In my opinion, one of the biggest pitfalls of sharing insights, best practices and advice while in the role of a subject matter expert (either real or imagined) is to give the impression that you’ve achieved perfection. Even worse is to claim that you’ve always been flawless and without misstep, which we all know is pretty much impossible.
So, in the interest of laying that potential perception immediately to rest, in this post I will talk about a couple of the most egregious errors I’ve made during my time leading teams and what I’ve learned from them.
Of course, if you don’t want to read this article, you can just talk to my wife, my kids or any of my friends for a more comprehensive list of my feeble foibles and epic failings.
Let me preface the following information by confessing to you that what makes these blunders so tragic is that I didn’t listen to my natural instincts and instead allowed myself to be bullied into dealing with serious personnel issues (aka, people’s lives) the way my superiors wanted me to.
Failure of Fortitude #1: This first example took place right out of the blocks when I became a sales leader with a HUGE healthcare company.
A family company. A company that markets baby shampoo. A company that holds its world-famous Credo up to the world as the symbol of their impeccable virtue.
I had just moved from Long Island, where I had spent my entire life, to Denver in order to lead a sales team throughout the Midwest. Due to a territory realignment, I inherited a team of six reps, three from one previous district, three from another previous district and a couple of vacancies that I needed to fill. None of these reps had received very much consistent or ongoing coaching over the couple of years before I arrived due to the previous managers being spread too thin and there being a general lack of oversight regarding field visits.
Before getting started in my new role, I was told by the Head of Sales that one of my newly inherited team members had to go. He had the proverbial target on his back and I was led to believe it was strictly tied to ability and performance. So, I put him towards the top of my list as I headed out to make my first round of ride-alongs with my team.
As soon as this gentleman picked me up at the airport I could tell that there was more to the story than I had been led to believe. He was a really nice guy. The kind of open, honest Midwest guy that I would have imagined coming from New York. His attire was nowhere near what it should have been given that we were going to be calling on a large university-based medical center that day, but I figured maybe that’s how it was done around there. (Bear in mind that the film My Cousin Vinny had come out only a few years before this and it kept popping into my head as I stood there in my grey, pin-striped, double-breasted suit and wingtip shoes!) To top it off, as we parked at our first stop, he pulled a plug of chew out of his mouth, tossed it, wiped his hand on his sock and we set off.
Despite his shabby exterior, I observed that this rep had really strong relationships in his accounts, and he had excellent clinical knowledge. His numbers weren’t great and his selling skills could have been better, but others had worse and were not as squarely in the cross-hairs of senior leadership. I started to wonder what the deal was.
I gradually learned that this rep had “over-imbibed” at a sales meeting a while before I took over, which had put him in eternal disfavor. Turns out that by the time I got there he was a recovering alcoholic (sober for several months) who had a number of other issues affecting him and his family. He needed support, not a performance plan, an up-his-ass manager and imminent disciplinary action.
This rep and I spent a lot of tension-filled time together during my time with that team. Even when his numbers were solid I was being pressured to lean on him in the interests of moving him out of the organization. He couldn’t understand why and frankly, I had trouble holding the company line because my humanity kept getting in the way. If only I had known the whole story from the start, I could have done so much better by him and balanced the needs of the employee and the company much more effectively.
Before I moved into my next position, we had a heart to heart talk and he finally saw that he needed to go somewhere else and re-create himself since he was never going to outlive his past at our current company. He did so and, as I understand it, ended up doing well and finding far more satisfaction.
Ironically, in this same district I had a rep who had been anointed “highly developmental” at some point and was therefore immune from repercussions despite massive gaps in his performance. He shirked just about every administrative task and other deadline and was eventually escorted by security out of a company meeting due to falsification of records and running a side business during company working hours.
Moral of the Story: Never get too attached to initial opinions if there is evidence that supports revisiting them.
Failure of Fortitude #2: Same company, different district and still within my first couple of years of becoming a manager. Definitely before I learned what a leader really was.
On my next team, I took over the District Manager spot after my colleague was promoted to become our Regional Business Director, so I had to deal with some of the baggage that comes with inheriting your boss’ old team.
