Leadership in Action

The biggest leadership test isn’t when things go well, it’s what happens right after someone messes up. I talk through the leadership habits I’ve found make the difference between strong teams and workplaces where people go quiet, cover up errors, and let problems spread. If you manage a sales team or you’re moving into sales management, you’ll recognise how quickly fear can turn into lost revenue, damaged trust, and constant firefighting.

I also dig into staff retention and why the “revolving door” is so costly. When salespeople keep leaving, clients lose that steady relationship they value, onboarding never ends, and the manager gets dragged into recruiting, training, and territory coverage gaps. I share what that looks like in real life, especially in large regions where you can’t simply redistribute accounts without creating more problems around workload, reward, and focus.

From there, I get practical about leadership communication: the power of making people feel heard, how real listening diffuses tension, and why it’s rarer than most of us think. I also explain how I build alignment with a clear vision and regular team rhythm, then tell a coaching story where a simple shift, “act like you already have the role”, transformed someone’s professionalism and trajectory. If you want better performance, stronger culture, and a safer way to handle mistakes without lowering standards, this one will give you tools you can use immediately.

If it helps, subscribe, share it with a manager who needs it, and leave a review. What’s one leadership habit you wish your last boss had practised?

Welcome to the podcast!

Transcript

Why Mistakes Reveal Leadership

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Something that's quite dear to my heart actually is good leadership. And the reason is that in my opinion, I think this is one of the biggest differentiators between good companies and bad companies. And it's not simply about having a good working environment, having an environment where staff members, however you want to describe them, have a work environment where they feel that it supports them. And also there's room to make mistakes. I think that's a very big one because we'll make mistakes. Basically, the only people who don't make mistakes are those who don't do anything. So making mistakes is bad to happen. So what's more important is how do we deal with those? And in a bad environment, people will try and hide their mistakes, whereas in a good environment, they'll put the hand up, be upfront about it, and then you can deal with it. And that to me is certainly one really important differentiator between a good environment and a bad environment. And I think as a manager in that situation, if you have people putting their hand up and saying, I screwed up and this is what's gone wrong, you have opportunity to fix it. It might be just something to do with that person, it might be coaching, it might be changing company procedures, however, it's done. But there is opportunity to immediately remedy the situation and stop it happening in the future. If you have the kind of situation where people are fearful of owning up to a mistake and they try and cover it up, you just don't know how much rot is getting into that organization. I will guarantee it will be a lot. So that's one aspect of good leadership for me. The other one, uh, because there are really two of them that jump out, and I'm sure there are others, and you're very welcome to write back to me, comment, whatever you want to do. But the other one is staff retention. And for a lot of companies, it's a big issue. Uh, it's something that I've heard companies brag about sometimes, but um, the company I have in mind, they had a certain group of people in a support type environment. And without wanting to sound unfair about them, they'd probably have difficulty finding jobs elsewhere. They wouldn't really know how to even go about it. Whereas the people at the sort of pointy end of the business, the salespeople, they had a revolving door of stuff, and it was causing a lot of disruption to the business because obviously I'm doing this from the perspective of sales and sales management. And if you're losing salespeople, what tends to happen is first of all, for clients who are long-term clients, you want to have a good relationship with them, a nice steady relationship. And a lot of the people that you're going to be dealing with as clients tend to identify a particular person with a particular company, and they don't like it when that person changes. They kind of draw back a little bit, and if you get it happening too regularly, you're really going to undermine that relationship with that client. So that's the first problem with the revolving door. Secondly, with taking on any new hire, it takes somebody a little bit of time to get fully up to speed. It might be on the products or the solutions that you're offering, it might be on company procedures, how different things are done, whatever it is. But there is always that lead time where if you are the manager responsible for them, typically it will fall to you to make sure that they have the support they need, they have the education they need, and that they're settling in okay, and they're they're kind of fitting in, and hopefully, you're going to have a good long-term relationship. If you have staff continuously leaving, then you are constantly in that recruiting phase, in that new starter phase, and that takes up a lot of time. And I'll I'll can vouch for that from my own experience. And certainly, recruiting is just one of those activities I absolutely hated. Uh, it would just stop me from from doing my main job, which was to make business, uh, make money for the business, for my staff, for myself, and I was constantly having to go off and go through resumes. Even if somebody had pre-screened candidates for me, I would often find that the people who were doing the recruiting really didn't understand what I wanted unless I sat down with them first, had a good face-to-face, and then we could go somewhere productive. Um, if I even had a guy turn up for an interview, which I didn't even know about, and the recruiter decided to just send him along. So the point is there's a lot of distractions that stop you as the sales manager, as the leader in that part of the business, to get on and do your job, the constant distractions. And of course, what can also happen is you have gaps where the previous salesperson has left, you haven't got the new person in place. So, how do you cover that gap? Do you cover, do you get other salespeople to fill in? And then you've got to deal with how they're rewarded because they're having to take time away from their people. Something I would often do because I was dealing with this was in Australia, so it's quite hard actually for uh other salespeople to cover because geographically you're well split up. We tended to have staff, sales