I race too much. My brain races too much, so even if I’ve listened to everything somebody said, unless you show that you’ve digested it, people don’t think they are being well heard. Sometimes you really don’t hear because you’re racing. It’s just the way my brain works. If you really want to get the best out of people, you have to really hear them and they have to feel like they’ve been really heard. So I’ve got to learn to slow down and improve in that dimension, both to make me better and to make the people around me better.

Q. What’s it like to be in a meeting run by Steve Ballmer?

I’ve changed that, really in the last couple of years. The mode of Microsoft meetings used to be: You come with something we haven’t seen in a presentation. You deliver the presentation. You probably take what I will call the long and winding road’. You take the listener through your path of discovery and exploration, and you arrive at a conclusion. That’s kind of the way I used to like to do it, and the way Bill [Gates] used to kind of like to do it. And it seemed like the best way to do it, because if you went to the conclusion first, you’d get: “What about this? Have you thought about this?” So people naturally tried to tell you all the things that supported the decision, and then tell you the decision.

I decided that’s not what I want to do anymore.

I don’t think it’s productive, and I get impatient. So most meetings nowadays, you send me the materials and I read them in advance. And I can come in and say: “I’ve got the following four questions. Please don’t present the deck.” That lets us go, whether they’ve organised it that way or not, to the recommendation. And if I have questions about the long and winding road and the data and the supporting evidence, I can ask them. But it gives us greater focus.

Q. How do you assess job candidates?

If they come from inside the business, the best predictor of future success is past success. It’s not 100%, but it’s a reasonable predictor. For an external candidate, what I’ve found is that reference checks are super-important. I didn’t used to believe so much in reference checks. You can always get somebody to say something nice about you. But the truth is, if you ask enough questions and you ask around, you can really get a profile of who’s accomplished various things and who hasn’t.

And I try to figure out a combination of IQ and passion. I just ask somebody to tell me what they’ve done that they are really proud of and tell me about it. And if it’s something you are proud of, you should be able to answer any question I can come up with, at least at a level that would satisfy my interest. I ought to be able to see your passion. It might be quiet passion; it might be bubbly passion. But I should be able to sense that you are one of those people who throws themselves into things.

Q. Is there a skill qualification or trait that you’re looking for in prospective hires that didn’t matter as much ten years ago?

Mostly, I’m still looking for what I’ve always looked for: extremely smart and talented people who love to work hard, who are passionate about technology and who have a great foundation in maths and science. But compared to ten years ago, technology is more complex, products and services span people’s lives in new ways, and our business is much more global. So it’s more important that people can think outside the confines of their individual expertise and their product group and connect the dots between technologies, customer needs and markets in new ways.

Q. What’s the most challenging part of your job?

Finding the right balance between optimism and realism. I’m an optimist by nature, and I start from the belief that you can always succeed if you have the right amount of focus combined with the right amount of hard work. I get frustrated when progress runs up against issues that should have been anticipated or that simply couldn’t have been foreseen. A realist knows that a certain amount of that is inevitable, but the optimist in me always struggles.

Q. Fill in the blank. You want the culture of your company to be more _____ ?

Efficient. That’s the direction every business leader is steering their company culture towards right now. Given the current economic climate and the uncertainty about how long the recession will last, this is a time when organisations need to do more with less, and Microsoft is no exception. We’ve made good progress, but for a company that has grown every year for more than 30 years, learning how to operate under more constrained circumstances is not always that easy.

At the same time, the need to be more efficient drives us all towards a sharper focus on what is important and what can truly move the needle in terms of meeting customer needs and taking market share. Of course, we need to be innovative, but we also need to be efficient.

Q. Any books on management and leadership that you’ve found particularly useful?

Jim Collins’s book Built to Last.

Q. In all the speeches you’ve given, is there a favourite line, story, passage or quotation?

In 2009 I was invited to share my business perspective on the economic downturn with House Democrats at their annual retreat. In that speech, I got to share something that my dad always told me growing up, which is a simple piece of advice that really shaped my approach to life and to business.

