E22 Optimizing Leadership: Sales Mastery

Executive coaching is discussed as a powerful tool for enhancing leadership development. It has been shown to positively impact leadership effectiveness through transformative learning and skills development. The guest, Sean Weafer, shares his journey into coaching and training, starting as a salesperson and eventually setting up his own training company. He explains the importance of coaching as a measurable methodology for creating change. He highlights the need for coaching in areas such as sales and leadership, where communication and influence are crucial. The difference between coaching and mentoring is also discussed, with mentoring focusing on skills transfer and cultural learning. In contrast, coaching encourages reflection and provides a different perspective to help individuals find solutions to problems. Coaching is seen as a way to expand consciousness and perception, enabling individuals to see new solutions and learn new skill sets. Welcome to CoachoNomics Presents Podcast, a part of the ECS Network. This is the Masters of Leadership Teachable Moment Series. I'm your host, Laura Perez-Ehrheart. I'm the CEO of Epiphany Consulting Solutions, a management consultant and executive coach. Today we're talking about the crossroads of coaching, leadership, and sales. Executive coaching is a powerful tool that can significantly enhance leadership learning and development. Extensive research has demonstrated its positive impact on leadership effectiveness through various mechanisms. These include transformative learning, which guides leaders to confront challenging dilemmas, engage in critical reflection, and participate in productive dialogue, including leading to profound self-awareness and behavioral change. In addition to that, skills development helps develop key leadership capabilities, which I refer to as power skills, such as people management, goal setting, and effective communication. Joining us today is Sean Weafer. He's mastered coaching and training, specifically in leadership and sales. He works with businesses and individuals to scale their sales approaches and remove the barriers that impede progress and performance. Sean, it's a pleasure to have you join me today. And for our listeners out there, I just want to say that we are recording live from wonderful Dublin, Ireland, and California. So, Sean, your expertise in coaching and training, particularly in leadership and sales, is highly respected. But I'm curious, why sales and leadership coaching? First of all, Laura, I love you being here. Thank you for the invitation. I started life as a merchant naval officer, and specifically as a wind engineer. And as I went through like a 10-year history in sales in the IT industry, I eventually ended up getting involved in sales training. Interesting story, I was the director of a software company. A couple of guys came and asked me, would you come and train our team in sales? And I looked at them and said, oh, I've never trained anyone in my life, I wouldn't know where to start. And they said, no, no, no, no, just teach them how you sell. And I went, how I sell? So typical engineer, I went away and drew up a few flow charts on how I sold, how I sell things. And I did a half-day training, and I got such an absolute buzz out of doing it that I eventually ended up within a year setting up a training company, specifically at the time focusing on sales, but evolving then into leadership, and then ultimately into coaching. So I suppose why leadership and coaching is because I've been in leadership positions, I've been in sales situations, I understand the challenges both leaders and salespeople face. And I suppose the coaching element really for me was, even though I was involved in training since 1994, I got involved in coaching in 1997, having met that wonderful American Dr. Dennis Wakeley, a behavioral psychologist, author, amazing speaker. And Dennis was my mentor for a little while, and he introduced me to this concept of coaching back in 1997, which was just getting off the ground, really. And what I loved about it was that it was measurable. I'll ask any engineer what he, she, or they thinks about the importance of engineering, and it's that which gets measured, gets done. So ever since, I happen to work very well with what I call subject matter experts who need to be influencers, whether they're accountants, lawyers, engineers, whatever. They need to be able to communicate, to empathize, to engage and influence. Same thing with salespeople, you know, it's not enough anymore just to have information. So coaching has been replaced by AI, it's been encoded into the algorithm. So we need to learn about this concept of engagement and interest. And then finally, the coaching was a measured methodology whereby I can measure change, which isn't always possible in the sort of a group training situation. A hundred percent, Sean. Coaching has so many positive attributes, and I'm glad you leaped into this profession. But I've worked for a few decades with countless professionals and teams over the years, and I can share many stories of how it's helped individuals, teams, and leaders evolve their communication styles, improve their working relationships, scale their professional skills, which have led to significant promotions that folks struggle to attain independently. How did you become a coach? You know, how long have you been coaching, and how did you get involved? In relation to the training, I got involved in training in 1994. But as I said earlier, I was a little sort of concerned that I wasn't able to measure outcomes as such from training, at least not way back then. We used to have what was called a sheet dipping approach. For those not familiar with agricultural terms, it basically means you feed sheep into a ducking station, so you get rid of all the bad stuff, and they come out the other end. It doesn't mean anything sticks, but you put them through the process. An analogy. That was kind of training back then, and it didn't really suit me. So I had already trained and qualified and certified as a psychotherapist and an analytical hypnotherapist, and I was casting around for something that would allow me to measure things. And then I met this wonderful gentleman, Dr. Dennis Wakeley, the