staff focused on certain states, and that's quite a large physical area. So, more often than not, it would lead to me following up inquiries and um doing sales calls to plug that gap, which courts took me even further away from the job I wanted to be doing. So I think understanding leadership, particularly as a sales manager. And look, I don't know if you're listening to this, if you are a sales manager, if you've been a sales manager for a long time, if you're very new to the role. And the purpose of this is simply to share some insights I've got from my experience of doing it, and hopefully they will resonate with you, maybe they won't. But there you go. The information is there. So, one of the first things that I learned as a manager is that the most important thing you can do is to let your staff feel heard because there are always issues. From time to time, issues are going to come up. It might be about a commission, it might be if it's a split commission, if something's happened, if it if a sailor's gone to one area, but a guy in another area did all the work, or a lady in the other area did all the work. All these kind of things that can be part of it. It might be, I mean, that there are just so many things that that can come up. So, as a manager, what's the most important thing to do when these things do come up? And to me, it's for that person to feel heard. So, what I would do, I'm I'm a big believer in sitting down with people face to face, and that's staff, it's clients, everybody. That's how I like to communicate with people. And I would always sit down and I would let them talk. I would listen, I mean, really listen to what they were saying and ask questions so that I was clear about exactly what the issue was from their perspective, what kind of outcome they wanted to see to resolve it. And obviously, in doing that, I'm looking at well, can I can I resolve any of this? And if I can resolve it, what can I resolve? Hopefully, all of it. Um, but sometimes you can't. But that to me was the key thing to really listen. And one of the reasons that's important is that most people don't know how to listen. And I've been trained in coaching as well, and one of the I suppose eye-openness for me when I was doing my training was the trainer I had pointing out that for most people, if you actually sit and really listen to them, most people have never actually experienced that. And thinking about your own experience with just sharing with other people, how many times have you started to share something with someone and they they've interrupted and made it about them? They'll jump in with their experience in that sort of a situation, and then they're off on a story of their own. Uh that to me is something I experience pretty regularly, and it's really unusual for someone to sit and listen to what I have to say. And I I often find that if I really want to share whatever it is I want to share, or whatever it is I want to tell the story of, I've almost got to fight to do that. So, with staff, this is why it's so important, I believe, that as a manager and really as a leader, uh, you listen to what people have to say. And even if you can't resolve the problem, and it may be you can't do anything, the fact that you've sat and spent the time and demonstrably listened to what that person has said can often diffuse the situation. And you can look at ways to begin to remedy it. It may not be a complete remedy, straight up, uh, but there are maybe steps that you can take that at least reduce the pain of that situation. So really listening to staff is, I think, very important. Another thing that I found helpful is to make sure everybody's on the same page, make sure that everyone has a clear vision about where the group is going. Now, the that group might be a particular part of business, you might have a sales manager, sales team, and maybe other people attached, so maybe um some admin staff involved supporting the group, whatever the situation is. But I always like to get people together ideally once a month. And if it was physically difficult, because I uh in in Australia, for example, I would have uh somebody working for me in New Zealand, and it wasn't always practical to fly them over to Sydney or Melbourne, wherever we were doing it. Um, usually the in-country staff uh they would come over from wherever they were located, and we would maybe combine that meeting with some training, uh, maybe joint customer visits, because sometimes it's useful for salespeople to spend time with other salespeople who they work with, and then kind of debrief afterwards because it's a way of sharing experience, learning, all those kind of things, but it does depend on personalities and people not feeling threatened by that. But having that clear vision about where the business is going, what the short-term goals are, medium-term, long-term, and giving people a view of that so that they feel not just that they're working to have more money themselves, obviously that's important, they want to have that. But a lot of people it goes beyond that. It's not just about the money, it's about career development opportunities. It's um you know, they might be able, they might want to go into management themselves, they might want to specialise in a certain area of sales, it might be project management, um, all these things. So if they feel that there is a path going forward, and obviously these things are always have that caveat that it depends on the results and business happening and nothing unforeseen coming out of the sort of left field that upsets everything. Uh, but people like to feel a part of the organization. Belonging is a really important uh aspect of any human interaction. So building that within a team as a manager, I think, is very important. People need to feel a part of the team, they need to feel they have a voice within the team, and also at the end of the day, there needs to be a clear leader. By all means, it's great for people to have their opinion, um, and it's important as a leader to validate those opinions, and also it's important that you hold the vision and you drive the business forward, and um there is there is one captain in the ship. So that's another thing that I've I've found very important. The the other one that I want to share, uh and I guess it's probably most easily related by telling the story. So I had a guy working for me at one company, and in fact, I before I even joined, I I'd gone over to Melbourne to look at places. Just I was just gonna get myself an apartment for a year because I was living in Sydney and I didn't really want to move to Melbourne. Um but for taking on that particular role, it was important that I was Melbourne-based for at least a while. And um one of the owners of the company was with me. We met for lunch and he told me there was a particular guy I needed to look at, and with a view to possibly terminating the employment because he had been consistently