Develop a sales leadership voice

- Being a great head of sales starts with developing a clear and consistent leadership voice. The reason why this is so important is that all of the decisions you make, the rules of engagement you setup for your team, all of the ways in which you'll react to situations that occur, all the decisions small and large that you'll make, they'll be analyzed by the people around you, all of your stakeholders, your team, your bosses, your customers, and the consistency that you develop is incredibly important because that becomes the moral high ground, the bedrock from which you'll make all of your tactical decisions. So that's the starting place. Now, before you actually develop your leadership voice, however, you gotta have a definition for leadership. There's a lotta great definitions for leadership, but the one that I have subscribed to I learned from Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn. Jeff explains that leadership is the ability to inspire others to achieve a shared objective. There's really two operative clauses in that phrase, inspiring others and achieving a shared objective. Now inspiration is tricky. We're gonna get there in a second, but first let's talk about what a shared objective is and how that differs from an objective that I may give you. Now many sales leaders and leaders in general might think that if I tell you what the objective is, it's now ours. I actually don't believe that human beings work that way. I think if I tell you what an objective is, you may think about it, you may even agree that your job is to help me realize it, but it's still you helping me realize my objective. What I think a great leader does, and what I'd really recommend a head of sales does every time is put in the work to develop a shared context on why we're doing what we're doing, why is the objective what it is, so that together we can understand the why behind the what. When you've accepted the why, it becomes your objective and my objective. That's our objective. We have a common understanding and a common commitment. That's a shared objective. So now let's talk about inspiration. This is tricky, and inspiration I believe is one of the most powerful forces in the universe for human productivity, but it's also one of the least understood. If you look up the definition of inspiration, you're gonna find some interesting things, one of which that I find most interesting is that usually the third of fourth definition is to breathe in the divine, inspire. So what you're actually doing is you're breathing in something from outside of you to make you feel different, often to make you feel more connected to something bigger than yourself, and if you're looking for material, what I'd recommend is thinking about what your company's purpose is, what its mission and vision is, and if you can take a component of that mission and you can make it your own, then you can share this spark of inspiration with others. So your leadership voice once clearly defined can deployed against inspiring others and achieving a shared objective, and then you're off and running.