My dad worked for Ford for 30 years. When I was a kid, he’d say: “If you’re going to do a job, do a job. If you’re not going to do a job, don’t do a job.” What he meant was, if you really want to accomplish anything, you have to be committed, motivated, tenacious and smart about what you do. That’s really just the essence of the American work ethic, but it’s one of the most important things I ever learnt.

Q. If you had to choose another profession, what would it be?

Education, probably. I like working with young people, and I think it’s really important to encourage talent. I love basketball, so I could see myself as a high school basketball coach. I think a basketball team that I coached would have a really good chance of being a winner.

Q. What would you like business schools to focus on more, or less?

I’d like to see more emphasis on the importance of taking the long view. Companies focus too much on short-term results in business. It takes patience to build a great business, and sometimes you have to be willing to make the long-term investment and then keep at it if you want to succeed.

Q. If you could teach any business school course, what would it be?

Leadership. Microsoft has grown from 30 people to more than 90 000 since I started, so I’ve had the chance to play a leadership role at practically every stage imaginable in a company’s growth and development. I’ve learnt a lot about leadership along the way from some great people that I’ve worked with and through experience. I’ve come to believe that to be a great leader, you have to combine thought leadership, business leadership and great people management. I think most people tend to focus more on one of those three. I used to think it was all about thought leadership. Some people think it’s all about your ability to manage people. But the truth is, great leaders have to have a mix of those things.

1. Keep an open mind
A common mistake that new managers make is to walk into the job with a plan that is one-sided and lacks employee input. Resist the desire to make immediate changes in your department in a show of authority, or you run the risk of damaging morale. While you are most likely to make adjustments and possibly even reassign some of your team’s roles, you should first work to obtain team feedback and, eventually, support.

2. Solicit input from the group
Ask what changes, if any, they consider necessary and the reasons for their recommendations. Remember that some individuals may have been doing their jobs for many years and are likely to have good ideas for improving the group’s cohesion and productivity.

3. Don’t assume, and don’t be a perfectionist
Assume you don’t understand all that’s required of you in your new role. There’s a good chance it’s more complex than you think, and if you go in believing you’ll get it right away, you’ll make a lot more
mistakes than if you approach it as a learning process. Also, some new bosses are so focused on proving themselves that they push people to work late and come in on weekends to get everything perfect. Being a superhero is not really worth wrecking the work-life balance of the whole team.

4. Be willing to back off a little
Get to know your staff. It’s vital that you form strong working relationships with your staff members. As their manager, you play a large role in their career advancement. People appreciate a workplace that makes their professional development a priority.

5. Start off on the right foot
Arrange one-on-one meetings with every person on your team. Before each meeting, do your homework. Review personnel files and evaluate recent performance reviews. Find out if your group has interests or talents that they would like to develop. Decide what you can do to foster such interests and how you can best take advantage of each person’s skills and experience. Set measurable goals and incentives, as well as a method for making sure these objectives are met.

6. Set the tone
Your actions will determine how your team sees you. Your goal is to establish your authority while also becoming worthy of respect. And when that tight deadline does hit and you ask your team to put in extra hours, do you stay late yourself? Will you stand up for your people if a conflict arises with another group, resolve their problems or discuss challenges?

7. Get feedback from your colleagues
Some new managers make the mistake of lowering morale inadvertently or in subtle ways. Like cutting off a team member who is speaking during a meeting. Don’t allow multi-tasking to prevent you from giving your full attention to an employee seeking guidance on a project. Also, don’t be the boss who keeps forgetting to include a particular person on group emails. While these indirect offences may seem minor, they could cause your team to resent your new role.

8. Be prepared for tests
As you establish your leadership, you may find that certain individuals will test your authority by missing deadlines or meetings, for example.

