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Be a Leader, Not a Boss (Adapted from Fearless)
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re you a leader, or are you a boss?
There’s supreme value in knowing the difference between the two terms. Unfortunately, most people in sales leadership positions don’t have that understanding. If you have people reporting to you and don’t know what the difference is, you owe it to yourself and your team to figure it out. By reading the rest of this article, you’ll begin to realize what being a leader really means... and why you definitely don’t want to be a boss. After that, enjoy the results of having a happier, healthier, and higher-performing team, along with less stress and aggravation in your own role.
Promotions Do Not Make Leaders
The world is overflowing with bosses. In sales, this is usually a person who has been promoted based on past performance and experience. Unfortunately, promotions do not — on their own — create leaders. Just because you can sell the stuffing out of your product or service doesn’t mean you have the skills to coach, motivate, and support people. Those are qualities of leadership, and they take more than the ability to perform; they require training and plenty of it. Great leadership is about mentoring and training, but what if you’ve never been trained in the first place? For all of the training we’re supposed to do as leaders, we’re often the least trained people in our organization. Whether you’re in the car business or any other industry, the practice of promoting people into leadership based on past performance, without ever teaching them how to lead, hurts us all.
Training the Trainer
The first time I went to a train-the-trainer course, I wanted to go back and apologize to all of my people for getting it wrong for so long. Later, when I took a break from being a trainer and hit the floor again, that feeling was even worse. All I’d ever done was tell people what they needed to do. I rarely showed them how to do it. I didn’t get to know who they were, help them set goals, work to bring the team together, or coach them toward success. I had been a boss, not a leader. Can you tell the difference yet? 32
Featured Speaker Tim Kintz
President The Kintz Group
I’ve only had two or three managers in my career of over twenty years who have ever truly exhibited leadership skills. I’m talking about the kind of person who knows where they’re headed and brings everyone around them along for the ride. The person who isn’t worried about getting their hands dirty and trying something out. The person who is fearless. If you’ve been lucky enough to work with someone like that, you know exactly what I’m talking about. You also know the opposite: The other 90 percent who create fear instead of easing it. They’re problem-focused instead of solution-oriented. They’re hotheaded and shortsighted. This is a ‘Seagull Manager’ — the one who flies in, makes a lot of noise, dumps on you, and flies out. Nobody wants that. Instead, be the opposite of a ‘Seagull Manager’, like head coach of the San Antonio Spurs, Gregg Popovich. In 2013, when the San Antonio Spurs had just defeated the Miami Heat for yet another of their many championship wins, Popovich sat at the end of a bench while his players celebrated at center court. All through the year, after games that they lost, he had always been the first in front of the camera taking blame for not preparing them well enough. That night, when asked what he did to make the team succeed, he wouldn’t take any credit at all. “Anyone could win with these guys; all I had to do was roll the ball out there and they made it happen.” That’s what real leadership looks like.
Five Rules Great Leaders Follow
Now that you know what great leadership looks like, how can you practice it yourself? The good news is, I believe there are some simple rules we can follow to get there. Five of them, to be specific:
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You know exactly what your expectations are. If you don’t know what you expect out of your people, there’s not a chance you’ll be able to lead them anywhere.
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Your team knows exactly what your expectations are. Trying to hold someone accountable to phantom goals doesn’t work. Ever.
T e x a s
D e a l e r
May 2021