author of the psychology of winning and many other books, Empires of the Mind. Actually, he was the coach on the NASA moon landings when they when they took off originally. Incredible individual. Very fortunate to know Dennis for a while. He introduced me to this idea of coaching, which was only really just starting to take off in America at the time, which was way back in 1997. And for me, it was like all the bells and whistles suddenly went off. I was like, whoa, here is the thing that you could actually measure and change. By the next time I saw Dennis a couple of months later, I designed the coaching system, which is very effective and I use it to this day, which is a system which, unlike a lot of coaching, which can be very, can somewhat be a little talk therapy sometimes, it's very measured about objectives and performance. So we'll identify the objectives, we'll future pace the outcomes of those, we'll break them down into the individual elements, we'll take it to the steps that you need to do on a day to day basis, we'll measure all that and then we'll review it at the end. The whole purpose being that it's a very accountable, performance focused process, whereby somebody knows that they physically change their situation when the job is done. And that's how I've been coaching for, oh my God, 27 years this year. Would you believe that's just hit me now? My God, I'm getting old. No, it's just that you're well-rounded and more experienced, that's all it is. Oh, that's so kind of you. I'm maturing, as they say, like a cheese. Absolutely. So, you know, everyone has a different perspective on what coaching and mentoring is. So talk about the difference between the two. I think first of all with mentoring, mentoring is fundamentally focused around the transfer of skills or cultural specific knowledge. Now, what that means is a person who's mentoring typically would have done the job before that they're mentoring somebody in our specific experience in that position. So, for example, I could mentor a banker, for example, or a lawyer, because I haven't done that job. I don't understand the culture. I don't understand, per se, the technical competencies required. So a mentor would be somebody in the past, typically it's been senior to the person has more experience in a position to pass that down. Actually, now we're finding a lot more reverse mentoring, where you're the members of organizations with experience of tech, for example, or AI are now mentoring more senior members of the organization. So, in a sense, it's almost inverted itself in terms of it. So it can work in different ways. But fundamentally, mentoring is focused around skills transfer or organizational or cultural learning in that respect. Coaching is slightly different in the sense that coaching is more focused around encouraging reflection, bringing accountability to bear, creating what I call a synergy, whereby the coach and the individual can create solutions to perceived problems that the individual might be facing in the role. Because the coach, they're not limited by that perception that an individual executive might be limited when he or she faces a problem in a particular role. The way I describe that is often you can find people, they find themselves, they've got to get through the wood. Let's say that's your career. And you end up banging your head against a tree, right? As we all do. Something holds us up, prevents us moving forward. A coach is somebody who comes in in a helicopter, not actually in the wood. They have a completely different perspective of the wood. And so they can see the exits that the person is heading towards. But they can also see exits that perhaps they might never perceive because they're operating with just being down in the wood, if you get my meaning. So what a coach can often do is open up new opportunities, new options, new vistas, new perspectives that perhaps might never be seen by that individual because the coach is not actually down in the woods with them. What a mentor does is that a mentor is down in the woods. So each year they, as Walker's wrote before, they take the person by the hand and lead them through the exits that they know. So I suppose what coaching is trying to do is expand the conscious, the capability, the perception of the individual so they can see new solutions to older problems. Or, for example, in my case, they could be learning skill sets that they aren't necessarily learning in the role. So that would be communications, skill sets, networking, high-level presentation skills, speaking skills, that sort of thing, which we wouldn't ordinarily have available to them. So that's how I would difference it. The coach brings a completely different perspective, brings a different process to it, whereas the mentor tends to lead people along a particular direction. Mm-hmm. 100%. Yeah. When I'm coaching folks, I really like to toss out different challenges. And I also like to challenge the assumptions, what I think is really important as a good solid executive coach to do is to challenge them, hold them accountable, bring different perspectives and approaches to helping the individual scale their learning. So when they weave that and partner it up with coaching, coaching provides that real-time feedback, situational coaching, if you will. I know that a lot of folks really find that helpful. I also think, Laura, that it's important that whoever you're working with as a coach, I mean, quite apart from the rapport and the trust that you have to develop with that person, that they themselves have sort of business experience, that they've worked with similar people to you. And I think the other benefit of having certainly a professional coach is that each year they typically have worked with other people in different industries. And so they can bring a very different perspective to the sort of challenges that you might be facing. In other words, how someone else might have addressed it, for example, or how they took a way of dealing with a particular problem. And I think that's the other value that you buy in when you buy an external leadership or executive coach. That certainly with not just their own experience, but experience of working possibly with multiple executives in multiple industries and being able to bring that experience