Create rules from the start on how you will deal with such behaviour, as your actions will set the tone for your tenure. Meet with those individuals and explain the impact of such actions. You might point out, for example, that failing to turn in a report by a set date may cause more work for other members of the group who rely on the information. If the employee has normally
been a high performer, try to find out what the problem is, and see if there is a way to help resolve it.

9. Be flexible – and collaborate
As long as you remain open to suggestions, encourage communication and set clear goals and incentives for your new staff, your chances of succeeding in your new position are high. And whatever the size of your business, you need to partner with people across the organisation and be prepared to work with leaders of external organisations and stakeholders.

Unlike any other position in the company, the sales person has two job descriptions, the one called a job description and the compensation plan. While HR may have the job description on file, the one that affects the sales person’s activities is the compensation plan. There are multiple considerations for business leaders to review when developing sales compensation plans because the plan doubles as a job description. Since it directs sales behaviours, you need to look at how it impacts the service the client experiences. It also impacts the overall results for the company. Thus, there are three entities to consider when formulating the sales compensation plan: the sales people, the clients, and the company (employer).

The equilateral triangle serves as the perfect model when designing sales compensation as it ensures none of those three entities is over/under recognised by the plan. Each side of the triangle represents an entity affected by the sales compensation plan. If any of the sides of the triangle are out of proportion from the others, the result is the law of unintended consequences. Things happen that are not intended, but are consistent with the message communicated by the plan. Here are some examples of compensation plans gone awry.

Sales Compensation Case Studies:

1. Health Club

A large health club chain offered a programme that provided employees of certain companies discounts on memberships. The way the programme was structured was that the health club sales person would generate a lead for the corporate sales person. The corporate sales person would call the company and offer the employees a 20% discount on memberships if they posted a flyer for 30 days to communicate the offer to the employees.

Coming back to the equilateral triangle model for sales compensation, this programme was a colossal failure. The company paid full commissions to both the health club sales person and the corporate sales person on a 20% discounted membership. Needless to say, the sales people were happy and invested countless hours pushing this programme instead of the other programmes offered by the company.

The other two entities were much less satisfied with this offer. The health club, because the membership was heavily discounted and double commissions were being paid, had an almost non-existent margin on every sale made. The company also found that its corporate sales team dedicated all of their selling time to this programme instead of other programmes that offered a higher margin to the company, but paid lower commission rates.

When looking at the third side of the equilateral triangle, the clients saw no value in the programme. They simply stuck a flyer on a bulletin board and saw no tangible benefits. Further, when their employees who joined the health club through this programme were interviewed, most said that they were planning to join anyway at list price. Thus, the programme failed two sides of the sales compensation equilateral triangle model.

2. Human Resources Outsourcing (HRO) Service Provider 

A firm offering outsourced services to human resources departments of large companies structured their compensation plan to pay commissions to their sellers at the highest percentage for the first 18 months following the commencement of the contract. After that period, the commission rate dropped to a fraction of a percentage. While at the surface the plan did not look perilous, there were some underlying components that caused issues.

The 18-month clock never restarted with a company. This means that if a sales person added other locations or regions, they only received the commission rate commensurate with the moment in time of the client lifecycle. If the sales person added a new client location in month 19, the commission they were paid wasn’t enough to buy a cup of coffee. If the client purchased additional services, the same compensation issue occurred. The plan incentivised the sales person to sell whatever they could in the first contract and not to bother with upselling/cross-selling as the compensation level did not justify the work. Since the commission rate for the sales person dropped after month 18, clients noticed that the attentiveness of their sales person dropped too. The plan unintentionally directed that to happen, yet attentiveness of the sales person is critical as the nature of these buying
relationships is such that there are hourly transactions. They need their sales person to remain engaged.

The HRO provider realised that its sales people were not focused on conquering accounts. The sales person would sell once and move on to another opportunity, with no interest in adding locations or selling new products/services to the account. The HRO provider would lose many clients in year two and three as the attentiveness of the sales person dropped. Unlike the health club example where the sales people were happy with the plan, but the clients and company were not, no one was happy with this plan. After two painful years, the plan was scrapped in favour of one that met the criteria of the equilateral triangle model.

