The Coaching Effect Blog

“We know it’s not the smartest thing to do, but we promote our high performing salespeople into management roles.”

In the words of the infamous Bob Newhart, STOP IT! Everybody knows that this “worst practice” needs to stop, but almost everyone continues to abide by it. Why? Call it laziness or call it lack of discipline, but no matter how you slice it, promoting a great salesperson, or team member, into a management role that does not have both the skill and will to be a high-performing coach has huge implications.

I always say if you need something done, ask the busiest person you know. Or, if you want to learn the habits of a successful person, spend time with one to better understand what makes him or her tick.

Harry Hicks is exactly the person the EcSell Institute wants to learn from on how to create daily habits to help drive high-performance coaching.

He saw through my juvenile behavior which, according to him, was not masking my ability. And while in his class I was expected to behave like a gentleman, which seemed more achievable to me than getting an “A” on a test. My 8^th grade core classes teacher, Mr. Yahnke, saw talent in me that was not only missed by other teachers, but something I certainly didn’t see myself. And as a result, he was about to obtain vast amounts of discretionary effort from me.

Roughly 65% of people are visual learners. Visual learners understand, absorb, and recall best by seeing information. I’m one of these people. I take hand-written notes to help me remember what I’ve heard in conversations. When faced with most tasks, I jot down to-do items or draw out a quick diagram of what I expect for an end result. If I can see how something works, I almost always have a better understanding of its process.

We are proud to announce and welcome our newest Independent Sales Partner, Chris Champagne. Chris will be responsible for representing all of EcSell Institute’s programming and services, including the Coaching Effect Survey, ONE-UP Coaching Cloud, the Coaching Effect Performance System, Academies, and the annual Coaching Effect Summit.

Every other Monday the EcSell Institute team gathers at the conference room table, or conference line, for a team meeting. An agenda is always sent out in advance in order to keep things moving at a productive pace and so team members can plan accordingly to the items of business that will be covered. 

Top-notch team leaders and coaches know that team development meetings are important to building cohesive, high-performing teams. They can be a great way to step away from daily grind activities and focus on often neglected, yet extremely critical work-impacting, topics such as:

• Developing strategies and work plans
• Creating shared goals
• Communicating and building relationships
• Discovering and shaping (and even repairing) team dynamics 

You’ve all read about it, heard about it and likely tried to implement it.  You intellectually understand the concept and perhaps have seen the benefits.  But very few leaders are emotionally ready to follow through on one of the most basic and challenging growth perpetuating behaviors - coaching through change. How do I know this?  By looking at the data of leaders at all levels who, despite understanding how activity and behavior change will lead to improved team sales results, either consciously or subconsciously continue doing the same things and obtaining the same results.

Last month we began our series on how leadership is portrayed in popular films and TV shows to see if those tropes work in the real world. For example, do managers who do things like give a motivational speech or a tough assignment really help their teams perform better? Our first blog looked at managers who were rated as good motivators by their teams and found that they led teams that sold nearly half a million more a year than other teams. So yes, the popular movie trope of the motivational manager seems to actually work in the real world.

“Because the world faces many challenges, and they can only be solved by teams. Those teams need coaches.” – "Trillion Dollar Coach"

Our mission at the EcSell Institute is to create a world where everyone knows what great coaching feels like. The individuals that were fortunate enough to know and interact with Bill Campbell experienced a world like this. The Trillion Dollar Coach is a fantastic new book that focuses on the life and coaching secrets of Bill Campbell.

From his early days coaching football at Columbia, to his time spent at Google, through his later days mentoring and coaching some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley, for free I might add, Bill positively impacted the lives of thousands of individuals and helped them become better people and professionals than they could have without him in their lives.