to bear on a particular challenge you're offering or a particular leader executive might have within a specific industry or specific company. Yeah, 100 percent. Leadership is not a one size fits all. It's very tailored towards the individual objectives and learning. Now that we're talking about leadership, let's talk about why is coaching a helpful leadership intervention? And where is it best applied? I think coaching is a very useful leadership intervention on a number of levels. Number one, it can help accelerate learning opportunities for an executive. Quite understandably, the more senior you become, and it's the most natural human thing in the world, the more exposed you might feel if you don't have all the answers to all the questions. And therefore, you might sit comfortably into group situations. Traditional training situations or webinar, you might prefer to deal with that on a one-to-one basis and a one-to-one level with somebody. And so it gives you that kind of confidentiality, that kind of security to be vulnerable. And I don't mean vulnerable in the sort of a psychotherapeutic way. I mean, just being vulnerable about your challenges, your weaknesses, what you're trying to deal with and how they might be holding you back. You may have certain skills that, you know, one should think, well, I should have it at this stage. But you don't. And on as long as I think you might necessarily have, because maybe you were never trained in that. So there's a great opportunity in a coaching environment one-on-one to provide skill sets, layer in learning, and make it super specific to the individuals that he, she, or they absolutely adapted what's going on. I think that's one of the areas. I think the other area is leadership can be quite lonely. You can find it quite isolating. If you're in a sufficiently senior position, you may not want to discuss issues with your peers. Whereas you can do that with an external coach, because all coaching engagements should have a confidentiality aspect to them. So nothing gets discussed outside of the room with anyone else. Not even your engaging sponsor within the company. It is strictly confidential between you and the other person. And that's what allows this great synergy to happen between a coach and between a client. So that isolation factor is important. I think accountability is also important. The more senior you become, the less people hold you accountable. In certain cases, in certain contexts, that might be the case. A really good coach will not only give you a methodology whereby you'll be working towards very specific objectives and measuring change each step of the way, but he, she, or they will hold you accountable around that. If I may, I'll take a moment to explain what I mean by accountability in coaching. Because typically, you know, a client is not accountable to you. You're not their boss. And they can effectively, you know, tell you to get lost any time they want, right? But really, they're not just accountable to themselves. Because the reality is where coaching is also very helpful is that when we get stressed or we get under pressure, we go into what's called recidivism, recidivistic behaviors. We go back to what's easy to do. And as a result, we don't move forward. And often, we don't hold ourselves accountable to make the change we need to make. Okay? Change can be fearful. It can be anxious. And yet, the one thing leaders have to do is manage change on a day-to-day basis. I mean, if we were all able to hold ourselves accountable, we'd keep all our New Year's resolutions, but when do we ever do that, right? So really, accountability in coaching, at least as I define it, is where I, as the coach, hold you, the client, personally accountable to yourself. And it's that dynamic, the dynamic that the client knows that each year they're working towards their goals, but someone is working alongside them to hold them accountable to make them happen and bring the clarity and the support to do that. They're the areas in which coaching can be hugely valuable for an executive or a leader. Absolutely. 100%. I'm going to flip the coin here and turn this more towards leadership. So is coaching a leadership style? And what difference does it make when leaders adopt a coaching approach? How does it benefit their team? I think we have to differentiate between what you might call traditional leadership and modern leadership. So traditional leadership is very industrial-based. Leadership came from the top down. Your authority and your expertise gave you power and effectively was a command-and-control type approach. I noticed a change in people calling themselves chief people officers now, for example, rather than human resources. Humans are not resources, they're people, right? But that was the way they were addressed in a traditional situation. We call leaders directors because they direct us what to do. But the reality is, in today's world, it's not about directing people. The job of a leader in today's world is to create the environment in which his or their people can be successful. And I suppose I can differentiate that between a command-and-control approach and a coaching approach. It's not saying there isn't a place still for command-and-control in the modern world. It's just typically we'd use command-and-control as in a directive style of leadership, where you've got people with low skill levels but a high willingness to do something, but they just don't know what to do, so they have to be taught. Does that make sense? That's where the leader... Perfect sense. That's where the leader is managing opposed to leading. Correct. And then at the other end, they need to manage using some command-and-control as well, where the person may have a very high skill set, but their motivation, their willingness to do the job has dropped off. And there may be a requirement for a sort of a command-and-control approach there. But in the vast majority of people they're working with, they really need to be looking at the fact that the people they work with, in most cases, are experts. They know what they're doing. They're qualified in many ways themselves. They have experience. And to get the best out of them is about coaching. And it's using very specific values. It's about collaboration. It's about