For most of my early years running sales teams, I managed people the way I’d have wanted to be managed myself. Tell me the problem, tell me what you’re doing about it, then let me get on with it. No long preamble, no hand holding, and a fair amount of pressure when things slipped.
It worked well on the two or three people who were built like me. With everyone else I got less than I should have done, and at the time I put that down to them. They needed more experience, or more time in the role, or in one or two cases I wondered whether they were good enough.
It took me far too long to notice that I was the thing they all had in common.
That’s the uncomfortable part of this. Most sales leaders aren’t sitting on a team of people who are worse than they are. They’re sitting on a team of people who aren’t like them, and if you can’t tell those two things apart you’ll spend years correcting behaviour that was never the problem.
Four people can do the same job well and do it four different ways
Take two people looking after the same set of customers.
The first does it through accuracy. They know the detail of every account, they don’t get facts wrong, and when they say something will be done by Thursday it’s done by Thursday. The customer trusts them because they’ve never been let down.
The second does it through the relationship. They’re the person the customer picks up the phone to. They know about the reorganisation, the new finance director, the person in procurement who makes everything difficult. The customer trusts them because they feel understood.
Both of them keep their customers buying, and both of them will hold on to an account when a competitor turns up with a cheaper price. Neither one is doing the job properly while the other improvises. They’re two routes to the same result.
New business works the same way. One person opens doors on energy and enthusiasm, gets into conversations quickly and creates interest where there wasn’t any. Another gets there on preparation, turning up to a first meeting knowing more about the business than the person sitting opposite them. Both work. Ask either of them to do it the other way round and you’ll get a worse version of a good salesperson.
What the four styles look like
This is what our TrustBuilder assessment measures. It doesn’t grade how good someone is at the job. It looks at how they build trust with other people, and how they prefer to work. There are four styles, and none of them is better than the others.
- Creative. Fast moving, full of ideas, energised by people. Very good at opening things up and creating enthusiasm. Less comfortable with detail and follow through.
- People Pleaser. Warm, patient and a genuinely good listener. Builds loyalty that lasts for years. Finds it hard to say no, and harder to deliver bad news.
- Analyst. Calm, precise and thorough. Wants the facts before committing to anything. Very reliable, and inclined to keep thinking about a decision that needed making last week.
- Authoritarian. Direct, decisive and comfortable taking charge. Drives things forward and makes the call. Can be impatient, and can come across as blunt without meaning to be.
Read that list and you’ll place most of your team inside a minute. You’ll probably place yourself too, and that’s the more useful half of the exercise.
This isn’t about putting people in the right box
Worth saying plainly, because it’s the easy conclusion to draw and it’s the wrong one. None of this tells you who should be doing which job.
All four styles can do all of the roles on your team. They’ll do them differently, they’ll lean on different strengths to get there, and the experience will feel different to the customer depending on who turns up. But an Analyst can look after a set of accounts superbly, and so can a People Pleaser. A Creative can win new business, and so can an Authoritarian.
Whether somebody is right for a role is a much bigger question than their style. It takes in what they can actually do, what drives them, and what they believe about themselves and their situation. That’s why our assessment looks at four things rather than one. Style on its own tells you very little about fit, and using it that way does real damage to good people.
What style does tell you is narrower and far more useful. It tells you how to get the most out of the person already in front of you.
The default that nobody notices
If you don’t know how someone is built, you’ll manage them the way you’d want to be managed. It isn’t a decision, it’s a default, and it’s almost invisible from the inside because it feels like consistency. Same standards for everyone, same directness, same amount of pressure when things slip, no favourites.
That default works well on the person most like you. It works less well on the next one. By the time you get to the person whose style is the opposite of yours, you’re getting a fraction of what they’ve got. You’re not managing four people, you’re managing one person four times and wondering why three of them keep disappointing you.
What it costs you
The consequences are bigger than most leaders expect, and almost none of them look like a management problem when they show up.
You read difference as underperformance. The seller who spends longer preparing, or who builds the relationship before pushing for a decision, is taking their own route to the same place. Measured against your route they look slow or soft, so you correct behaviour that was working. What comes back is a worse version of what you had.
Your coaching doesn’t land. The same sentence is heard four different ways. To one person it’s a challenge worth rising to. To another it’s a threat to the relationship they have with you. To another it’s an assertion with no evidence attached, so they don’t accept it. To another it’s criticism with the recognition stripped out. Three of them change nothing, and that reads back to you as a capability problem when it was a delivery problem.
Your intervention makes things worse. Pressure lifts the people who thrive on a challenge, which is why it’s the first tool most of us reach for. Applied to somebody who needs reassurance, or somebody who needs the evidence before they’ll move, more pressure produces more hesitation. So the harder you push the further behind they get, and the more justified the pushing feels.
Disagreement stops reaching you. Two of those four styles find it very hard to argue with you. They’ll agree in the meeting and go quiet afterwards, so something you could have dealt with in March turns up in your figures in June. You didn’t miss the warning. It was never said out loud.
Your forecast becomes a reading of personality. One style commits early and confidently because that’s how they’re built. Another hedges on a deal that’s far safer than it sounds. Take every commitment at face value and you’re forecasting temperament rather than pipeline, which is why forecast accuracy so often varies by person rather than by deal.
The team starts copying you. People work out what gets rewarded and they perform it, and copying your style means dropping the thing they’re naturally good at. You end up with four thinner versions of yourself instead of four different routes to a result. You hired the difference and then trained it out of them.
The change is smaller than it sounds
None of this needs a personality transplant, from you or from them. What it needs is one deliberate adjustment per person, held long enough for them to feel the difference.
That’s harder than it reads, because flexing costs you the behaviour you’re best at. If you’re fast and decisive, it means sitting in a silence you’d normally fill. If you’re the one who wants all the evidence, it means backing somebody’s judgement before you’ve seen it. If you’d rather keep the peace, it means saying the difficult thing without softening it into something they can misread. The adjustment is small, and it feels wrong every single time, which is why so few managers ever make it.
So where do you start? With yourself, because your own style shapes every conversation on the team and it’s the one you’re least able to see. Then take your people one at a time and ask a plain question about each of them. When this person is at their best, what are they doing, and does any of it look like what I do?
If the honest answer is that you’ve been rating people on how closely they resemble you, that’s worth knowing. It’s also fixable, and it doesn’t cost you a hire, a restructure or a training budget.
How somebody builds trust is one part of the picture. What they can do, what drives them, and what they believe about themselves are the others, and you need all four to manage a person properly. That’s what the MyAcumen Team Diagnostic gives you on everybody in the team: https://myacumen.online
Or if you want a quicker place to start, the free Team Scorecard takes about four minutes and points you at where the gaps most likely are.