One of my reps was a woman who was there when it had been my RBD’s team. She wasn’t especially warm or likable but was a strong rep and posted some really nice numbers. I can’t remember if it started during my time as her DM or beforehand, but she ended up having to go out on short-term disability several times due to recurrent cancer (it’s hard for me to even write this without hating myself). Bear in mind that we were selling a supportive care drug into the Oncology space and our pervading mantras were “quality of life” for cancer patients and “it’s all about the patient” in our marketing campaigns.
Despite that, every time this rep had to go out on disability, my RBD got furious. He made it sound like she was “faking” cancer or doing it to get out of a meeting or some other responsibilities. Again, I was pressured to get out in the field with her the second she came back to work and grill her about her numbers, her accounts, everything. I feel like I held my ground more this time around due to my earlier experience, but it was still not acceptable. I should have been more of a champion for her. I should have pushed back. But I wanted to succeed and I bought into some of the BS that was being jammed down my throat.
Several years later, she ended up moving to live near me and her kids went to the same school as mine did. I was mortified and tried to avoid her for a while. But eventually I took a deep breath, slapped myself in the face and walked up to her one day and said, “I’m sorry. I wasn’t very nice to you when we worked together and I could have done a much better job”. She agreed and while I don’t believe I was totally forgiven, I did what I could to make amends for my previous ethical shortcomings.
Moral of the Story: Try to avoid doing things you’ll have to apologize for later.
Finally Getting It Right: Later in my career I worked for a company that was launching a novel drug into the Rheumatology space. Our focus was on gout, a disease that it turns out is very prevalent in Pacific Islanders and Hawaii was part of my district. The National Sales Director and the VP of Sales kept telling me they wanted to put a full-time rep in Hawaii, which was usually only done by multi-billion dollar brands. Normally, the Islands were covered out of Los Angeles or San Francisco.
I told them I didn’t think there were enough Rheumatologists in that geography to justify a FTE. Normally, we created a territory when there were 85 or so full-time Rheums in an area and there were only 14 in all of Hawaii, 2 of them part-time. They asked – I said I didn’t recommend it. This took place several times. Eventually, it became clear that we were going to hire someone in Hawaii and I had to comply. So, I used my network to find a great rep, a great guy, and we hired him away from the company he was with since we still had some upside promise at that point in the launch.
Fast forward four months or so and the launch wasn’t going very well. Demand for the drug was far lower than we had anticipated and we were only hitting at about 25% of our forecast (yes, that’s right, 25%). The company culture grew more dysfunctional and toxic by the day. The sales coming out of Hawaii were very low, especially since it’s a very price-sensitive market and our product was priced at a significant premium over conventional therapies.
During one of our Business Review meetings the VP and NSD brought up the fact that sales in Hawaii were low and started to insinuate that it was the rep’s fault. This progressed to the point where they told me I had to put him on a Performance Improvement Plan, a PIP.
This time, though, I knew what strong leadership looked like. I knew the right thing to do by my team member and my internal compass. I said no.
I explained to them that it was ludicrous for us to have taken this person out of another stable, well-paying job and to then dump him this early in the game. It would be different if the rest of the country was killing it and he was a laggard, but that was not the case. I told them that we should give him more time, and if it turned out that they wanted to undo their ill-advised decision to put a full-time rep in Hawaii, they should do it the right way. Treat the rep with dignity – don’t blame it on him. Package him out in a generous way and help him to land on his feet. Why should he suffer because senior leadership didn’t do their due diligence?
Moral of the Story: It’s never too late to get things right.
I guess that during the time between the first and last of these scenarios I “grew a set” and decided that I was no longer going to be an immoral shill for people just because of an org chart.
And that’s why I’m a consultant now. I answer only to myself.
So, my parting thoughts for all of you in any kind of leadership role is to be true to yourself. Be true to your beliefs. To your integrity. To your knowledge of what’s wrong and right. Be the human shield that your people need sometimes and you will sleep well at night and have a legion of grateful colleagues, past and present. And there’s nothing better than that!
Elevate Your People. Elevate Your Sales.