co-creation. It's about synergy. And these are the things that become very important. And this is why, particularly for people who are what I call subject matter experts, leading in the modern world can be very challenging, because they work in a situation where they believe it's their expertise that gives them their authority, when in actual fact it's their ability to influence, to communicate, to connect, to synergize, is where leadership comes from in the modern world. And that's where there's a whole other set of skills that they need to need. They need to move from what I call being experts to being influencers. Because in today's world, leadership, really powerful leadership, is about bringing your people, is setting a direction, and then working with each and every individual on that team in terms of what each year they get from accomplishing that collaborative or synergistic goal. And that's conversations. That's about making connections and having better quality conversations. And that's where the challenge comes for a lot of leaders. Well said. Someone in the leadership role, it's their job to help their teams develop their own leadership styles. And to also help them expand on their skill sets. That's what a leader does, is they mentor, they coach up. And it takes a certain individual that has insights and really good people and communication skills to be able to coach up their teams, whether it's an entire team or one-on-one. Because everyone on our team is going to require a different kind of communication and coaching style. In my experience, I've noticed that some leaders who say that they're coaching their direct reports spend a lot of time doing so virtually. So, which is fine if the individual is working across the country or, you know, working in the other part, another part of the world. But there's times when it's critical for a leader to physically be present and maybe to flex their influence in the workplace. They need to be ready to show up, especially if their direct report, for example, is struggling to grow their leadership legs or acumen and might be challenged in a new, you know, leadership role or a new team dynamic. What's your viewpoint? It's interesting you talked about the increase in remote working. Obviously, this is here to stay. To go back briefly to the difference between command-and-control leadership and micro-management versus coaching, I mean, by far the style that works more effectively in a remote and hybrid engagement is collaboration. Synergy is coaching. It's advanced questioning skills. It's understanding the psychology and motivation. You know, you need these skills more than command-and-control when you're working in a remote situation. As far as the leader showing up physically in the room, particularly when we're junior people, I think that's important. I think what leaders often forget is that whether they're aware of it or not, because they're in a position of authority and power and in a position to appraise people, to make a judgment about them, particularly when it comes to things like performance reviews, there's a natural need in all team members to want to build rapport with their leaders, to want to be liked, to want to be appreciated by them, because they know that if they're in that situation, then the appraisal will go better for them. So whether they're aware of it unconsciously or consciously, a lot of our team will look to build a relationship or model our behaviors. So if you're the leader who's not projecting positive behaviors, let's say they're excessively command-and-control, they're excessively micromanaging what they're doing, they clearly demonstrate they don't trust people, you're really just setting yourself up for a massive fall. Because first of all, your people will probably... Those who model those behaviors will cause, shall we say, conflict within the team, because other people start pushing back against them. Second of all, you'll lose engagement with a lot of the members of the team, because they just won't engage with that kind of behavior anymore. And as a result of that, you'll lose authority and you'll lose influence and you'll lose the ability to really synergize your team and get them to where they're capable of being. So it becomes even more important that, you know, yes, physically you show up, particularly for more junior members, but that you model a leadership style which is supportive, collaborative, and as I said before, in a sense, think about the word co-creative. It's almost like, you know, there's an old... The expression education, I believe, comes from the word educare, which is Latin, which means to draw from within. Now, in most cases, education, we're teaching people things, we're pushing it on to them. But educare, the original meaning of the word is to draw from people what they know and then align what they know with their own motivation to deliver on the team's goals. That's what a really good leader does in today's world. Well said. I'm going to turn the corner a little bit now that we're talking about leadership and going to the intersection of sales and leadership. You've spent many years training and facilitating leaders and sales teams. Talk about how leadership and sales are similar. In what ways are they similar? People tend to think that selling and leadership are two completely different aspects of business. In fact, I actually see them as the same. I think one of the reasons that is is that there's an old stereotype of what sales is all about, you know, pushy, in your face, sort of overly cocky. Maybe in a sense that sort of corresponds with the old command and control style of leadership. But the way I define it is I see them as two sides of the same coin in terms of the skill sets and mindset that are needed to be successful in both. Number one, if you're a salesperson, an account manager, a business development person, even professional leads to marketing and serve their services, what we have to do is to be able to build trust and influence external stakeholders who then make decisions to provide revenue for our business. So it's about making connections with and influencing external stakeholders who make decisions to buy from us to provide revenue for our business. So that's the sales side. If you will, salespeople are really