HRevolution

After several months of détente, the “A” player has worked from home and has largely duplicated last year’s performance. She tells me she only interacts with the office as needed, and dislikes the Friday morning sales talks run by “Metrics Man”. She feels it would help him tremendously to actually do the job for a week. Apparently, he thinks that if you call people in your database enough times, eventually they buy. Her own dbase is threadbare and her production is slowing. She’s wondering if he’s feeding the “B” players in order to teach her a lesson.

But last week, Metrics Man blew up at a different salesperson. He isn’t enjoying his supervisory role, doesn’t have people skills, and lapses into a defensive (conflict) mode. The bottom line is, supervising salespeople isn’t among his strengths. He’s developed record of stepping on toes, strong-arming subordinates, and being generally hard to deal with. He’s highly valuable in other areas, but not this one. So, after this conflict he was reassigned to duties more in line with his capabilities.

So, the last manager was re-assigned because he couldn’t motivate the troops to high enough performance, and this one because his people skills weren’t strong enough to manage extraverts. For the moment, the President plans to manage the sales group, presumably while they look outside the organization for a sales manager.

The fact is, that different personalities work better for different things. It’s a lesson this organization doesn’t seem to grasp at the sales or managerial level. They might get lucky and find a good manager. I hope so. If not, they will continue to struggle until they figure it out.