Good managers are not necessarily good leaders.
If you were a good manager, does that mean you are also a good leader? Not necessarily as there’s a distinct different between a good manager and a good leader.
The famous Peter Drucker quotes – “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”
Imagine this scenario:
Your Sales Manager had asked you to get an agreement from your distributor to raise a purchase order of $100,000 in order to fulfill his sales commitment for a specified period, even when the distributor had not received an official purchase order from the end customer yet. Aligning yourself to your Sales Manager needs as both of you were sharing a common objective, you followed the instructions to do so. You persuaded the distributor with whom you have had such a great relationship with. The distributor finally gave in and complied by issuing you a purchase order of $100,000 within the specified period. Both of you met the sales objective then. Both of you looked good in fulfilling the commitment at that time.
And now, let’s analyze the situation:
You had delivered your commitment for that specified period. You gave your Sales Manager and probably, the organization as well, an extended lifeline. You performed to expectations. You did what you needed to do for the short term benefits of every one concerned.
On the flip side of the coin, you were not in compliance with the standard of business conduct of your organization – an order cannot be booked unless there is an official purchase order from the end customers. The impact of this practice is you endure the risk of reversing your revenue recognized within the specified period, should the end customer end up not issuing the purchase order at all. This will put your organization at risk of not meeting its commitment still, at the end of the day, in the long term. And you might end up needing to work a lot harder under a much stressful situation to compensate the short fall of revenue that your organization experience. The long term impact is detrimental.
How would you rate your Sales Manager in this situation? Well, from my point of view, I cannot say that he / she were a bad manager, especially if he / she had been meeting all the revenue commitments on a very consistent basis. The end result is he / she delivered. No one would really question how the results were achieved (at least, not until some revenue reversal occurred). In that regard, I believe he / she were a good manager, doing things right in applying the appropriate knowledge within the organization to achieve the results expected of him / her.
On the other hand, was he / she a good leader? The demonstrated behavior of booking an order without an official purchase order from the customer is absolutely not acceptable. It goes against the moral values as well as the standard of business conduct practices. The behavior demonstrated reflects bad leadership for sure.
Have a look at this article – http://blogs.bnet.com/salesmachine/?p=4204&tag=nl.e808.
Digest it. Think about sales management vs sales leadership. Make your own assessment and which one would you prefer? Sales management or sales leadership?
Tags: attitude, business conduct, leadership, sales management
