Recently I stumbled across some notes that I had kept from a project I had been involved in which involved looking at manager behaviours. The aim of this project was to identify "preferred behaviours" in sales managers when they were working closely with their sales representatives. The outputs were interesting and helped my colleagues identify four main types of sales managers and the differences between effective and ineffective behaviours.

Four Types of Manager.

A few years ago when working as a coach for a multinational Pharma company my colleagues and I were given the task of designing a framework that enabled managers to work more effectively with their sales representatives out "in the field". There had been considerable discontent from the sales representatives in that, a large proportion of them "dreaded" the "field visit" from the manager as it was deemed stressful and seen very much as an assessment and the manager