Management Makes the Difference

Course Overview:

The ability of your managers to lead your organization through the challenges of change and enable their team to add more value, increase productivity, serve customers better, and enhance your competitiveness is critical to your success. This program focuses on the critical skills and practices managers need to lead, build quality environments, and stimulate and sustain high performance throughout their work units.

Target Audience

• First-line Sales Managers and Account Team Leaders

Course Length

• 3 Days

Course Outcomes

In addition to assessing both the strengths and improvement opportunities of their current skill set, participants will:

• Apply a strategy and style suited to the motivational needs of differing individuals
• Assess the use of different management styles and strategies with problem employees
• Recognize the impact of a variety of factors -- their own expectations, the climate of their work unit, their feedback, the information they share, and the assignments they make -- on the performance of their sales teams
• Develop and communicate positive expectations in ways that more powerfully influence sales team performance
• Identify the motivational needs of team members as well as specific tactics and strategies to meet these differing needs
• Increase their effectiveness in providing constructive feedback both informally and in formal performance reviews
• Identify and apply techniques for empowering their sales professionals to take personal responsibility for their performance improvement
• Develop and implement individual and unit-wide performance improvement plans

Course Activities

This course includes pre-work and in class activities to help participants identify their own strengths and improvement opportunities:

• The Performance Management Questionnaire (PMQ) and Personal Values Questionnaire (PVQ) are individual feedback instruments that tie learned skills to measures of the success of managers' own current practices in developing the performance of their direct reports
• A video case series with a Situation-Response Method for applying personal experience to case situations and discovering other strategies and tactics that may produce better results
• A "Pygmalion Effect" video and exercises for creating a high-performance climate by providing positive, motivational feedback, timely and effective guidance, and challenging assignments that encourage employees' self-reliance and proactive effort
• The "Barriers to Change" team exercise for developing the skills needed to implement performance improvement plans successfully, both for individual direct reports and for the entire work unit
• "The Sales Call" video and exercises for practicing effective coaching and counseling skills
• The "Barriers to Change" team exercise for developing the skills needed to implement performance improvement plans successfully, both for individual direct reports and for the entire work unit