Empathy is Among the Most Important Leadership Skills You Must Have

BY C. Lee Smith
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Have you just been promoted to the sales manager position? Congratulations! One or more corporate leaders recognized your hard work as a rainmaker. They want to reward you and figure you can teach the rest of the reps how to land a whale. 

Before you roll out your personal management style, remember that empathy is among the most important leadership skills you must have to be successful in your new role. Your reps believing you empathize with their situation tells you you’re on the right path. 

Here are a few ways to incorporate empathy while managing your sales team.

Empathy is the Most Important Leadership Skill

Each of your reps struggles with professional challenges such as closing deals. They’re also dealing with personal problems ranging from a childcare shortage to a looming separation and divorce. The best way to demonstrate empathy is to get to know and understand each rep. Their strengths and weaknesses in the selling process will appear in any psychometric and skills assessments they’ve taken. Using that information, you can coach them to improve their selling skills. You should also spend enough time learning about their personal challenges and show interest in how they’re faring without being too nosy. Strengthening these relationships by showing empathy builds trust.

Working Alongside Your Team

Once you’ve earned the trust of each team member, they’ll be more willing to pitch in when you ask. But that’s not all you need to do. When asked what they liked best about their managers, one sales rep said, “…worked beside us all the time.” Another rep told us, “if my boss can be this active and committed, I should do more.” 

There’s a common theme in these answers. These sales representatives respect a manager who works as hard or even harder than they do. Gerhard Gschwandtner and Maryann Hammers point out that involvement and effective leadership skills don’t mean getting so “overwhelmed with the paperwork and managerial tasks that you forget about the work your sales team is doing.” Your reps want your advice. 

They appreciate it when you take the time to be on a sales call with them. And they need coaching tips and feedback to help them improve outcomes. Doing all that with a positive mindset means understanding that empathy is among the most important leadership skills.

Leading Change

It’s easy for sales reps and managers to become complacent in selling the same products to the same sets of customers. But the changing marketplace will leave you and your organization behind if you don’t adjust to new ways of doing business and economic cycles. The rapid shift that sales organizations made during the recent pandemic showed the need for good leadership skills to lead teams through change. 

Sales reps could no longer close deals during in-​person meetings. Instead, they transitioned to online video meetings and learned to conduct discovery and close deals in that format effectively. Managers who trained their team members to make the transition and showed empathy during the rapidly evolving process most likely had the best outcomes.

During times of great change, the best sales managers will continue communicating what’s happening to their reps. For example, when the sales method changes or a new product is rolling out, they’ll sign their team up for appropriate training. They’ll also deliver timely feedback on how reps perform as they deal with change while constantly empathizing with them whenever necessary. However, the lack of empathy may show the opposite results.

Focusing on Your Team

Another indication you understand that empathy is an important leadership skill is revealing through where you focus your attention. Some managers expect to ride on the backs of their team members to the next rung on the corporate ladder. Gschwandtner and Hammers relay the story of an ambitious sales manager who pursued a promotion and “overlooked the need for complimenting and thanking his regional managers for their extra efforts.

Whenever they achieved their goals, he asked them to set their expectations higher and told them their salespeople could do much  more.” The manager focused on what he thought he needed instead of what his team needed. He showed the exact opposite of empathy — cold-​heartedness. Unsurprisingly, several of his managers left the organization, and he eventually lost his job.

You know what each of your reps needs to excel in their position. When you give them your time and expertise, they’ll repay you with loyalty and closed deals. That activity level makes your entire department shine in the eyes of senior leadership.

Photo by Liza Summer on Pexels.


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