_Today I see so many manager and coaches sitting behind their desk, Creating spread sheets and sending out emails that never get read.

Get out from behind your desk and wandered around your department or organization and just talk with the members of your department or organization? There is a term for this activity – MBWA, management by walking around.

Presence Among Your Employees is Important The benefits of getting to know your people and letting them know you care about them will go a long way toward improving morale, communication, and employee performance. Time spent with them will have dramatic, indirect, positive rewards for you as a manager.

You don’t have time? You have too much on your plate already? Excuses, excuses! If you are stuck every day in meetings, conferences, research, doing paperwork, reading email its time to get you S#@t together, Review your priorities and make some commitments to work towards yours and the organizations goals.

You can’t manage and coach your staff from behind your desk. You can only coach, train, inspect, lead, and direct when you are in the presence of your employees.

Being visible to your employees allows you to:

1. Catch people doing things right and recognize them.
2. Catch people doing things wrong and modify behaviour through coaching.
3. Keep in touch with the reality of your department or organization.
4. Be available for questions, concerns, or needs of your employees.
5. Find new creative ways to run your department.
6. Be a sounding board for your employees.
7. Send the message to your employees that you care and are interested in them and their jobs.
8. Fix things before they break.
9. Break things that need to be broken.
10. Determine common perceptions that people have about the business, their jobs, customers, and so on.

Effective Managers and coaches are In Tune with Their Organization The most effective managers and leaders get to know their people. They know their frustrations, concerns, questions, beliefs, problems, dreams, goals, strengths, and weaknesses. You can’t know any of this if you are barricaded behind piles of reports, non-stop meetings, and a heavy workload. The job of a manager is to manage it, not do it. The job of a coach is to coach not sit from a far and question.

It is critical that managers be in tune with their organization’s culture, perceptions, employee attitudes and frustrations, and not wait for these to filter up through the ranks as rumours or hearsay.

Negative things are happening in your organization right now, and the sooner you identify them, the sooner you can reduce, eliminate, or neutralize them. If you just act as if everything is just fine, prepare for the consequences. Get your head around what your role and responsibilities are.

Leadership, management and coaching are not easy, it’s not sexy its hard work. Its repetitive, doing the same thing day in day out, setting expectations, measuring result and adjusting with effective feedback. Coaching is ongoing, working with individuals to achieve there goals and the organizations expectations. Now get going. Get out from behind that computer and start talking to your people… Now!!

•    Always come to work as early as you want your staff to be in.
•    Dress the way you want your staff to dress.
•    Handle your problems on a one-to-one basis.
•    Always show your boss respect in front of your sales staff.
•    Spend a little time each day with individual staff members.
•    Teach them what you do right.
•    Admit your errors as quickly as you want others to admit theirs.
•    Go on at least one sales call with each sales person each week.
•    Never assign a rookie to a major account.
•    Never get drunk with your staff.
•    Never get drunk with your boss.
•    Never get drunk.
•    If you blow up, apologize immediately upon calming down.
•    Go for a walk around the block before you blow up.
•    Never let programming organize a sales promotion.
•    Go to two lunches per week with your biggest clients.
•    Make your sales meetings informative and interesting.
•    Make your sales meetings as short as possible.
•    Schedule a weekly meeting with your boss to recap sales for the week.
•    Work with the PD, Creative, or promotions department, not around them.
•    Make all your staff live under the same rules..
•    Develop a creative program with cash bonuses to copy department program department or promotions department.
•    Develop a master testimonial book.
•    Keep the “promotional sheets” in the sales bins fresh and current.
•    Go on as many national sales trips as possible.
•    Understand the role of the reps they sell- you motivate and lead.
•    Hire the best salespeople you can find.
•    Hire your replacement.
•    Don't answer a question with “Because I said so”.
•    Learn your traffic system and inventory system so you can understand it.
•    Demand 10 new sales contacts per week from your direct retail staff.
•    Have a quarterly sales meeting outside the office.
•    Make sure you have a great assistant.
•    Buy your own tape recorder and write your memo’s on it.
•    Go to dinner with each staff member to get to know them.
•    Develop a sales person of the month award.
•    Invite your boss to sales meetings once a month.
•    Go to lunch once a month with the boss.
•    Never make your boss wait.
•    Learn word processing, e-mail, and social media.
•    Read the Wall Street Journal/Financial review every morning or other appropriate business publication.
•    Assign political advertising to one person.
•    Get rid of the negative force on your staff.
•    Talk to your fellow sales managers in the market once a month.
•    Badmouth competitors rather than your own medium.
•    Never badmouth your boss or company to anyone.
•    Never badmouth a sales person in your team to anyone.
•    Get an order bell for the sales office.
•    Always get excited about an order.
•    Always get upset about a cancellation.
•    Make ‘budget’ making an event every month.
•    Don't go home until your work is finished each day.
•    Make sure you go home when you leave the office.
•    Quit smoking.
•    Exercise.
•    Don't take your job home to your family.
•    Don't take your family to the job.

Yes.. Leaders transform and managers transact!

By this I mean that managers are responsible for maintaining stable processes, controlling costs, and motivating personnel: they supervise the companies subunits. Managers are consumed by the routine, repetitive operations of the business. For this reason they are often thought of as advocates for the status quo and for stability.

Managers focus on measured outcomes because they are rewarded by the business. It's no surprise to understand that two basic principles are at work in this context: 1) what gets measured gets paid attention to and 2) what gets rewarded gets done. These two principles draw sharp boundaries around the manager’s job and around his expectations for his subordinates.

A leader resists the status quo and proposes changes. Leaders are supposed to be visionaries who succeed in persuading others to share their vision for the enterprise. Leaders change the ‘rules of the game’ when they articulate a new business model for the firm. This is called transformation and it is why we refer to some top executives as ‘change artists’ or ‘turnaround specialists’.

Managers accept the Leader's vision and they lead the troops in day-to-day operations to achieve it. A less glamorous description to be sure; but an absolutely crucial one for achieving the firm’s financial and strategic goals.

It hard to motivate others if you don't talk with them.

Managers who's teams are not performing well stop doing the right things and look for the quick fix.

Their time is consumed with non effective activities rather than stopping and deciding "what is the right thing to do".

Teams need to be lead from the front. Start regular One on One's, Coaching and feedback. Communicate to your people regularly about performance and give feedback around effective behaviors, coach for better performance and measure the steps.

What gets measured gets done!..

Professional managers fall into two Categories:
Doers and Feelers.

Doers do what needs to be done to reach a goal they have set.
Feelers do what they feel like doing.

Your ability to motivate others increases exponentially as your reputation as a doer increases. You also get more clarity about who are the doers and feelers are in your team..