A printed number without coaching doesn’t prove the manager is optional. It proves the manager’s coaching wasn’t the variable.
A BDR recently told me about what happened when his manager was out for six weeks of paternity leave.
The team hit their number without him. Nobody covered the one-on-ones. Nobody ran a pipeline review and the results came in anyway.
Then the manager came back and started micromanaging the team again during their team meetings and via emails to the group.
That is the part most leaders might misread.
Six weeks is not a referendum on whether you need managers. A pipeline already in motion will close while someone is on leave. A team that was already going to hit can hit with the ritual removed. What the six weeks proved is narrower and more useful: this manager’s current approach to 1:1s and coaching did not produce this number. If the meeting disappears and the number doesn’t move, the meeting wasn’t coaching. It was a calendar event – checking the box.
I asked the BDR what the manager actually does in his one-on-one. The answer was, “He asks me how things are going.”
Asking how things are going is not coaching, and neither is “where do you need help?” Those questions are fine if you are trying to understand more about your employee. They are not coaching. If that is the extent of the manager’s approach, it sends a direct signal to the rep that ‘this meeting is not worth preparing for’. Plus, if the rep knew what their problems were, they would already be working to fix them, including coming to their manager proactively. What they want is the manager coming to them with an evidence-based approach to helping them improve.
Ironically, that same week, the company’s head of sales posted on LinkedIn about the importance of coaching. I believe he meant it. I have met a lot of revenue leaders, and almost none of them are cynical about this. They want their managers’ coaching. They say so in all-hands meetings, and they say so publicly, with their name on it.
But think about this: The reps read that post. Then they went back to a one-on-one where their managers failed to deliver on that promise.
A leader who never says what they value is not a real leader. Worse, a leader who makes a public commitment and then does not back it up loses credibility with the team. His people had evidence, and it did not match his words.
Credibility lives in the gap between what you claim and what your organization can verify. Say the right thing and build nothing behind it, and every reasonable person on your floor learns to discount the next thing.
The manager lost credibility, too
Six weeks of numbers is evidence. Just not the evidence most CROs think it is.
The team didn’t learn they can run the company without a manager. They learned that they can hit this number without this version of the job: status questions, group email pressure, and activity theater. So when he came back yelling for more activity, more pipe, more deals, they were not rejecting the seat. They were rejecting a motion they had just watched fail the only test reps respect. Did we need this to hit the number?
He still had the title; he just had less credibility. Authority gets assigned, credibility gets earned back one conversation at a time, and he spent the first week back spending it.
I don’t think he was managing badly on purpose. He likely came back from six weeks away and, trying to add value, reached for the only tool he had. Nobody ever gave him another one. Sit with that for a second.
That manager likely got promoted probably because he was good at selling. Then somebody gave him eight people and a forecast and a calendar full of one-on-ones, and nothing else. “Go get ’em, tiger!”
The questions I would ask the CRO
When you hire a new rep, does your organization set expectations, have a scorecard, and a ramp plan? Does your frontline manager check all three? What did you write down for managers?
If you are a manager of managers, ask yourself three questions, in this order.
- Have you defined what coaching means here, in enough detail that two of your managers would run the same play in the same situation?
- Have you set that expectation for a manager the way you set expectations for your rep? (the “sales math” or “cookbook”)
- Are you inspecting it? (Asking about it in a skip-level is not inspection.) How do you absolutely know that 1:1s are occurring and if they are any good? Aside from: did the team hit their collective number – what proof are you looking at?
If the answer to any of those is no, coaching at your company is a personality trait. Some of your managers have it; some do not. Your reps know exactly which ones, and not one of them is going to tell you.
Why this is worth your attention
Gallup put at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement on the manager, across 183,806 teams.
Gallup is not a six-week snapshot. It is what happens to engagement, ramp, and consistency when the manager system is weak across quarters. A team can print one number with empty 1:1s. That is how good late-stage pipeline hides a coaching problem. The next two quarters are usually when you pay for it: sloppy deal inspection, slower ramp, and reps who have already decided the coaching talk is branding.
Bain and Dynata surveyed 262 sales reps and found that only half meet with their manager at least once a week. At the companies growing fastest in revenue and market share, that rate ran double the laggards.
Korn Ferry reports roughly 28% higher quota attainment and 32% higher win rates where coaching stays consistent. Consistent is the word doing the work in that sentence. Most coaching arrives in bursts, right after a bad quarter or a good workshop, and then the calendar wins.
What I would do this week
I have spent years watching leaders write a prescription for the whole organization without examining a single patient. A post about coaching is a prescription. It goes out to everyone, costs nothing to write, and never touches what’s broken.
Instead, examine a few patients. Ask three of your reps, separately, what their manager does in a one-on-one. Not whether they like their manager. What the manager does specifically. They may be uncomfortable, but seek the truth and make them feel comfortable giving it to you.
Three different answers mean you have three managers doing their best with whatever they worked out on their own. That is a system nobody built, and no post is going to fix it.
