Trying to outdo your sales force will discourage them…and you! Instead, respond to their needs, help them to achieve success, and watch while you and your entire team reap big rewards.

Any manager who fears the success of his or her employees is doomed to failure. It may sound crazy, but there are managers who, consciously or unconsciously, have concerns that their salespeople will outshine them. As a result, through bad management practices, they prevent or indirectly discourage people from performing at their peaks. Such mismanagement pulls the entire sales performance chart into a downward spiral.

One of the primary roles of a One-Minute Manager who practices situational leadership is to train subordinates to become winners. A manager must continually strive to help his or her people develop the skills to be independent and self-directed.

At one time, productivity was considered the single criterion of managerial success. Today, however, bottom line results in the present are not the sole measure of a manager’s efforts. Future growth and perpetuation of the organization have to be of prime importance for the manager who wants to help his or her people succeed.

A successful leader wants his people to look good and perform well. People who are able to become top achievers do so because they work in an environment which encourages self-initiative and development. These folks grow because of a flexible, responsive management style.

In such an organization, leadership is not based on the personality of the boss. Rather, it is built on the belief that the manager must respond to the changing abilities and motivational levels of each individual within a management group.

The end goal is to help people achieve success as defined by mutually established goals. People should be managed so that they will begin to accept responsibility for themselves and their jobs. The manager, therefore, must help salespeople develop the skills needed to consistently perform well, and in addition, must provide support to build people’s confidence and self-esteem. The end result will be a sales team that can work independently, efficiently and profitably.

Face it, it takes a great deal of time for a manager to work with each untrained and uncommitted salesperson. A manager should work to move his people beyond the custodial stage of support and training. Only then can the manager direct his or her energies to other pressing management functions.

In a sense, one of the goals of Situational Leadership is not to get bogged down in leadership. A manager should set his people up so he can get away from many of the day-to-day support issues which the salespeople can and should be handling by themselves.

This does not give managers license to fade away only to return for the quarterly review. A good manager will continue to keep his finger on the pulse of his organization or department. He will continue to find opportunities to praise people and to regularly circulate among the troops to get a feel for what is happening.

If a manager is able to help his people reach a certain level of development, he can back off from the minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour hand holding. However, he is always available to provide plenty of support when necessary. He is always there to give lots of one-minute praisings as well as reprimands. Yet, he’s not an on-the-job babysitter.

The manager who practices situational leadership is really working to develop his people into stars. He is not in competition with them. He is not afraid they will outshine him. When the folks he supervises are performing at their peaks, he knows he has succeeded as a manager. Conversely, if he allows people to perform at a lackluster level, on the mistaken premise that they will make the boss look good, everyone, including the manager, loses.

Dr. Ken Blanchard, the “One-Minute Manager” himself, holds the position of professor of leadership and organizational behavior at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and is the chairman of the board of Blanchard Training & Development Inc., in Escondido, California.