Focus on the Model
As you develop your compensation plan, ask yourself these questions to ensure you are following the equilateral triangle model:

1. What message does the plan convey to the sales person about where to focus their selling time?
2. How does the plan impact the client experience?
3. If the sales person follows the plan exactly as it is written, how is the company impacted?

Remember, the compensation plans you put in the hands of the sales organisation are their marching orders. The equilateral triangle model helps to ensure every action taken by your sales team is intended and aligned with your business objectives.

Individuals more creative than groups

Or will it? New research conducted by Nicholas Kohn and Steven Smith from A&M University in Texas shows that group brainstorming is not nearly as effective at generating novel ideas as
most business people think. Two key findings arising out of the research show that people are likely to generate more ideas, and more creative and varied ideas, when they brainstorm on their own individually (individual participants produced 44% more ideas than groups).

In addition, an interesting thing happens when people brainstorm together in a group – instead of producing a range of different ideas, as one might expect, people in a group tend to mirror the ideas of others in the group. The net result is that the group produces fewer ideas and the ideas it does produce are less varied.

The need to conform

Researchers call this tendency to conform to one or few similar ideas ‘collaborative fixation’. As Nicholas Kohn explains, “Fixation to other people’s ideas can occur unconsciously and lead to you suggesting ideas that mimic your brainstorming partners. Thus, you potentially become less creative.” Such conformity could be the result of something known as ‘evaluation apprehension’, the fear that others will criticise your wildly creative, left-field ideas. Interestingly, the researchers also found that the rate of conformity increased as the number of ideas exposed increased. In addition, groups that were exposed to more ‘typical’ mainstream ideas produced fewer novel and unique ideas.

Taking a break helps

Another interesting finding that emerged from the study flies in the face of normal brainstorming practice which throws people together in a room to ‘thrash it out’ for hours. “There is a decline in the number of ideas over time,” say the researchers. They found that when groups were given a break in the middle of the brainstorming session, it appeared to revive them and stimulate a fresh outpouring of ideas.

At KreditInform, the credit management solutions company I founded with my partners, all senior managers were part of a super bonus scheme. The company shareholders worked it out as follows: we identified the top executives who had the greatest impact on profitability, and we agreed to give away a certain percentage of the company profits to the management team.

Mitigating the risk

The obvious risk was that as soon as these bonuses were paid out, the recipients would resign – not an unusual scenario in the sales environment, where people are constantly on the move. To counter that, we implemented a programme that would encourage our managers to grow and mature with the business. We took a certain percentage of the profits each year and put this into a trust managed by external trustees.

Everyone who qualified for the super bonus had a say on incentive payouts, so it was a democratic and highly representative set-up. We would say we expected margins of x amount, and we had a budget of y. When that
was attained and exceeded, a percentage of that amount (over and above their normal salaries and incentives) would be paid to the executives who were part of the scheme, but it would be paid into the trust on their behalf.

The shareholders and senior management would from time to time be in a position to bring other executives on board, provided the existing members were in agreement. Eventually we had in excess of ten executives who were sharing – at different percentages– the amount of money invested in the trust. This was paid out in tranches as the investment matured over time, and remained in place for the life of the business. When KreditInform was eventually sold, the trust was liquidated and all members were paid out in line with their shareholding.

The payoff

This super bonus incentive vehicle did some extraordinary things for the organisation. It instilled a great deal of belief in the leadership on the part of the executives who were eligible. They knew that we were not in business just to make a short-term profit for ourselves. The trust enabled us to demonstrate that we were prepared to share a significant portion of the profits with people whom we recognised as drivers of the business.

Because we paid this incentive over a period of three years, job hopping was curtailed. It’s more difficult to exit a company when you know you are leaving behind R100 000 in the kitty for someone else.

