In the last 100 years, perhaps there has never been a time than the last 18 months, when resilience building for sales organisations and sales leaders became a shriller clarion call. With most organizations and people getting impacted by Covid-19, the R Factor (R for Resilience) mattered the most to ensure leadership effectiveness in the sales domain. However, it must be noted that to ensure continuous leadership effectiveness, resilience cannot be merely event based. It has to be “leadership lifestyle” based.

To be effective and successful, it is imperative that sales leaders do the following on a continuous “leadership lifestyle” basis under each of the 3 components of resilience:

1. Belief systems:

• Proactively make meaning from the experience of team-mates related to their personal goals in the context of organizational goals and get involved in supporting people to achieve their goals.  This surely is compassion in action.
• Sales is a domain where success and failure are the two sides of the same coin. Maintain and communicate a positive outlook. Help the sales organisation as a whole, as well as individuals; find hope, and identify and work towards realising new opportunities.
• Take a leading role in finding transcendence for the organisation and its employees. Provide inspiration, define routes towards transformation, and do whatever is possible to support individuals to achieve growth.

2. Organisational processes:

• Be a proponent for flexibility for employees, showing an openness to novel ways of working, acknowledging and accepting newer ways of relating and connecting to people.
• Focus and build connectedness, with individual team members and reporting groups. Give and encourage mutual support, show respect for personal experiences, and recognise the strains and stress of balancing new ways of working with team members’ possibly very stressful family situations from time to time.
• Help, where possible, to mobilise organisational resources to support team members and their families. Build networks of team members that are able to offer each other mutual support. If needed, and feasible, offer financial security and even direct financial support.

3. Communication processes:

• Be very clear and totally consistent in organisational communications, and clarify ambiguous information quickly, especially where team members are feeling high levels of anxiety about any unclear messages.
• Be brave and behave with open emotional expressions. Share your own pain, respond empathically to team members’ pain and loss, tolerate differences in the way people respond to loss – and don’t forget to offer respite too, with appropriate humour and expressions of happiness when justified.
• Reinforce what ought already to be within the mainstream organisational culture of collaborative problem solving. Brainstorm, share decision-making in appropriate ways, emphasise a democratic ethos, agree and focus on goals, and plan together with team members.
• Make timely and decisive decisions to bring change as organizations that suffer from “decision paralysis” rarely move forward.

Many studies have indicated the importance of resilience as both an individual and leadership trait. Resilience in sales leaders brings about a transformation in the way a sales organisation operates and prepares for the future. It alleviates suffering, builds trust and loyalty, and positions the organisation exceptionally well for facing future challenges. For a sales leader who is trying to be more resilient, an improvement on even a few of the bulleted points above will help.

This blog has been written by Meena Murugappan, Associate Partner at GrowthSqapes.