engaged in influencing externals, building relationships and influencing external stakeholders. The other side of the coin is then the leaders need to connect, build relationships, influence internal stakeholders who then execute what must be done to deliver for the external stakeholders. So I see actually leadership in sales as a continuum in the sense that salespeople, key account managers, business developers, whatever client acquisitions, whatever term you want to use, are building the external relationships in which the foundation of the business are being built and then providing the revenue whereby the leaders then facilitate and create the environment in which the internal stakeholders can successfully deliver consistently what's needed to provide for our external stakeholders who are fundamentally the lifeblood of any business. That's why I see both sales and leadership effectively as two sides of the same coin. Same skill sets, same attitude, same mindset, just contextually different. So I'm curious, how does a leader maintain their ability to influence, have authority, and yet be approachable as a leader? Because, Sean, there's been many leaders that I've talked to that always say, Laura, I have an open door policy. But that's not always the case, right, Sean? The problem is if you have an open door policy, as soon as somebody walks in, the door closes, everybody gets nervous. Yep. That's what I do. Oh, I'm in trouble. You know, I think the fact that they say I have an open door policy, that's part of the problem because it means they're sitting in their office and they're not walking the ground and being available to people who are doing the job. You know, if you think of yourself as a leader, you're a facilitator. You've got to go to where the people are doing what they're doing. I mean, yeah, you need an office, but your office is where you get that quiet time, that reflective time, that opportunity maybe to work one-on-one with some of your people. I mean, if you're good as a leader and they do understand that you coach and you support and you help people, then what happens is when the door closes, people appreciate the person inside, you know, is not getting something sort of ripped off them, if you will. You know, it's a supportive situation. That person's been coached. That person's been supported. That person's been helped. That's what you want to create. In terms of your influence, there's a couple of things you really need to be really successful at to be a really good leader. Number one, you've got to be able to project your executive presence, your brand, if you will. And brand is what people are saying about you when you're no longer in the room. I believe that's what Jeff Bezos of Amazon described brand as. And that's really important, particularly in today's world where we are more hybrid, we're early engaged, and increasingly so. It's how people feel about you is a critical element. Now, you know, you mentioned the leadership in sales. There's some very interesting research came out of Harvard with a professor, Gerald Zaltman, who said that 95% of purchasing decisions are emotionally based. That's extraordinary. We only justify our decisions logically by 5% of our capacity. Now, that's the same thing if a leader's trying to get one of their team or some of their stakeholders internally to buy into what they want to do. It's about emotion. And they come down to three key things. How well can you empathize with a person's situation? Empathy is becoming increasingly more important in terms of engaging as a leader, having a sense of where a person's at, understanding their challenges, and recognizing you're in a position to help them. Engagement, so how well do you build trust? How well do you create a situation where you are a person people are happy to take on challenges to because they know it's not going to be a judgment. It's going to be a conversation that is nonjudgmental, but it's going to help them get to another space. And then you're going to have – and by the way, just in terms of building your presence, a really key thing around that is your ability to represent and to be an effective speaker. That's a really key skill. But the other skill is influence. And that skill is just how good are you at asking questions and listening to the answer. How good are you at positioning suggestions? Are you good with your language? Do you use language in a way that's not seen as threatening? So we talk about – I talk about what I call soft language or influential language. So you might use words like if, suppose, maybe, perhaps, might, would. By using this kind of language, you remove the perceived threat when you want someone to do something for you. So if you were to do that, how comfortable would you be? Or what specifically would you do first to see what the outcome is going to be? Or how specifically can I help you with this? So languaging and questions and influence and suggestions is a critical part of your influence as well, particularly on a one-to-one level or, indeed, a one-to-many level if you're working with a team. I've known leaders who have sat in their office and have attended a virtual meeting when their executive team might be right downstairs from their office. And the leader stays in their office on a virtual meeting. You're right. Get out of your office. Have that – show and demonstrate that executive presence by showing up physically in meetings, especially if they're down the hall. You know as well as I do that that does not set a good tone. You're spot on when you said earlier leaders are the models. They lead the way. They demonstrate their leadership style through their behavior, through what they say, how they communicate, how they address issues, how they present themselves to the world. And, yes, that includes their branding. That's a big part of their branding. What they say, what they do, and how they communicate is huge. And it demonstrates the kind of leader that they are. And if they don't think that people are not paying attention, the whole world has eyes on them. And that whole world is the organization that I'm talking about. But you also stated something that resonates with me, Sean, is that people do remember how you make them feel. I don't know if you know who the great and late