As the shareholders of the business, the leadership team had to think very carefully about which levels of staff we allowed into the incentive scheme. But the reality is that as the business grew bigger and bigger, and profits soared, we opened it up to more employees. We were careful though, about the number of years they had worked for the company and their level of seniority. We brought on board people who had demonstrated loyalty because we wanted to show them that we appreciated their commitment.

As a result, we had many senior level executives who stayed with the organisation for years. They were drawn to a programme that enabled them to share in the profits, and they understood why these would be distributed over time, as opposed to being awarded immediately.

Setting the tone of the busines

This type of scheme can be implemented in any market. Even in an economic downturn, a business has to make a profit to survive. Sharing those profits, though they may be less than they used to be, actually focuses your
entire management team on increasing the business’s profitability. It’s common sense.

Although the profit motive should not be the number one driver of the business at the expense of the customer experience, as a motivator it can ensure that your customers derive the best benefits because your team will go the extra mile to close the sale and ensure customer satisfaction. It’s also worth remembering that senior executives set the tone of the business – they create the corporate culture. When they go the extra mile, when they enter the business and commit to a long-term career, they encourage others to do the same.

This can dramatically lower the employee and executive churn rate, which is good news for any organisation. If you are thinking about implementing a super bonus incentive scheme, make sure you begin by defining the objective. It may be to reward longevity, or it may be to recognise those who are maximising profit. It’s imperative to define the objective so that you can balance the reward appropriately.

Entrenching a high performance culture

Strong leaders anchor their high-performance culture with a wide variety of approaches. Here are examples of what you can do to co-create your future:

• Develop common messages that everyone on your management team uses in their presentations and informal discussions on where you’re going, what you believe in, and why you exist.
• Develop/review your vision, values, and purpose through a series of cascading meetings throughout your organisation.
• Get local teams to develop their own vision, values, and purpose linked to that of your organisation.
• Have team members constantly give each other feedback, discuss ways they can live their values, and ways they may inadvertently violate them.
• Use formal (eg. 360º feedback programmes, organisational surveys) and informal feedback processes and practices to nurture values-centred leadership up, down, and across the organisation.
• Make ‘values fit’ a final screen in your hiring process. Get lots of input on this from the team members the new candidate will be working with.
• Ensure everyone who is promoted is a good role model for your vision, values, and purpose – especially if they will be leading others. Make these linkages explicit in all communications and announcements.
• Examine the common words used to describe customers, organisational members, and other partners (like suppliers). Are ‘head count,’ ‘vendors,’ ‘consumers,’ and other such cold, impersonal, and dehumanising phrases often used?
• Ask customers, partners, and organisational members what they think your organisation or team cares about most.
• What gets people fired? What does that say about your values?
• Make sure vision, values, and purpose are deeply embedded in and drive all your training and development.
• Begin or end meetings with reflections on living your vision, values, and purpose.
• Weave references to your vision, values, and purpose in all presentations, discussions, feedback, coaching, recognition, etc.
• Have a contest to develop the snappiest slogan or purpose statement.
• Tell stories and publicise good examples of your vision, values, and purpose in action.
• Look at your calendar and meeting agendas to see if there are big gaps between you and your team’s espoused values and lived values.
• Continuously work to align the organisational/team and the personal vision, values, and purpose of everyone in your organisation.

Unfortunately, if improvement ideas or employee concerns come up at the exit interview, it’s probably too late to improve or help your exiting employee.The best time for an associate to discuss concerns and suggestions with you is as a committed employee, not on the way out the door. Gather and learn from employee feedback by using surveys, department meetings, comment or suggestion forms, and more. Useful information can be gained from employees who leave voluntarily and those you fire.

Conduct interviews in person

Your employee’s manager should conduct the exit interview, with a human resources senior staff person doing a follow up. Some organisations use written or online questionnaires.

Most professionals suggest talking with the departing employee to explore and understand individual views and feelings. The exit interview questions are key to obtaining actionable information. Begin with ‘light talk’ to help your departing employee feel comfortable. Assure them that no negative consequences will result from honest discussion. Explain that you will use the information gained, in context and in its entirety, to help your organisation do better. Freely explore each response for additional clarification and complete understanding.

