, pay attention to them (a big one), lay out clear expectations help them set goals and actions to reach them.
How to get an overachiever to put their energy into developing these skills? The training and coaching should include self assessments because overachievers like metrics. Give them metrics on being a leader (not just production of their team) and challenge them to develop those behaviors and skills. Ongoing measurement of the behaviors and skills will need to be provided so that they can see their progress.
1st thing I do is make sure the over achiever is “consciously competent” Too often we promote the record breaker/over achiever not realizing that they may not be the best one to pass it on. There are 4 levels of competency.If we promote at level 3, “ego” will try to over compensate for lack of competency. Thus, all of the problems you described occur. Here are the levels:
1.”Unconsciously Incompetent”: At this stage, a person has no knowledge or skill, and is unaware that he/she is unskilled.
2. “Consciously Incompetent”: I can bring new people to this level simply by making them aware that they are missing a skill. This is usually the level a new sales person enters the field. They are conscious that they need new skills to be able to do their job. This awareness, alone, gives them room and motivation to grow.
3. “Unconsciously Competent”: This refers to those that are good at what they do but do not know why they are good. We have heard of the “Natural” sales person who seems to instinctively do the right thing. These people often have never taken a sales course but still are on top. They have learned from trial and error a pattern that works for them, and they just blindly follow that pattern. The problem is, they never took it to the next level. So, when they miss a sale, they don’t really know why. They can give you lots of speculation and excuses, but they really aren’t sure. What is missing is an awareness of what behaviors are causing the success or failure. That level of awareness belongs only to those at the highest level of sales competency. “Conscious Competency.”
4. “Consciously Competent”: These are people that know what behaviors work and what behaviors don’t, and why. They are the people that make the best teachers and managers because they aren’t just good, they know exactly what behaviors cause them to be good. They can see what is going on in a sale that could help or hinder the situation, and are able to change gears when necessary. They don’t just blindly follow a pattern. When you reach this level, you will be able to be successful in almost any type of sales. These are the people you want in management. Sometimes we mistake a naturally talented sales person as being someone who would make a good manager. However, if that person is only at level 3 (Unconsciously Competent), he/she will not be able to pass his/her ability onto the people under him/her. This is why good sales people don’t always make good managers.
Again, if the manager isn’t consciously competent, they will become “ego” driven. They can’t understand why they can’t pass it on, and resort to those tactics. They become impossible to work for and are always described as micro managers and will have unreasonable expectations for their team.
The best way to promote an overachiever is to start development BEFORE promoting him/her. A formalized program recognizing top achievers who have expressed a goal to go into management can help to avoid some of the pitfalls and disillusionment that sometimes happens. A program teaching management skills, helping to set expectations, etc. can create a “pool” of qualified candidates for management openings. It also can help clarify for these individuals whether or not they really want to move into management.
Boy you hit on a good one here Doyle. The fastest way to wreck a sales team is to promote the top producer into management without recognizing and addressing the pitfalls you’ve outlined above.
Connecting is a problem for the new manager. I know because I lived through the experience. What a new manager needs to remember is that they became successful sellers when they approached their customers in a way that built emotional engagement. The same thing needs to happen for a new manager to be successful with their sales reps.
Sales people do not produce anything with their hands. They “create” sales with their brain power. The way to motivate sales reps is to emotionally engage them to be successful. If you do so everything else falls in place because the sellers are self motivate to succeed.
Brand new research and a review of previous research shows that the best performers all do the same things – but they may not all do it in the same manner. (This is 2007 research from Curt Coffman, the co-author of First, Break all the Rules.)
For a new sales manger not to engage the heart of the sellers is receipt for frustration. You still need to set expectations of what is required, provide training to learn how to do it and establish an efficient system or process to help the seller to their job. That is not going away. But don’t focus on the “how things get done” – focus on the results.
Remember that the role of the sales manager is critical when it comes to motivating a seller. Remember too that the bottom line for sellers is having a manager who truly understands them and works to maintain a relationship with them. This is the most important dimension of creating individual excellence.
There is an old saying that “Great players don’t always make great coaches.”
This is really what we are talking about here. It is important to recognize that sale leader and sales person are 2 entirely different roles and thus require unique competencies.
Sales Leaders must:
- Inspire a shared vision for the team
- Manage conflict between individuals and departments
- Pull, compile, analyze, and communicate data (the unspoken part of sales leadership)
- Constantly “educate” the rest of the business on what the customers actually want/need and bring people back to earth when it is time for goal setting.
Top Sale People must:
- Build rapport quickly
- Be trust worthy
- Think quickly and often be technical experts
- Work independently with a high degree of success
- Have a think skin and short memory
- Be eternally optimistic
Finally, a top sales person may have little interaction with his/her peers and almost none with his/her manager given that the sale person is alway at or above quota and the manager is burdened with getting the rest of the team up to par. So how are they supposed to learn how to lead when they spend so little time being led?
The answer is hire the right competencies and if you are promoting from within the sales team spend the time mentoring and coaching all your sales people so when the time to promote arrives you are prepared and don’t go for the “easy answer” by tagging your top producer unless he/she is prepared and have the right skills to be successful.
This is the usual mistake any organistaion makes when they promote internally a Overachiever. they do not train them for the change. These overachievers need to be trained in the Dale Carnegie principle – People Management and they will succeed alongwith the team.
Transitioning from a peak performing sales person to a credible field leader is not easy for a few reasons. First, many of the skills that helped you climb to the top are held at a subconscious level, so it is hard for you to coach others if your skills are not brought to a conscious level. Also your credibility as a leader must be earned. Think of your sales people as customers of your leadership! That’s something you’re good at. You must first find out what your “customer” needs, then find a way to satisfy that need. Focus on assessing your team members skill and WILL. First make sure they have the skill then the will should follow. Will always follows skill.