Maya Angelou was. She's an American icon and she made a statement that stuck with me many, many years ago that people may not remember what you said or what you did, but they will always remember how you made them feel. Yeah, absolutely. And actually just in relation to what you said there, Laura, something that my father got arrested in his past now, but he used to be a major in the Army Reserve here in Ireland. And I suppose I got lessons in leadership of him as I was growing up. And one of the things that always struck me when he said, never ask your man to do something you're not prepared to do yourself. Because if you ask someone to do something and they clearly see that you're not only capable of doing it, but you're willing to do it, it's one of the most motivating things that a leader can do at the end of the day. And in a sense, that leads to the concept of leadership integrity as well, or for that matter, sales integrity, integrity of business, I suppose. Now, my definition of integrity of business is it's not rocket surgery, okay? It's do what you say you will do when you said you will do it. That's it. A hundred percent. So I'm curious, everyone defined leadership differently. How do you define it? I think, as I said earlier, I think the purpose of leadership is to create the environment in which people can excel, and to create an environment which is supportive. It is frictionless. It is conflict-free. It's focused. It provides clarity. It provides context. It provides confidence. And it provides the skill sets to allow people to pursue their journey, and in the process of pursuing their journey, accomplish the objectives of the business. And I think what a leader also does is that each year they need to be very cognizant that there are two sets of agendas at work in a business. There are the corporate agendas, which absolutely we need to go to because that's what we're there. We function in that business to provide those services for our clients or to get those clients. But what tends to get overlooked is the personal agenda of the individual. And you talked about my coaching. I've coached in the past where people were burnt out. They didn't want to do the job. They wanted to leave. And after several sessions, once we uncovered the motivation they were looking for in the job, they were just reborn in terms of doing the job because all I did was align their own personal purpose and how they can get there by delivering on the corporate objectives. A really good leader knows how to synergize the company and the personal agendas of the individual they're working with. And that's why questioning and listening and structuring and putting a measurable process in place are also important for leaders in today's world. And it's also equally as important to develop our future leaders. Once future leaders are spotted, talk about what those ways are to identify internal future leaders and how to nurture those future leaders. I heard something a long time ago. You're probably familiar with yourself, Laurie, but you hire for aptitude and you train for aptitude. I think it was Coca-Cola or something came up with that years ago. And it is so true. I mean, you look for the attitude. There are people who are happy to do the job. They'll come in. They'll do whatever it is they're going to do. And that's all they'll do. And that's probably because they have a very fulfilling personal life, and that's great. It doesn't mean they can't be switched on. It doesn't mean you can't enthuse them. It doesn't mean you can't motivate them. It doesn't mean you can't engage. But the leaders need to be people who see a bigger purpose in what they're doing, can see a way in which they can be of service to people around them. There are people who want to challenge themselves, who look to step up, what we call next-level leaders, right? They want to step up. So I would be looking for people who are willing to come forward, willing to take on a project, willing to develop themselves. You know, we talked about this educare, to draw from within, you know, actively looking for opportunities to grow. In many ways, almost make their own selves felt. And it's not necessarily because they're ambitious. Look, they may well be ambitious, and people can be ambitious. That's a good thing. It should be lauded. But it's just that they'll make their presence felt. I think a lot of leadership is about presence. And you'll see them in terms of they're supporting their fellow workers. They're helping them out. They're, you know, walking them through a project or whatever. And I'm not talking, by the way, that people come in at 6 a.m. and leave at 12 p.m. That's just nonsense. I know it's a big American thing, but I'm not a subscriber getting up at 5 a.m. in the morning, doing your meditation, your 20-mile rule. You know, I'm in bed until half 6, quarter to 7. I'm not getting up for anyone at 5 o'clock in the morning, right? Yeah, I get it. It's a lifestyle thing. But I'm looking at what we put into the hours when they're there. That's what I'm looking for. And, in fact, I'd be very concerned if I saw somebody having to work in at 7 a.m. and leave at 8 p.m. at night, because a person like that is not balanced. A person like that is a person who is overcommitting themselves. They're engaged in presenteeism, which is as bad as absenteeism. I want to see a person who is capable of managing their time and their lives in a way that they can sustain that as more pressure and more expectation comes on them as they move up the ladder of being a leader. Yeah, that's not sustainable. I think that, you know, post-pandemic and, you know, Sean, I know that a lot of countries see America as, you know, that we're just a bunch of worker bees and we're from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. post-pandemic. You know, I know a lot of people started to really take a hard look at how they invest their time in the work that they do. And people are learning different ways of working smarter, producing results, you know, and learn to manage their time better. Absolutely. I mean, you know, forgive me. I didn't mean to imply that the Americans are worker bees. Not at all. We are. And I know enough Americans. I've had more than a few points of Guinness. I know they know how to party as well, so