Servant Leadership has become a wildly popular approach for sales managers. They describe it as “rolling up my sleeves” or “working in the trenches” or “being the closer.” In practice, they’re doing the work of frontline sellers, filling in when there are vacancies and handling delicate customer matters or tough sales negotiations.
The problem with this approach is twofold. First, it doesn’t work because it’s not sustainable. It creates massive voids because the work of managing isn’t being done. Second, it’s not a true representation of servant leadership. The original researcher and author of The Servant as Leader was Robert Greenleaf. He measured leadership effectiveness by the impact a leader had on others’ development, knowledge, autonomy, and performance.
When doing sales work for sellers, managers suppress opportunities for growth and development. They diminish growth by limiting the very challenges that stimulate growth.
Similarly, when managers are too quick to answer questions and solve problems, they deprive sellers of experiences that would build autonomy, expand capacity, and improve individual performance. Without intending to, these managers cap potential.
The remedy is asking quality questions. This passage from Harvard Business Review encapsulates the specifics about why questions are particularly important for those in management positions:
“Much of an executive’s workday is spent asking others for information – requesting status updates from a team leader, for example, or questioning a counterpart in a tense negotiation. Yet unlike professionals such as litigators, journalists, and doctors, who are taught how to ask questions as an essential part of their training, few executives think of questioning as a skill that can be honed.”
“That’s a missed opportunity. Questioning is a uniquely powerful tool for unlocking value in organizations: it spurs learning and the exchange of ideas, it fuels innovation and performance improvement, it builds rapport and trust among team members. And it can mitigate business risk by uncovering unforeseen pitfalls and hazards.”
Instead of doing the work for sellers… Instead of problem solving and giving directives too quickly… highly effective sales managers ask more questions like these:
- What do you think is the best course of action?
- What would you like to achieve?
- What’s most important to you?
- What concerns do you have? How can we address those and still proceed?
- How do you feel about this?
- What’s holding you back?
- What’s the ideal outcome in this situation?
These questions stimulate self-discovery, build micro-commitments to action items, and promote autonomy. Value is unlocked by these questions as seller potential is unleashed instead of being inhibited.
Like the needs discovery process in selling, asking quality questions of sellers reveals their needs and priorities while also engaging them in meaningful ways. This boosts retention, heightens productivity, and expands individual and team capacity for stronger business results. Effective sales leadership focuses on building these strengths rather than winning one-off sales.
This is an excerpt from DISCOVER Questions® for Connections, Clarity & Control, available now on Amazon.
