“Don’t Hate Me Because I Make It Look Easy”

'Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play
And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate

As part of our work related to the design, development, and delivery of a global sales leadership training program, we started interviewing some of the top performing sales professionals within the client organization.  Of the 7 interviews, 5 of the people interviewed were unhappy with their jobs and company.

The reason for their misery was they all felt colleagues in their own company ranging from other sales people to sales support and product engineering “hated” them for being successful and making it “look easy.”

Last week, right before the Labor Day Weekend break, I wrote a blog post with a focus on helping our readers focus on 5 business acumen skills to survive a recession. I received a lot of positive feedback and even spent several hours working with an executive from one of our client organizations to develop a workshop he wanted to lead taking the learnings from the blog and apply them to their global chemical manufacturing business.

It’s not a matter if, it’s simply a matter of when.  Despite the record-breaking and robust economy,   there will be another recession. It may come before the election of 2020, or it may come after. But it will surely happen. For those who haven’t been through a recession, it’s usually not a fun thing. It requires strong business acumen and enhanced decision-making skills to survive.

Everyone in business has of course heard of the performance conversation where you schedule  regular one-on-ones with direct reports and teammates to give coaching and feedback.  Learning about it, training on it, and practicing it probably accounts for 15-20% of all money spent on leadership development.  There are several great coaching models out there such as Coaching Essentials from The Marcus Buckingham Company (a division of ADP) and the GROW coaching model.

The cohort participating in the Business Acumen for Emerging Leaders learning journey was  paralyzed. They didn’t know where to begin, what to do, or what was going to happen to them. As they read through their materials and analyzed the P&L statements and Market Reports, I heard a voice say, “I never realized how hard it was running a company.”