Frequently, execution weaknesses trace to the supporting elements in the sales ecosystem, not to the talent base. h, strategic analysis of the elements in a typical sales ecosystem. A focused effort on continuous improvement – with honest inputs from the sales people – will yield the kind of productive supporting environment sales professionals require to succeed.
Management
The Importance of Employee Conversations
The work of a manager revolves around conversations. Only through conversations with your team, your peers and work partners, and your own manager, can you influence productivity and engagement.
Define Your Decision-Making Style
Learning to position ideas from the perspective and decision-making style of the person you’re communicating with can make influencing easier and more effective.
Why It’s Critical to Have Sound Financial Acumen
While you might not ever be fluent in finance-speak, you can develop the acumen to carry on the conversation in the language of business. Finance folks alone shouldn’t dominate the conversation – better decisions and greater alignment occurs when all departments are balanced throughout an organization.
Engage. Coach. Develop.
Regularly fulfilling these three manager accountabilities – engage, coach, and develop – shows to the employee that the manager is invested in helping the employee prosper.
Don’t Change for the Sake of Change
Identification of the root cause issue is a critical step to ensuring successful organizational change and performance improvement.
You Won’t Survive as a Commodity. Differentiate on Value!
Differentiation is what you provide your customers, either a product or a service, that they cannot get elsewhere or do for themselves.
Agile Estimation – Feature and Story Sizing Scales
It is important for scrum masters, product owners, and teams not to outsmart themselves when developing their relative sizing scales. Effective Agile teams must develop a simple, repeatable scale for feature-level sizing and story point estimating.
Developing ‘Soft’ Skills as a Leadership Strength
Soft skills are critical to effective leadership and success as project managers.
Becoming the Hero’s Coach
Unfortunately, the well-honed skills that define a great individual contributor don’t always translate to the skills needed to lead people. Even when good people skills are developed success can be elusive unless newly minted managers shift their mindset from being the “hero” as an individual contributor to the “hero’s coach” in managing others.