that's not a problem. That's what we do. A bunch of Americans, good people, right? But what I meant was there are certain gurus out there who promote these kind of lifestyles, right? And to be honest with you, they're not balanced lifestyles. You know, you have to look to yourself. You've got to look to your commitments. You've got to look to your family. You've got to look to your old self. You've got to look to your relationships. And then what powers your ability to be there for them is what you do. And hopefully what you do is something you're also enthused about. And if you have a good leader who created the environment in which you are enthused about what you're doing, and is there with you and walks the ground with you and helps you get where you need to go. Even more importantly, is prepared to represent your brand at more senior levels in the organization. You know, I've been one that's guilty of overwork and being a workaholic and championing others and talking to executive leadership about maintaining and sustaining how they work and how they live. Then I need to be walking that talk. It's really important to find the balance. And like I said, post-pandemic, a lot of people really looked at the quality of their life and said, you know what? This is not sustainable. I need to change my work habits and how I live to be able to live a more productive and work more productively. We're talking about nurturing the future leaders. So once organizations spot these future leaders, Sean, how quickly does the business or those executive leaders need to respond once these future leaders are spotted in the company and provide learning development platforms for using coaching, for example, to nurture those future leaders? I think as far as coaching is concerned, it depends. Usually coaching brought in from somebody extremely like yourself, myself. You're looking at middle to senior leaders typically, right? And unless they have a coaching process internally, usually people at middle or below don't tend to get that coaching engagement, unless there's a group coaching on them. But there are fundamental skills that need to start to develop very quickly. What you find if you take professional services, for example, I work with accounting firms, for example, or legal firms. And they know that the more senior they become, the less important their expertise of doing the job is. Right. And more important, their relationship skills become their connection, involvement, engagement and so on. And so I think really when you start looking at senior leaders, you need to start investing those. First of all, educating them as to the importance of those skill sets. Because typically and traditionally, we've always been educated that expertise comes first, logic comes first. But in actual fact, to be successful, it's emotion that comes first. It's engagement, it's empathy, it's influence. These are the things that matter. But you would start training them. And that could be down to something like we run a program called Next Level Leaders. And it's a little bit different. We don't do the standard stuff most people think of in a leadership program. We train them in critical thinking skills. How do you deal with a situation that you haven't got an answer for straight away? How do you deal with that? We have a barrister from Scotland who trains them in gravitas, presence, dealing with imposter syndrome, confidence. Such a critical piece. So there are skill sets. And there's one expert talks about well-being, managing team conflict, for example, how to make it easy. That sort of situation is what you're dealing with. You start teaching those skills and integrate those skills into how they look at leadership. And then you can take them and accelerate their development from there. But there are some foundational things you need to be investing in initially. So we're going to turn the corner a little bit and talk more about the sales world. No matter what line of business we're in, we're all far as leading in the sales arena. At some point selling something, whether it's an idea, influencing change, getting others to join our vision. So leading a sales team requires a different mindset. And back in the day, I came from the hardware and software side of marketing and sales. What are some of the best practices to align a sales team's goals with the company's overall vision? I think we need to define selling a wee bit more. In terms of there's a traditional sense that selling is about pitching an idea. It's how we push an idea to you, how we communicate an idea to you. That's not my view of selling. My view of selling is, and actually the root word from which selling comes from, means actually to be of service. So how can I be of service here? There's no way that you can teach people, sales people, to put a square peg in a round hole. You teach them to say thank you very much and move on. They only want to find people who have pain that they can solve. And if you can identify people's pain and bring a solution, you'll engage every single time. So I think in terms of motivating a sales team, really key things that are important. A little clarity. I'm amazed at the number of sales teams I've worked with in the past that lack fundamental forecasting capability. So not just, well, this is your yearly target, but this is your monthly target. This is your weekly target. So, again, I'm not supporting micro-managing, but I am supporting clarity because from clarity comes confidence. And confidence comes from the ability to be congruent or convincing. And from there comes competence. So the fundamental element is clarity. I think the other thing, then, is for the manager, the leader, to work with the individual and say, look, you know, why is accomplishing this goal important to you? We're back to the coaching element again. And that's finding out, well, you know, so if you make 150% of target this quarter, why is that important to you? And most sales people will say, well, because I make more money, duh, right? But what a really good manager will say, well, duh, what will you do with the money? And with that, you get a very different response. They say, well, I can take my kids to Disneyland in Florida, or I can put a down payment on a home, or I can take a trip. Find the personal motivation behind the reason and align that with their goals and with their sales goals. You don't need to do incentive travels or bonuses or anything if the person is that aligned. There's no more powerful motivation than inner motivation, the desire to move towards something as a result of accomplishing something. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not turning down the idea you shouldn't have bonuses and commissions and incentive. That's all the fun stuff. When you're successful sales people, ultimately, they don't get motivated by those things because they've won them before. The real motivation comes from within. And a good leader, a good manager will always align. And don't forget that those values and those alignments change every year or every six months. So you go back and revisit them and realign them. That's how you get your sales team on fire, individually and collectively. Keeping your sales team fired up, talk about some strategies for driving sales while maintaining a positive team culture. What does that look like? This sounds a bit strange, but I didn't talk about command and control. Because there's a little bit more requirement of command and control because sales is such a performance-orientated process. It's about getting the numbers, about helping them. I think, first of all, it's quick intervention. If somebody's not making the numbers, you need to get in one-on-one, say where you are, what's going on. But I also think it's the culture of the team that's important. And by that, I mean I have two sons that are grown boys now. But I remember when we were very small, my wife was a great fan of buying books on parenting. And it was called Raising Boys because it just happened to be two boys, right? And there were rules in that book which I think are applicable right across the spectrum, whether it's leading sales teams or leadership teams. And that is this. Number one, there's somebody in charge. So there's somebody who you're going to be accountable to. It's important because that's part of the dynamic to get things done. Number two, there are rules. And number three, they are going to be fairly enforced. That's the key. And I think people understand that. You know, you'd be surprised how much engagement you'll get from people who are willing to move forward if they know they're all operating on a level playing field. And that's why I think those simple rules are applicable in a leadership situation. And I'm one of the great ways of motivating sales teams. I mean, I love sales people. I was a sales person for a long time. But let's face it, they're not the most focused kids on the block. And they often have the attention span of gnats, right? And I wholly apologize for all of those engineers who are sales people, too, are highly structured and highly focused. But the reality is selling is predominantly an accidental profession. Like nobody when they were seven years old says, when I grow up, I'm going to be a sales person. Right? And even if you did, your parents said, no, you're not. Right? Because they didn't perceive that. And all kinds of personalities find the word sales. Because they ultimately realize that they enjoy the challenge, they enjoy the excitement, and they enjoy the rewards. And that's a good thing. Yep. Well put. What advice would you give someone that is starting in sales and service today? Get highly familiar with AI. Understand how you differentiate. And use it as a time-saving tool. Email generation, LinkedIn messaging generation. Use it as a time-saving tool. Subscribe, whatever, 20 bucks or whatever you're going to pay. Every month you get the latest version. Become highly cognizant of that because it will help you with creating, you know, current personas or, you know. And that saves an enormous amount of time. Right? So definitely become conversed with AI. But then understand that your job today is not about carrying a message, information to people. Understand that people have AI now. They have the Internet now. They don't need you to bring them information. Here's what you need to be able to do. You need to be able to build trust with people so they're willing to share with you and that you get their attention. And then you need to be able to ask the right questions and make the right suggestions so that what you're doing is that you're not gaining information, but you're interpreting information that people have already to help them resolve a problem, ideally by using your service or your product. So our job today is more about being an advisor rather than being the traditional salesperson concept. Our job is to diagnose. Our job is to consult. Our job is to make sense for people of the information they already have, how it can be applied to help them do what they want to do. Learn those skills. And learn very similar leadership. Learn to be a good speaker. Learn to be a competent speaker. But learn AI. Understand that your job is now to consult and to diagnose and to support and to interpret. And then learn the skill sets that are going to help you be able to do that as in terms of communications. And again, I've said it before, I will say it again. Be crystal clear about what you want to accomplish, what your numbers are, and what you personally get out of making those numbers work. Understand not just the what but the why. Brilliantly put. You know, no matter what industry, we're in sales. We're always pitching, sharing, and wanting other people to jump on the bandwagon. So great advice. Sean, thanks so much for your wisdom. And I appreciate you. My pleasure, Laura. Thank you for your invitation. To learn more about Sean and his area of expertise, go to seanweafer.com or nextlevelleaders.io. That's it for this episode of CoachoNomics Presents Podcast. If you're interested in being a guest or you're a subject matter expert, please go to my website, www.epiphanyconsultingsolutions.com and submit your request on the Let's Chat link. You can also find me on LinkedIn under Laura Perez Earhart or my website, epiphanyconsultingsolutions.com. We hope the content and conversation will give sparks of inspiration. If you love and learn from the show, pay it forward and share my podcast with your colleagues and friends. I'm Laura Perez Earhart. Until next time, stay safe and live well.