End on a positive note

Before showing the door, wish your soon to be ex-employee success in their new endeavour. Employees have the right to decline an exit interview and should be informed of that option.

Sample Interview Questions

• Why have you decided to leave?
• Have you shared your concerns with anyone in the company prior to deciding to leave?
• Was a single event responsible for your decision to leave?
• What does your new company offer that encouraged you to accept their offer?
• What do you value about the company?
• What did you dislike about the company?
• The quality of supervision is important. How was your relationship with your manager?
• What could your supervisor do to improve his or her management style and skill?
• What are your views about management and leadership in the company?
• What did you like most about your job?
• What did you dislike about your job?
• What would you change about your job?
• Do you feel you had the resources and support necessary to accomplish your job? If not, what was missing?
• We try to be an employee-oriented company in which employees experience positive morale and motivation. What is your experience of employee morale and motivation in the company?
• Were your job responsibilities characterised correctly during the interview process and orientation?
• Did you have clear goals and know what was expected of you in your job?
• Did you receive adequate feedback about your performance day-to-day and in the performance development planning process?
• Did you clearly understand and feel a part of the accomplishment of the company mission and goals?
• Describe your experience of the company’s commitment to quality and customer service.
• Did the management of the company help you accomplish your personal and professional development and goals?
• What would you recommend to help us create a better workplace?
• Do the policies and procedures of the company help to create a well managed, consistent, and fair workplace in which expectations are clearly defined?
• Describe the qualities and characteristics of the person who is most likely to succeed in this company.
• What are the key qualities and skills we should seek in your replacement?
• Do you have any recommendations regarding our compensation, benefits and other reward and recognition efforts?
• What would make you consider working for this company again in the future?
• Would you recommend the company to your friends and family?
• Can you offer any other comments that will enable us to understand why you are leaving, how we can improve, and what we can do to become a better company?

Do these seemingly important tasks give you cover and make you feel as if you are doing important sales work – even though you know once you start on them you will never pick up the phone? Avoid these distractions; never check your email first thing in the morning.

Putting Second Things Second

I have no doubt that when you wake up in the morning you are greeted with dozens of emails in your inbox. Maybe you check your email on your smartphone before you even leave your house. Almost certainly you turn on your computer and go straight to email when you arrive at your office or sit down at your desk. Bad idea!

Once you open yourself to the demands of the outside world, it is very difficult to bring your full attention and focus to the most important tasks you need to complete each day (avoiding the demands of the outside world is how I write each morning at 5:30, when no one wants or demands my attention).

The most important task you need to complete each day is prospecting. You may need only one hour of prospecting to achieve the outcomes that you need in the way of opening new relationships and opportunities, or you may need five hours of prospecting. Either way, you need to put first things first, and email should not be the first thing.

But It May Be Important!

It is true that some of the emails you will receive will be important. There are a couple of things to keep in mind here.

First, most of the emails that will greet you in the morning will not be important. A good number of them will simply be emails on which you have been copied so that other people can keep you informed. Much of what you will be kept informed about is completely irrelevant and a waste of your time.

Second, if you are concerned about problems, requests, or enquires from your existing clients, know that if something were really important, they would have called you on your cellular phone. It’s not likely that they would send a time sensitive request to your email.

Finally, the client requests that you find in your inbox will still be there when you log into your email. And you are going to open your email in a few short hours.

How to Spend Your First Two Hours

Instead of opening your email, take out your call list and blast through two hours of calls. You have already separated your research and your calling, so you can literally devote your full attention to making your calls.

Two uninterrupted hours of prospecting with your email unopened is equivalent to about 463 hours of prospecting with your email open.

At 10:00, after two solid hours of calling, open your email. Archive all of the ‘for your information’ emails. Respond to anything that requires a response. Delegate the tasks for which you are not the primary value creator. Then follow up with all of your client-related requests, giving these your full attention.