under his numbers, so he was uh achieving less than 50% of his year to day, uh of his monthly actually each month, and clearly that was a that's a situation that couldn't continue. So um I met with this guy uh when I joined and started going out with him. The first thing I did was start coaching him, and that's probably um the subject of another podcast. But to cut that particular story short, I got him to the point where I actually increased his target because for me there is a minimum target level to make a salesperson worth well, basically valid in an area. Uh, and um basically as a as a rough rule of thumb, I would used to use three times their salary as the target because there are overheads associated with salespeople, they need to be profitable at the end of it, and of course, there are um non-direct salespeople who and other parts of the organization that need to be funded. So uh one of the rules I would always follow is just looking at targets and making sure they were sensible. And I've certainly found instances where targets weren't particularly sensible, and uh, in fact, they were far too low to have a viable business or even to justify having a salesperson in that area. So that's kind of the background to the story with this guy. And um, anyway, we'd um I'd gone back to Sydney and I had a call from the management director who I reported to, and he basically told me that this guy was becoming a little bit disruptive in the office. Um, he, when he was in the office, he obviously he often wasn't bothered to shave. He basically looked scruffy, and that there were certain standards that within that business that they wanted to maintain, and he was falling short of them. And um, unfortunately, the management director's answer to most things was to put people on report, which is something I've never gone along with. I've always felt there was there were better ways to handle things. So I basically said to this guy, no, we're not putting him on report, but let me deal with it. And all I did was I gave this guy a ring and I said, Look, um I know that you've got an area here, and I know you want to develop your career, and I know you want to move into management. And we'd created progressive steps for salespeople from a regional uh sales engineer, with the term we'd use, to um a regional manager and then a sales manager and all that sort of thing. And I basically just said to him, Look, uh, I know you want to be a regional manager, so the best advice I can give you is to start acting as if you already have that title now, as if you've already been promoted. So, how does a regional manager act? How do they interact with other people in the office? How do they dress? How do they show up? Uh, how do they deal with, how do they talk to their clients? I want you to imagine that and I want you to begin step into that role from now, because when you do get promoted, the situation will be that people would just think you were already in that role and perhaps even be surprised that you hadn't been promoted until until then. So that was essentially the advice I gave him, and it it did work very well, actually. I had a phone call from the managing director uh a couple of weeks later, basically asking what I'd said to him because the guy had totally turned around his whole at his whole attitude, and um he was showing up professionally, everything he was doing was professional, and it was just a complete change from where he'd been. So, the reason for sharing this is that I think to get the best from people uh you need to understand where they want to go, what their aims are. As a good leader, it's not just about delivering the result every month, every quarter, every year for the business, but also understanding at an individual level how your team, what the individual team members aspire to, how can you build that into their professional development? Uh, what can now there may be limits, there always are, but there are always places you can take it. And I always had the view that I wanted to get a minimum of four years from a salesperson that I employed, because that first year you're likely to be a little bit under target or kind of at the low end of the target, unless you got really lucky. Because for somebody coming in new, and particularly if it's university graduates, people like that, there's a lot for them to learn, and they need time to learn it. If you pile too much pressure on, uh, it's too much. You've got to, by all means, there needs to be a little bit of pressure, but it's very easy to overdo it. So it's all about measuring and knowing the person. And one of the things I uh like to do with all of my salespeople was uh try and go out with them for at least one day every month. Uh, if if I had to travel, then it would be a little bit longer, it'd be a couple of days, two or three days. Uh, in New Zealand, I would go over there for one week in every three months. But the purpose of those visits was really to support and coach them as they needed to chat to them, have a beer, find out what's going on, find out where the problem areas are. And um, as I've said, coaching is probably another thing to another subject because uh this podcast I'm gonna wind up in a moment. Um, but it is so important to get to know your staff, they need to respect you, they need to be a clear leader, but equally they need to feel safe enough with you that if something screws up, they can come to you. And one of the things I I would say to um, in fact, the next senior guy to me going within the structure I had was actually quite a young guy. So he had other people within our team who were older. But I made it clear that if I wasn't available and somebody needed an authorization from somewhere, then to go to this guy. And what I said to him was, Look, if it happens, give it your best shot, best decision. But always remember, first of all, we're gonna make you're gonna make a mistake, all of us do from time to time. So don't worry about that. If you make a mistake, I'm gonna we will sit down together and we will take the mistake apart. I'm not gonna take you apart. And I've seen some really bad sales managers, and all and it's almost as if they can't wait to jump on the smallest mistake that their salespeople make. And to me, these are very weak people. They try to feel superior by bringing other people down. And what I've always found is that the strongest and the best people to be with are the people who allow those around them to make mistakes, and then you just sort it out. So I hope you have found that useful and um maybe given you some ideas or some thoughts. And um, as always, with the podcast, you are most welcome to uh drop me uh an email, Graham at salescraft.training, with any subjects you would like me to have a chat about and share my experience. So I may not be able to share much on on some of them, but I'm always happy to uh give it my best. So that's it for now. I'll speak to you next time.