Page 245 - Just Promoted A 12 Month Road Map for Success in Your New Leadership Role

230 Just Promoted!

Regular reflection and high levels of self-awareness should be standard fare
for leaders moving up. Self-analysis is part of being a good diagnostician, prob-
lem preventer, and problem solver. Questions such as the following can help
you reflect on your organization’s progress and your own personal progress:

■ How am I (are we) doing?
■ Where do I (we) wish to be in the future?
■ How should I (we) get there?
■ Are there pitfalls of which I (we) should be careful?

At the six-month mark, Suzanne reflected on her accomplishments and dis-
appointments as the leader of a small sales team. She had made three new hires.
She had structured and led them through a comprehensive training process.
They were reasonably confident they could work with new clients, were actively
involved in developing proposals and contracts, and had mounted and suc-
cessfully carried off an exhibit at the industry’s major trade show.
However, Suzanne’s list of disappointments was much longer than her list
of accomplishments:

1. The sales reporting system was virtually nonexistent. Even though she
had designed a system and she required weekly itineraries and weekly
reports on contracts and proposals, her people were not accounting for
their time and accomplishments. In addition, the operations department
had insufficient information to plan for the upcoming workload.
2. In spite of weekly sales meetings, Suzanne did not have good data on her
people’s activities. One seemed good at managing old clients but seemed
to have no new leads. One seemed to spend too much time writing sales
materials. All seemed to avoid phone work. She felt uneasy that the reas-
surances she was given at sales meetings did not seem to be operational
in daily performance activities.
3. In spite of the added sales resources and the fact that she had divided her
marketing leads among her sales force, the actual number of sales pro-
posals had not increased from when she was doing the job by herself. To
some extent, this was because her salespeople were managing old con-
tracts up for renewal and managing the professional conferences, activi-
ties formerly completed by operations staff. This in itself was an
indication that her sales force was not sufficiently oriented to new sales.