Leadership is a fundamental part of successful outsourced sales models. You need to have a team of leaders that you can trust, primarily if you operate in multiple locations.
When you have poor leadership, sales quotas often take a turn for the worse. That's why it's important to identify the components that make a good leader. You should try to work on your weaknesses or the weaknesses within your company to ensure your team has all the resources they need for success.
Can you Become a Better Leader?
Some people have it in their minds that leaders are born, not made. Maybe you think that good leaders are these outgoing personalities that can dominate a sales pitch. That's not always the case. Often, experience and learning effective communication make are the two key factors of a good leader. These are things that have to be learned.
There might be some traits that make good leaders that are personality-based, it never hurts to be approachable. But ultimately, having the drive to push forward and overcome obstacles is essential to the process. How you do that is pretty much up to you. While an outgoing leader might take the challenge head-on, which saves time, an introverted leader might think about the problem a bit longer and come up with a better solution. Both personalities types and methodologies have their own merits/drawbacks. It doesn't mean one is notably better than the other.
Effective Communication in Leaders
You've probably had a leader where your words went in one ear and out the other. This is the tell-tale sign of a bad leader. However, they might not even realize they're doing it. Managers need to listen to issues and learn to identify underlying problems so they can fix the cause instead of reacting to the symptoms each time they pop up.
There's also a degree of emotional intelligence that goes into being a good leader. You can imagine that building relationships with a team will involve a hefty amount of empathy and understanding. Put simply, being able to recognize your own emotions and those of others will allow you to connect to your team in a much deeper way. This is critical if you want to be or hire a good leader. No one wants to work for a manager that doesn't think twice about you going through a terrible time in their life. It happens to everyone, and there should be some level of understanding.
If you walk away from this article with nothing else, at least consider how camaraderie and happiness impact any work environment. Employees who feel respected also feel empowered, and that flows into their work.
Experience in Leadership
I do not mean experience in the industry. What I mean is simply experience as a leader. Of course, it's not always the case that managers learn from bad experiences with employees, but often they do improve over time.
When you're a leader for years, even decades, you realize there is no definitive template for handling employees. People are people, and they are all different. It's more the ability to recognize a vital issue like work ethic and determine if this problem can be fixed based on the unique individual. There are a million different factors that go into being a leader. Everyone wants to be treated with respect and know that their opinions matter. They also need support and assistance when their performance is slowing down.
Understand that an employee is a person first and an employee second. This is the first and best step to becoming a more well-rounded leader in any industry.