Repeat this in the afternoon, shutting down your email until around 15:30 or 16:00. You will be shocked at how much your prospecting efforts are improved, and stunned by how much more work you complete.

Email is a distraction

Close yourself off from distractions. Exercise your self-discipline. Prospect like you mean it. You can thank me later.

Questions

• Do you open your email as soon as you get to the office? Are you opening your email even before you leave your home?
• Are you compelled to respond to the emails or complete the tasks in your email after you open them?
• How distracting is it to be notified of a new email every time something hits your inbox? Are you compelled to divert your attention long enough to look at that email and decide what it means?
• What activities are important enough that you eliminate all distractions and give them your full attention?

Even if you never heard this one before, you probably know a few people who passively resist fulfilling routine tasks and complain of being misunderstood and under-appreciated. They unreasonably scorn authority and voice exaggerated complaints of personal misfortune.

Clinically defined, passive-aggressive behaviour is the expression of negative feelings, resentment, and aggression in an unassertive, passive way (such as through procrastination and stubbornness). They are amongst the most challenging of difficult people and their damaging behaviour can affect your workplace and bottom line.

Does your organisation officially recognise and handle passive-aggressive behaviour?

A recent article in HR Magazine by Signe Whitson, sheds light on how to deal with and keep in check those who (you know who they are) routinely miss deadlines, and negatively impact productivity and workplace morale.

Refuse to be a victim of this behaviour

We all have stories about the annoying, sometimes conniving ways of a family member, friend or co-worker. While irritating, passive-aggressive behaviour usually isn’t costly. Except that in many workplace situations, passive-aggressive employees can sabotage deadlines, morale and productivity. That’s why it’s critical for leadership and managers to recognise passive aggression before it affects workplace efficiency.

Recognising passive aggression

“I think I know, but I’m not quite sure.” Passive-aggressive people usually lack assertiveness and are not direct with supervisors about their needs. They fail to ask questions about what is expected of them and may become anxious under pressure. Passive aggression is a deliberate and masked way of expressing hidden anger. In the workplace, passive-aggressive behaviour can manifest itself in one or more of the following ways:

Temporary Compliance

The passive-aggressive employee often feels under-appreciated and expresses his underlying anger through temporary compliance. Though he verbally agrees to do a task, he delays completion by procrastinating, forgetting deadlines, misplacing documents or arriving late. For the passive-aggressive worker who feels under-acknowledged, temporary compliance is satisfying.

Intentional Inefficiency

The passive-aggressive worker finds it more important to express covert hostility than to maintain an appearance of professional competence, using intentional inefficiency to complete work in a purposefully unacceptable way.

For example, Marjorie felt snubbed when she was passed over for a promotion. She decided to go about her job in a new way; the quantity of her work did not change, but it became marred with omissions and errors. Though Marjorie never missed a deadline and took on every requested assignment, the quality of her work had a way of creating embarrassment for the unsuspecting supervisor caught presenting misinformation.

To protect against saboteurs, look out for employees whose work is consistently at or below minimum standards, who insist “no one told me,” and who personalise confrontations by authorities, playing up their roles as victims.

Letting a Problem Escalate

Teamwork and communication are vital to productivity. When a passive-aggressive employee withholds information or deliberately fails to stop a glitch from turning into an irreversible gaffe, operations can halt. Misuse of sick days may help identify a passive-aggressive employee.

In another example, Alan called in sick the day before a deadline, knowing that his presence was critical. He took pleasure in single-handedly foiling completion of the quarterly report and in the resulting companywide affirmation that without him, the department could not progress. Sabotage is the name of the game for the passive-aggressive employee who justifies his crimes of omission by saying, “I didn’t do anything.”

Hidden but Conscious Revenge

In contrast to the inaction that marks the previous tactic, some employees use covert actions to get revenge on supervisors. The passive-aggressive employee is aware that the person he is angry with has enough power to make his life miserable, so he decides it is not safe to confront him directly. Whether by spreading gossip that maligns the boss’s reputation or misplacing a document, the passive-aggressive employee finds justification in secret revenge.