Jim, while you’ve covered some really important aspects, I think you will find these 4 steps of learning come from the teachings of NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) and universally apply to any new learning. The following is easier absorbed when we think how we learn to drive a car.
Stage 1: we call Unconscious Incompetence because this is where we don’t know what we don’t know. We may not even be aware that an opportunity for learning exists.
Stage 2: is where we move into Conscious Incompetence where we do know what we don’t know. We’ve already recognised there is a worthwhile learning opportunity available to us and therefore an area of knowledge or skill in which we are deficient. We can now begin to think about how we are going to constructively address that deficiency and move toward competence.
Stage 3: we call CONSCIOUS Competence because this is where we know what we know. We focus on actually learning the knowledge or skills that we identified as being of value to us in Stage 1. Effective learning means actively concentrating and consciously thinking about exactly what we are doing at every stage as we store the learnings that will enable us to make use of our new knowledge reliably, at will and without assistance in the future.
In the later parts of Stage 3 we should be able to demonstrate the skill or knowledge to other people, but we may not be able to teach it well to others yet. Repeated practice is the key to moving on to the stage of Mastery.
Stage 4: is known as UNCONSCIOUS Competence which is where we don’t know what we know (i.e. we become less consciously aware of what we know) and through continued practice the use of what we know becomes second nature and moves from being a conscious to an unconscious functioning.
Here we may find we can effectively teach what we have learned to others. After an extended period we may also find that what we do in an unconsciously competent way has become so ‘instinctual’ that we actually find difficulty in explaining it to others!
Skills and knowledge evolve so we need to avoid complacency and periodically check our unconscious competence against new standards.
While overlapping, personal performance and management are very different skills sets; both will go through the same 4-stage process to mastery.
Ken you’ve lived this – your comments are full of life and clarity. I noted Nancy’s comment on checking the individual’s key motivators.
To me all this highlights cloudiness at the leadership level ABOVE the Sales Manager role. They must have clarity about their direction and what they want from this role. A Management role may be a terrific development opportunity for one high achiever but poison or dangerously disillusion another!
Leadership looks at WHY the role is important, WHY it is different from the Sales role and therefore define WHAT competencies, attributes and attitudes are required. Understanding the role thoroughly has to give clarity and appoint the right-fit person. Muddiness here can destroy a high achiever, team morale…and your business!
P.S. The mental conflicts presented are brilliantly clear. Great stuff Doyle.
While it is possible for a Sales Professional–individual contributor or manager–to lack “empathy,” it is highly unusual and undesirable. True Salespeople are generally highly empathetic ‘listeners,’ who strive to uncover and meet Clients’ needs using open, consultative dialog–not slick trickery.
It is true that sometimes the best Salespeople make the worst Sales Managers; and the worst Salespeople make the best Sales Managers…In these rare cases it can be easier for ‘bad Salespeople-good Managers’ to ‘distance’ themselves from the people
they are managing: enabling them to be more objective, while projecting less of their own expectations/experiences on those who report to them.
More often, we encounter good or great Salespeople who adapt well to Sales Management roles; here, again, empathy–not the lack of it–is key…In my time as an Individual Contributor, I have been fortunate to work with many excellent Managers who knew from experience exactly what it was like to be in my shoes–and the empathy that comes with that knowledge made them better mentors and coaches than they otherwise could have been.
As a Manager, the trick for me has always been balancing empathy for the Individual with the need to consistently produce quantifiable results for the Team and the organization. The temptation to over-extend oneself as a coach or mentor is
always there; so is the temptation to take too much of the Individual Contributor’s work–something which disempowers rather than supports them.
At the end of the day, my best results as both an Individual Contributor and a Manager have come from a healthy acknowledgment of personal responsibility carried out in the spirit of shared goals. Sales Team members all want the same thing for themselves and their organizations: success.
By treating peers and reports as responsible members of a community–the Company and the Sales Team–we encourage success and respect individuality; and we avoid sacrificing results for being liked. It is rare–and unprofessional–for Salespeople not to understand and welcome the mutually beneficial nature of working as individuals within a team.
For all of these reasons Sales Managers usually train/coach and mentor to Individual Contributors’ strengths; while looking for supportive and healthy ways to build upon areas that need improvement. This cannot be done without empathy, and it cannot be done by assuming responsibility for others; it can be–and is–done by recognizing our responsibility to our reports and ourselves. There is a very great difference between being ‘responsible for’ and ‘responsible to;’ just as there is a very great difference between ‘working with’ and ‘working at’ people–and keeping these truths in mind can be of incalculable value in managing oneself and one’s reports effectively.
Love this article…can’t count the number of times I have said, ” Why is this so hard for them…I did it this way..why can’t they?….
the reality is, they are not me…
My job as manager is to guide and faciliate the process of them being successful, and not stepping in to “save” or do it myself..even though it is tempting. I have to coach and let them learn, but be very clear in what I expect from them.
Development begins by creating an environment of trust and respect. It’s helpful if the leader knows how to develop people and has the insight to do so. I would begin by asking questions. Ask the person to help you understand how you can best help them. Rather than assuming you know how to do this, make it collaborative. High achieving people like to be engaged, and be invited to the table for solution.
Help your employee learn about patience and discuss the outcome and perception of how they communicate, good, bad or indifferent. Be truthful, encouraging to them. Don’t sugar coat things. Let them know you want to help them without telling them what to do at each juncture. Let them know mistakes are allowed. We do out best learning from making them.