Simple advice that will make you more successful - Keith Rosen 'Sales Leadership' Chapters 10-14

We're on Chapters 10, 11, 12, 13 & 14 this week. Chapter 10
'Mindful Coaching: The Inner Game of Coaching Champions' This
chapter is about coaching oneself to be a good coach. It's an
interesting one. I do think there is an extremely important case in
who is coaching the coach. Keith talks about mindful coaching, he's
very into be aware of your own communication. He talks about
assumptions being a widespread problem, but for me, assumptions are
the way we make sense of situations and are based off of previous
experience, so sometimes, they can be imformative. Keith writes
down 33 assumptive driven words to challenge and we found this
really useful!! He then discusses how we should reinforce positive
behaviours after a successful deal to reinforce that behaviour -
where he put this in the book was really well-timed. I would've
added a section about figuring out why the team won the deal and
how we can then replicate that. Keith stresses the importance of
understanding the importance of how people act, understanding what
makes people tick. We thought this was quite useful as we don't
think many people think about the language and the way it's used.
Keith gets into use of language and he's right, he offers a case
study where 2 people are discussing the same topic but using
different language and not understanding one another - he offers
some useful insight into how best to communicate to provide
thorough understanding. Keith's first plug for another book comes
on p.180 which is a VERY refreshing change from the previous books
we've read. We thought the section 'Can you coach fear and
confidence' was really interesting! Chapter 11: 'Know Your Players:
Transforming Talent Through Observation and Feedback' Keith talks
about one of my favourite subjects here - talking about the 'why' -
talking about what a person's why is and why that is. I think Keith
could chat about leading the team more, a lot of this chapter was
about leading the individuals. Keith asks 'How do you determine the
root cause as to why someone is a top performer and why someone is
underperforming?' - which is a great question to have in your mind
as a coach. Keith's got me bought in on the world enrol - it's
about getting the salespeople who work with you to agree with
what's happening - this message resonated with me. The example
scripts on p.199 are great, they're really good and we'd use them.
Chapter 12: '15 Common Coaching Killers That Sabotage Coaching
Success' Not a bad chapter, you will already know about the 15
different coaching killers from reading the book already - but
Keith does go over them in a lot more depth. They're a good
summary! Toxic Tactic #2 - Keith talks about valueless questions
that bring people down and from our experience, he's absolutely
right! Asking 'why didn't you do this' never helps a situation.
This is a brilliant book and I don't want to knock it, but it seems
like he hasn't been a sales leader in his career, only a sales
coach. BUT this is easily the best book we've read on the show so
far. We disagreed with Toxic Tactic #3 'Coaching People in Your Own
Image' - because a lot of hugely successful companies have done
this and we don't think that copying the actions of somebody who is
successful at what they do is necessarily a bad thing. In general,
the toxic tactic were spot on! Chapter 13: 'Culture Shift:
Sustaining The Habit of Coaching' This is a quick, easy to read
chapter with some great advice. His comments on peer to peer
coaching were great and we liked that he included this in the book!
Chapter 14: 'The Final Transformation' We think people want to be
managers because society tells them they ought to be. Genuinely,
for us, it's been the most useful book we've done on the show thus
far and it's really well-written. It's also made me realise that
I've grown a lot in the past couple of years as a leader, more than
I thought I had, so that's good!