Tell-Tale Signs

Do any of your employees have these passive-aggressive credentials?

Work history:

• Avoids responsibility for tasks
• Performs less when asked for more
• Misses deadlines
• Withholds information

Professional activities:

• Leaves notes and uses email to avoid face to face communication
• Arrives late for work and extends lunch breaks
• Uses sick days during major team projects
• Resists suggestions for change or improvement

Special qualifications:

• “Forgets” and “misplaces” important documents
• Embarrasses co-workers during meetings and presentations
• Justifies behaviour with plausible explanations
• Consistently behaves this way

Damaging behaviour

By the nature of their covert acts, passive-aggressive employees are skilled at evading the long arm of workplace law. Unchecked, a compliant rule breaker can have a major effect on productivity and morale. When managers understand the signs and recognise patterns, they can protect themselves and other employees from being unwitting victims of this office crime.

And what about the passive-aggressive boss? They too are a workplace annoyance and can force many good people to leave their jobs in order to preserve their sanity and self-respect. As blues legend BB King says, you don’t want to be ‘paying the cost to be the boss.’

But not all reps who get coached, even by good coaches, do better. In fact, our research shows that coaching is almost worthless when it targets the wrong reps. And our work suggests that management targets the wrong reps all the time.

Left to their own devices, sales managers often skew their coaching efforts dramatically toward the ‘tails’ – the very best and the very worst reps on their team. They engage with poor reps because they feel they must in order to meet territory goals, and they work with their best reps because, well, it’s fun. Few managers can resist the lure of reliving their glory days by passing along their wisdom to the one or two reps who remind them most of their younger selves. To combat the tendency of managers to coach just laggards and leaders, companies implement elaborate systems to allocate coaching equally across the sales force. They imagine that “all boats will rise” as a result.

Ineffective coaching

Unfortunately, our data shows that both managers’ coaching tendencies, and companies’ responses, are misguided. In research involving thousands of reps, we found that coaching – even world-class coaching – has a marginal impact on either the weakest or the strongest performers in the sales organisation. You’d think that coaching the lowest performers would pay off because they have nowhere to go but up. Actually, that’s often not true, particularly for the bottom 10%. These reps, we’ve found, are less likely to be underperformers who can improve, and more likely to be a bad fit for the role altogether. That’s not really something coaching can fix. It’s likely to be a different kind of conversation altogether (often involving HR).

Likewise, star-performing reps also show marginal performance improvement due to coaching. While our research shows that there are some important retention benefits from coaching your high performers, it would be nice to think that great coaching (especially from former high-performers) makes your stars just a little more stellar. But that’s just not the case.

Target the middle core

Our conclusion? The real payoff from good coaching lies among the middle 60% – your core performers. For this group, the best-quality coaching can improve performance up to 19%.* In fact, even moderate improvement in coaching quality – simply from below to above average – can mean a six to eight percent increase in performance across 50% of your sales force. More often than not, that makes the difference between hitting or missing goals.

At the end of the day, who your managers coach is just as important as how they coach. The data clearly suggests that organisations should do away with coaching democratically and instead shift the majority of their coaching focus away from low and star performers towards the core.

This may be a hard pill to swallow. Despite the evidence, we find that this recommendation doesn’t sit well with all sales leaders or sales managers. Sales leaders argue that coaching should be delivered in an egalitarian fashion and balk at the notion of targeting coaching by performance level. Managers are quick to point to their own success turning around low performers through intensive one-on-one coaching. Several years after we first unveiled it, this finding continues to be a white-hot topic of debates among sales leaders.

How does coaching work in your sales organisation? Is it democratic, targeted, or just non-existent?

NOTE: *In our research, we defined “performance” as a rep’s gap to goal (i.e., percentage of quota attained). See the diagram for a graphical summary of these findings.