Are you stuck in a cycle of average performance? Or could you be performing at a higher level?

This summer, I designed and delivered the inaugural Peak Performance Mindset VIP Retreat for B2B sales leaders. Why? During my decades-long career as publisher of Selling Power magazine, I’ve come to understand that most sales professionals are largely limited not by external factors, but by their own minds.

Negative thoughts, implanted beliefs, an addiction to distraction – these are the kinds of restraints that keep many sales leaders and salespeople in a cycle of average performance.

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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.

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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.”

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The email waiting in my inbox on a lazy Sunday morning from one of my close friends from a partner company made my entire weekend.  “Thank you for having the courage to fight for what you believe in and not taking the easy way out by playing ‘not to lose’.  I’m inspired by your desire to play to win and confidence that you can figure out the best solution.”

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One of the easiest and most passé things a leader can say to their team is “I wish you all could act like a start-up company.”  The implication of that statement is that the team should be agile, innovative, entrepreneurial, nimble, resilient, disruptive, and every other cool buzz word that you can think of.  Besides being somewhat insulting, teams in large organizations typically push back on this approach by saying that they “don’t have the right resources”, “they will get blamed for making mistakes”, “they aren’t compensated well enough”, “the systems are old”, and “customers don’t really like change anyway.”

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